The Lauras Page 7

  Ma was tired and overwhelmed and taut with apprehension at the newness of the place, new rules to learn, so when the joke hit her a few seconds later she broke, doubled over with her face on the table, laughing so that she couldn’t breathe. Of course, no one else had heard the exchange, had even noticed that anything had been said to my mother, so it just looked like she was a little nuts as well.

  They became a matched pair, the screamer and the laugher, and for once Ma didn’t really care what they all thought of her. Odd as she was, Ma really liked Laura, so much so that she didn’t care that Laura was paranoid and a liar.

  And then she found out the hard way that Laura wasn’t paranoid or lying.

  She had climbed into Laura’s bed one night so that they could whisper in the dark. They were still girls, still enjoyed the things that make girls’ lives exciting, so they were pressed tight together and telling secrets, half asleep, when the door creaked open and she felt Laura go stiff and silent against her. They weren’t supposed to be in each other’s rooms ever, let alone after lights out, but this wasn’t an about-to-get-caught panic.

  Ma was on the far side of the bed to the door, reacted before she thought and rolled to the edge, lowered herself silently onto the floor so that the spill of comforter and the darkness hid her. She heard the door eased closed, footsteps crossing the room, and then a creaking protestation of springs as the edge of the mattress was put under the stress of an adult’s weight.

  “You’ve been waiting for me, haven’t you? There’s a good girl,” someone said in a voice too rough with whispering for it to be recognizable.

  My mother stayed there on the floor, silent, unseen, until the person left. But she wouldn’t tell me what happened, what she heard happening.

  In the morning Ma found herself unable to speak a word. She looked up at the faces of the teachers, the kitchen workers, the custodians. It had been dark, the voice distorted by the harshness of whispering, she hadn’t gotten a look at the person’s face, had no real sense of height or breadth or shape. It could have been any of them.

  Laura didn’t ask if Ma believed her now. They shared a look, the quiet dark look that made people say that Laura was crazy, and the teachers asked Ma if Laura’s aliens had come for her as well and stolen her words while they were visiting.

  They traded everything they could—candy, cigarettes, dirty pictures—for money, stole long-life food from the pantry, planned and prepared as well as they could. The tension of need—the longer they waited the more resources they had, but the sooner they left the less likely it was for their stash to be discovered—drew them tight. When they finally made tracks it was unplanned, a day like any other, except that they both decided during breakfast that there would be no more waiting. They weren’t kept locked up, were allowed out and about town in their free hours, so when they said they were going to the library that afternoon, had their backpacks with them, it didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Except the bags were full of food, and instead of going into town they hopped the first bus in the other direction.

  They made it to a city, a not-so-big place whose fortune was on the downward trend but still big enough that they wouldn’t be found so easily. There was a choice of abandoned buildings, and they pried away boards over windows and made a nest in one of the empty offices, piled up blankets and cardboard against the cold and made their own world. They begged and busked and stole and slept together under the mound of dirty comforters that other people had thrown away, and all was well for a while. Other people joined their little kingdom, down-and-outs with nowhere to go that didn’t want to risk it alone; they had nothing and they shared it all. Winter came and they begged more, added layers to their clothing, and handfuls of the people that had joined them disappeared, either dead or given up and gone to a shelter or to prison or back to wherever it was that they’d been running from.

  Then one night Laura didn’t come home, and my mother curled alone in the mound of clotted cloth and tried to suppress the terror that churned her gut. The next morning the boards across the windows splintered away, and the rest of them were taken. My mother didn’t even try to fight.

  The minister who conducted Bible Study at the home twice a week had recognized Laura, had walked past her twice to be sure as she sat cross-legged in the sun in one of the city parks, shaking a cup and smiling at everyone she saw. He had called the cops to have her picked up, take her to the police station. She had told them about the squat because they accused her of kidnapping and murdering my mother.

  They were almost properly arrested, for vagrancy and solicitation and breaking and entering and underage consumption of alcohol and tobacco and everything else that the cops could think of, but then their reasons for running away and how young they really were came to light. Laura, who was slightly older, was sent to a women’s shelter; Ma was pitched to the next group home, where she met another Laura and had her first kiss.

  I asked her then how she crammed all of this running and living into such a short span of time, how she got through school. She didn’t answer at first, sucked on her menthol until the tip burned red like the eyes of the damned and her cheeks sunk in, peered at the dark road and let the smoke slowly out her nose.

  “You can pack a lot of living in if you try. And it feels like longer than it is, when you’re young. Time moves slower.”

  When I woke up we had crossed over into Georgia. There was a bag of trail mix and a bottle of water open in the gap between our seats, and Ma was smoking slowly, tapping her fingers in time to the country on the radio. It was like we had never stopped rolling, like we had just left the mountains and the diner and the apartment over the grocery store. Nothing had changed, except for me. I wasn’t the passive kid anymore, going along with my mother’s plans, because I knew now that she didn’t have a plan as such, that she let things happen and pushed back against them just as much as I did.

  “You mad at me?” Ma asked finally.

  “What makes you think that?” Which in my family always more or less meant yes.

  “You’re in a funk. And I always thought you were my kid, that you wouldn’t mind the moving around, moving on. But you’re your dad’s kid, too.”

  “No, I’m glad we’re on the road again.” And I was. It was comfortingly familiar, and at the same time overwhelmingly full of possibility. And as much as I wanted to see my dad, I wanted to see where we were going more. “I just feel kinda shitty. Been feeling kinda shitty for a while, really—one day I want to cry and the next I want to punch people, and the only thing that helps is wearing myself out.” I didn’t mention my extended sessions of five-finger solitaire—some things are just too private.

  “Sounds like hormones,” she said. “They’ll settle down in a few years. Or decades. Or else you’ll learn to deal with them. I’m sorry, and I know adolescence sucks complete ass, but all you can do is ride it out.”

  I rolled my eyes at her miserably.

  “And keep the attitude in check so that I let you live that long.”

  “It’s better when we’re on the road,” I said. “There are too many other things to think about.”

  “I guess that’s good. We’re going to be on the road for a while.”

  “What about school?”

  “Hopefully not that long, but if things don’t go to plan . . . It’s not like you’ll be able to learn anything right now. Makes more sense to let you keep to yourself until your body and your brain start settling down. And anyway, I picked up some textbooks at the last garage sale I went to. If we haven’t found a place to stay put for the winter when school starts up again, you’ll be able to keep up on your own.”

  “Why are they all called Laura?” I asked.

  “Say what?” Ma said.

  “Is that a code name, so you don’t give away who they really are? Why do all the women in your stories have the same name?”

  She’d been quiet for a while before answering, so I wasn’t sure if she was inventing a cover story, if
I’d been right in guessing she’d rechristened them all to make the remembering easier, or if she was trying to determine herself why it was that so many of the women who had had a lasting impact on her were named Laura.

  “First of all,” she said, “they’re not all Laura. You’re conveniently forgetting everyone else. My girlfriend who ran off with the preacher wasn’t named Laura. Second, when we got to Florida you were complaining that every kid in school was named Jason or Brittany—it just so happens that when I was born everyone was naming their daughter ‘Laura.’ And third—” she paused for a drag on her cigarette—“well. When you’re eight or nine, say, and you make your first best friend, they’re the greatest person in the world and you know that you’ll be friends forever. But one day one of you moves away and they leave a vacancy. And then you meet someone with the same name, and because you’re eight part of you thinks not exactly that they’re the same person, but they were made from the same block of clay, maybe. And you try to get the new Laura to fit into the hole the old Laura left. And when you get older it doesn’t matter that you know things don’t work like that, because your ears will be primed and your heart will beat faster at the sound of that name. It will stand out to you and make something inside you go soft, and since it stands out you’ll pay more attention to them, and if you pay more attention more often than not you wind up being friends with them, until you look back when you’re forty years old and realize that you have a long string of Lauras behind you who were all important, and it isn’t just coincidence but the eight-year-old you trying to fill in the hole that the first Laura made.”

  We stopped only when we absolutely had to, marked time by the journey of the sun across the sky measured in hand spans rather than minutes. By the late afternoon the landscape had changed: we were somewhere in the rural part of Georgia, hot and dripping with green. She pulled over often now to look at the book of road maps, but each time it only confirmed that she remembered correctly, or almost correctly. She could read a map well but there was some interruption of the signal when it came to applying the ink-and-paper guide to the landscape around her, so she handed me the book and asked me to confirm her turnings. The part of the map we were on was mostly nothingness, a road or two through a blank.

  The sun was wallowing low behind the trees when we swung onto a long driveway, the rutted dirt overgrown with weeds. We had to stop twice to move fallen branches, clear enough space for our car to inch farther along the dark track. I could tell that she was nervous, and that made worry bubble up in my own stomach, worry of what we would find, of what was putting her off when so little did.

  The trees ended suddenly and we rolled out into open late-afternoon light at the bottom of a small, bare hill. I had to lean forward to see the house at the top: wooden, the paint peeling, with a broad, low, wraparound porch and dark, hollow windows.

  The place skeeved me out.

  “Are they expecting us?”

  “Nope.” She cut off the engine and leaned her crossed arms on the wheel.

  “Are they going to be happy to see us, or are we, y’know, going to get chased out of here with shotguns and dogs?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  I didn’t ask which possibility she was referring to as being the unlikely one.

  She got out of the car and I followed a few feet behind as she trudged up the hill. The house was incongruous, a chip of suburbia set down in the middle of the woods. A few yards from the front door she veered away through the sparse, baked grass, and strode around to the backyard.

  She took the bucket that was wedged under the downspout at the corner and emptied it. The house had a wide screened-in porch on the upper level, and she stood the bucket on its end to give her a boost up enough to step onto the knob and then the frame of the back door. She clung with her toes and fingertips for a moment while I listened for dogs, then pulled herself up. Her fingers fumbled with a corner of the screening, then pushed an entire section in, so that she could somersault herself through the hole. I heard her boots on the boards of the porch floor, then the scrape of a window opening. I started counting, decided that if she didn’t come back by twenty, fifty, one hundred, I was going back to the car, going to hide in the trees, getting out of that creep-ass place.

  The back door shrieked open on unoiled hinges.

  “Settle down, it’s just me.” She took my arm and pulled me into a mudroom that smelled of old rubber and musty raincoats. “You didn’t half scream.”

  “What if they come home while we’re in here? What if we get arrested or shot or they just lock us in their basement for the rest of our lives?” I locked my knees and tried to break her grip on me as she pulled me farther into the bowels of the house.

  “For Pete’s sake, Alex. They aren’t coming home. They’re dead.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  I didn’t scream again, but it took her a while to convince me that we wouldn’t be finding any dead bodies.

  “They died more than a year ago. They’re safe and buried, I promise. Somewhere else! Somewhere else! I didn’t mean under the floorboards, you morbid nutcase. We wouldn’t be here if they were still alive, trust me.”

  The house was frozen in the fifties: the wallpaper and refrigerator, the radio in the living room, the curtains that no one had bothered to draw when they left. I followed her slowly, quietly, from room to room as she ran her fingers through the dust on the furniture, stood for a moment in seemingly random spots and corners and let out sighs that she might have been keeping in since she was last in the house. There were framed photographs on the wall running up the stairs, all of them black-and-whites of groups of kids, and in the background of most of them a man and a woman with serious faces and white, white skin, whose clothing looked cheap and uncomfortable, like it had been made out of polyester bedsheets. As I went up the stairs the couple got older, began looking more and more like each other. She didn’t look at the photographs as she went up, kept her eyes on the heavy railing like she expressly did not want to see them, but when she got to the landing she stopped and took a picture off the wall.

  We paused at the top of the stairs: five closed doors. She looked at them, not as though she were guessing what was behind each but as if she knew and could not decide which to face first.

  We began on the left, her moving slowly, me following a few steps after. The first room was closed up neatly, like a cosmetics case or a paint box: two sets of bunk beds flanking a high, heavy-sashed window, a chest of drawers on either side of the door. It had a dormitory feel to it, as though it were intended to sleep whomever was passing through and had failed to gather the imprint of any one child’s psyche. She went over to the window frame, poked at the left side a moment, then took out her pocket knife and pried a slab of wood out of the skirting board.

  “Whatcha looking for?” I asked from the doorway.

  “Something someone else took a long time ago. But never mind. They probably needed it more than I did.”

  “Who was that?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  She went back out to the hallway and opened the next door, and a flutter of moths came out. It was a closet with linens still folded and piled neatly. She went down on her knees, sunk her hands between the sheets under the bottom shelf, then pulled them out into a tumble on the hall floor, stretched out on her belly to get a better reach into the back of the closet. I heard wood scrape on wood, and then she handed a panel of chipboard out to me that was painted white on one side, and wriggled farther in so that only her legs from the knees down stuck out into the hallway. Behind the back wall of the closet I heard her sneeze.

  “I used to fit my whole body in there,” she said as she backed out. “You could get two of us in, if you really wanted to.” She had a cigar box in her hands, one of the deep, narrow ones, and her fingers had left trails in the thick dust that coated it. I waited for her to open it, but instead she hefted it in her hand, shook it a bit to hear it rattle, then put it down next to t
he picture, which she had left on the floor by the top of the stairs, propped with its face against the wall so the children couldn’t watch us.

  “What’s in there?” I asked her.

  “Things.”

  She paused in front of the fifth door, skipping the third and fourth altogether.

  “Are you sure that we aren’t going to find any dead people, and no one is going to show up and arrest us for trespassing?”

  “Yes.”

  She pushed the door halfway open but stood stuck on the spot.

  “If there aren’t any dead bodies, why aren’t you going in?”

  “We aren’t allowed in their bedroom,” she said.

  The furniture was ugly veneer in a dull color that had probably been the thing to own when it was first bought. Ma hung on the edge of the room, her hands behind her back, remembering another time. We stood there for a while, so silent that I could hear the birds outside, the sough of wind through the trees, the creak of the house settling around us.

  “Hey, I need you to do something. I thought I’d be able to but I’m not so sure now,” she said, and I gave her the eye. “There’re some plastic packets sewed to the underside of the mattress—I need you to wiggle under there and get them out.” She fished in her pocket, pulled out a folding knife that I was pretty sure was over the legal length, and handed it to me, and I only hesitated a moment before getting down on my knees and crawling under the bed. I figured I was immune to whatever it was that was bothering her.

  The room smelled musty and old in that way that makes your throat close up, and the underside of the mattress was about as pretty as you’d expect, but I found what she’d told me I would: three squareish bundles done up in vinyl sheeting and stapled closed, sewed on all four edges with huge stitches to the underside of the mattress, lumpy in the center with things I couldn’t see. I lay on my back like I was working on a car, picked at the dark thread with the point of the knife—misjudging and having one drop on my face only once—and tossed them blindly out to her one at a time.