A Room on Lorelei Street

  The Thunderbird is a dark vacuum, an airless space light-years from everything. She fights an impulse to drive by her house and shake Mama, shake her over and over, shake her until a part of Zoe shakes right out and Zoe picks it up and runs. And the impulse shifts to a burning urge to drive to Grandma’s tiny apartment and bang on her cold, bolted heart, to go to Aunt Patsy’s and Uncle Clint’s and beg to be worthy like Kyle, to go back to the party and dance with Carlos even if Reid is watching, dance close and hot until their sweat runs together, because his eyes and his mouth and everything about him makes her burn, but instead she keeps her hands steady on the wheel, steady, all the way to her room on Lorelei Street. When she gets there she changes her clothes, turns out the light, and crawls between light sheets cooled by a thin breeze.

  But still she burns. She is on fire with need. Burning that goes deeper than her skin, etched deeply, maybe in her soul, and there seems to be nothing for it, no balm, save inching her arms up to hold herself and wishing the arms weren’t her own.

  Twenty

  Sweat mingles with tears. Tiny tears. Tears that no one sees. No one knows. But Zoe. She feels each one. She feels them trickle like sweat, but different because they start in her heart, wind through her throat, and then spring from the corners of her eyes like birth. It feels like birth. New. She wipes them away, like sweat, and no one knows but her. She knows.

  “Deuce!” She swings. Not just a swing. A death serve. The serve is missed, and a cheer and a bark roar from a tiny spot in the crowd that seems to Zoe to fill all of Ruby.

  “Ad-in!” Her next serve slams into the corner but is returned. Her backhand hisses the ball back through the air, kissing the net. It is her last game. Singles. She won her doubles match. Singles are reserved for the strongest players. Sometimes she plays, sometimes not. Today she’s up against the number-two player at Cooper Springs High. Her next return is low—too low. It hits the net and falls back on her side. But still, another cheer and a long-tongued smile. And she swipes at the sweat-tears again.

  “Deuce!” The ball slices the air and the green and the lines, and the Cooper Springs player shakes her head at a ball she hardly saw.

  Another cheer, and Zoe fights to keep the tiny unnoticed tears from growing into a sob.

  “Ad-in!” The serve bullets into the hot spot, and the ball is returned but sails out of court.

  “Game Buckman!” the referee calls.

  And the air and sound stop. For Zoe. Movement is syrup slow, stretching out thin.

  Slow, while she turns.

  For the first time ever, she turns and waves into the bleachers. She waves at someone who is waving back at her. A crazy, cheering, silver-haired lady with a pom-pom, a flag, and a smiling dog.

  In the bleachers.

  For Zoe.

  Twenty-One

  “I didn’t know you were coming,” Zoe says. It is awkward. She doesn’t know if she should say thank you. She doesn’t want to say thank you. It seems too…needy. She thought about it on her way home. She thought about it as she showered and changed. It pulled and it twisted until a light thought became heavy. Why would Opal want to come? For her? And now as she runs down the stairs to go to Kyle’s party, Opal and Count Basil are there bringing in the mail, and something must be said. “It’s just that I was surprised is all.”

  Opal hugs her mail to her chest and tweaks her head to the side in her sparrowlike way. “Really, dear? You didn’t read it?” she asks, smiling.

  Read it? Zoe skims back through her mind and days.

  “My eyes, dear. I thought you read my eyes yesterday. I read the invitation in yours.”

  I invited her? I have to be careful with my eyes, Zoe thinks. She might read all kinds of things there. What is she reading now? Zoe looks down and picks at her cuticle. “Sure,” she says. And then she looks back up but is still afraid, a gauzy, thin familiar feeling circles her mouth holding back words that she does and doesn’t want to say. Words that might open a wound that is just scabbing over.

  “You’re welcome!” Opal says, her words breathy and soft. “And I thank you! You were amazing! The Count and I had such a time!”

  Opal goes back to sifting through her mail and grimaces. “Bills!” she says. And then the smile returns like a bird that can’t be shooed from a nest. “Maybe if I change the name to Opal’s Lorelei Home for the Criminally Insane it would keep them away!” Always possibility.

  Zoe smiles. “Thank you, Opal.”

  And it doesn’t seem needy at all.

  She leaves, letting Opal’s criminally insane possibilities entertain her as she drives and appreciating Opal’s concern over bills. No excuses. Humor, but no excuses. Mama never even looked at the mail.

  Mama.

  Will she be there today?

  Zoe knows no one is expecting her, except maybe Kyle. Kyle will be looking for Zoe. But Grandma will have made it known that she was uninvited. Mama, Aunt Patsy, Uncle Clint—they all will know. Will they want her there?

  And then an icy thought catches her, starkly, in the middle of the Indian summer heat. It’s been four days since she left home and, other than Grandma, no one has tried to see what happened to her. Hasn’t Mama even wanted to come see her? Make sure she is okay? Wondered about her suspension at school? Wondered about anything at all? Or is it still just about Mama? Mama, and how everything affects her. Never about Zoe.

  Or maybe it is simply that there is no part of “Mama” left. No part that Zoe remembers. No part that held her hand in the grocery store. That smoothed her hair away from her face with spit-moistened fingers. That painted Zoe’s toenails in rainbow colors and then laughed as they wiggled. And now Zoe questions those memories, too. How real were they? As fuzzy as her memories of running through a sprinkler on a hot Texas day when it seemed that Shasta daisies were crowding for room near the porch and Popsicles filled the freezer. How much was real…and how much was wanting?

  There has always been wanting. Wanting her clothes to be washed and pressed with love. Wanting someone to pack her a lunch. Wanting someone to double-check her school papers. Wanting someone to meet her at the bus. Wanting someone to care if her socks matched or her underwear were clean or her teeth brushed. Zoe did all those things for Kyle. The wanting told her to do it for him.

  She stops at Barry’s Hobby Shop on Third Street and picks up the kite she ordered for Kyle two months ago. Thank God she’d already paid for it all or she’d be stuck. “Forty-nine dollars,” she sighs, thinking how much gas, food, and cigarettes that could buy. But she didn’t know then where she would be now, and two months ago when she saw the kite, she knew she had to get it for him. Kiteman, she has called him since he was four and stretched his arms to the sky trying to touch the tails with his hopeful stubby fingers. From digging holes with spoons to throwing balls for Zoe to chasing kite tails, Kyle found his own ways to pass time waiting for Daddy to return to the park to get them. The Dragonslayer 1000 is incredibly beautiful, even to Zoe—with its iridescent emerald diamonds on a shimmering blue background and its spinning tails of forest green—plus, she splurged on a rubber-gripped reel that could wind in the massive kite with ease. She can’t wait to see Kyle’s face when he opens it. Did he know about her leaving? He is only ten—no, eleven now. Would Grandma put Zoe’s leaving on his shoulders, or would she keep it among the adults and spare him the worry? Of course, when it comes to Mama, no one is spared. “He’ll know,” she whispers.

  Zoe turns on the last road out of Cooper Springs into the subdivision where Uncle Clint and Aunt Patsy live. Their double-wide home is still more than a mile off, but she can already see it peeking up on a small rise in the landscape. It is a green postage stamp in the cracked bareness. A sparse sprinkling of other homes dot the area as well, but Uncle Clint has a heavy hand with watering and planting, and poplars shoot up in the distance like giant green geysers, setting his house apart from the others.

  An oasis, she thinks. Uncle Clint’s Double-Wide Oasis.

&
nbsp; Her insides flutter as she gets closer, and she thinks for a moment to have another quick smoke before she gets there, but as her fingers rummage blindly through her purse on the seat next to her, she realizes there isn’t time. Shit. Shit. She takes several quick breaths instead, trying to will the tension away. She turns into the long gravel drive and counts the parked cars already there. Aunt Patsy’s, Uncle Clint’s, Grandma’s, and two others she doesn’t recognize. She wishes there were more, like at Yolanda’s party. Hundreds more so she could dissolve into other faces and conversations. But she already knows that Kyle’s party will be nothing like Yolanda’s.

  Her car crunches to a stop on the loose gray gravel, and the sound of her slamming car door rattles the still air. She knows everyone is probably around on the back patio under the shade of the aluminum awning, but she walks up the short wooden porch to the front door anyway. It seems like a halfway point—a way to ease into what is to come. She taps lightly on the door. There is no answer, so she turns the knob and enters the large empty living room. From there she can see half the kitchen and hear the clunky clattering of pans but still sees no one.

  “Hello?” she calls.

  Aunt Patsy lifts her head from under the counter and then, like she has just comprehended who the voice belongs to, stands. Her lips are half-parted, and her brows lift into the blue kerchief that covers her baldness. She has been done with chemo for three weeks now. Zoe wonders how long before the hair grows back, but she can’t ask. She can’t even notice. She pretends that Aunt Patsy’s eyes aren’t hollow, that her wrists aren’t thin. Like she is still just the same old Aunt Patsy she always was. Maybe she is. They are all good at pretending.

  Aunt Patsy wipes her hands over and over again on her apron when there is nothing on them. “Zoe?” she says. “Zoe.” She smiles and comes around the counter with her arms outstretched. “I didn’t know—”

  Zoe kisses her cheek. “Grandma said I wasn’t coming?”

  Aunt Patsy nods and glances out the kitchen window that looks out on the back patio. “Oh, yes,” she hushes.

  “Is it okay? With you?”

  Aunt Patsy frowns and blows air out the sides of her mouth, as she draws Zoe into the kitchen. “Everyone is welcome in my house, and anyone who gets their knickers in a knot over that will just have to go plant them elsewhere! You hear?”

  “I hear,” Zoe says. But she doesn’t really. She is fond of Aunt Patsy, but a welcome from her isn’t enough.

  “Now let’s go outside and say hello.”

  Zoe is still not ready, and she steps away from the door. She asks to borrow some gift wrap for Kyle’s present first. Aunt Patsy leads her down the narrow hall, pulls some wrap from a shelf in the closet, and leaves the supplies spread out on a lower bunk in Wain and Kyle’s room so Zoe can complete the job. “Hurry now,” she says. “Kyle will be happy to see you.”

  “And Mama? Is she here?”

  Aunt Patsy nods but doesn’t say anything about Mama being happy to see Zoe. Just a silent nod and she leaves, maybe afraid to get started on any talk of Mama at all on a day that is supposed to be happy for Kyle. Aunt Patsy has priorities, Zoe thinks, and she is glad Kyle lives here.

  The room is tiny but neat. Every square foot is filled with the orderly storage of boy things. She wonders at the space Wain had to give up in order to squeeze in Kyle—the space in his room, and the space in his life. Some people are able to squeeze, to mold around another life like it has always been there.

  Wain is just a year older than Kyle, so their interests are similar. It is a good match, she thinks. Kyle belongs here. She knows Kyle’s underwear is always clean. He goes for checkups to the dentist. He has to be in bed by nine on a weeknight. He is missed if he is home late from school and scolded if he causes needless worry. A world revolves with an orderly rhythm and he helps make it happen. A rhythm that she has never known, but surely Grandma thinks otherwise. Grandma imagines it in her mind. They all do. Appearances can be deceiving. A new dress from Kmart for Christmas day can make it all seem so together and right. Appearances. If Mama is here today, will it be a new dress, or easy laughter, or long pants to cover her withering legs that will make it seem that everything is right and Zoe is all wrong? Will her shaking hands or faulty steps be shrugged off with an explanation of little sleep, or a touch of the flu, or whatever else that will make Mama seem right?

  Zoe finishes wrapping the awkwardly shaped package, and with nothing else to delay her, she walks down the hallway to the sliding glass door and steps out to the patio to get it over with. She is suddenly overwhelmed with the need to see Kyle. She needs to see his eyes and make sure they haven’t changed. She needs to hold him, to rub his head, to soak in the love he is full up with.

  She needs some of that before she sees Mama.

  Twenty-Two

  She stares out at the green. It rolls like eternity, an area too big for her voice to penetrate. Too big to whisper, Come here. Too big to reach out and gather him to her. Just to her, without the world scrambling in the way. And would he come? Would he be afraid because he knows she loves him and she hates him? She hates him for leaving her. Alone. After everything she did. How could he leave her? She wants to look into his clear, blue, watery eyes that are just like Mama’s and ask…why? And then she wants to slap him. Slap him a hundred times across his beautiful face, and then kiss his tears away and beg forgiveness. Because she loves him. She mostly loves him.

  He plays in the five-foot Doughboy pool Uncle Clint set up at the beginning of summer. Wain, too. Their laughter and hoots jump across the hot afternoon air. And the hooligans. The five hooligans Grandma is surely frowning over. But Zoe can’t see her face. She is far out in the green expanse, planted at a round table in the shade of an orange-striped umbrella. Her eyes move from Grandma’s stiff gray hair to the head next to her. Blond, freshly curled hair is pulled back into a clip.

  Mama.

  Mama wears a long navy cotton skirt and a blousy red and white top that makes her look cheerful and patriotic. It lifts Zoe. The effort. But she knows about appearances. It settles her, whispers to her, Don’t be fooled, not again. But it wouldn’t take much, she knows, perhaps just a hand cupped tenderly under her chin. The wanting is still there.

  Kyle spots her. Silhouetted against a hot, silky-white sky, he waves. His arm cuts across the blinding backdrop, back and forth, back and forth, filled with wet, splashing, eleven-year-old freedom.

  “Zoe…,” his voice calls, but it rolls through the air like a fog, slowly fingering its way to her ears in a blurry echo because, with the waving of his arms, heads turn, and across the distance of grass and betrayal, she is looking eye to eye with Grandma—Grandma turning heavy shoulders, a stiff neck, her jaw cutting the air. Looking. Looking just long enough so Zoe knows. She saw her. And then she turns back, as big and unmoving as the Doughboy pool.

  And then Mama, last of all, because sound and movement are curdled for her, and she finally awakens with the knowledge who the turned heads are for, and she turns, too. She stands, her hand balancing a glass that even Aunt Patsy and Uncle Clint can’t seem to deny. She lifts her hand, but Grandma grabs her arm and pulls her back into her seat with something urgent that must be said right at that moment. Was it a wave? Was Mama going to wave? But just as quickly, Mama has forgotten her, tucked Zoe back into her sleepy dark memory, and Zoe is staring once again at the back of her head. She wonders, a slow uncurling thought…Did Grandma lie about Mama crying for me? Was that only what Grandma hoped for?

  The knowing crawls up her back, stiffens her. Mama didn’t cry.

  “Zoe! You came!” And Kyle is upon her, his hair wet, pressing upon her breast, and she doesn’t care that he is soaking her crisp ironed clothes she wanted Grandma to see. She holds him, letting the wet glue them together, pressing her lips against dripping cords of hair. Closing her eyes and drinking in the cool and the touch of arms wrapped around her waist.

  “Of course, Kiteman. Where else would I be on
your birthday?” she says. He pulls away, glancing over his shoulder to his friends, who are calling him back to the pool.

  “It’s just that…” He hesitates. She sees a too-old crease surround his eyes, and the light blue grows dark. “Is it true you left? You left Mama…alone?”

  And then she wants to slap him. Shake him. She wants to clutch her stomach and squeeze away the hollow his worried eyes have carved in her.

  “I had to, Kiteman” is all she can say.

  His voice is hoarse, barely a whisper. “Is she going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He looks down like he is tossing away the thought and then lifts his gaze to her again. “You okay?” he asks.

  And all is forgiven for the share of worry that is for her. She ruffles his hair and says, “Go! Stop being such a drudge! Your friends are calling you.” His smile returns, and he runs back to the games and worries of being dunked. It is all he has ever known. To move on, because Zoe has made it so. For him. She rubs it out of his hair, out of his life, because she can.

  The laughter and splashing resume with a dash and a jump, pushing her back into the world she came from. Alone. The dampness at her breast fades to dryness, and in seconds, Kyle’s touch is gone. She smooths out the wrinkles left across her crisp white cotton blouse and sees she forgot to do her nails. Shit. She forgot to do her nails. A wrinkled blouse, ragged nails, and alone.

  She looks back at the house, but Aunt Patsy has gone inside. Uncle Clint, his neighbor Odell, and Aunt Patsy’s older brother Evan, hover over a barbecue near the storage shed. Evan’s wife, Norma, is clucking and playing lifeguard near the pool. And then there are the disapproving backs of Grandma and Mama ready to swallow her up.

  “Hello!”

  She turns. Out of nowhere, Quentin Hale has descended like an angel to save her from a lawn that pins her to its middle.