A Room on Lorelei Street

  “You sure?” Zoe knows Carly hates to be alone. Brain scars, she thinks.

  Carly’s brows pull together, and she blows a puff of air out between her lips like being alone is nothing to her. “Go,” she says.

  And Zoe does.

  Thirteen

  It is eight minutes from the school parking lot to the shaded parkway. Eight minutes for every worry to crowd her mind. What if? What if? What if Mama needs me, what if Kyle calls, what if Opal changes her mind, what if Mama…Mama…Mama? It always starts and ends with Mama. The what ifs are only blotted out when Zoe’s feet stamp out a frenzied rhythm up the stairs and she slides her key into the lock, throws open the door, and it is all still there. The bed. The jukebox. The stone bulldog on guard. The air. Hers.

  Every corner is still there.

  She walks to the bed and lies facedown, her arms spread wide, her fingers digging into the fabric, holding to be sure, tossing on a crest between laughter and tears, and then she lifts her head, focuses, and the gauzy dream is solid. Her breathing slows, and she takes in the comfort of the room. She lets it fill her, settle her like ballast in a boat. And then, when the calm has coursed to her fingertips, she gets up and begins taking a few last items from a pillowcase propped in the corner. The need to finish her nesting is obvious. Of course. Down to her marrow she needs this. She pushes thoughts of Mama aside and finishes finding order for the years of jumble she brought from home.

  A tuneless hum tumbles from her throat and floats on the air as she works. She carefully places a small, rose-flowered photo album at the end of the window seat on a tasseled tangerine pillow. She fluffs the other pillows lining the seat and then rearranges them. Their bright mismatched colors remind her of a worn but loved box of crayons. Next, she sets a tiny wooden tray on the dresser next to the picture of her and Kyle and places half a dozen perfumes on it. She sprays a blast of Summer Morning into the air and inhales. She marvels. She controls the smell of her room, too. She sprays another blast and sets the bottle with the others. Her battered stuffed Eeyore is placed between the two pillows on her bed. His matted gray-blue fur looks nice, she thinks, against the tiny winding-leaf pattern of the spread. Opal said she had another spread if Zoe preferred, but the delicate leafy design is perfect for under the star-filled ceiling. It will stay.

  She continues to empty her pillowcase until it is flat and then she neatly folds it and sets it on a shelf in her closet. Her closet. It’s done, she thinks, and there are still two hours before her shift starts at the diner. Enough time to smell the Summer Morning or rearrange everything all over again if she chooses. Or maybe time to run to the store for a few things to fill the refrigerator.

  A refrigerator. She has a refrigerator to fill. Her own refrigerator.

  After paying Opal and buying lunch and half a tank of gas, she still has twenty-two dollars. Today that sounds like a fortune. More than she needs for a few things. The room is working. It’s working.

  She walks out of the deep closet to the stone dog and smiles. “You’re doing a good job,” she says, and hunches over to move him a few inches to the right—But then she is raising, lifting…going from crouched and hovering over the dog to straightening her legs…pulling back her shoulders…lifting her chin…uncurling her spine…every movement noted and frozen in time by a sharp knock at the door.

  She instinctively knows. It is not Opal. But who? No one knows she is here.

  Except Mama.

  The knock comes again, hard, demanding attention.

  But Mama’s knock would not be so forceful. It would be slurred, undecided, barely there. Barely interested.

  It is not Mama.

  The knock comes again. Impatient.

  She walks to the door, forcing a smile, ready to say hello, ready to see how it feels to answer her door. She turns the knob and swings the door wide.

  Gray eyes pierce her own, and a hand lifts up, casting a flapping shadow like a bird across her face. The hand comes back down before she can twist away, and the black shadow becomes a white explosion across Zoe’s ear and eye. She winces and presses the side of her head but keeps her eyes on the gray ones holding her own.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Grandma—”

  “Don’t say a word, missy! You hear me? You just listen!”

  “But, Gra—”

  “You leave a note? You leave a note taped to the TV?” Her words come out strained, like tight cords ready to snap. “You know what that did to your mama? What she’s been doing all day long? Crying! You hear that? Crying! Crying her eyes out for a hard, ungrateful daughter!”

  Zoe stares hard at Grandma. She wants Grandma to look into her face. I’m not invisible. Just look. That’s all.

  But instead Zoe sees the saliva gathering at the corners of Grandma’s mouth, working up into silvery threads that slide into the creases of her mouth because Grandma will not swallow, will not take the time to lick the corners with her tongue, because she has too much to say and no time at all to search Zoe’s face.

  “Your mama’s had enough heartache without you adding to it! Who do you think—”

  “Grandma!” Zoe hardly recognizes her own voice. It is loud and desperate and stops the wrinkled lips midsentence. “Grandma,” she says again, but she can’t go farther. Zoe looks away, examining the doorjamb, picking at the creamy paint with her fingernail, afraid, as the words finally run out of her mouth to a place where she can never take them back. “I can’t. I can’t watch anymore.” But they are still not the words she wanted. Her brain has sidestepped.

  Grandma’s head tilts to the side, her voice lowers and each word comes out distinctly separate like she is afraid, too. “Can’t watch what?”

  “I can’t watch Mama…die.”

  “What?” Fear explodes in Grandma’s eyes at the suggestion of losing her favorite child. Her upper lip lifts and freezes unnaturally, exposing yellowed teeth anchored in receding gums. “What are you saying?”

  “Mama’s dying, Grandma. It’s the alcohol. Mama’s…an alcoholic.” There. She said it. It’s done. And it doesn’t sound silly or impossible. It sounds true.

  Grandma shakes her head and sighs. Her voice softens. “Beth, Beth.” Zoe listens carefully to her middle name said softly, almost tenderly. Grandma reaches out and momentarily cups Zoe’s chin. “Now, Beth, that’s a fool notion you’ve gotten hold of—probably in one of your classes at school. A few drinks don’t make someone an alcoholic.”

  “But, Grandma—”

  “Now you hear me out. I ain’t denying your mama tips it a little often, but she’s going through a hard time right now. That’s all. Just a hard time. What with your daddy—” Grandma raises her eyebrows and sighs again. “Well, with him passing on—especially the way it happened—well, like I said, she’s just going through a hard time. This’ll pass. But in the meantime she needs her family to be sticking close by her.”

  As Grandma continues to speak she opens her purse and shakes out a cigarette from a nearly empty pack. She lights it, pulls hard, and blows smoke out through one side of her sagging mouth. “You don’t get over something like this overnight, and your daddy, well, he was the love of your mama’s life, so that’s—”

  “Love of her life? She threw him out, Grandma. That’s why he was at the motel in the first place.”

  Grandma smirks, and smoke drifts out her nose. “I know how it looks, but that was nothing. Lovers have quarrels all the time. It wasn’t their first, and no one guessed it would be their last, but that doesn’t change how she felt about him. She was crazy about that man,” and then under her breath as she always had to do when talking about Daddy, she added, “though only the Lord knows why.”

  Zoe feels the wound of Grandma’s familiar comment fresh each time. She is half of Daddy. Half of Daddy stands before Grandma right now. His dark eyes, dark hair, and maybe more. But there is no sense, Zoe thinks, in digging open old wounds, when fresh ones lie before them. And Grandma
has to at least hold to the logic of time. “But, Grandma, it’s been almost two years since Daddy died, and even long before that Mama and Daddy were drinking—”

  “You just trust your granny. You hear?” She places her hands on Zoe’s shoulders and holds her squarely. Zoe doesn’t move. She wants to believe. She wants to trust. She wants to hear what Grandma can say that will change it all and make Zoe wrong. She waits.

  “I’ve been around a lot longer than you,” Grandma says, “and so has your mama. And right now she needs you. That’s all you need to worry about.” Grandma steps back and takes another puff of her cigarette. “Now let’s push all this nonsense aside. I’ll help you get your things together and then follow you back home to smooth things out with your mama. I’ll do that for you. I’ll make things right between you two again, you hear?”

  “Yes, Grandma,” Zoe whispers.

  But she wonders what Grandma has just said. She tries to grab hold of the wispy threads that said nothing, but maybe everything. How will Grandma make things right? Did she say? Where are the answers Zoe thought she would get? Is she wrong about Mama being an alcoholic? What is the nonsense? Everything that Zoe has been afraid of for so long? Or all the possibility she hoped for? Or everything about Zoe? Did Grandma ever really look into her eyes, or did she just see Daddy’s black pupils that don’t account for any time or thought at all?

  Grandma reaches out to push Zoe aside to enter the room. Zoe’s room.

  Zoe shifts to block her. “You can’t come in, Grandma!”

  Grandma stiffens.

  “It’s the landlord,” Zoe explains. “She doesn’t allow smoking. That’s all. Besides, it will just take me a few minutes…to get my stuff together. Why don’t you go finish your smoke in your car and I’ll be right down.”

  Grandma takes another puff. “All right,” she says, measuring her words. Zoe knows she is happy to finish her cigarette, unhappy about taking orders. The nicotine wins the draw. “But hurry, I’ve got other things to do today.”

  I do, too, Grandma. I have to go to work in two hours. Did you know that? But the words stay hidden in her head, crowding for room among all the other unsaid words. She watches Grandma return to her car to wait, her steps heavy on the stairs, heavy on Zoe’s brain.

  Zoe waits until Grandma disappears around the corner of the garage, then retreats to her room. She bends down, slides her empty duffel from beneath her bed but then stands again staring at it, not sure what to put in first. She sits down on the edge of the bed, stroking the tall carved bedpost. Put something in, Zoe. Something.

  But she can’t think what that first something should be.

  She stares at the frayed straps of the duffel and thinks, It is over. The room is over. She was wrong. She made Mama cry. She is an ungrateful, terrible daughter. Grandma said so. And if those aren’t reasons enough to be packing her bags, she knows Grandma has a steady supply of more to take their place. She always does. All this waiting and yelling and crying for Mama.

  Why?

  Why always Mama?

  She lets one thought tumble into another, pushing the packing away. Push, Zoe. Think. She wonders, if she were Uncle Clint’s daughter, would Grandma have come barging her way in? Would it have been worth her bother? Zoe thinks not. Mama is Grandma’s favorite. It has always been clear that she is, but why?

  Zoe flips through the pages of Uncle Clint’s life like she is searching a book for answers. Something that would explain why she must now pack her duffel and leave her room. Why Mama and not Uncle Clint? He’s a nice enough man. Always clean-shaven. His hair thinning a little on top, but always neatly trimmed and combed. He has a steady job. Nothing fancy, just throwing mail at the Cooper Springs Annex, but it’s reliable. Why shouldn’t he be the favorite? Would she still have the room if he was? He treats Aunt Patsy respectfully and keeps his yard weeded and green and plants a vegetable garden every spring. He’s not the life of the party, that’s for sure, usually busying himself with chores like hauling soda from the garage, or adding ice to the cooler, or emptying the trash, or hanging out on the driveway and fiddling underneath someone’s hood since he’s handy with tools. He’s quiet, dull even, but you can count on him. Counting on someone is worth a lot. Shouldn’t that make him a favorite? Aunt Patsy calls him the salt of the earth, which Zoe takes to mean he is one of the plainer spices, but maybe the most important. But not to Grandma. She always has a cutting remark about him. If he’d gone to college, he wouldn’t be stuck in a government job. If he was thriftier, he’d have a real home instead of a trailer. If he put his foot down once in a while, he wouldn’t have a houseful of hooligans running through it all the time.

  His trailer is a double-wide manufactured home on an acre of land, and the hooligans are the abundant eleven-year-old friends of her cousin, Wain. Grandma always sees the glass half empty instead of half full when it comes to Uncle Clint. Why? And Aunt Nadine, the oldest of Grandma’s kids, well, Zoe doesn’t know a lot about her, but she knows she’s not a favorite, either. She’s the mysterious aunt no one talks much about, or at least they’re not supposed to. She moved away to Brownsville when Zoe was four. Brownsville is about as far as you can get from Ruby and still be in Texas. Aunt Nadine only comes back once every several years, for a holiday, a wedding, or maybe a funeral. She came to Daddy’s funeral, and that was the last time Zoe saw her. She popped in and out in two days and stayed at a motel, which started a commotion with Grandma, but then Aunt Nadine was gone again just as fast, so the fight had no fuel. Aunt Nadine seemed to have a wall around herself as far as Grandma was concerned. Grandma didn’t have many cutting remarks for Aunt Nadine. Mostly no remarks at all.

  But when Grandma talked about Mama, a change came over her. Zoe noticed her stature actually seemed to change, like she was growing bigger and stronger, and her gray, empty eyes sprang to life. What made that happen? Mama is the youngest, her baby, is that it? She has heard Grandma call Mama her miracle baby. Grandma said her female parts were scarred and torn, and the doctors with their high-falutin’ degrees said there would be no more babies. And then Mama came along and proved them all wrong…. Or maybe it was Grandma who did the proving? Was that it? Grandma had to keep on proving that they were wrong and everything about Mama was right?

  Or maybe it has nothing to do with being a miracle baby at all but that Mama is so needy and Clint and Nadine aren’t? Mama is needy. Maybe that’s what it’s all about. A child who still needs Grandma, or maybe a child Grandma is still holding out hope for. Like a baby bird that has fallen out of the nest and the mother abandons the rest to save the one. Is that it? Is that why she is losing the room? Why she has to go back? Because Mama is a lost bird?

  But it’s probably none of those things, and Zoe knows she can’t ask. Some things are not meant to be brought up—like Daddy patting Mama’s tummy and begging her not to get rid of the baby inside. Some things might gnaw inside of you, like the awful way Daddy died, and other things might squeeze your heart so you can’t take a breath, like watching Mama’s legs starve away. But some things. Some things. They don’t have a real life if they aren’t put to words, and it is probably best just to pack your bags and not rock the boat because if you do, you just might knock the boat clean over and make everybody drown, including yourself.

  Drowning.

  How painful is it? Zoe wonders.

  “Beth! What are you doing? You haven’t packed a thing! You think I have all day to—”

  Zoe springs from the edge of the bed. “I’m not going, Grandma.”

  “What?”

  The words jumped from her throat, and she’s surprised at them, too. “I’m not going back.” She pauses and then steps closer to Grandma. The surprise is over, and she adds more deliberately, “I’m never going back.”

  Grandma fills the doorway, the afternoon sun squeezing past her silhouette in hot lines of light. “I heard the not going back part, but I want some explaining to go with it!”

  The words are ther
e. Ready. Rehearsed a hundred times over on dark, tear-filled nights, but they are held back by fears that opening up one secret could make them all come pouring out—even ones she doesn’t want to know—fears that whisper in her ear, Be silent. Be careful.

  “Well, Beth?”

  “I’m just not going,” Zoe answers softly.

  “And that’s what I’m supposed to tell your mama? You just aren’t?” Grandma tilts her head and looks down her nose at Zoe. It’s a look that makes Zoe want to curl inside of herself so the whole world is black. It’s a look she has seen so many times before.

  “You don’t have to tell her anything at all,” Zoe says. “She knows where I live if she wants to hear it from me.”

  Grandma knows Mama will never show up and so she changes the direction of the conversation. Zoe has always noticed that about her—her skill at maneuvering conversations and lives.

  “What about the car?” she asks. “You think you’re gonna keep that thing?” Her voice lowers, and she spits the words out like well-aimed bullets. “Think again, missy.”

  Zoe hadn’t thought about the car. No one has keys to it but her—she made sure of that the last time Mama was arrested. She has all the keys for safekeeping. The only way Grandma is going to be able to take it away is to have it towed, and Zoe wouldn’t put that past her. “When Mama can drive again, I’ll give it back.”

  Grandma moves on, searching for the next soft spot. “You think you’re going to make it on your own? You’re only seventeen! You sling hash, for God’s sake! You think you can make it on that?” The look again. She fumbles in her purse for another cigarette and lights it as she continues to talk. The cigarette is tucked in her knobby fingers like a glowing pointer that she shakes at Zoe. “You ain’t gonna make it. You hear me, Beth? You’ll be back. You’ll come crawling back for forgiveness, and you know what? We’ll give it to you, too. Your mama and me. Because we’re family, and that’s what family does. You’ll come begging and crying, and we’ll take you back. But things’ll be different, that’s for sure. You can count on that. You hear me, Beth? You hear what I’m saying?”