Mockingbird

  “Scared?” Angela said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Really scared.”

  Angela took a towel off the rack and started drying plates.

  “Did you ever worry that you were going to be a terrible mother?” I asked.

  “Me? No way. I knew I would be a great mother.” Angela laughed out loud. “What a stupid little shit I was. But no, actually, I never worried about that. I always felt like all I had to do to be a better mother than my mom was to stick around, you know? To be there for more than four months. I was pretty sure I was up to that.” She put up a stack of plates.

  “What if the hurricane hits and the power goes out while I’m in the delivery room?”

  “Hospitals have backup generators, Toni.”

  “What if the backup malfunctions?”

  “And if you’re in labor at night and if they have no flashlights at the hospital and nobody can find a candle and they have to do an emergency C-section?”

  “Just for instance.”

  Angela scooped up a handful of silverware and began scrubbing fork tines. “Then your odds of coming through it with a healthy baby are still probably a hundred times better than they were for your great-grandmother.”

  “I suppose.” A breeze had come up and I could hear the live-oak branches creaking. Drifts and swirls of conversation eddied into the house from the garden, where Carlos’s numerous relations laughed and talked amongst themselves. “Even if Iris doesn’t get us head-on, she’s going to come close. Candy dreamed it. Someone has to go out tonight to get masking tape and bottled water. And ice, we’ll need ice to keep the food from going bad if the power goes out.”

  “Where can I find a rag? My scrubbie thing is all slimed up.”

  “Under the sink,” I said. “Because Houston is so flat, the roads fill with water very fast. I’ve seen Westheimer impassable in ordinary storms. My little car could never make it to the hospital.”

  “Then you call an ambulance,” Angela said.

  “Sometimes ambulances are late.” As Mary Jo found out the hard way. “You know what my pregnancy books advise to get labor underway?” I said. “Sex. Lots of good sex.” Angela probably thought of a bunch of funny things to say, but suppressed them all, for which I was grateful. I hated sounding so sorry for myself. “Candy was supposed to be my labor coach.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “She didn’t make it to all the classes, of course. But she made it to some. I guess she and Carlos will be on their honeymoon instead. They’re going to San Cristóbal. That’s in Mexico. It’s in the mountains, not so hot as here. Momma always said it was beautiful. She was going to take us someday.”

  “Candy isn’t going to leave early just because you had a fight,” Angela said. “She’ll still be there for you, Toni.”

  “I don’t want her there. I don’t want her in that room with me.”

  Angela laughed. “Toni, I hate to break it to you, but when you’re in labor you won’t be thinking about this little scrap. They could put a branding iron on your butt and you wouldn’t notice. But you will want a hand to hold. I strongly suggest that you and Candy kiss and make up.”

  “That doesn’t come very easily to me.”

  “Then let me help. You have two lines, Toni. ‘Candy! You look so beautiful!’ is one. This is tricky because you have to say it, and you have to mean it, but it’s going to be a tough sell after what you said this morning.”

  “She doesn’t need me to tell her she looks fabulous in that dress. A blind man could tell her that.”

  “She needs to hear it nonetheless. And more particularly, she needs to hear it from you.”

  “Why me? Why not you?”

  “I’m not her big sister,” Angela said. “Whether you like it or not, Toni, on this day you are all the mother Candy has. It’s your job. You worked hard for her all those years. Are you going to blow it now?”

  I grunted. “What’s my second line?”

  “‘Everything is going to work out between you and Carlos, I just know it.’”

  “Why should she believe me? I can’t see the future. Fifty-two percent of all marriages fail. Why should she beat the odds?”

  “Say it, Toni.”

  “How convincing could it be, coming from a woman Nobody Could Love?”

  “More convincing than it sounds from a woman divorced two times,” Angela said drily. She turned back to the sink and reached for a handful of silver. In a pompous British voice she said, “That woman, sir, is not only divorced in herself, she is the cause of divorce in others.”

  “Shakespeare?” I guessed.

  “Winston Churchill,” she said. “More or less.”

  The phone rang at five the following morning. I hadn’t gotten to sleep until almost one, and even then my night had been restless and filled with bad dreams. I swung myself out of bed and ran to the phone, amazed at my own speed. “Candy?”

  “Iris is coming right for us,” my sister said. “She’s due to make landfall at Galveston in two hours. I’ve been watching the Weather Channel all night. We can’t do this in Baytown. I’m going to start calling people. We’re going to move the ceremony to our house.”

  “Here!”

  “Ten o’clock, Toni. It has to be ready for ten o’clock, the priest is booked for the rest of the day. I’ll call him, you call—no, never mind, I’ll do the calling. You just get the place cleaned up, get some food, whatever.”

  “Wouldn’t it make more sense to—”

  “I’m not getting married in a church, Toni! I just can’t. Not with this happening. This is a sign. I never had one damn dream about my wedding day!” Candy cried. “I hope that makes you happy,” she said, and she slammed down the receiver.

  “What’s up?” Angela asked through a mouth full of pillow.

  “She never dreamed about her wedding.”

  “What?”

  “Candy. She sees the future in dreams. But she only sees happy times.”

  “So?”

  “So she never saw her wedding.”

  Poor Candy. Knowing her as I did, I imagined her going to sleep for the last eight months, hoping every night that this time she would see a vision of herself, radiant at the altar. And it never happened. No happy wedding vision for the girl who grew up listening to our parents fight, the girl who slipped off at fourteen to get laid because it was the one thing she could call true and only hers…If I was worried about the kind of mother I would make, I realized for the first time just how scared Candace Jane must be about the kind of wife she was going to be.

  “Better get up,” I said to Angela, who moaned and hid her head under her sheet. “We have a lot of work to do.”

  I woke Daddy and went downstairs and fixed us all a big mess of chorizo and eggs. It was cool downstairs, cooler than it had been in months. The clouds on the storm front had arrived; the sky outside was pitch-black, the moon and stars blotted out. When I opened the French doors to the garden, the night wind blew inside. It smelled of flowers and the sea, it tugged at Pierrot’s diamond pants as he sat in the chifforobe, and flapped the tails of the Preacher’s black coat. In the kitchen, strings of dried peppers and garlic swung and rustled.

  A quick breakfast and then we set to work getting the house ready for a wedding and a hurricane. Angela had gone out for storm supplies the night before, rolling into a twenty-four hour Kroger’s. They had been out of nearly everything; she came back with a roll of parcel-wrapping tape and six liters of tonic water. They had been sold out of ice, but shrewdly Angela had brought back a ten-pound bag of charcoal briquettes, on the theory that if the power did go out, we could cook what we couldn’t freeze.

  I took the parcel tape and taped X’s across all the south-facing windows so that if they broke they wouldn’t shatter and spray glass inside. I kept both TVs on the Weather Channel and listened while I worked. Iris was moving north-northwest at twelve to fifteen miles an hour. She had been upgraded to a Class 3 hurricane, with sustained wind speeds of 125
mph gusting to 145. The folks at the Weather Channel were having a wonderful time; for them this was as good as a war and a presidential election rolled into one. Regular and infrared satellite photographs tracked the storm’s progress while the commentators talked knowledgeably about how hurricanes spawned killer tornadoes when they hit land.

  Just past six o’clock in the morning it began to rain.

  I looked at Angela as the first drops began spitting against the French doors. “Here we go,’” I said, scrabbling in the kitchen drawers for flashlight batteries. Although I had been exhausted to the point of uselessness for much of the last two weeks, today I found myself, on five broken hours of sleep, bursting with energy.

  “God, you’re like a buzz saw,” Angela said, yawning.

  “Panic.”

  “I can’t panic properly until I’ve had some coffee,” she said.

  “That’s because you’ve never been through a hurricane.” I tested the big Energizer flashlamp, catching her square in the eyes with the beam.

  “Brat!”

  “Great. Still working. Close the patio doors, would you?” Ordinarily I loved to hear the sound of the rain drumming down in the garden, but the wind had stiffened enough that the tile floors were beginning to darken. A flash of movement caught my eye as a little green lizard scuttered inside to get out of the storm.

  Daddy carried his breakfast plate over to the sink. “I’ll get the Coleman lamps out of the garden shed.”

  “Yuck. Nobody wants to be married by kerosene light. We’ll go with candles.”

  “For later. Just in case.”

  He took his windbreaker and headed out. When he came back five minutes later he was drenched, and the battering rain was much louder. “You’re making puddles on the floor!” I shouted, springing for a mop and starting to hum an old Pogues tune. I mopped the way pirates rowed after a few cups of grog. I was the Mop Queen.

  After mopping I made Angela help me heave the table against the wall so it could pretend to be a sideboard. I set out our best china cups and saucers and silverware and dessert plates. I filled Momma’s antique sugar bowl but decided that we didn’t have enough linen napkins to go around. “Time to bake,” I said. “Cookies or brownies or Rice Krispie squares?”

  “Brownies first,” Angela said decisively. “They’re classy and they take the longest. Mine never turn out, though. I’ll start on the Rice Krispie squares. They’re tacky but everyone likes eating them. To judge by last night, I’ll bet Mrs. Gonzales has been baking for a week. Leave the fancy stuff to her. Throw in cookies at the end if you have time, they’re easy and fast.”

  “Spoken like a Professional Mom,” I said. “I’m in awe.”

  I was melting butter and cocoa together at eight o’clock when Candy arrived. The instant the door opened we were deafened by the storm roaring outside. The clamor had crept up so gradually and we had been in such a hurry, I hadn’t really paid attention to it. Now it was awesome. I could hear high-power lines singing in the wind. Rain chattered like gunfire against the kitchen window.

  “Bitch won’t bring the cake!” Candy yelled. She staggered inside, wild-eyed and wind-blasted. Outside the world was a howling madhouse. The sun should have been up for an hour, but the shrieking darkness was so thick with rain that not only was it still pitch-black, I couldn’t even see a glimmer from the streetlight across the road.

  “What?”

  “She won’t bring the cake! I paid her good money for a cake, no Royal icing, a good lemon icing ’cause I swore I wouldn’t be one of those brides who stands up in front of everyone at the reception and can’t cut through the fucking atomic bombproof icing and now the bitch won’t bring it because of a little fucking rain!”

  “Candy? How did you get here?” Daddy said.

  Candy stood bristling before us like a wet wolverine. “Walked,” she said. “Swam.” She pulled off her cowboy boots with a huge sucking sound, her fingers slimed with mud. A cup of water drained from each sock. She was wearing a windbreaker and jeans and looked like she had crawled across a motocross track during a race in a monsoon. Great swaths of mud and live-oak leaves and bits of paper and pine tree needles were stuck to her clothes. In one hand she clenched a king-size JC Penney plastic shopping bag. “I was on the phone arguing with the cake lady when I heard this crashing noise. I thought the roof of the house was tearing off, swear to God. Then the line went dead so I had to come here to use your phone. I put the wedding dress in a dry-cleaning bag and then put the dry-cleaning bag in a Sears bag and put the Sears bag in here,” she said, rattling the JC Penney bag menacingly. “When I went outside I found that crashing noise had been the live oak outside my apartment falling over. Guess what broke its fall?”

  “Your car,” I whispered. “Oh my God. Is there much damage?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Toni. It’s a Civic! A live oak on that is like dropping a cinderblock on a ladybug.” Candy was shaking with rage. Or maybe it was delayed fear. “I was three minutes from getting in that car, you know. It looks like a pop can that got squashed under an anvil. I would have been squirted out the windshield like so much toothpaste.”

  “My,” Angela said. “Isn’t this exciting?”

  “I need to use the phone,” Candy said, stomping past me in her wet socks.

  “What for?”

  “Gonna get my fucking cake.”

  “Candy, the cake lady is not coming. She shouldn’t come. You shouldn’t have come. There’s a killer storm outside. Nobody is coming,” I said.

  “I paid good money for that cake,” Candy said. She didn’t move for the phone. Tears were starting in her eyes.

  “You shall have your cake,” Angela said. “Toni, don’t be ridiculous. Of course people will come. Not everybody, perhaps. But plenty of people will. Carlos will, and that’s all that matters.”

  “But—”

  “No, we don’t really have time for buts,” Angela said smoothly, taking Candy by the arm. “Come upstairs and let me get to work on you. I think we’ll use the hair dryer first, before the power goes out.”

  The room lit with unbearable brightness. Thunder exploded all around us. An instant later the transformer behind our house blew up. Green lightning arced from it like fireworks gone mad. The lights gasped and went out, along with all the electric appliances. At first all I could hear was the ringing the thunder had left in my ears. Then the transformer, spitting and sizzling. Then the moaning winds and the rain battering against the windows. One of our tile shingles tore off the roof and came smashing down onto the patio. A moment later, with a great wrenching, creaking noise, a ten-foot plank pulled out of the back fence and went cartwheeling through the garden.

  “Or,” said Angela, “we could towel-dry and style with hair spray.”

  After that there wasn’t much to do but listen to the back fence pull apart, one plank at a time.

  By eight-thirty the sky had turned a greasy, unnatural copper color. The wind was ferocious, but more fitful, and the rain began to ease up. Five minutes before nine o’clock the clouds split as if being ripped along a seam. The wind died to nothing and a blue window opened in the heavens like a cervix dilating.

  “The eye of the storm,” I said to Angela, who had popped downstairs for a moment while Candy used the toilet.

  “How long will it last?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “By the way, I’m having contractions.”

  Angela stopped. “How far apart?”

  “Seven minutes, twelve minutes, eight minutes, and thirteen minutes so far. Not regular. It probably isn’t real labor. But it isn’t Braxton-Hicks.”

  “Do you feel it in your front or your back?”

  “A bit of both. Real labor is supposed to be just in your back, I know. It probably isn’t real labor.”

  Angela held my hand, looking at me. “Probably not. You scared anyway?”

  “No,” I said. “Well, yes. But I’m okay. I just want to get it over with. Want a brownie?”


  The toilet flushed. Angela squeezed my hand. “Later. I have all I can handle upstairs.”

  Candy stomped out of the bathroom in her bare feet and wedding gown, the buttons undone all down her back. “With any luck the damn priest will drown,” she said, and stomped upstairs. Angela rolled her eyes and followed.

  After a moment’s thought I waddled over to the chifforobe. Momma’s gods gazed out at me, the Preacher stern, Sugar lazy, Pierrot grinning his cruel smile. “Now, you listen to me,” I said quietly, picking up the Widow by her test-tube body and staring at her black button eyes. “This was your idea, remember? This is supposed to be the happiest day of my little sister’s life. And I swear on Momma’s grave that if you ruin it for her, I’m going to take you down to the Greyhound bus station and bury you six feet deep in the Lost and Found box, do you hear me?” I shook the Widow until the dried spiders in her glass body bounced and jiggled.

  I heard what sounded like the ghost of a malicious laugh. “That goes for the rest of you too. You know what I’m going to do with you if this doesn’t go well?” I said, glaring at Pierrot. “You’re going to be a Christmas present for a family I know with two-year-old twins.”

  The faint laughter choked off.

  I closed the chifforobe doors and got busy setting out candles.

  Just after nine, to my complete surprise, our guests began to arrive.

  Greg was first, sweeping inside with a great stomp and flourish, resplendent in a London Fog raincoat and brandishing an enormous green umbrella. “I’m early! Can you imagine it? But I thought I’d better come while the skies were clear.” Whisking through the front door, he spun around on one heel, accidentally spattering me with raindrops from his twirling umbrella, and wound up leaning against the wall next to the table-cum-sideboard. “Rice Krispie squares! Yum. But I’ll wait until the reception proper, shall I?”

  I wiped the water from my face. “Hey, Greg, glad you could make it.” And suddenly I was. If I were to double over with agonizing contractions in the next thirty seconds, Greg would be instantly available for a spot of Galahading. He wasn’t husband material, not for me—nor was I wife fiber for him, apparently—but in the short term, I couldn’t ask for a better friend.