All Over Creation (35 page)

“You're—” he said, then waited for someone to help him out, and of course Yummy obliged. Cass would have been perfectly happy to let him wait forever.

“Cass,” Yummy said. “Cass Unger.”

“Quinn,” Cass said, but nobody heard her.

“Of course,” Elliot said. “Yummy's friend.” He smiled at her, like a parent trying to be gracious. His eyes were flicking back and forth between Poo's dark little face and hers, comparing.

“Cute baby,” he said. “Is he—”

“He's mine,” Yummy said.

Elliot raised his eyebrows and glanced past Cass at Phoenix and Ocean, who were standing half hidden, as though he were expecting more children to pop out.

“Just the three,” Yummy said. “That's it. No more.”

Cass felt her face redden with shame, but even that didn't belong to her entirely. Yummy's babies, Yummy's shame. She felt Ocean beside her, clutching her pant leg. Poo squirmed in her arms. Behind her, Phoenix slammed the door and headed back out into the wind. Something small and hot burst inside her chest. Poo sensed it and started to cry. Yummy held her arms out for him, and he went to her gladly.

Elliot was putting on his coat. “So,” he was saying to Yummy. “Are you free for lunch? Tomorrow?”

Yummy nodded.

Stripped of the baby, her reason for being there, Cass turned and walked toward the door.

But it wasn't over. Not quite. Not yet.

“Cass?” Yummy said. “Could you take Poo again tomorrow afternoon?”

Cass couldn't bear it. “Will wants to start planting as soon as this wind lets up.” Her brain felt squeezed and useless.

“Just for a few hours . . .”

Old habit won out. “All right.”

Outside, Phoenix was throwing stones against the side of the barn, but he was far enough away so that the wind carried off the sound of impact. Silent rock against old wood. He looked so small under the towering poplars bending stiffly in the wind. Beyond him stretched the empty fields, overhung with a pale cloud of swirling dust.

Cass headed toward home. Halfway there she realized she was holding on to her stomach. Just thinking of Yummy together with Rhodes made her sick, as though the sight itself carried a taint. For the rest of the evening she tried to keep the images from her mind, but it was too late. That night she dreamed about the horrible brown room at the top of the stairs, and the train yard beyond, and the mournful, eerie overtones of steel straining against steel. Waking, she realized it was just the wind creaking in the poplars, and she relaxed. A few minutes later the cramps started.

It didn't take long. It never did. In the grim yellow light of the bathroom, she washed away the traces that smeared the insides of her thighs. It wasn't fair, she thought, bitterly. But it was a damn good thing that she hadn't told Will after all.

 

 

“Cassie?”

Will stood next to her, hand on her shoulder. He reached over for the mouse and closed her files, then shut down the computer. The server had logged her off already. She'd fallen asleep.

“What time is it?”

“Time to get up,” Will said. It was still dark outside, but he was dressed. He was ready for his coffee and breakfast. She followed him into the kitchen.

“Will?” She was groggy, but she needed to talk to him. To explain what had been going through her mind.

But he was in a hurry. “What?” he asked as he put the coffee on, annoyed that he had to. He wanted to be in the fields before dawn. It was the start of planting.

So she kept it simple. “I want to think about adopting again.”

He couldn't keep a grimace from rippling across the plane of his face, but he controlled it. “Cass,” he said, evenly, “can't we talk about this once the crop is in?”

He hated the social workers and all the forms and home visits. Home invasions, he called them.

“Fine,” she said. “I'm sorry.” She meant it. She hoped he would remember the conversation later and understand.

He put his hand on her arm as she reached the refrigerator door. “Honey, I know how you feel.”

She elbowed him aside. No, she thought. You don't. She broke the eggs one by one into a bowl, beat them, and lit a fire under the skillet. That was the problem. He didn't know how she felt at all.

The jagged sound of my father's breathing filtered into my bedroom through a baby monitor, which Melvin had installed in case Lloyd needed help in the night.

“I don't want people spying on me in my own house!” Lloyd had said, eyeing the plastic transmitter on his bedside table. It was shiny white with pink and blue buttons and softly molded edges.

“It's not people,” Melvin said. “It's your daughter.”

“What earthly good would she be?” He plucked at the sheets in frustration. “Put that eavesdropping contraption in your camping car and maybe I'd see the point.”

“Out of range,” Melvin said.

“Listen,” I said, “I don't like it any more than you do, Dad. It's just in case.”

He stared at me, then closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the pillow. “In case of what?” he said. “In case I decide to run away?”

Now, in the gaps between Lloyd's exhalations, I could hear Ocean and Poo breathing softly in their corner and the creaks of the settling house. At night the house sounds were palpable, pressing against my skin. I tried to be still. I stood in front of the mirror and undressed slowly, examining my body in the green glow of the night-light,
nude!
as Cassie used to squeal. How prudish she was. I hugged myself to keep my limbs from twitching. I wanted to stomp and shatter the silence.

Instead I slipped on my robe and tied it tightly around my waist. It was the same mirror I'd had as a child, and I'd grown up in front of it, turning and craning my neck, searching for clues to the future. The mirror was the same, but the girl was gone, leaving only phantom limbs and a flicker of her excitements. The particular collection of cells that comprised her, the ones that Elliot had stroked and fucked, had long ago been sloughed off and replaced by new ones. Cellular turnover occurred in seven-year intervals, didn't it?

Cell by cell you slip away, then resurrect.

And now? Elliot was back, and I could feel my cells quivering, all set to betray me again. He was still a handsome man, slightly thicker, not the whip-thin hippie I'd loved as a child, but to sleep with him now would make me somehow complicit, wouldn't it? A molester of my own childhood?

Phoenix could tell what was going on the minute he saw us in the kitchen. Fourteen is an unforgiving age, and he still wasn't talking to me. But it wasn't just Phoenix. They all knew. Cass, and Ocean, too. Later, in my starry bedroom, in my arms, Ocean confessed to me in a whisper,

“Mommy, when I see people kiss, it makes my little butt hurt.”

What does
that
mean? She was small and warm in her flannel pajamas, squirming in her mommy's arms. Sweet cheeks. Tangled hair.

Good night, Puddle.

In the weeks before Elliot arrived, I'd been flirting with Geek in the greenhouse. It was a desultory flirtation, killing time. We'd lie crosswise in the hammock, side by side, and rock to “Blue Hawaiian Moon.”

“Are you trying to seduce me?” I asked him once, sipping indigo nectar from the overhead feed, watching it travel through the loops of clear tubing.

“Can I?” he asked. We were sharing the tube.

“No. I'm too old for you,” I said. “A whole different generation.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” he said, twirling the ends of my hair. “Age is relative, and anyway I'm a product of the Summer of Love. Love is in my nature.”

I was tempted. It was easy to forget I was ten years older than this person who swayed beside me playing with my hair.

Just as Elliot had been ten years older than me.

But of course it was different. Geek wasn't a child. A child can't be held responsible, can she? No matter how much she might have felt she was to blame? But even as I tried to absolve myself, I knew that in my awkward, childish way, I had seduced Elliot, hanging around the classroom after school, loitering by his desk at dusk. Of course I was complicit. And if so, if together Elliot and I had miscarried my childhood, maybe now, together, we could bring that girl back, to comfort and even to forgive. After all, he said he was sorry. The minute I heard those words, I knew I wanted to sleep with him again.

I lay in bed and stared at the peeling stars. I turned down the volume on the baby monitor and reduced my father's breathing to a faint static interference. Pretending his breaths were waves on the beach, I drifted off to sleep.

 

 

In the clarity of the day, as I bundled up Poo to take him next door, the anticipation of the night before turned leaden. Cass was no help. She had on a frilly apron over her sweatshirt and would barely meet my eye as she lifted the baby from my arms. She didn't approve, and I felt a temptation to linger, to ask her for a cup of coffee and a word of absolution. I wanted to explain to her, carefully, all that I was thinking and feeling, and maybe it would take the better part of the afternoon, but that was all right, too. My date with Elliot felt like a sentence, compared to the safety and the comfort of Cassie's bright, sunny kitchen. But she blocked the door. It was the first day of planting, she told me. Will had left early for the fields, and she was busy. She'd be feeding the workers lunch today, as well as covering the office.

“Gosh, Cass,” I said, “I didn't realize . . .” But just as I was reaching out my arms to take Poo back, the phone rang and she pulled a cordless handset from her apron pocket and withdrew into the house with my baby.

I sat for a while in the Pontiac, smoking a cigarette and trying to rekindle some excitement, but the feeling eluded me. I headed into town. I hadn't been able to think of a restaurant, so he suggested meeting at his motel. Already things were different. For one thing I could now drive myself to get fucked.

I looked for his car in the lot, a baby blue Beetle, but of course it wasn't there.

I knocked, and for a moment I panicked, almost turning to go, but it was too late. Mr. Rhodes opened the door. I couldn't look at him. Instead I looked past him into the room.

Things were different.

There were sheets on the bed. There was no soup on the stove. The windows were curtained, not clouded with steam.

He reached for my hands. Speechless, I allowed him that. He shook his head and held on to my fingertips. “You haven't changed,” he said.

Glancing up at him then, I felt young and suddenly reckless. I took a step forward and placed my hand on his cheek. He closed his eyes, mute now, turning his mouth into my palm. The naked arch of his neck bent to my gaze, and I felt my confusion abate beneath a wave of tenderness and power. His breath, warm against my palm, made my skin tingle all over, and then I remembered—
This
is what it feels like to be fourteen and thrilling at the edge of sex when it is still brand new, testing the waters where his desire laps your shore, sticking in a toe, and not understanding the swiftness of the current—

Enough. This is enough. Stop here—

But the pull of the past was stronger than I was. It caught me up. He slipped a DO NOT DISTURB sign around the doorknob. There had been too many locked motel doors, and it was happening too fast. Always too fast. But once locked in, I had to go through the motions.

He scanned my face, then drew me in close. With my face pressed into his neck, I could see the coarsened pores of his skin. I thought about his cells as I tentatively kissed them. I breathed and tried to recall his scent, the one I vaguely remembered from the flannel of an old sleeping bag, but it wasn't there. Something else. Blackboards and chalk. The smell of felt erasers. No . . .

Cologne.

Expensive, but still I choked on it. I pushed him away. He caught my hair, wrapped it around his fist and tugged.

Oh, he said. I remember your hair.

He buried his face in it. I shut my eyes. If he would only tell me more about who I'd been, I would tolerate the cologne and maybe even grow to love it. His hand was on the small of my back. His fist never loosened its grip on my hair as he backed me across the dull beige carpet. The sway-backed mattress sagged under our weight—the springs had too much give, too soft for the hips and the heels to find purchase, to push him away. I placed my hands against his chest. I wanted to explain. Maybe I could make a joke of it—
I don't like sex that bounces, Elliot
—I could give a little laugh—
I don't like to wallow.
But it seemed awkward to demur on the grounds of an insufficient mattress. He removed some of my clothing, then some of his. The mustard-colored bedspread felt like spun plastic, cold where it touched my skin. I lay there, passive, staring up at the stained and perforated ceiling as he traveled over my body, touching my breasts, humming his discoveries wordlessly into my thighs.