All Over Creation (55 page)

“Why'd you do it, Jillie?”

He heard her sigh. “You really don't get it, do you? At first I was just curious. I wanted to find out why you were so preoccupied with Liberty Falls. But after talking to her—”

“To Yummy?”

She paused. “How could you have sex with someone named Yummy?”

“That's not her real name.”

“Whatever. Yes. I talked to her. She wasn't terribly helpful, but her son certainly was. As was Cass Quinn, and the local sheriff, and the lawyer representing the Seeds of Resistance, who are languishing in jail. And after hearing about the way you treated all of them, I just decided to fuck you. Interpenetration, Elliot. For the way you screwed us all.”

“For chrissakes, Jillie,” he said huffily, starting to defend himself. “I didn't
screw
anybody.” But then he remembered Shiva and backed down. “At least I didn't mean to. Was I so bad? I thought we had a good time. I thought that's what you wanted—”

“What I
wanted!
”

So much for placating. He held the receiver away again, shrinking from her rampage.

“I'm thirty-four years old, Elliot! I'm not part of your free-love generation, remember? That was just a lousy exploitative concept you hippie dickheads came up with to get fourteen-year-old chicks into bed.”

No, he thought mournfully. You don't understand. It wasn't just that. Free love was so wonderful. So . . . free.

“Love is not free, Elliot. It costs. And you're just a fucking stingy bastard who's too cheap to pay.”

He tried Yummy later that day. As usual, the kid answered.

“I told you to stay away from my mother, you scumbag!”

He sighed. He was really beginning to hate the telephone. He stared at the statue of Kali that sat on the far edge of his cluttered desktop. “Don't talk to me that way,” he said listlessly.

He heard the click of an extension picking up, then, finally, Yummy's voice.

“Phoenix, get off the phone, please.”

“It's a wrong number, Mom.”

Elliot broke in. “Yummy, it's me.”

“I know,” she said. He heard the sound of a receiver clatter to the floor, followed by the boy's footsteps.

“Just a moment,” she said, then muffled the phone. He waited, straining to hear what she said to her rude brat of a son, but he couldn't make out the words.

“Hi,” she said. “Sorry about that.” She sounded very composed.

“Hi.” He sounded less so. His heart was pounding. He tried for levity. “Your secretary does a good job screening your calls. I've been trying to reach you for weeks.”

“He's very protective.” She paused. “I haven't been home much.”

“Yes, I gather.” He paused, listening to the silence that was opening between them. Now that he finally had her on the line, he couldn't think of what to say. He scanned the heaps of paper and junk on his desk, looking for a clue. He wasn't even sure why he was calling, except that she was one more urgent item on an urgent list of things to do, calls to make, business yet unfinished, crises ready to break.

He knew he had lots of things to tell her.

“So?” she asked.

“I'm sorry about your father,” he said weakly.

“He's not dead yet.”

“It must be hard.”

Another long silence, and then she spoke. “Yes. There's no one left here to help.”

“I've been trying to call. Did your son give you any of the messages?”

“I heard.”

“I don't think Phoenix likes me much.”

“No. He sort of picked up on the general Elliot-bashing vibe. He blames you.”

He felt his heart constrict. “For what?”

“Well, a lot of things. You got his friends thrown in jail, for one.”

“I didn't make them go into that potato field.”

“Then your girlfriend called and talked to him. By the way, she seemed shocked to hear that you'd had sex with me when you were my teacher. I didn't think people in Washington, D.C., got shocked about that kind of thing.”

“She's not my girlfriend.”

“But mainly Phoenix blames you for his grandpa's heart attack.”

“Me?”

“Sure.” He heard the ratchet of her lighter as she lit up a cigarette. “Lloyd has hallucinations about you. He calls you the Terminator.”

“Why me?”

“Well, aren't you?”

He could almost hear the subdued rattle of her scimitar, the build of her rage. He knew he was making a tactical error, but he was tired of getting stepped on. “Listen. I didn't start this. I wasn't the one exploiting a sick old man to further some political agenda.”

She exhaled sharply. “No. You exploited me instead. And now you're exploiting Cass and Will. You lied to me about being a reporter. Why didn't you just tell me? I wouldn't have cared.”

“I never said I was still a reporter. I said I was working on a story. Which was true.”

“Oh, right! Your girlfriend told me all about the slimy way you operate. Phoenix is right. You are a scumbag—and a murderer.”

He could picture it perfectly, the old man's panic, the pain as he gripped his heart.

“No,” he told her. “I
saved
your father's life.”

“What?”

“That night in Liberty Falls. When you ran away.”

It was time to lie down under her feet. Time for full disclosure. He started talking. The words came, fast and urgent, and he hoped that when he finished, her manifestation would be merciful and compassionate.

“That night, after the abortion, when I drove you home, I knew I had to break it off. I'd made a terrible mistake, Yummy, and I didn't want to hurt you any more than I already had. When I told you, you didn't seem at all sorry or surprised, and I figured you were sick of me. I didn't know you had run away until later.

“I was asleep. There was a pounding at the door, and I got up to answer, thinking it was you. The wind rushed in. It was freezing outside. Your father was standing there. I could barely see his face, but I knew who he was. He had a rifle hugged to his chest. He demanded to know where you were. He raised the rifle like he was going to shoot me, but instead he pushed me out of the way with the barrel and came into the house. He was clumsy and half crazed, knocking over chairs and the table, slamming doors and smashing holes in the drywall with the butt of his gun, just tearing the house apart.

“I stayed out of his way. I managed to find some clothes and put them on. I had my car keys in my hand and was looking for my shoes, about to make a run for it, when it got real quiet. I heard a strangling noise coming from the bedroom. I went in. Your old man was kneeling on the floor next to the mattress, rocking back and forth. He was holding a small knitted thing. A sweater you'd left behind. He was twisting it in his hands and saying, ‘Where is she? Where is she?' like he could wring you out of the fabric. He was sweating, then this gurgling sound came from his throat, and his body went rigid. His hands curled into fists, like mallets, and he struck his chest, once, twice, hard, then he doubled over and started gagging. I went over to him, asked him what was wrong, but he couldn't talk.

“Somehow I got him on his feet and out the door. It was icy, and I could barely support his weight and keep from slipping in the driveway. I didn't call 911. Maybe he didn't want me to. He was so big I could barely manage to fold him into the Volkswagen. He didn't say a thing for the whole ride in, just sat there gasping and clutching your sweater, but as we approached the emergency room, he started to speak. He told me one of your neighbors was going to report me to the sheriff and have me arrested for statutory rape. As the orderlies were taking him away, he grabbed my sleeve. ‘Go!' he said. ‘Find her. . . .' There were nurses and people watching, so I guess I promised. He let go, and they wheeled him off. I went back to my house and packed and left that night. I wasn't going to wait around for the sheriff or a lynch mob from the PTA.”

He paused. Full disclosure, he reminded himself.

“Your father survived, so you see? I saved his life. But I didn't try to find you. I had no idea where you might have gone. I figured if you had run away, it was just some attention-getting stunt, that you'd come home on your own. Kids do it all the time, and you were pretty precocious. Right then I just needed to get out of Idaho before the cops showed up. I had friends in New York, so I drove east. You know the rest. I wasn't proud of what had happened, and I guess I just forced myself to forget all about you.”

He took a deep breath, waited, and then he spoke again into the deadening silence of the long years and miles that lay between them.

“Yummy, you've got to believe me when I tell you how deeply I regret all this now.”

I replaced the receiver into the cradle and stared at the phone. It was the living room phone, made of thick black plastic, and, like the phone in the kitchen, it had a real metal bell inside that rang loudly whenever a call came in. These old phones are cumbersome to operate, and the higher the number, the farther your finger has to travel around the dial. I stuck my finger in the zero hole and rotated until it hit the crescent-shaped steel stop, and then I pulled it out again and watched the dial revolve slowly backward. Zero has the longest arc—the wheel has to come full circle.

Momoko was weeding by moonlight. I walked out onto the porch with a glass of ice water and watched for a while, then threaded through the maze of beds to join her. The moon was almost full again, and my mother's garden glimmered. She didn't hear me coming, but I could hear her. Amid the night cries of insects, she muttered and sang. Cajoled her seedlings.
“Gambatte ne, tané-chan. . . .”

Be strong, little seed.

It was a sound that moved me like a heartbeat. I walked along the dirt paths to the bed of bunching onions where she worked. The smell of onion was sweet in the air.

“They're not
tané,
not seeds anymore,” I said, squatting down next to her. “They're full-grown plants.”

She looked up and blinked. The moon cast a silvery light across the planes of her face. “No,” she said. “Grown-up plant is seed, too. Like those ones.” She pointed to a cluster of tall purple flower balls, perfectly round and globelike on their thick stems. “Those ones are only flowers now, but they gonna be seeds.” She stretched her arms to accommodate the whole garden. “Everyone gonna be seeds.”

The onion flowers looked comical. They oscillated like Styrofoam balls on the ends of car antennae. I pulled one close to my face and studied the little florets. The smell was stronger. Momoko went back to her weeding. I released the flower and watched her for a while longer, drinking my water until the ice rattled against the plastic in the bottom of the tumbler. It was tricky, talking to her. Her memory waxed and waned, returning in phases only to disappear into darkness again. These days she usually remembered she had a daughter and that daughter had run away, but only rarely did she connect that girl with me.

“Mom? When did Lloyd have his first heart attack?”

She jabbed at the earth with a trowel. “I don't remember.”

“Was it the night I ran away?”

She nodded. “That's right.”

“I didn't know that.” I dug a small hole in the earth and planted an ice cube, then covered it up again. Maybe tonight was a good night. I took a deep breath. “Was it my fault?”

She shook her head. “No. It was his heart. His fault.” She jabbed the ground vigorously, over and over. His heart. His fault. I watched the chrome tip of the trowel sink into the loam.

“Why didn't he ever come after me? You know, after he got better.”

She looked up, bewildered, and nudged her glasses with the back of her hand. No, she was too far gone for this conversation. She couldn't possibly remember, but still I pushed on. “The least he could have done was write. He never answered a single one of my letters!” It sounded like whining, but I couldn't stop.

She bent over and teased out another weed, then sat up again on her heels. She wiped her hair off her forehead with the back of her sleeve. In the moonlight she looked young as she gazed off toward the potato fields.

“He never saw letters,” she said.

Her words were slow to sink in. “Never saw them?”

She looked down at her hands. “He was too sick. He almost dying. Doctor said I must not make any upset for him. Upset will kill him.”

She was talking to herself now, and her voice sounded far away. “Yumi's letter is so full of upset, I think maybe it gonna kill him. Even if she is so mad at him, I know she don't want to kill her daddy. She is not that kinda girl.”