Backseat Saints (36 page)

It’s all I’ve thought of in the car on the drive over, building scenarios in my head that could explain her sudden departure,
each more soap opera silly than the last. I imagined that she hit her head and got amnesia, or witnessed a Mafia killing,
or was abducted. I never came up with a single explanation I believed, and now that I am here, this is all I want from her:
a reason I can understand. I say, “You hardly took anything when you left Fruiton. I even found your money, eighty-two dollars,
left behind in your old black boot. What happened? Why did you go without me?”

She stares down at the floor. Time passes. Whole minutes, one after another after another.

Gret comes back in the room and her tail goes down. She gives my mother a wide berth and slinks low-bellied past her. She
comes to heel and sits down looking worried. Fat Gretel, who would face-lick Attila and play Frisbee with Jack the Ripper,
does not like my mother. My mother’s downward gaze is drawn to my dog, and I can see it’s mutual.

My mother stares at my dog, pressing one open palm to her chest, and I watch her slowing her heart with her strong will. She
takes a deep breath, like she’s about to start yoga, and then another. When she finally meets my eyes, hers are as empty and
shiny as marbles. My mother looks right at me, and she lies to me in a voice as flat as window glass.

“I went to mass that day, and I was visited by a saint. It was… a vision. She told me I had to go.”

It’s like a slap. This is the question I’ve come to ask, three thousand miles. Instead of an answer, I’m getting a metaphor,
and a shitty one at that. I’ve already figured out that she must have had help from the Saint Cecilias, but she sure as hell
didn’t learn about them through some mystical vision, and the metaphor can’t explain how she could let them spirit her away
sans child.

I say, “Why are you lying?”

My mother keeps talking in that flat, almost bored way. “She told me to leave immediately, and not look back. She said—”

“Stop fucking lying,” I interrupt.

She doesn’t acknowledge that I have spoken or that she has stopped. She is perfectly controlled.

She gives her shoulders a little shake, as if she is shucking off a cape, and walks toward the stairs. She picks up my bag
and says, “I’ll show you to your room.”

“Why did you leave without me?” I demand again.

She starts up, slow, like her knees bother her, talking over her shoulder at me. “None of my friends know I have a daughter,
Rose Mae,” she says. “Please be discreet. I do not want to try and explain you. Nor will I explain myself.”

I follow her, and Gret follows me, careful to keep me as a wall between her and my mother. I say nothing. There is nothing
else to say right now. I don’t even ask if her friends will find it odd to learn she has a strange woman living in her spare
room. They won’t. There is always a strange woman living in her house, hoping to escape a marriage made of swords.

My mother goes up step by step, toting my bag and talking like a bored tour guide. “The kitchen is through that open doorway
in the parlor. Help yourself if you get hungry. I usually cook a hot dinner, and I’ll make enough for two if you care to join
me. There’s a half bath in front of the kitchen, behind the stairs.” She reaches the top, me right behind her, helpless to
do anything but follow. “That is my room.” She points at a closed door at the end of the hall. “That’s the bathroom, between.
And this is your room.”

She opens the door directly at the top of the landing, and she is right. It
is
my room. Exactly.

A twin bed, a table, and a lamp sit at the far right corner, opposite the door. They are placed in the spot where the bed
and table in my childhood room in Fruiton still rest. The dresser sits across from a comfy chair for reading and a floor lamp,
also just the same as Fruiton. She’s even put a writing desk and matching wooden chair against the window, as if she thinks
her residents might have homework. The furniture is a hodgepodge of finishes that range from maple down to darkest cherry,
and my bedroom set back in Fruiton was all white wicker, but the placement of each piece matches my girlhood room exactly.

“Holy shit,” I say in spite of myself. “Did you do this on purpose?”

She looks at me with her eyebrows rising in a question. She doesn’t even realize. I might not have caught it myself if I had
not just been home. She and my daddy both are living in shrines they’ve erected to lives they themselves either wrecked or
abandoned.

“Let me guess,” I say. “The saint who came to you in your ‘vision.’ It was Cecilia.” Her eyes barely widen, but I catch it.
I go on.
“Yes, I went out to Cadillac Ranch. I saw your note. And if I’d gone to Rodeo!—if I’d hooked up with your railroad, I’d have
ended up here, wouldn’t I?”

The room says so. She’s made this room for me, the same way Daddy remade our house for her. But my mother is shaking her head
in a cold, vehement no.

“Never here,” she says. “We would never take you someplace at all connected to your past life. I am the last person we would
have brought you to.”

“Against the rules, huh? Well. I came my own way. Cecilia’s rules don’t apply to me. Your rules don’t, either.”

She is watching me, wary. “I suppose not. Not really. But Parker and my other friends will find it strange if they see that.
As a courtesy, I ask that you at least appear to keep them.” Her formal speech is beginning to bother me. It’s as if she’s
given up contractions for Lent.

“I’ve broken one already.” I set my bag down on the bed and say, “I’ve got Pawpy’s old revolver in here, and I’m keeping it.”

All at once her eyes go avid. Her blank expression drops away. We have come to the piece of conversation she has been longing
to have, while I was wanting to ask her what happened the day she left me. She straightens up and presses one hand to her
lips.

“Pawpy’s gun?” she says, muffled behind her hand. She takes a single step toward me. “Is that the… is that what you used?”

“What I used?” I ask. She’s failed to give me the one answer I wanted most, and I hope she’s asking something that will let
me fail her back. She wants something from me right now, badly. I step in, eager to know, so I can refuse to give it to her.

“What you used instead of taking the railroad. What you used to end things. With your husband. You used Pawpy’s old forty-five?”

Now I understand, and I feel a smile coming. I can’t damp it down. It’s almost an exultation, that I can look her in the eye
and
say with ringing, happy truthfulness, “Momma, are you insane? I didn’t shoot my husband.”

She tries to swallow and coughs instead. Her face crumples and her hands fist, and all at once she’s furious. “Rose Mae, no!
Tell me that man you married is not still walking on this earth.”

“It’s Ivy now,” I say, so sweet now that she is wanting something and I don’t have it to give. “I’m Ivy Rose Wheeler. You’re
the one told me it was him or me. I chose, Momma. I got rid of Rose Mae.”

Her eyes snap, and now she is beyond angry. Her skin is wax, and her eyes have a fevered glow. Her nostrils flare, and when
she speaks, her voice sounds deliberate and deep, each word dredged up from the diaphragm. “Rose Mae, you stupid child, why
did you come here? Dear God, you should have gone with the railroad. Do you really think fate can be fooled? That it can be
that easy? It doesn’t matter if you keep my rules or not. Nothing you do will matter. Not as long as you are here, and he
is breathing.”

She steps back, out of the room, her hand on the knob. “Your business with Thom Grandee is not over.” Her words are livid
prophecy, intoned like she’s Elijah calling bears, and then she closes the door. I am left shaking, alone in a pale blue room
she’s made to mirror mine.

I
AM LIKE AN ANGRY five-year-old, holding my breath until I am blue enough to match her decor. I am giving her the silent treatment,
except I am almost thirty, which means I do not crumble after ten minutes and weep into her skirts. Instead I meander around
whatever room she’s in, touching all her things.

She has appointments all day long, crystal junkies and new age woo-woos coming in for readings. Whenever one rings her wind-chime
doorbell, she asks me politely, in formal language, to excuse myself. I’ve toted a Barbara Kingsolver book to my room, and
each time I go up and close my door and read in silent, furious obedience. When I hear the client leave, I mark my place and
come back down to steadfastly ignore her where she can see me do it.

She has lots of appointments, and many of her clients are her friends, too. I hear them air kissing at her, the rustle of
hugs and cheery greetings as I go up the stairs. None of them are surprised to see my ass disappearing upwards. None of them
ask to be introduced. They are waiting, I suppose, to see if I am going to stick. No sense befriending another Lilah. The
way my room faces the staircase, sounds travel from the parlor directly up to me. I could leave the door open and eavesdrop,
but I am more interested in
The Bean Trees
than bullshit fates invented by my mother.

After her eleven-thirty leaves, she turns on the red-palm window
sign. Belgria is a busy street. In fifteen minutes, a drive-by supplicant is ringing her bell, wanting a peek at the future.
I don’t get to see the walk-in. She won’t even open the door until I am in my room with the door closed.

Perhaps she is worried that this passing chimer will turn out to be my husband, come to kill me. Thom Grandee in the parlor
with the wrench. That’s ridiculous. Thom is looking for his Ro clear across the country. She is not there, and she is not
welcome here. If he did know to look in Berkeley, I strongly doubt that he would stand politely on the porch and ring the
bell, bearing murderous intentions like a hostess gift.

During our shared and silent lunch, my mother hooks another true believer with her sign. I am banished back upstairs halfway
through my grilled cheese sandwich. I hear her answer the bell, and after a brief exchange, the door closes again, and there
is no more conversation. This second potential walk-in must not have passed muster in some way.

I open my door and see her coming up the stairs with a basket of fresh laundry. She walks past me without speaking and goes
down the hall to her room. She closes her bedroom door decisively, but I follow her and let myself in. She is standing on
the far side of her queen-size bed, facing me. She has dumped out a jumble of bright cotton clothing on her wave-covered comforter,
and she’s folding it. Her lips thin as I enter, but she does not tell me to get out. Her room is done in the same endless
blues as the downstairs. It’s bigger than mine, but not as bright because her windows are covered with heavy drapes.

I come closer, stand across the bed from her. She has collected a blown-glass and crystal menagerie, and I sort through it,
bored. I find sharks nested with seals, lambs cuddled up to lions, and no people: She’s made paradise on the bedside table.
I put rough hands on her unicorn, picking him up and flicking his silly garland of blue roses. “You’re out of luck, buddy.
No virgins here,” I tell him.

“Be careful, Rose. That’s breakable,” she says, stern and maternal.

“I’m Ivy,” I say to the unicorn, and set him down dead on his side.

Mirabelle’s nostrils flare. She leaves the rest of her blouses in a scatter to wrinkle on her bed and goes back downstairs.
I go back downstairs, too.

She sits down at her table, shuffling her cards. I see my father’s note still sitting on the bookshelf, neatly folded, but
now it is directly in front of
Persuasion
. I’m pretty sure I set it down closer to
Sense and Sensibility.
I don’t think she’s read it, but she must have picked it up and set it back down wrong, or at least pushed at it with one
disgruntled finger. Its presence is eating at her edges. Good.

I go to the other end of the room to touch things in her small store. A bowl full of polished rose quartz shares a shelf with
Saint Christopher’s medallions. Crystal balls are lined up with no irony beside a display of hand-carved wooden rosaries.
She sells tarot cards here, too, and books on how to read them. The decks are stacked beside prayer candles with the images
of obscure saints frosted onto the tall glass tubes that hold the scented wax.

I pick up Saint Jude and check the label. Twenty dollars seems excessive, but then again, this is a
magic
candle. It says so, right on the sticker. A bastardized novena is printed on the glass opposite Jude, something between a
spell and a prayer. I set Jude down and paw through the candles, finding a host of less familiar friends: Expedite, Lucy,
the Infant of Atocha. They’ve left Mother Church and gone voodoo.

While my mother sits on her chair and shuffles and watches me, I take up the Saint Lucy candle. The spell on the back is a
demand for Lucy to reveal a hidden truth or expose a liar. I hold it up to show my mother, modeling its useful marvels as
if I am Vanna White. She stares deliberately away from me. I tuck the candle into the crook of my arm and keep shopping.