Backseat Saints (7 page)

“That is a big loss,” she said, tight-voiced. “Perhaps it’s him. But I don’t think so.”

“Jim Beverly,” I said, firm, punching his name at her like a fist. “That’s the loss. Not—”

“Fine,” she said, cutting me off. “This card represents your present.” She turned it. It took a second to make sense of the
image. A slim woman in a blindfold stood in front of a lake. It was sunset, so the water had gone red behind her. There were
twisted, mossy shapes humping out of the water. Logs, or maybe crocodiles. She held a long sword in each hand, crossed over
her chest to make an X.

The gypsy put her silver-tipped finger to her bottom lip and tapped, thinking. “It can’t have been that bad, losing this Jim.
You married someone else, after all.”

“How do you know that?” I said, spine a-tingle. She might have seen my rings. But for most of the conversation, my fingers
had been hidden in my lap, touching her book. “Have you been watching me?”

She snaked one hand under the tiny round table and pushed a fist hard into my ribs, just under my left breast. I gasped, unable
to help it as she pressed directly down on a fresh bruise.

“You’ve married,” she said, as if the pain that flashed across my face confirmed it. Her hand hovered half an inch above the
spine of her own book. I waited, breath held, until she leaned back. “This is the two of swords, and it stinks of violence.
That’s some man you picked.” She put her hand back on the deck, readying to turn another card. “Want to see your future?”

“Why not?” I said, still trying to sound casual, but the way her hand had gone straight to my freshest hurt spot had gotten
to me. I didn’t want my question answered, did not want her to say out loud all the reasons Mrs. Fancy had not been able to
imagine a future for me.

At first I thought the card was upside down, but then I realized it was the figure in the center. It was a man in a wolf’s-head
helmet, hanging from a grape arbor by one ankle. His feet were bare. His hands were clasped in front of him, and I thought
he was praying, but then I realized they were bound by slim, thorned vines.
The wolf-head on his helmet snarled, but beneath, his human face looked perfectly calm.

I felt my eyebrows come together. “I’ve seen this card. It was on that mystery show with the old lady who solves crimes. She
said it was a death card.”

I looked up at her, and the gypsy’s eyebrows mirrored mine.

“Most readers will tell you it isn’t a death card,” she said. “They’ll say it is a card about change.”

“Being dead would be a pretty big change,” I said.

The gypsy’s eyebrows were still pushing inward, as if they’d been exchanging letters for a long time and now they were trying
to meet. “Some readers would say it only means you need to alter your perspective. Or you should do the opposite of what you
would normally do, or you should make a sacrifice.”

“So your stupid cards say I should, what, kill a goat?”

“Literal and flip, are those your only settings?” she asked, sharp. “I’m telling you what other readers might say. They’d
say it’s not a death card. He’s hanging by his ankle, not his neck.”

“Still,” I said. “That can’t be all that comfortable.”

She waved a hand at me to shush me, and then she spoke again in an urgent whisper. “Most readers would say it’s about change.
But I’m looking at a girl with the tower in her past. I’m looking at a woman in a marriage made of swords. These cards are
screaming. They are saying, Change or die. I suggest you change, and if not, then you should go see Cadillac Ranch today,
because for you, there isn’t a tomorrow.”

I found myself leaning in to catch her words, my hands clamped down tight on the stolen book, as she went on.

“Sometimes, Mrs. Professionally Pretty, those ornaments men hang on your branches get so heavy they can crush you dead, and
in this configuration, death is what I see. I’d say it’s either for you or your husband.” She looked up from the cards, her
black eyes burning. I felt held by them, breathless, and she was a visionary in that moment. “Choose him. You live. It’s the
choice that I would make. If it’s a death card, you choose him.” She leaned back from
me and said, louder and slower, “Until you do, I don’t have one damn word more to say to you.”

With that, she scraped up all the cards and dumped them willy-nilly down into her bag. She picked up her coffee cup and drained
the last, cooling third. I didn’t speak, and she stood up and said more words to me anyway. Three of them.

“You are welcome.”

I hadn’t thanked her, but she wasn’t being sarcastic. She said it like she was opening a door, inviting me inside.

“Why are you in Amarillo?” I asked. “You didn’t come here to see Cadillac Ranch.”

She grabbed her purse and slung the bamboo handles over her shoulder. “It’s just a stop,” she said.

I shook my head. This could not be coincidence. “Did you come here to see me?”

“Everything is just a stop,” she said, picking up her suitcase.

She walked away. I stared after her, sitting like roots had grown out of my hips and twined themselves around the chair legs.
At the last moment, she did turn back, looking annoyed. “He’s the guy that sang ‘Danke Schoen.’ Mr. Vegas. You would know
him if you saw him.”

She went through security.

I sat there, shaking, watching her disappear down the hallway.

When she was truly gone, I scooted my chair back so I could look down at the book in my lap. My hands had been wise. They
had understood what the cellophane wrapper meant before my stunned brain had: This was a library book. I expected some new
agey self-help thing or maybe something by Robert Penn Warren or Flannery O’Connor. But it was
The Eyes of the Dragon
, by Stephen King. Fairy tales again. She’d always been a scattershot reader.

I flipped open the front cover and saw the manila pocket. There was no card in it, of course. The card would have told me
the name she was living under, but it was filed at the library. The words,
Property of the West Branch Berkeley Public Library
, were stamped in black.

The words looked more serious and permanent than ink to me. They seemed carved, as if the page was made of stone. The book
in my lap felt heavy enough to be solid granite.

I touched the word
Berkeley
, disbelieving.

Until half an hour ago, I hadn’t seen my mother in twenty years. Now, suddenly, my mother was alive. My mother was a gypsy
who lived and breathed and checked out books in California. This woman had left her child to save herself, and now she’d come
back to flip the hanged man card and say I had to make a sacrifice. What did she know about sacrifice? I’d been hers.

But she had said, “Live.”

She had said, “Choose him.”

My mother had appeared just long enough to tell me that if I wanted to survive, I would have to kill Thom Grandee.

I
TRIED TO CHOOSE HIM, and I failed. What did that leave? That was all I could think as I tore through the woods, sprinting
back to Mrs. Fancy’s Honda. The next thing I knew, I was zooming east down Highway 40 toward home, praying harder than I had
ever prayed in my whole life. I called every saint it seemed might do a lick of good. I called them out loud, demanding intervention
with the kind of flailing desperation that can rise when even hope has left.

Francis, patron of cars and drivers, answered first. He was in the car with me. I could hear him breathing easy in the seat
behind me. Then Michael took the seat beside Francis. He’d come to close the eyes of his policemen, making their radar guns
heavy in their hands, sending them for coffee at any Dunkin’ Donuts that took them off my path.

I should have been surprised. Hell, I should have been wetting myself. I’d been calling my saints my whole life, but I hadn’t
had one show before. I must have wept out Mary’s name for comfort, because she was in the back as well, even though she had
to squash into the narrow middle seat with her patient feet on the hump.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, but if saints were answering, then the place by me was only for Saint Roch, patron of both dogs and
pestilence. I needed him for Gretel and for Rose Mae Lolley, in that
order. As I thought his name, before I could call, he was already obliging me. He appeared beside me with his ankles crossed,
one gentle arm’s length away.

I was driving fast enough to make the blowsy air outside sound like a great wind. I was sweating hard. I could feel it clotting
in my hair, which was once again tucked up inside my baseball cap. I reached up to pull the cap off, but my hand U-turned
on the way up, going to the dash to flip on the AC instead.

That was when the first shiver hit me: My body understood the danger long before my mind did. My hand had been right not to
remove the hat. I needed it to shade my face and hide my hair.

I was driving down the very road Thom would be taking. My heart bounded up from my chest, lodging in my throat. Each beat
banged against my gag reflex, choking me. I could pass him at any second. Het up as he must be right now, if he saw me tearing
down the highway in a borrowed car, he’d run it off the road and yank me out of the wreckage, demanding answers. Then he’d
find Pawpy’s gun in the Target bag, and he’d know in two heartbeats where I’d spent my morning. I hadn’t looked down into
the gun’s black eye since I was little and my daddy and I stared down into it together.
You must never, never point that hole at anything, at anything, ever, unless you want to see it utterly destroyed.
If Thom caught me now, I had no doubt I would be looking it in the eye again.

My foot went weightless on the gas pedal, and the car slowed. Then I stomped down again. What if I had passed him already?
I could have easily slipped by in Mrs. Fancy’s plain car while he was checking on Gretel, who I had to believe was absolutely
still alive. Saint Roch nodded in comforting agreement.

Thom could already be behind me, or he might be two cars ahead. There was no way to know. I twisted my head this way and that,
trying to see all around me, searching for his Bronco. The road got away from me, and I listed so far right that I ran up
onto the bumpy shoulder. I wrestled the wheel and got mostly back in
my lane. I saw the next exit, mercifully close. In two minutes, I was safe off the highway, panting as I pulled into a gas
station.

I drove around to the back side of the building, letting the Honda idle by the restrooms while I tried to swallow my heart
back down and breathe. Every piece of me hollered to keep moving, to run, to go far and fast. But where?

I knew three things: That I had to get home. That Thom was somewhere on the road between me and my house. That I must not
be seen as I made my way. These were facts, true and unchangeable, and they bounced off each other in hopeless, tangled equations.
I couldn’t go home, and I couldn’t be still. Maybe I should start driving and hope that the Honda and my saints would know
a safe path. If Mary had her way, we’d head east, very quickly, putting state after state between us and Thom Grandee until
we came home to Alabama, to hill country, with its thousand places to hide. This flat state gave me nothing.

I started praying again, calling Rita of Cascia now. She watched over shitty marriages and all things impossible. She appeared
crunched up on Michael’s lap, the low roof making her bend her head to a miserable angle. I still had no idea where to go,
but a picture of our arrival flashed into my head. They would pile out of the tiny Civic after me, wispy saint after wispy
saint, like the Honda was a mystical clown car made up special for Catholics.

I got the giggles then. My own laugh scared me, it was so high-pitched and hysterical, and I tried to make it stop. The laugh
turned into hiccuping, and the lady figure on the closest bathroom door got all bendy and rubbery. My vision went gray around
the edges, and it was all I could do to keep my foot pressed down onto the brake so I didn’t rev slowly forward and have a
five-mile-an-hour collision with the back of a Shell station. I thought,
It’s bad to faint while the car is on.

I saw my bottle of Coke resting in the driver’s-side cup holder. I focused on it, and the rest of the landscape became a fuzzy
backdrop that looked like it was being filmed through cheesecloth. I
bought these small bottles instead of cans and allowed myself one a day; Thom, an ex-jock, liked my body tight beneath its
curves. I’d grabbed it this morning on my way out the door, thinking about how the cap would pop off with a hiss of gas I
would feel more than hear. I’d planned to have it when I had finished up my morning’s awful business, a working-class girl’s
champagne. Now here it sat like a party favor left over from my real life. I picked it up. It still felt cool.

I held the bottle first to one eye, then the other, trying to clear my vision.
More than that.
It was the word version of that same impulse that had turned my hand when I went to take the hat off, but now it had a voice.
I recognized Rose Mae, working to save my ass while Ro Grandee, professional nice girl and dedicated victim, hunched and writhed
in a lathery panic. Rose knew to press the cool bottle to my eyes to take the swelling down and ease the red. When next I
saw Thom Grandee, I could not look like I’d been crying.