Shining Sea (10 page)

“Before Daddy died?”

She thought she'd told this to Sissy before. With a tribe for a family, it's easy to forget what one child has been told and another hasn't. “Before your father died, yes. Come on, let's get you back into your own bed. We'll keep you home tomorrow.”

In the morning, Sissy's fever is down to one hundred, but her stomach is still unsettled. She doesn't give Sissy any more aspirin, although she pops one herself.

“I'll run to the UtoteM to pick up another bottle of ginger ale,” she says. “I'll get some saltines, too.”

It's a warm February day. Although still morning, the sun drops its curious desert glare over the city, glinting off the roofs of cars and mailboxes. She buys two bottles of soda and rolls her window down on the way back. The pungent, camphorlike odor of the creosote plant fills the car. It must have rained during the night.

She turns onto East Avalon Drive. Sissy is standing out front their house, talking to two strange men. That girl! In her nightie, too.

The men are wearing uniforms.

She just keeps on driving, right past the house, right past Sissy's astonished expression, past the two men, their heads swiveling to look at her. She drives to the end of the block and rounds the corner, toward Camelback Mountain.

She'll keep on driving. She'll drive and drive until she's disappeared into the desert. Until everything has disappeared.

Her hands fall loose on the steering wheel. Sissy is there alone, on the doorstep.

She turns right at the next corner and then turns right again.

Maybe this time she'll turn onto East Avalon, and it will all have been a dream.

There will be no Sissy on the doorstep.

No anyone on the doorstep.

It will all have been a bad dream.

She turns the corner onto East Avalon very slowly, so slowly, as though somehow she can stretch time, make it long, elastic. Sissy is still there. The men are still there. She pulls up the driveway and opens the car door.

“Get into the house,” she tells Sissy.

The younger of the two men steps forward. He has a wide face and brown eyes with almost no eyelashes. The left side of his chest bears a name tag. The right side shines in the late morning sun with badges and insignia.

“Excuse me, ma'am.”

She hefts the two bottles of ginger ale into her arms and walks toward them, the heels of her shoes clicking on the stone walk.

“Ma'am,” the young man begins again. “I'm Sergeant Major John Goode of the Eleventh Signal Group at Fort Huachuca. This is Chaplain Trenton.”

The other, older man has a silver cross on each lapel. It is not a hot day, but sweat glistens on his forehead.

She shakes her head.

“Ma'am, are you Mrs. Ronald McCloskey, mother of Private Luke Patrick Gannon?” the young man says.

Luke
. “Luke!”

“May we go into the house?” he says.

She pushes past the men into the house. Sissy steps back, out of the way, clutching the top of her nightie.

He's sick. Or missing in action. Or, no, he's gone AWOL. That's it. That's
it.
Luke's gone AWOL. Or sat down in the middle of the barracks and simply refused to move. That would be like Luke! He'll be court-martialed now. Will he go to prison? Or just be given a dishonorable discharge?

But he's safe! That's the main thing. Safe.

She turns to the soldiers and points at the living room sofa. “Sit.”

The two men perch on the edge of the sofa, taking their hats off and clasping them between their hands. The younger one starts again, “Ma'am, the—”

She waves her hand. “Can I get you glasses of ginger ale?”

The sergeant major looks at the chaplain. The chaplain nods.

“Thank you, ma'am,” the sergeant major says.

She carries the bottles of ginger ale into the kitchen and sets them down on the counter. She leans over the kitchen sink and vomits.

“Mommy! Do you have my flu?”

She looks up. Sissy is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, watching her. Seeing her face now, Sissy lets out a cry.

She reaches for her daughter and pulls her in tight. Tight, tight, tight, so tight it is hard to breathe.

“I'll tell them to go away,” Sissy says into her chest.

She lets go and lowers herself down until she's eye to eye with her daughter. “Listen to me, Sissy. Your brother is with God. He is
with God
.”

Because she knows.
She knows
.

She ties on an apron, then rips it off. She fills two glasses with ice cubes.

Back in the living room, the soldiers sip once from their ginger ales, then set them down on the coffee table, carefully reaching for coasters to place them on. She sits stiffly on an armchair in the same room where she relaxed with Sissy last night. So careless. So thoughtless. When her son was somewhere dead, dying.

Luke.

Utopia.

“Ma'am, I have an important message to deliver from the secretary of the army,” the young soldier says. “The secretary of the army has asked me to express his deep regret that your son Luke died in Phu Yen Province in Vietnam on February eighth. Ma'am, Private Gannon was a grounds casualty.”

She shakes her head. “I don't understand,” she says.

“He was killed by small-arms fire.”

“No.”

“It was at base camp, ma'am.”

Luke. Luke.

“He's coming home now,” the chaplain says. “He'll be arriving at the air force base tomorrow. We need…to discuss arrangements.”

“No,” she says, again.

“Ma'am, I'm sorry.”

“
No,
he's not coming home. He's not coming home
ever
.”

“Ma'am,” the chaplain says.

“Are you Catholic? You're not even Catholic, are you?”

“No, ma'am. I'm Presbyterian. But the army will provide you with…”

She stands up with such force that the armchair rocks backwards. “The army couldn't even send a priest?”

Sissy claps her hands to her head. “Mommy!”

“Never mind. Never mind,” she says. “What does it matter? What could it possibly matter?”

The two men have stood. “Ma'am, should we call your husband?”

“I'm Luke's only parent.”

“
I'll
call Ronnie,” Sissy says in a small, trembling voice.

Sissy leaves the room. She sits down again. The men take out their papers.

“Luke will go to Los Angeles,” she says.

The chaplain lays his hand down on hers. “Ma'am—”

She pulls her hand away.

“Yes,” she says. “Los Angeles. With his father. We already have a place there. Thanks to
you,
we already have a place there.”

P
ATTY
A
NN AND
L
EE
are arguing in the living room. Again. She turns over the top card on the deck between her and Kenny. The pile underneath slides out over Kenny's bed, and she tucks the stiff new cards back into a tower, tapping the sides to make them uniform. She and Kenny shouldn't be sitting on the bed—this is where she's sleeping while she's visiting. But Patty Ann and Lee have made the living room and kitchen no-go territory. Kenny's elementary school is closed for three days, since the janitor discovered a crack from last year's quake. Or maybe from the one in '71. Sean should have started at the same school, but apparently after the first day the teacher sent him home and told Patty Ann to wait another year.

Maybe that's why Patty Ann asked her to come. For help while all three boys are home. Two active little boys can be quite a handful when there's a new baby.

“War, Grandma!”

She snaps her cards down, counting loudly—“One, two, three, jack!”—to distract Kenny from the sound of his parents fighting.

“If you walk out that door, do not bother walking back in,” Patty Ann shouts.

“You're so uptight, baby. When did you get so uptight? You weren't like this in high school,” Lee shouts back.

“In high school I didn't have three brats and a broken oven and a doofus husband saying he was going to dump his latest jack-squat job to drive down to San Diego and then across the desert and then back to Anaheim,
Anaheim,
in our car-with-the-bumper-tied-on-by-a-shoestring-but-the-only-one-we-have to go to some rock concerts. David Bowie!”

“I'm not ‘going to some rock concerts.' I'm not going for
Bowie
. It's work, man. And if the job's jack-squat, why you raggin' about my leaving it?”

“Cause it's the only fucking one you have. You're going to get fired again, Lee.”

“I can turn over some good bread like this. Things were crazy at his show here this past week, just like I said they'd be. It's like a whole new level selling this stuff.
This
is my new job, babe. I'll come home with…”

“Shut up. Shut up! I don't even want to hear about it. That's fucked up, Lee. That's fucked up! Are you fucking crazy? My
mother
will hear.”

My mother will hear? What planet do they think she's living on? Do they think she doesn't already
know
what Lee's up to? That she doesn't see his red eyes, his tapping fingers? That she thinks the package wrapped in foil in the back of the fridge marked
DON'T TOUCH
is a roast chicken? And all the rest of it: the empty bottles under the sink in the kitchen. The filth. Where does Patty Ann get the idea that it is acceptable to live this way, especially with children in the house? There are ways to behave and ways not to behave. It is that simple. Women don't
get
to give up. If they did the world would collapse.

Kennedy turns over his last card. “Queen! I win this war, Grandma!”

She hands him her lost cards. “So you did, Kenny.”

The yelling is getting louder.

“You'll change your tune when I come back in a Cadillac,” Lee shouts.

“
A Cadillac?
Like my mom's husband drives? I thought you said they were only for the Man. I thought you said they were only for pimps or fat-ass honkies. So: which one are you?”

Kenny jumps up from the bed. She lassoes him with her arms before he can run out of the room.
Grandma
. Born when she was not quite forty-one, just a few years after Sissy, he could be her own son. The new baby is sleeping peacefully in a crib in one corner of the bedroom. The little brother, Sean, is playing in another corner with the G.I. Joe she handed him after she'd stepped out of her car, a little dazed from the long drive from Phoenix. Patty Ann appeared behind the screen door, her face a shadowy web, the baby a dark bundle in her arms, and pushed the door open:
You're here. You came.
Then, spying the little plastic soldier and snatching it up from the stunned child, her face grew distant, a pale flat moon under the midday Southern California sun:
We don't let him play with stuff like that
.

Don't let him play with stuff like that? Like
what?
She gave the G.I. Joe back to the poor kid as soon as Patty Ann left them alone again, and he hasn't set it down since. He acts as though it's the only normal toy he's ever had. Maybe it is. He's gliding it through the air right now, making loops upon loops, accompanying the motion with soft sounds, almost the only sounds she's heard him make since arriving. All the boys seem oblivious to the shouting from the kitchen. Ugly scenes clearly are nothing new to them.

Life has taught her that there's no changing the past—or, really, the future. Free will doesn't mean free to choose what happens. It means free to be a good sport about it. But she has to protect the boys in what little way she can while she is here. That's
why
she's here, surely—Patty Ann can't be hoping for her help with Lee.
A lot of other fish in the sea,
she used to singsong while Patty Ann curled her finger around the telephone cord.
Just wait until you get to college. You'll see!

She should have tied Patty Ann up with that telephone cord.

If only Michael had been still with them.
Patty Ann,
he'd have said after the very first time Lee came around,
that boy undoubtedly has his merits, like all of God's creatures. But he is not the right one for you
. And Patty Ann would have listened. Patty Ann always respected her father more than her mother; Michael was a doctor and a war hero. She herself doesn't even have a college degree. She could spend her life trying to prove she's worthy of bearing the name Gannon.

Of course, in real terms, that's water under the bridge. She's a McCloskey now.

“…the Man.”

“Oh, fuck you,
the Man!
If the Man can get me a fucking stove that works, then bless his Man soul!”

“Yeah, that's just what you are, isn't it? You'd fuck the Man for a new fucking stove, wouldn't you?”

“Me?
Me!
”

She gets up and loudly closes the door to the kids' bedroom. Children should never hear the things she's heard since arriving the day before yesterday. It's worse here than she expected, and she'd expected bad.

Hey, Mom, what's up?
Patty Ann said on the phone three days ago, as though seven months hadn't passed since they last spoke.
How's the weather in Phoenix? How's Sissy? Want to come visit for a few days? Want to come
tomorrow
?

Even before they hung up she was reaching for her suitcase, because if Patty Ann was calling, Patty Ann must really need help. She thought Patty Ann would be forced to see her at Francis's graduation last spring, but then Francis got the job in a guitar shop and said he wasn't planning to attend his graduation, so there was no point in her coming. When she tries to call, it's always Kenny who answers:
Mommy can't talk right now,
he says. Which means she hasn't spoken to Patty Ann since the two-year memorial service for Luke last February.

She sits down on the bed and runs her hands over the sheets.

Two years, seven months, and three days.

Once a woman becomes a mother, the morning never comes when she wakes up, stretches her arms out, and feels light, like a teenager, again. Happy, yes. Weightless, never. The children grow up, they move out, they experience life in a way no amount of Mercurochrome, bandages, and a mother's kiss can make better. Becoming a mother means committing to a lifetime of worry.

Unless that child is lost. Forever.

And then you wish you could have all that worrying back. God, please, let me have it back! God, please, let me have
him
back.
Why did I waste all that time worrying instead of simply being grateful for this perfect person I put on this earth? Why can't I just have this perfect person back? Why why why.

She reaches beside the bed for her purse and snaps it open. She rummages for a cigarette before remembering she quit again.

“You okay, Grandma?”

“Am I okay? Ha! You won that battle, but you haven't got me beat yet!”

They are an American family, and people have to stand by their country. Luke
had
to go over. It was no one's fault. Not hers, not Luke's, not their country's. Patty Ann is the one who had choices. And made them badly.

She flips over a card.

We've moved to a house,
Patty Ann said on the phone. At least the last place had other apartment complexes around it, a sidewalk, a row of palm trees. Patty Ann's new home looks out on a FedMart gas station in a torn pocket of LA, a far cry from the orderly neighborhood where she and Michael brought Patty Ann up. Someone—presumably not Lee—has painted the squat bungalow a dubious blue that has nothing to do with the sky or a robin. The front door is on the side by the carport instead of in front; the interior is a box split in four. The kitchen door opens onto a back patio lined with broken cement. The only semblance of lawn is the scrub out front.

And the state of things inside…In her time, people
cleaned
their homes before having visitors, especially mothers or mothers-in-law. Wives turned the rugs, men washed the cars, together they hid any sign of desperation. When she first arrived from Phoenix, Patty Ann's house looked as though the Bomb had hit it. Soiled clothing lay on the beds and floors, dirty dishes on the counters and tables. An ashtray spilled ash and cigarette butts onto the sofa. A stuffed bear, flattened and chewed as though by a dog—although there isn't any dog—lay on the ragged carpeting. The musky odor of dirty bedding filled the air.

Even with kids popping out of her like Pop-Tarts from the toaster, she kept their house as neat as a pin. The day after Michael died, her heart heavier than an iron, she tucked in the corners of their empty bed, tight enough to pass any inspection. She pushed those sheets in under the mattress, firmly folded back the top sheet by the pillows, smoothed the now-barren land of her private life, then went out to the kitchen and tied on a clean apron.

The first thing she did at Patty Ann's—after pouring herself a glass of water and sizing up whether Patty Ann might possibly be pregnant again, which, thank God, doesn't seem to be the case—was to gather up those filthy sheets and take them to a Laundromat.
For Christ's sake, Mom,
Patty Ann said, lifting her shirt to feed the baby right in front of her, like some woman in
National Geographic
magazine.
You just got here, and already you're criticizing my housekeeping?

Yes, Patty Ann. Yes, I am. You live in a pigsty. And look at you—you act like a suckling sow. On the way back from the Laundromat, she stopped at Sears and bought a vacuum cleaner. The abandoned Electrolux in Patty Ann's carport clearly would never hum its hum over anyone's floor again, probably stopped working months ago. Maybe it never worked.

Patty Ann is twenty-seven now, with three children. Lee's family was never much, but she brought Patty Ann up to be better than this.

Kenny turns over a card and rubs a sunburned knee. He fiddles with the edge of his shorts. “Mommy doesn't like it when we close the door to our bedroom, Grandma. She says it's sneaky. She says she can't keep an eye on us.”

“That's okay,” she says. “You just concentrate on your hand.”

“Oh, Grandma. Everyone knows war's just a game of luck.”

“You say that because I'm winning.”

“No, you're not!”

They compare piles.

The front door slams.

“Okay, okay. Your pile is bigger,” she says. “But it's not over till it's over. I'll whip your butt yet.”

“Grandma!”

The front door opens and slams again. Patty's voice carries in through the windows: “That's it. That's it, Lee. I mean it!”

The old Dodge's engine turns over, stalls, turns over, catches. A roar fills the air, and then quiet.

“I guess Daddy's gone,” Kenny says. He turns over a card.

“Keep your eyes on your cards. Never mind about your father.”

“Mommy says we shouldn't play war, anyhow. She says we should play peace instead and make it so whoever turns over the lowest card wins the pile.”

“Right. Well, never mind about your mother right now, either.”

Two, three, four minutes pass. The freckles on her grandson's nose spill down its bridge and onto his wide cheekbones. His bright eyes become smaller with concentration.

The screen door slaps shut again. Patty Ann's footsteps are heavy in the kitchen. She lays down her last card and loses it to Kenny.

“Well,” she says, “that's that. Time to get started on lunch.”

Sunset spills Hi-C colors over the cracked backyard patio, warming the bland beige into something richer, almost rosy. She and Patty Ann sit on the two wooden garden chairs, towels thrown over the seats to keep splinters from entering their tushes, and sip burningly sweet lemonade mixed in the old white pitcher that once belonged to Michael's parents. Patty Ann has slipped some vodka into her own, as though she won't notice. The baby is down for the night, inside the house. The two boys—bathed and in clean pajamas-–sit cross-legged on the scraggly lawn on a beach towel, eating Popsicles she walked across to the gas station to buy. It's peaceful now, without any chance of Lee stumbling back in.

Maybe Patty Ann will finally explain the phone call and why she was summoned.

“Don't drip on yourself,” she says to the boys.

“Oh, let them be, Mom.”

Kenny is licking the multicolored pop slowly, preciously, and the melting is getting the best of him. “There's a fresh roll of paper towels on the kitchen counter,” she says.