South of Elfrida (17 page)

“I know the feeling.” She told Joe what had happened to Darling.

Joe's long face waggled as he sighed. “Javelinas will go after anything. They will eat McDonald's burger wrappers and the flowers from a Christmas cactus. They appreciate the pansies folks from Wisconsin plant for them.”

The comment made her smile; winter visitors loved their pansies.

Evan examined the baffled fellow in the next bed, his face twisted in a grimace. A man of Joe's intelligence and conversational style would lose his mind if he stayed much longer. She had that spare bedroom, an extra pillow, and some blankets, and it would be easy enough to rent a bed. She could handle the
IV
; she had her first-aid certificate. She pictured Joe propped on her oversized sofa in the living room, watching the hummingbirds. She shifted her gaze to Joe. His eyes were the soft glistening green of a cactus after a rain. She heard his voice telling stories. She pictured the Mountain Dew bottle repaired and filled with seed. Maybe, just maybe, the Gila woodpecker would drop by for some exercise.

“At least leave me something,” she'd whined, and when he did break it off, Sheryl convinced herself she was grateful for the red truck, a slightly used Blazer. Then she lost it on black ice. The truck swooped away from under her in a ripple of space and time and veered from the expected track. A new universe gaped with glory for one moment, then slammed shut the next. The truck staggered uncertainly and pitched off the road onto its side, like a wounded horse that needed to be shot. She came out of the accident bruised, one eye blackened. She came out looking like a woman who'd been beaten, or like one who'd fallen, battered by nothing but getting out of bed.

At the time of the accident, she'd bled like a stuck pig. Scalp wounds, she knew, had the capacity to startle. The ambulance guys put her in the back with the gurney. One drove and the other sat facing her, alert and watching. She'd worked in a health clinic long enough to know it wasn't because she was so lovely that he studied her; he was waiting to see if her pupils dilated, indicating shock. Her face, no doubt, was streaked with brownish, drying blood. His attention was calming. “They teach you this, don't they?” she said, and then his gaze turned wary and he reached for her wrist to check her pulse. “I'm fine,” she said, “just mad as hell. The car was all I had left.” Such a curious, true confession—blood and loss caused even a normally private person to spill all sorts of things. “All I had left.” Her eyes stung with tears due to her voice talking in the vacuum of the ambulance and a kind man observing her.

He said, “You didn't hurt anyone. You kept control, so you didn't hit another car or smash into someone's house. I don't think you're badly hurt. A truck's only a hunk of steel.”

She stared at him as though he'd missed the point, but he hadn't. Thinking about how she might have run over a kid throwing snowballs, or plowed into another vehicle, killing someone's mother, made her cry.

Bruised, she thought she looked more interesting, a person with an emotionally complex life. Her buddies at the health clinic made a case for guardian angels and loved the drama. “You didn't crash into the telephone pole,” one of the nurses said. “You could have smacked it head on, been trapped inside.” Because Sheryl hadn't hit anything head-on and the electrical system still worked, she'd simply scrambled through the sunroof onto the tarmac. They jabbered on about what might have transpired, instead of the rather prosaic events that did. A miracle, other staff exclaimed, wearing their pink and blue teddy bear cottons. “Huh. More like punished,” Sheryl had said, thinking of the totalled vehicle. Then she figured she'd leave well enough alone. Trying for another woman's husband, even if that man was her own ex-husband, was bad karma.

She cut her curly hair short, tinted it with blond highlights. Brunette with blond streaks felt good for a day. Then she was back to where she'd started, wondering if her life mattered. She wondered if you could matter when no one loved you.

At the clinic, besides working the desk on-call, she ran a counselling group. She thought it was ironic that she, of all people, was hired to give advice to girls. She'd made a mess of things with her marriage, another mess of things with her divorce, and foolishly played around with the same man afterwards. She'd put a lot of work into him; he no longer said, “I seen.” She hadn't really wanted him back, not to live with, but she was flattered by the idea that he still wanted her. Desired her sexually.

The teenaged girls in her group, from abusive situations, wore their spangled jeans tight and their tops so short their baby fat showed. They had tats and nose rings and acne and smelled like cheap vanilla. Some were farm girls who had chosen the wrong boyfriends; others needed to escape fathers or step­fathers. They thought she had it together after the accident (they respected her new hairstyle). For a while, they showed up on time, they stopped texting long enough to listen to her spiel about birth control. One of them admitted, “But I want a baby. I want someone to love me.” Sheryl said, “I know the feeling.” By then her bruises were fading to a tainted green.

A girlfriend talked her into a six-night “exotic” Caribbean cruise, for single baby boomers over forty. She asked a neighbour's little girl to come by every day to look after her hamster, Harry. The child was thrilled by the offer of money; it was her first real job, and Harry was so cute. Harry, a Golden, was cute. Most people Sheryl knew didn't believe someone like her would have a hamster—a hamster was a child's pet. “You don't think I'm the hamster type?” she'd ask, chewing gum with her mouth open. Sheryl had always had hamsters, and while she was married, they'd had a ferret. When she shops for groceries, Harry rides in her shirt pocket, a ball of warmth against her heart, like having a secret love.

Her seatmate on the connector between Dallas and Miami was a boy of about ten, travelling alone, stretched out on the two seats, his left arm in a sling. When she'd leaned in to claim her seat on the aisle, he'd given her the once-over, taken his feet down, pulled himself tighter toward the window. She murmured, “You'll be all right.” People said she had a way with children.

She ordered a double gin and tonic. He'd been visiting a grandmother. His mother was a waitress at a resort in South Bay or North Beach, he wasn't sure. He lived at the resort, and he got to go out on big boats. Sheryl wondered what else his mother did at the resort besides waitress if she and the boy lived there. She thought about a child not sure of his whereabouts in Miami—north, south; maybe children didn't care. It was the mother who mattered to a little boy, being close to the mother. In answer to Sheryl's question about his looks, he said he was a mix of many things.

“Oh,” she said. “People must think you speak Spanish.”

His father was black, his mother Norwegian. His father played football and had been famous. The child himself wasn't big for his age. He had once flown first class because his father had paid for the ticket. “Oh,” Sheryl said again. They would have catered to him, the light brown child in first class, they would have fed him macaroni and cheese and cut up his steak, served him extra portions of cake.

This trip in coach, he'd come all the way from his grandma's in Spokane, and because his flights were all “short haul,” he'd had nothing to eat but peanuts and cookies. Grandma, the white one or the black one (Sheryl didn't ask), may not have known about short-haul flights and the fiscal fly-and-starve policy. She wondered why more fights didn't break out on planes—people with low blood sugar or, for that matter, smokers at the end of their ropes. She rummaged in her carry-on and came up with a granola bar, told him it was high in protein and had good carbs. He took it, doubtful, tore the paper off with his teeth and his free hand, gobbled it in four bites, and then thanked her.

“What happened?” She gestured toward the sling.

He shrugged, turned to the window.

She said, “I was in an accident. Totalled my car. Got out with a few bruises.”

He looked at her with admiration. “Skateboard,” he said.

“I loved that truck. It had sentimental value.” But she hadn't deserved it, not really; she'd pressured him into buying it. She'd lied to everyone about how it had come to be hers. “I think I'm a liar. Are you a liar?”

The boy considered. His eyes were green with flecks of gold. His lashes were long and curled upwards. “Mom says to only tell white lies.”

Another hour and they would land. She opened the second gin, added tonic. Every day during the affair, she'd lied by omission; she'd cracked jokes with his new wife.

“How do you define a white lie?”

“One that don't hurt,” the child said and went back to fiddling with the
DVD
player.

The plane dipped. He turned to her. She said, “Air pocket. Just keep your seatbelt on.” He was fine-boned, almost pretty, brown curls, and lips with ridged edges. Nice, she thought.

He tapped a finger on the
DVD
player. “Battery used up.”

“They're not very good, are they?” She meant the batteries.

“This player is very good. My daddy give it to me.”

“Gave it to me,” Sheryl said. She'd missed her calling. If she'd been an English teacher, she could think of herself as being paid to go around correcting everyone's English. “It's my job,” she would say and press the corners of her lips to bring out the dimples. She would go around correcting adults as well as children—no more “between him and I,” no more “from her and myself.” The child shifted in his seat. She let him sniff an empty gin mini. The airline served Tanqueray. “The good stuff,” she said.

The bathroom ceiling in her motel room was slick with condensation. Outside, people splashed in a turbid pool. Fronds and tendrils of wet, unclean-seeming things unfurled everywhere. The flowers were odd and oversized, beautiful she supposed, but she would never stick her nose in to smell them, for fear of bugs or something slimy. The air smelled like it was teeming with lizards and frogs. She pulled the covers back, inspected the bed; the sheets were dubious, limp and thin. Studied the armchair before she sat down. Crossed her legs, wiggled her foot. It would be another whole day until her girlfriend arrived, and she couldn't spend the evening watching for movement in the rug.

Remembering that the cabbie had driven around and behind the entrance to a posh hotel to deposit her where she was staying, Sheryl realized that her cheap motel and the hotel were in the same building. She found a way to get to the hotel without going outside, eventually opening a door and gliding through a magic portal from her crappy world into a nice one. The hotel's carpet was new, the wallpaper fresh; the towels on that side, she saw as she passed a housekeeping cart, were fluffy. The concierge greeted her as she stepped off the elevator. She still worked out; she was holding her shape. She felt good crossing the spacious lobby to the cocktail lounge.

The eyes of the man were the colour of honey with a dash of cinnamon. Like a tiger's eye marble, Sheryl thought. He was about her age, early to mid-forties, with a short, thick neck. His skin was burnt almond, a black man who, like the sweet little boy on the plane, was a mix of many things. She slid onto a stool and ordered a Bombay Sapphire martini to top off the drinks on the flight.

The man at the bar pulled his head back a few inches as he let her study his eyes. “Hi,” she said. Far, far from home.

Well-dressed men and a few women in suits occupied the chairs at the tables. The men were watching a football game, the
HD
screen tilting from the wall over her left shoulder. The man with the honeyed eyes cheered at something in the game and, after a grunt to get her attention, said—still looking at the
TV
—“I'm working security for the team. They had me come down early, secure the rooms.”

“The team is staying here, in this hotel?”

He tossed her a scornful look. “You think you gonna get information, security-type information, out of me? Do I look like that kind of nigger?”

She was in Florida; maybe people talked that way here. She laughed as if he'd made a joke and looked to the man on her other side. This other man, in a lightweight grey suit that fit him well, was leaning against the bar eating a burger.

“That any good?” she asked.

His eyes appraised her. She was wearing a sleeveless black dress that showed some cleavage. “Not bad.”

She looked through the chilled alcohol in her drink, at the cool olive on the bottom. A woman could change how a man saw her by adding a layer of heavy-duty foundation, long-lash mascara, and a simple, daring dress. Power rose in her belly, made her chortle. She thought of asking the usual questions—where he was from, line of work, how many children—but the man with the honey-and-cinnamon eyes leaned forward, square hands on the bar in front of her. “You tryin' to steal my woman?” The idea of being this stranger's woman, even for a night, felt both risky and consoling. She craved touching. Her body was jumping out of its skin for lack of touching. His skin smelled sweet, with a hint of tobacco.