THREE
“I’d been living for the last four or five years with a guy in Chicago-a guy I met during my first and last year at Drake in Des Moines. We weren’t married, but it was more than a shack-up thing, you know. We, uh, had a kid, and you know, stuck it out together.
“We were part of the Old Town scene-he turned out op art paintings and sold ’em on the street and through various shops, and I clerked in a bookstore-just a couple hippies with a love child, right? Gradually we both got into drugs, him kind of heavy, me not so-I found I couldn’t let go of the idea I was supposed to be a ‘good mother’ to my child.
“The kid was getting along fine, until one day he-by this time he was about three-and-a-half-he started acting sickly. Short of breath all the time, and complaining sometimes about chest pain. I took the kid to a doctor-and from the doctor to a specialist, and found that he had a heart condition that… that could eventually require surgery. Boy, did I come down quickly out of that druggie fantasy-world. I immediately started making mental lists of the changes that would have to take place in my life; that night I tried to tell my soulmate what the score was and he said, ‘No more fuckin’ hassles,’ and walked out. I haven’t seen him since.
“The moment the door closed behind my ex, I reached for the phone and called my mother and started pouring it all out. It’d been years since I talked to her, years since I’d dropped out of college, turned runaway, moved to Old Town and had a kid and all. I’d hardly got a word out when Mom told me that Dad died three years ago. I… I slammed the receiver down and waited for the tears, but there weren’t any, so I laughed instead. The kind of laughing that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with being happy, y’know? And, after the laughter, I thought of suicide. Real seriously thought of suicide. But my kid came first, before any such luxury, so I picked the phone up again and called Mom back.”
She stopped, and I thought for a moment she was going to break down; her one hand clutched the cup of hot chocolate, the other was on the table, trembling. My instinct was to hold that trembling hand-to give her some support. I didn’t know her well enough to do that, of course-but then we’d been through a war together, hadn’t we? A one-eyed war, so I followed my instinct and took her hand, and she gave me a quivery little smile that said she hadn’t taken my gesture the wrong way, and she got her story going again.
“Mom said she could help me, help us, my kid and me, but she also said certain arrangements would be necessary and that she would call me later, after the… arrangements were made. Four hours dragged by. Then the phone rang again, and I picked it up and it was Mom. What my mother told me seemed strange to me, but I didn’t argue. I was glad for the help. Anyway, she said I wasn’t to come to Des Moines-that’s where my family always lived-but was to meet her at an address in Port City. I didn’t know she’d even ever been to Port City. But that was where we’d be living from here on out, according to Mom. She wouldn’t explain why, only said she’d tell me more later, after we were settled in.”
Here she paused again, looking down into the cup of hot chocolate like she was looking for tea leaves to read.
“What I later found out was that an ‘old friend of the family’ who lived in Port City was interested in my kid, and wanted to make sure the boy was given the ‘best possible care.’ Those words: best possible care. Only this old friend wanted to remain anonymous. I had an idea who this person was, but I thought I better not make waves… at least not when I found out my boy was to be sent to this famous clinic, in New York.
“Still, several things were really bothering me. Mom and me were supposed to stay in Port City. We weren’t to follow the boy back east to the clinic. There was no reason given for this, it was just a… condition. And so as to stay as anonymous as possible, our benefactor insisted on making all his arrangements with Mom-that made me sure I knew who it was but Mom always denied it. I… never pressed the issue. My kid came first.”
Now her voice started to catch every few words; the blue eyes were moist.
“Last night… last night I spent the evening with a friend of mine. Since I didn’t have a car, my friend offered to drive me home, to Mom’s house, where I’ve been living. Half… half a dozen blocks from home the air started to fill with black smoke. The sky was… it was orange. Our house was in flames.”
She was squeezing my hand, now; she didn’t seem to know she was, but she was.
“I… I jumped from the car before it even stopped, and started running. As I was running I saw a couple firemen trying to carry a burning sofa out of the… the blaze. On the sofa was… was what I could only make out as a… ch-charred lump. Which the firemen put from the sofa onto a stretcher, to put it in the ambulance that was backed up on the sidewalk. I looked closer, and… the charred lump… was Mom.”
And now she cried. Finally she cried.
I started, “You don’t have to…”
But she went on. Choking back the tears, their wet trails shiny on her face, like thin narrow ribbons.
“Mom’s hair was burned off, only short black stalks of it were still there. Her skin was showing through the burned strips of clothing that were on her, and h-her skin was ash-gray, where it wasn’t black. Her face was so… so burned it swelled three times normal size. It…”
“Stop, Janet,” I said. “Don’t put yourself through this.” I’d taken a paper napkin and was dabbing at her face, drying the tears like a parent; she didn’t seem to know I was doing it.
“They didn’t let me ride in the ambulance with her. They said she had to go to the University Hospital, in Iowa City, where they have this burn unit. They sent me to my friend’s house to stay the night; a doctor came with me to give me sedation, but I wouldn’t let him. Five hours later I called the hospital and a doctor told me that my mother’s condition was critical but that there was something weird about the nature of her condition: There were definite signs that led them to believe my mother was beaten-badly-before the fire.”
And she looked at me with blue eyes that weren’t moist anymore; they were cold and clear and, somehow, frightened and frightening at the same time.
Then Meyer came in, and said her bus was there. She got up quickly to go, and I followed along, getting in a couple quick questions, getting back a couple quick answers. One of them was “Yes,” when I asked if she’d call me when she got back from Iowa City, and let me know how she and her mother were making out.
Then she was just this pale sad face in a bus window, gliding away from me.
FOUR
Ten minutes after Janet Taber’s bus left for Iowa City, John’s bus pulled in.
He stepped off the bus, two heavy bags in each hand and a clothes bag over one arm, and the smile under his sunglasses said he saw me. The sunglasses were wraparound goggles, two huge silver mirrors reflecting the sun, and the smile was John’s usual white dazzler, so the main impression of him at first glance was all sunglasses and teeth.
Not that the rest of him wasn’t striking at first glance: there was the way he was dressed, too. He had on black leather pants and a yellow-dyed buckskin coat-they were big on the West Coast for a week or two that year-with the longest hanging fringe I’d seen since the day Roy Rogers came to town when I was six. An open-collared blue shirt was showing under the coat, and a gaudy multicolor scarf was tied in a confident knot around his neck. Only his short black hair, his erect posture and the stride he used as he approached me might tip you to his being an Army sergeant arriving home on leave.
We clasped hands firmly and used our free hands to grip each other’s shoulder.
“Hello, Mal.”
I looked at his clothes and shook my head and laughed, and that patented smile of his gradually fizzled into an embarrassed grin.