After stripping down to panties and a tank top, she sat in bed, atop the sheets, sipping cold lemon vodka in the warm darkness.
At the open window, the night lay breathless.
From the freeway arose the drone of traffic, ceaseless at any hour. This was a less romantic sound than the rush and rumble of the trains to which she had listened on many other nights.
Nonetheless, she could imagine that the people passing on the highway were in some cases traveling from one point of contentment to another, even from happiness to happiness, in lives with meaning, purpose, satisfaction. Certainly not all of them. Maybe not most of them. But some of them.
For bleak periods of her life, she’d been unable to entertain enough optimism to believe anyone might be truly happy, anywhere, anytime. Geneva said this newfound fragile hopefulness represented progress, and Micky wished this would prove true; but she might be setting herself up for disappointment. Faith in the basic Tightness of the world, in the existence of meaning, required courage, because with it came the need to take responsibility for your actions — and because every act of caring exposed the heart to a potential wound.
The soft knock wasn’t opportunity, but Micky said, “Come in.”
Geneva left the door half open behind her. She sat on the edge of the bed, sideways to her niece.
The dim glow of the hallway ceiling fixture barely invaded the room. The shadows negotiated with the light instead of retreating from it.
Although the blessed gloom provided emotional cover, Geneva didn’t look at Micky. She stared at the bottle on the dresser.
That piece of furniture and all else upon it remained shadowy shapes, but the bottle had a strange attraction for light, and the vodka glimmered like quicksilver.
Eventually, Geneva asked, “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. But we can’t just do nothing.”
“No, we can’t. I’ve got to think.”
“I try,” Geneva said, “but my mind spins around it till I feel like something inside my head’s going to fly loose. She’s so sweet.”
“She’s tough, too. She knows what she can handle.”
“Oh, little mouse, what’s wrong with me that I let the child go back there?”
Geneva hadn’t said “little mouse” in fifteen years or longer. When Micky heard this pet name, her throat tightened so much that a swallow of lemony vodka seemed to thicken as she drank it. Crisp in her mouth, it became an astringent syrup as it went down.
She wasn’t sure that she could speak, but after a hesitation, she found her voice: “They’d have come for her, Aunt Gen. There’s nothing we can do tonight.”
“It’s true, isn’t it, all that crazy stuff she told us? It’s not like me and Alec Baldwin in New Orleans.” “It’s true, all right.”
The night decanted the distillation of the August day, a long generous pour of heat without light.
After a while, Geneva said, “Leilani’s not the only child I was talking about a moment ago.” “I know.”
“Some things were said tonight, some other things suggested.” “I wish you’d never heard them.”
“I wish I’d heard them back when I could’ve helped you.” “That was all a long time ago, Aunt Gen.”
The drone of traffic now seemed like the muffled buzzing of insects, as though the interior of the earth were one great hive, crowded to capacity with a busy horde that at any moment would break through the surface and fill the air with angry wings.
“I’ve seen your mother go through a lot of men over the years. She’s always been so … restless. I knew it wasn’t a good atmosphere.”
“Let it go, Aunt Gen. I have.”
“But you haven’t. You haven’t let it go at all.”
“Okay, maybe not.” A dry sour laugh escaped her as she said, “But I sure have done my best to wash it away,” and with vodka she tried but failed to rinse the taste of that admission from her mouth.
“Some of your mother’s boyfriends…
Only Aunt Gen, last of the innocents, would call them boyfriends— those predators, pariahs proud of their rejection of all values and obligations, motivated by the pure self-interest of parasites to whom the blood of others was the staff of life.
“I knew they were faithless, shiftless,” Geneva continued.
“Mama likes bad boys.”
“But I never dreamed that one of them would… that you…”
Listening as though to the voice of another, Micky was surprised to hear herself speaking of these things. Before Leilani, revelation had been impossible. Now it was merely excruciating. “It wasn’t just one bastard. Mom drew the type… not all of them, but more than one … and they could always smell the opportunity.”
Geneva leaned forward on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched, as though she were on a pew, seeking a bench for her knees.
“They just looked at me,” Micky said, “and smelled the chance. If I saw this certain smile, then I knew they knew what the situation was. Me scared and Mama willing not to see. The smile… not a wicked smile, either, like you might expect, but a half-sad smile, as if it was going to be too easy and they preferred when it wasn’t easy.”
“She couldn’t have known,” Geneva said, but those four words were more of a question than they were a confident assessment.
“I told her more than once. She punished me for lying. But she knew it was all true.”
Fingertips steepled toward the bridge of her nose, Geneva half hid her face in a prayer clasp, as if the shadows didn’t provide enough concealment, as if she were whispering a confession into the private chapel of her cupped hands.
Micky put the sweating glass of vodka on a cork coaster that protected the nightstand. “She valued her men more than she valued me. She always got tired of them sooner or later, and she always knew she would, sooner or later. Yet right up until the minute she decided she needed a change, until she threw each of the bastards out, she cared about me less than him, and me less than the new bastard who was coming in.”
“When did it stop — or did it ever?” Geneva asked. Her softly spoken question reverberated hollowly through the serried arches of her steepled fingers.
“When I wasn’t scared anymore. When I was big enough and angry enough to make it stop.” Micky’s hands were cold and moist from the condensation on the glass. She blotted her palms against the sheets. “I was almost twelve when it ended.”
“I never realized,” Geneva said miserably. “Never. I never suspected.”
“I know you didn’t, Aunt Gen. I know.”
Geneva’s voice wavered on God and broke on fooclass="underline" “Oh, God, what a blind stupid worthless fool I was.”
Micky swung her legs over the side of the bed, slid next to her aunt, and put an arm around her shoulders. “No, honey. Never you, none of that. You were just a good woman, too good and far too kind to imagine such a thing.”
“Being naive is no damn excuse.” Geneva trembled. She lowered her hands from her face, wringing them so hard that in a spirit of repentance, she must have wanted to fire up the pain in her arthritic knuckles. “Maybe I was stupid because I wanted to be stupid.”
“Listen, Aunt Gen, one of the things that kept me from going nuts all those years was you, just the way you are.” “Not me, not bat-blind Geneva.”
“Because of you, I knew there were decent people in the world, not just the garbage my mother hung with.” Micky tried to keep her wetter emotions bottled in the cellar of her heart, safe storage that she’d successfully maintained until recently, but now the cork was pulled and apparently lost. Her vision blurred, and she heard vintage feeling wash through her words. “I could hope… one day I might be decent, too. Decent like you.”