At the phone, I put in my change and dialed.
“Hamish, it’s Helen,” I said. “Could you come pick me up?”
“Where?”
I thought quickly. It was a walk I could easily make.
“Vanguard Industries. Twenty minutes.”
“You know,” he said, “Mom told me about your mom.”
I leaned my head into the reflective surface of the phone. Pressed it hard into the return-change knob.
“Yes. Vanguard, okay?”
“I’ll be there.”
I hung up. The voices in the restaurant area behind me grew louder.
I did not turn but proceeded down the back hall toward the “Heifers” and “Bulls” rooms, as if it weren’t clear by a bit of translation that this meant women were cows. The back door was propped open with an ancient gray milk crate turned on its side. Carefully, I stepped over it, opening the door only a little further to squeeze past. There were a few beat-up cars parked at odd angles in back-The kitchen staff, I thought-and a Dumpster on the edge of the lot before it turned to grass and trees. As I climbed up the hill out back, I saw a large paper sack on top of the Dumpster. The top was open. Inside were rolls of bread, perhaps a day old. I thought for the first time, How will I live? and saw myself in a month, two months from now, grabbing a bag like this and ferreting it away.
I paused at the edge of the trees. I saw Sarah, marking off days on a calendar and living in my house alone, waiting for me to come home from a prison term for manslaughter or accidental death. She would need work, and my job would be open. Perhaps Natalie would drive her that first day. The students would be pleased-new meat-and she could talk to Gerald on her breaks. “My mother died,” he’d say. “My mother rolled a decade,” she’d say. I knew Sarah well enough to know she’d love the lingo-a paltry consolation prize.
But none of this was the picture in my mind that scared me most. What scared me was the one where I was home again, where Sarah and I lived together, where she ran errands and massaged my feet while they sat begging on a leather ottoman. She’d bring me broths in bed and draw a shawl over my shoulders, rub at the caked-on food at the corner of my mouth with a damp cloth. And I would begin to forget her, to scream at her, to say cruel things about her body and her love life and her brain.
I bushwhacked through the trees along the property line and entered a patch of roadway forest. The ground was strewn with litter as I cut farther in, beer cans and condoms being the trash du jour, and I winced each time I accidentally stepped on them.
I had forgotten the red hair ribbon on the porch, leaving it to Bad Boy to have his fun with, and my fingerprints were on every surface of the kitchen. How many children bathed their mothers on the floor, sliced their clothes off with scissors, or quite literally dragged them outside to get fresh air? There would be no evidence of Manny Zavros anywhere.
On the arm of my desk lamp at home, I had hung a ribbon from my mother’s hair. It too was red. But there were other ribbons, as well as a magnetic cat, a Mexican Day-of-the-Dead skull, a snail figurine, and the felt Christmas ornament my mother had sent. Why would any one thing in my home draw more attention than another?
I had not squirted the bleach into the toilet that morning. The hair from her braid might still cling there-might have scattered, unbeknownst to me, across the tiles of the bathroom floor. Would it have a time-and-date stamp if examined in a lab?
I reached Elm. Traffic was intermittent on the back roads, and I waited for my moment to rush out of the trees and across to the other side-ducking into another patch of abandoned forest.
The police could easily discover enough evidence. And if faced with direct questions, I knew I would tell the truth. Either way, when I thought of returning home with Sarah, I could see only one destiny, and it was hers, not mine.
I reached the place where I would have to scramble down a steep embankment in order to meet Hamish. I looked down the gravelly berm that they had built on all three sides of Vanguard. More than anything, the place itself looked like a high-voltage electrical plant. In the lot below, separated from the berm by a high metal fence, was a row of shiny black SUVs-top-of-the-line. I would pass within a whisper of them.
I took precautions not to injure myself, descending the steep slope from a seated position, crawling like a crab all the way. I strapped my purse over my neck and left shoulder and rested it in the center of my stomach for the descent. It would not be the last time, I knew, that I wished I could trade my discipline for Sarah’s youthful resilience. My youngest could still beat the shit out of her body and go to her job the next day-if she had a job.
At the bottom I stopped for five whole luxurious minutes, daring the men inside Vanguard to sense me radiating human heat on the other side of the corrugated fencing that shot up ten feet high. It was utterly sterile. Not an ant or a blade of grass. Not a weed. Just gravel and more gravel. An endless gray sea lit up by spotlights posted along the fence.
I did not want Hamish to come and look for me, so I pushed myself up and walked hurriedly along the wall toward the parking lot.
About two hundred feet away, I could see Hamish’s car near the entrance. He hovered next to the giant illuminated V that sat on the edge of the property.
I stepped briskly across the pavement and slipped inside the car.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“No argument,” said Hamish.
As we backed up into the road, I saw a guard come around the opposite side of the building and glance our way with a quizzical look. I could have met Hamish outside the VFW or the Mini Storage, but I hadn’t thought of them quickly enough.
“Where’s your car?” Hamish asked.
I could smell the heavier-than-usual application of Obsession and remembered that Mr. Forrest had once given my father cologne from Spain that smelled like pot. Oblivious, my father wore the cologne until it was gone, saving the bottle on his dresser, where I found it the day after he’d shot himself.
“Sarah borrowed it,” I said.
This seemed to satisfy him. He stopped at a four-way stop and leaned over to kiss me. I shrank back, but he remained undaunted.
“Where shall we go?” he asked.
Paris and the Ritz, I felt like saying, and thought of the maudlin song about some sad woman realizing at the age of thirty-seven that she would never drive in an open car in a European capital. If that was the limit of her deprivation, she was one lucky bitch.
“The thing is,” I said, keeping my hands on my lap and avoiding his gaze, “I need to borrow a car.”
He pressed the accelerator. “Is that it?”
“I’m in a weird place,” I said.
“Your mom?”
“Yes.”
“Do they have any idea who did it?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said, and I decided it couldn’t hurt. “A boy who used to come over and do things for my mother,” I said. “His name is Manny.”
“The one who fucked someone in your old bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“My mom told me about that.”
We passed the quarry, where mountains of gravel and shale sat waiting to be borne away on trucks. They glimmered under the low argon lights spaced throughout the property.
Twenty years ago, there had been a boy Sarah’s age who was playing captain-and-pirate on top of a giant pile of gravel dumped at the end of our block. He climbed up, brandishing a balsa-wood sword made the night before with the help of his father, and quickly sank inside.
“Do you remember Ricky Dryer?” I leaned my head into the window. I saw the reflection of my tired eyes come toward me and then disappear.
“The kid who died. Man, I haven’t thought of him in years.”
“Let’s go to your house, Hamish,” I said. “We can have a drink and talk.”