“Oh,” Zoe says like she understands. Taxes. She twists the red cord in her fingers. She only wanted to make sure no one had been murdered in this room. It seemed like a reasonable thought, but now it is ridiculous, childish. A new feeling is spreading through her. Like there are too many things that she needs to understand but doesn’t. Will she have to pay taxes? Shit. Why am I here?
“The bathroom is through there,” the lady says, pointing to a door next to the jukebox. “The kitchen wasn’t too difficult, but a bathroom was just too hard to add. It’s in with the rest of the house—just down the hall, and you have it all to yourself. That a problem?”
A problem? Zoe doesn’t know. It suddenly seems like too big of a decision. A bathroom down the hall? Her excitement mixes with fear and she can’t think. She doesn’t know what to say. What do you think, Zoe? What? What? She takes a bite of licorice to give herself more time to think. She chews and swallows. “No, I don’t think it’s a problem,” she says, but she is not sure if that is what she wanted to say at all.
“Opal,” the lady says holding out her hand. “Opal Keats.”
Zoe takes her hand and feels papery skin and wiggling veins beneath her fingers. The hand is warm and small in her own. “Zoe Beth Buckman,” she says.
Opal smiles and twists her head to the side like a sparrow, as if she is trying to get a better view of her. “You old enough to be renting a place, Zoe?” she asks.
Zoe thinks. She is seventeen years old…going on a hundred. She changed more of Kyle’s diapers than Mama and Daddy put together. She has cleaned vomit from the bathroom floor more times than she can remember and has washed her own clothes since she was ten. She has tucked Mama into bed and kissed her forehead but can’t remember when Mama’s lips last brushed her own temple as she went to sleep. She has worked since she was twelve, first babysitting, then waiting tables. She identified Daddy at the morgue when Mama was too broken up and Grandma couldn’t be bothered. She has lived at least three lifetimes in her seventeen years. She looks into Opal’s eyes. “Yes,” she says. “I’m old enough.”
“I can see that now,” Opal says, squinting. “I can see it in your eyes. You have an old soul.” There is a long pause. Silence. Not even the panther clock seems to make a sound. Zoe turns around once more, taking a last look at the room, seeing details she missed before, like the braided rug at the end of the bed and a life-size stone bulldog tucked under the table by the front door. She hears her thick rubber-soled waitress shoes squeak on the floor as she turns and then remembers that this was how she imagined it. Polished wooden floors. That much she knew.
“Will you be taking the room, Zoe?” Opal asks.
Zoe pulls her car keys from her pocket. She looks everywhere but into Opal’s eyes. She aches for the room, but a weight, a whisper, pulls at her…. What about Mama…what about Mama? She reaches down and brushes the head of the stone bulldog. “I’ll have to think on it,” she says, and she leaves not caring that, for the first time ever, she will be late for work.
Five
Zoe stops the car at the curb and turns off the ignition, but she doesn’t get out. It was a busy night at the diner and she is tired, more tired than she should be after a short shift. Instead of thinking on it as she promised Opal, she had tried to concentrate on other things, like orders of chicken-fried steak or peach cobbler, even school and Mrs. Garrett. All through her shift she battled to keep the room out of her head—the room she couldn’t possibly take—but instead the battle escalated into a raging war.
“You okay?” Murray asked her when a plate of fries and a patty melt crashed from her arm to the floor.
“Yes,” she said, but even as she helped clean up the mess, all she could see was a clock on a brass panther’s belly, ticking away seconds, months, and years.
No peace is in sight, but she desperately needs some. She kicks off her shoes, rolls down the window of the Thunderbird and leans her seat back. She can’t go into the house. She still needs a few moments alone. Time.
It’s a hot September night, but heat has never bothered Zoe. She hears Mr. Kalowatz’s sprinklers hissing next door, and from across the street a faint drone from the Fensters’ TV drifts through their screen door. It is so still, so calm, she thinks, and she drinks it in. Periodically a tree frog starts up a wave of chirping and then quiets again. And that she soaks in, too. All those things outside of herself that seem to have order. She lets them seep in.
For a moment she forgets and is able to fall into the stillness. The gentle harmony of sounds cradles her, rocks her, and in the darkness, her tired faded house seems almost beautiful. She rubs her stocking feet together to push away the soreness and looks out the window into the glittered sky.
The angels threw glitter up there just for you, Zoe, Daddy had told her. They celebrated almost as much as I did the day you were born. Every time you look up there you remember how special you are—so special the angels threw a big party.
She rests her head on the ledge of the window and scans the billions of blinking stars sprinkled all the way down to the horizon. A party, she thinks. “I must have been pretty special, Daddy,” she whispers. The Hendersons’ dog two houses down begins barking, which starts a domino effect, and distant dogs throughout the neighborhood join in, until the sprinklers, the reruns of M*A*S*H, and even the shrill tree frog are a background rhythm. She smiles at how quickly calm can turn to chaos. Mr. Henderson comes out his door and yells for his dog to shut up, and soon the dog’s silence begins a reverse domino effect. The crescendo subsides, and the calm returns. It’s all connected in strange, mysterious ways, she guesses…the sprinklers, the M*A*S*H reruns, the tree frog, the dogs, even Mr. Henderson…all connected in ways they can’t ever know, ways only she can sense, because on this dark, starry night she is there to hear them. She is the
re to listen.
Almost revived, she gathers her shoes and purse to go into the house—and to Mama. The chain-link gate groans its usual warning as she passes through, and she tries to ignore it. I have to go in, she thinks. When she reaches the steps, she sees a red tag hanging on the doorknob and she squeezes her eyes tight, trying to hold the battle in. She snatches the notice from the door and reads that they have forty-eight hours left before the power is cut.
“Dammit, Mama!” she says under her breath as she opens the door. “Mama?” she calls. There is no answer. She walks to the kitchen and sees a gallon jug of red wine sitting on the table, half its contents already gone. She slaps the notice onto the table next to the jug. The dishes from this afternoon still sit in the sink, now covered with cold, gray water.
“When is ‘later,’ Mama?” she sighs. She turns to go to her room, but a scrap of paper taped to the refrigerator catches her eye.
Sorry, Sugar. Principal called. Had his mind set so I didn’t even try. No big deal. One-day suspension. Go to counselor’s office in the morning. Something about counseling during sixth period on Fridays, too. Sounds cushy and gets you out of class.
Mama
Zoe feels a hot rush in her chest. Yes, Mama, it is a big deal! I have P.E. sixth period! Tennis! But it will be a cold day in hell before you ever remember that! She rips the note from the refrigerator. “Mama!” she calls. She walks down the hall, past the bathroom, to Mama’s closed door. The note trembles in one hand, and she opens the door with the other. She stops when it is only open a few inches.
Mama’s legs lie tangled in the sheets, but between them two larger, hairier legs move in a rhythm that make Zoe’s stomach wrench. She stumbles back from the door, leaving it ajar and fumbles for her own doorknob, searching for an escape. She falls into her room, closing the door behind her.
Zoe feels her breath coming fast, out of control. A flash of sweat heats her face. She can’t even be bothered to lock her door. She doesn’t think that, maybe for me, she should lock her lousy fucking door. She stands in the middle of her dark room with her hands over her face, pressing, measuring breaths that want to come in gulps, pressing to hold it in. That’s where the wine came from. She won’t do one stinking thing for me, but for that she will screw her way to oblivion.
Zoe falls onto her bed in the dark and pulls her pillow over her face. Her gulping breaths are muffled. The only other sound is the jingling of her tips as they slip from her skirt pocket to the floor. The pillow is wet against her face, and her uneven breaths pull something out of her she hates, pulling until her head throbs and a sharp stab swells in her throat. Finally her breathing quiets and she lies on her back, limp, staring into the blackness, her chest occasionally jumping for a breath like it did when she was a child. The darkness vibrates around her and the room is stuffy, but she is too weak to get up and turn on the light or the fan. She wishes the black void would swallow her up. It would be easier.
Her chest jumps again, and she thinks of Kyle and how she used to rub his chest when he was little and hold him tight in her arms so the shaking would go away. “It will be all right, Kiteman,” she would whisper against his cheek, no matter what the problem was, whether it was a scraped knee, or it was a lonely, stormy night and Mama and Daddy still hadn’t come home. She always promised him everything would be all right.