Desperation Road(17)

This place, she thought. This road.

In her mind she began to trace her steps, to calculate what had gotten her here, into this night, with this sleeping child that she couldn’t care for, with the wolves outside waiting to get her. But it was as if she were trying to fit together arbitrary pieces of different puzzles. No logical order or pattern or reason for one thing to fit together with the next. She had drifted for so long. Her mind was a cloud and her memories lost in the cloud and even if there were people and things worth remembering none of them would have done her any good right now. Would anyone or anything be able to save me from the shit I’ve fallen into?

Across the way a man and woman in matching denim shirts climbed out of a truck cab and walked hand in hand across the parking lot to the café. He opened the door for her and she slid her hand across his shoulder as she crossed inside.

Maben tried to think of someone else to blame but she couldn’t.

There was that one time, she thought. She was in the hospital bed and almost Christmas and the nurses wore antlers and the doctor carried candy canes in his coat pocket. Annalee came in the early morning and the nurse handed Maben the tightly wrapped child and when Maben looked at her the expression in Annalee’s eyes made Maben think that the child already knew her and in the moment of that first exchange she swore to God and the angels and the nurses in antlers that things were going to be different. I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Annalee. Not a damn thing. We’ll be all right.

And they had been for a while. There had been a three-room apartment on the back side of a sliced-up antebellum with the nocturnal sounds all around—rats or maybe bigger animals crawling around underneath the slanting wooden floors and the loud television of the apartment next door and the banging around of the two drunk old men upstairs and the pill dealer in the other place upstairs and the constant comings and goings of those in need of him. A waterstained clawfoot tub and a waterstained sink and a refrigerator that dripped and left a tiny pinkish trail. A twin mattress that kept Annalee close to her as they lay together and a chair in the corner that wasn’t meant to rock but Maben had cut holes in tin cans and slipped them onto the chair feet and then it rocked just right. The dropoff laundry three blocks away where Maben washed and folded clothes for people who didn’t have to do it themselves and Annalee lying in a basket filled with clean, warm towels from the dryer and falling asleep to the electric lullabies of the washing machines. Getting paid in cash every Friday by the owner, a bent, whitehaired man with countless grandchildren. He had given her a stroller and a box of dolls and rattles and plastic blocks. A car seat if she ever got a car. Walking with Annalee, back and forth to work or to the Dollar General or to the grocery store or wherever they needed to go, the spring turning into summer and their walks together maybe out of necessity but always welcome to Maben as she wanted to wrap up the sun and the warmth and the child and the days together and put them somewhere safe so that one day she could get them back out and look at them and remember.

She stood from the chair and let the curtain fall across the motel room window. Shades of purple and gray across the bed. Across Annalee’s exhausted little body. Maben knelt at the end of the bed. Sleep, she whispered. Sleep.

She moved her hand and turned and saw herself in the wide mirror covering the wall above the sink. She was draped in the dark. Faceless, almost shapeless. She stood still for a long moment and stared at her blank black figure. Then she slowly raised her arm to make certain she was real and the shadow in the mirror mimicked her movement and she knew that this was much more than a bad dream.

She let down her arm and crossed the room and sat on the floor with her back to the wall.

I didn’t have to go up those stairs, she thought. Stay way the hell over there, bad habits. Stay your ass over there. I got a baby now and you’re too sharp to play with.

She had started to listen for the steps, the fifteen steps of the staircase that split the middle of the big house and led up to the door of the pill guy. Late at night she listened and counted as they went up and counted as they went down. Rickety, horror-story-sounding steps and she created a phrase to match the fifteen steps, five words she whispered to herself in the dark, a word for each step, repeated three times. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs.

Then she began to peek through the blinds and out at the street to see what they looked like. There was the Hispanic girl with the eagle or hawk or something with fabulous wings tattooed on her calf. The handful of young black guys in muscle shirts and sweatpants who looked fast and strong. The high school boys who arrived in an SUV that was worth a small house. The usual ragtag and wornout stragglers who ambled to the house from all sidewalk directions at any time of day or night.

During the day it wasn’t difficult. She worked and then changed diapers or took Annalee for a walk or fed her or rocked them both to sleep. It was during the night after Annalee had woken her and Maben had given her a bottle and gotten her back to sleep that she imagined going up the steps herself and knocking on the door and getting a little something. Just a little something.

Stay way the hell over there. Back up. Keep going.

So then she began to watch for him and that became more difficult because she never saw him. Never caught him coming or going, only heard the muffled sound of his voice when someone was at his door and he became this strange, faceless thing that lived up the stairs and provided the magic beans.