Mother May I(79)

This was where we had connected, Coral and I, and it wasn’t a character. It was only me. My most basic, beginning self.

The steep stairs shortened my breath. Above me a huge blue cowboy hat appeared over the crest of the hill. As I hurried up, the rest of Funtime Jack rose, his face splotched black with mold that turned his wide smile into a threat. His blue pack mule stood beside him, one eye a fuzzy black pit. The end of its round nose had fallen off. The ticket booth came into view last. It had rotted in on itself, deflating into a pile of wood and shingles and signage. At the top a path snaked between Jack and its remains, leading to the carousel.

I had to stop for a moment to catch my breath. Most of the animals and poles were gone, I saw. On the far side, the roof had fallen, so it was almost like a cave. I peered into the shadowy recesses, and there she was. Coral Lee Pine, who owned that whispery voice I’d learned so well.

She sat on one of the bench seats for tired parents. It was loose from the base, canted to face the stairs. I could not make out her features in the shadows. I walked forward, conscious of the phone in my pocket, the seconds ticking away. How long had the climb taken? Four minutes? Less?

The bench’s sides were carved into the shape of a stampede of horses. They faced me, too. Their mouths yawped open, and their eyes were wide. As I got close, I saw they were actually unicorns, with faded wreaths of roses around their necks and short spiral horns.

One of the rideable animals, a lion, was lying on his side to Coral Lee’s left. The pole was still attached, so it looked as if he’d been run through. He had carved roses in a wreath around his neck, too, but the paint had faded and peeled away until the blooms looked like odd, spongy growths.

I was at the edge of the platform now. I stepped up, finally close enough to see her deep-set eyes. Here was the face I’d first seen peering through my bedroom window, with that pointed chin, the turned-down mouth. Here also was the meemaw of the school’s parking lot, wearing the same dark knit cap with its small peak. Her long hair straggled down her shoulders in thin, silvery ropes.

She was no older than my mother-in-law, but she had not had Margaret Cabbat’s regimen of moisturizers and doctors to roll back time; the years sat heavy on her. She was pale, and a sheen of sweat had broken on her brow. Her eyes met mine, wide and anxious and too intense for me to hold the gaze.

Just to her right, she’d placed a small card table. It was set for tea with a woven mat, a flowered china pot, and two matching cups on pink-flowered saucers, the delicate handles edged in gold. They were full of dark liquid, and all at once I could not swallow. The brimming cups were harder to look at than she was.

Her baggy, shapeless dress was ash-colored. She had a brown-and-orange afghan on her lap, hand-crocheted by the look of it. The folds of it pooled on the bench beside her. One hand was hidden under the blanket. Holding a gun? I had no way to tell. But that possibility did not make me nearly as anxious as those delicate cups or the intensity in her hooded eyes.

“Hello, Mrs. Cabbat,” she said, quite formal. The voice from the phone. It made my jaw tighten but also pulled me one step closer. We knew each other, she and I. She gestured toward the path behind me. “That’s your husband in the driver’s seat down there?” I nodded, glancing back. The stairs were too steep for her to have watched my ascent, but I could see the lot, and the cars, and the gray road snaking away through the hills and trees. Trey was a shadowy shape in the driver’s seat. “He needs to come up now.”

“In a little. I told him I’d wave when it was time.” Sabreena Kroger’s voice, shaky and unconfident. Southern. Shy. I hadn’t been this girl in two decades, but I wasn’t acting. This was a true creature, pulled out from the deepest places inside the woman I’d grown into. This was the girl Coral Lee Pine felt for, connected with. At the same time, I was Robert’s mother, here to fight her tooth and claw. I could hold both. I knew I could. It was the most important thing the theatre had ever taught me. “I wanted to talk to you first. Just us.”

“I thought you might. Please, pull up a seat.” There was another bench, sitting aslant, nearby. I came closer and sat down on it. “I’d offer you tea, but . . .” She smiled for the first time, wide, almost a grimace. I was shocked by all the dark gaps in her mouth. So many of her teeth were gone. She gestured at the china cups. “This is not for you.”

I felt my skin trying to shudder itself off my body. “I know. It’s for Trey. And you.” She dipped her chin in a small acknowledgment. “Is it the same drug I gave Spencer?” She nodded, and I made myself meet her gaze as I told her, “It’s not a good way to go.”

She shrugged. “I used a lot. It will be faster. It will be very, very fast.” She picked up the cup closer to her, considering its dark contents. “Call Mr. Cabbat up now, please. He can have his tea, and we’ll wait a little. Then I tell you where to find your boy and have a drink myself.”

Time felt as if it were moving so slowly. Too slowly. I wondered if my timer had somehow turned itself off in my pocket. Surely seven minutes had passed? “I want to talk to you first.”

She shrugged. “You don’t have much time.” She lifted her cup to me in a mock toast, as if readying to drink it, Trey or no Trey.

I felt a chill of doubt in my spine. Marshall had convinced me that Robert was here, but if so, if she killed herself now, we would find him easily. She would never allow that. I knew it. Was Marshall wrong?