Summertime Read online

  Sasha continues: ‘Your sister called us…’

  ‘But I didn’t tell her I was staying with you.’

  ‘She was aware of it all the same. Sisters are like that, as our mothers will confirm. Jane called to say that you must go directly to Uncle Eric’s house. Mama tried to argue but Jane explained that this is at the request of the police.’

  Shaking my head with incomprehension I climb into the car. As we drive through the pay station, the lighting making the colours of the cars look like other, different colours, I remember how Jim said that Daddy’s death was not straightforward.

  ‘I confess,’ says Sasha, ‘to some confusion about such police interest in your father. But no doubt all will be explained on our arrival. I think I remember the route. It will take us, perhaps, forty-five minutes?’

  ‘Nearer an hour.’

  We drive east. Until Sasha winds up his window I breathe the air in deeply. I recognize in it the balminess and saltiness of San Francisco.

  Sasha says: ‘Now Lucia, you will need a car and tomorrow we will hire one. There is a cheap company only a few blocks away.’

  ‘Actually, Sasha, my colleague’s having a hirecar sent over in the morning.’

  ‘Good gracious. A hirecar delivered, actually delivered, to our house. It is possible your humble Russian relatives will find this, and your metropolitan clothes, somewhat intimidating.’

  I redden and, since we are crossing the well-lit bridge, perhaps Sasha notices because he says: ‘Forgive me. I must remember that you are no longer the little girl who could be relied upon to get lost on a rocky beach or somehow drop a shoe down the elevator shaft at Grandma’s apartment.’

  When I am silent he adds mischievously: ‘Or perhaps that girl is still hiding in there somewhere.’

  I say: ‘How about you, Sash? I was surprised to contact you on the same number.’

  He sighs: ‘I, too, am surprised at this. But, whenever I think of leaving the foundation, my empire or my salary expands enough to keep me there. Perhaps you feel horrified that Sasha is living with Mama as he used to and driving to the same office he drove to fifteen years ago. But the ease with which one can resume the rhythms of one’s past is astonishing, as perhaps you will find now that you are back.’

  I shake my head. ‘I’m not going to resume anything.’

  ‘Beware, Lucia, sometimes the past is too strong for us.’

  For an instant it seems to me that the car’s momentum has nothing to do with its engine. We are being dragged back into the past, towed helplessly along by a powerful but invisible truck.

  From the moment the freeway narrows and the dark shapes of trees congregate at the roadside like mourners I find myself reliving another journey along this route. Although I have travelled the road countless times since, I recall now my family’s precipitate return from Arizona many summers ago and the smells and colours of my memory have the freshness of new paint. We could have taken the slower route through the valley but Daddy chose the freeways where he could go faster and the quantity of traffic made us unremarkable. On the freeways the other road-users were lost in their own dreams and we hoped they would hardly notice there was a crazy woman bouncing and yelling on the front seat of our car. As we crossed over the bridge Mother seemed to understand that we were close to home but this did not calm her. ‘You murderer!’ she shrieked at the surprised man in the toll cabin. Jane and I sank lower in the back seat until our heads were invisible from the cabin. ‘God, yes,’ she snarled, ‘God, yes, I see it in your eyes that you also have killed! Oh, I know all about you.’

  Daddy apologized and we took off rapidly like a boat blown on by some irresistible wind, the wind that had blown us swiftly away from gas stations and grocery stores and, on one awful occasion, a roadside motel. It had blown us all the way from Arizona.

  When we turned into our bumpy, rocky drive Mother quietened suddenly. She stared up at the house with something like meekness and Jane and I exchanged grateful glances. We were home and Mother was better. Daddy stopped the car and we got out of it slowly. It was already a habit to do things slowly because we had learned that jolts and surprises triggered a corresponding response, many times magnified, in Mother. We stretched. We blinked with the astonishment of people who have thought of nothing but their destination and now have arrived there. We staggered a little with the knowledge that we were no longer in motion. We looked around us. We noted the way the grass and the trees seemed to have stretched themselves out a little to fill the spaces we left during our few weeks away. We glanced, cautiously, at Mother. She sat in the front seat of the car without moving. I saw that she still wore the white, contorted mask that had mysteriously covered her real self ever since I broke my arm in the canyon. Gently, Daddy opened her door. Mother still did not move. Daddy said, his voice so soft that I wanted to hug him: ‘Tanya, let’s go inside, you’ll feel better now you’re here.’ We gathered around the car door, although not too close in case there was a sudden armwaving ambush of crazy recriminations. But Mother, her face flattened and snakelike, spoke quietly. She said: ‘I am not getting out of the car. You treat me like some piece of cargo to be pulled across the world, a box, a bag, some battered old suitcase left at the quayside. Well now, simply, you cannot leave me anywhere because I do not intend to get out of the car.’

  We stared at her. Ever since the canyon we had attempted to restrict and calm her movements, now she was volunteering to do this herself when it was least appropriate.

  ‘Do you hear me?’ she yelled so loudly that I jumped backwards off the drive and into some poison ivy. Jane and I looked at Daddy and saw his face, which had been set hard all through the long, miserable drive home, crumple like an old shirt. ‘No, Tanya, you can’t sit here forever…’ he began but his gentle voice disappeared rapidly beneath her screams. ‘I am not…’ Her face was swallowed into a massive wet, black hole of mouth and tongue and teeth. ‘I am not, not, getting out of the car.’

  We waited and waited for her. We waited motionlessly. Then, reluctant to leave her alone, we went into the house. It got dark. Daddy brought her food which she ignored. He spoke to her with soft kindness. She closed the car door on him. From the kitchen window I saw his helplessness when she shut him right out. He was big enough to force open the door, lift her, drag her from the car into the house but he didn’t try that. He didn’t even shout.

  She stayed there all night and most of the next day and Jane and I remained indoors. We looked at her from the kitchen window sometimes and it seemed to us she didn’t move at all. Occasionally, oppressed by the strange silence and the curious impasse in our lives, we sat on the deck which looks out over the valley. It felt good to have the whole house between us and Mother. Then Daddy, apologetically, sadly, told us that he would have to call for help. His shoulders were bent and he looked smaller. Two men and a woman came. The one in a suit had a long, hushed conversation with Daddy in the kitchen while his colleagues tried to talk to Mother through the car window. She did not wind it down or reply or give any indication that she heard them. It was evening when they took her away. When I could bear her screams no longer I ran down through the yard. The heat of the day was thinning and night-time seemed to reach out at me as I ran in and out of the trees. I didn’t stop when branches grabbed me or bushes scratched my legs. I sat in the furthest corner of the yard with my fingers in my ears where I wouldn’t hear any more of her yelling (‘So! You are murderers! He has sent you to kill me, now I understand it!’). Finally there was silence and when I crept back around the barn I found a new emptiness. The car and Mother were gone.

  Sasha and I travel in silence. The roads curve around low contours. The lights of the city behind us have dissolved in the darkness. Even the hum of the car’s engine seems like a kind of silence. When we reach the undulating hills I am lulled by their rhythm and by my memories of their rhythm. My eyes close and fatigue sweeps over me.

  6

  ‘Are you falling asleep?’ asks Sasha su
ddenly.

  ‘I’m not sure if I’m asleep and dreaming or awake and remembering.’

  ‘How close to the turning are we?’

  ‘It’s over the top of this hill and down a bit.’

  Sasha slows. The car engine whines. He swings right.

  We ride high along the valley’s steep sides, bouncing in and out of the craters in the dirt road. I know that, over to the left, when the bushes clear, the valley can shock you like a vast eye, open and glaring. But now there is nothing out there but the dark.

  We near Daddy’s house. My heart speeds, my breath shortens.

  ‘Don’t I recognize this one?’ asks Sasha, pausing before a break in the foliage. Our headlights fall across a drive, snaking mysteriously into the fold of the hill.

  ‘No, that’s the Holler house.’

  ‘Friends of yours?’

  ‘I used to play with Jim Bob Holler. I thought I was in love with him when I was nine and he was eleven.’ I start a little at the sudden, sharp memory of Jim Bob, blond hair crewcut, his body nutbrown, in motion, running, at the edge of a pool, his stride breaking as a harsh voice, his father’s, commands him to walk.

  ‘Aha,’ says Sasha, driving on slowly. ‘Nine and eleven. Was there perhaps a juvenile undercurrent of sexual awareness?’

  ‘I didn’t know about that stuff when I was nine.’

  ‘And later? When you did?’

  ‘Jim Bob wasn’t around by then.’

  He is peering along the sides of the dirt road looking for the next break in the foliage. I haven’t thought about Jim Bob Holler for years, or that Arizona trip. Shock and fatigue and my sudden return have brought the distant past up close.

  ‘Now, I’m sure it’s on that bend,’ says Sasha, leaning towards the windshield as though this will help him see in the dark.

  A distant mailbox glints in the headlights. ‘No, before it. That’s the Zacarro house up by the bend.’

  ‘And were the Zacarros good neighbours?’ murmurs Sasha, inching forward.

  ‘Okay I guess. Mr Zacarro had polio when he was a kid and he limped a bit.’ More than a bit. When he moved forward one half of his body seemed to want to stay right where it was. He had to drag that whole side, his left side, along with him, animating it like a ventriloquist animates his puppet. I used to imagine Mr Zacarro’s side lying lifelessly in their porch on the days he decided not to take it with him to work.

  Suddenly Daddy’s drive seems to jump out from the foliage at me. I draw back.

  ‘Well? Are we here?’

  Daddy made the drive himself, embedding round-faced seawashed stones in the dirt in a labour that must have taken months. But Daddy liked physical work. The neighbours hired men with machines to dig or build or asphalt but Daddy made things himself and he fixed things himself. He was always meaning to fix the drive. It was a good drive but over the years it sank in places, so you had to throw the wheel to left and right to avoid the deepest holes. I have travelled around those holes many times. For real and, far away, in my sleep. On foot, to the school bus. In my corner of a car filled with family or suitcases or shopping. As a passenger in cars driven by young men, their fathers’ cars, smelling of their fathers’ cigarettes, with a father’s newspaper thrown on to the back seat. And when I learned to drive, along with parallel parking, I learned where to swing the wheel to avoid the rises and falls of Daddy’s rocky drive.

  ‘This is it,’ I say. But when Sasha turns to me for an answer I realize that I thought the words without saying them. ‘Yes, here, we’re here,’ I tell him.

  No sooner has Sasha turned the wheel than he must halt the car. There is bright red and yellow tape threaded between bushes so it hangs right across the drive. On it the words Police Do Not Cross Police Do Not Cross are repeated like a mantra. It is the words, not the flimsy tape, which prevent us from driving straight through.

  Suddenly there is light bouncing off my face, off the windshield, pouring into all the car’s dark crevices. We turn and the beam of a flashlight diverts a little to reveal a rectangle of uniform. Sasha winds down his window. A policeman leans towards us.

  ‘I can’t permit you to drive any further.’

  I stare at him. ‘I live here,’ I hear a voice say. ‘I mean, I used to.’

  The officer looks across Sasha at me.

  ‘Maybe…’ he suggests, looking down suddenly. The light follows his eyes. ‘I have your name right here on this list.’

  I give him my name and he nods.

  ‘Oh. Oh, okay. You’re the other daughter? The one from back east?’

  He looks at Sasha. I explain: ‘This is my cousin who just met me at the airport.’

  The man shines his light on the clipboard again. ‘Okay, well I’d like to ask you to leave your car this side of the barrier. It’s getting pretty congested up there.’

  Sasha reverses into the dirt road.

  ‘You have a flashlight?’ asks the man when we duck under the police tape.

  ‘Only a cigarette-lighter,’ Sasha admits apologetically.

  ‘Be careful, those rocks are dangerous in the dark. We’re lighting the top with gumballs but it’s a while before you get to them.’

  Sasha takes my arm and waves the cigarette lighter uselessly before us as we stumble towards the house, stubbing our toes, my heels slipping into the gaps between the stones. The policeman shines his light for us but as we step beyond its beam there are a few minutes of darkness when the stars seem to appear overhead and the fresh night air envelopes us. We inhale its damp woodiness.

  I close my eyes. Despite the difficulties of negotiating the drive’s incline and curve, despite the sound of Sasha puffing and cursing at my side, I experience the deep peace of my last moments of ignorance. Soon I’ll know everything.

  ‘I believe,’ says Sasha, ‘that Jane and Larry are here waiting for you.’

  Up the incline and round to the right and I open my eyes. I stop at the sight of the big house. When I remember it, and that is often in my dreams, I remember it as it was when I was small, painted a pale egg-blue, surrounded by the slender trees and sparse bushes which Daddy planted. In the time I lived here it changed to its present state but I had forgotten how choked by growth it has become, how the trees now press against the windows, how creepers suffocate the porch.

  ‘Lucia? Are you all right?’

  I nod. The doors of the house and barn are flung open, and that feels like a violation, as though someone usually dignified just had their clothes ripped off. The scene, lit by a police car, flashes at me surreally in first red then blue then white. Alongside the flashing car are others, two of them police cars. In all the time I lived here there were seldom visitors and never police cars except possibly after someone poisoning coyotes poisoned Mother’s dog instead. And now here are three police cars, parked randomly, abandoned with a gumball flashing, windows open and a radio talking inside one.

  As I pull Sasha around the barn I feel as though I am reaching the end of some epic journey instead of a few hundred yards of rocky drive. My heart beats fast and suddenly I have no breath and can progress no further. I lean against a car, first sideways, and then I twist my body and prop myself against its roof with my elbows.

  ‘Lucia?’

  My voice is small: ‘I’ll be okay in a minute, Sasha. Give me a minute.’

  I look up at the big, flashing house. Its gables have sinuous woodwork and the porch posts have candycane twists. It should be cute as a gingerbread house but it isn’t. It looms right over you like a big bully. It mocks me and it mocks the beating of my heart. I remind myself that I was other people when I lived here. A baby, a kid who learned how to hammer rocks before she learned hopscotch, a girl who had to creep around the house in case she disturbed her crazy mother, a lovesick teenager. They were all other people and the house mocks them all.

  Sasha waits for me by the car. He moves his weight awkwardly from foot to foot, stamping a little. Then he takes my arm and tugs me a little towards the house.<
br />
  ‘I understand that extra lighting may be required,’ he says irritably as we weave around the flashing trees to the porch, ‘but do you think it is necessary to turn the place into Las Vegas?’

  As I climb the steps, another police officer emerges from the house, faceless in his uniform and the artificial light. He wears a radio around his belt and a crackling female voice issues from it. She seems not to be speaking English.

  ‘Uh-huh?’ says the man.

  The foliage is brushing against the back of my neck like spiders. I can hear Sasha behind me, breathing heavily.

  The man prompts: ‘Name or ID, please.’

  On the other side of the house is the deck and when you lean over it you’re leaning right over the valley. But whoever built the house must have understood that looking at the valley, flat and rolling on forever like an ocean, only dry, can drive you crazy. So he added this porch, nestled up to the barn and the yard, overshadowed by the hill and now overhung by foliage. The dark side of the house. As a child I’d spend hours here and the porch swing where I sat is still in the same spot by the door. For a moment I glimpse a small girl, in the very corner of the swing like a doll someone threw there, and my heart aches for her loneliness. I blink and she’s gone.

  The man puts his hands on his hips and eyes me closely.

  ‘I can’t allow you in here,’ he says.

  I reach for the swing and my fingers find a crust of rust. The seat does not move. Some flakes of rust fall like dandruff and there is a faint metallic smell. At first Mother sat next to me, telling stories, reorganizing my hair, smelling of sugar as we rocked back and forth. Then, after she stopped being that kind of mother, I sat here with Lindy, my giggling blonde-haired friend. Finally, I was the lonely doll hunched in the corner as though their absence was so massive it took up the whole of the rest of the swing.

  ‘Ma’am, would you please identify yourself?’ A new softness in the officer’s tone makes the back of my eyes sting. A moment later they drip with hot, salty tears. My legs feel weak and I sit on the top step of the porch and watch the tears fall on to my lap.