The Good Daughter Page 15

  She wouldn’t mind at all if she never saw Nolan again.

  —

  The next morning Quinn got in Nolan’s truck and made her way to Beaumont, close to the Louisiana border. She took I-45 south and then cut across until she reached the town and the house where she grew up. She never entered the property—it had been Sigrid’s house for so many years that even looking at it from the curb made it seem like it hadn’t been home for a long time even before she’d left—and Quinn signed paperwork at the office of the executor of the will. Her father, always with “one eye in the future, the other on doing what’s right,” according to Horacio McCann, Esquire, had an ironclad will. The house had been promised to the Texas Historical Society of Beaumont, and a price had been set years before he passed. Sigrid had lived off her small pension but had never been entitled to the house. When Quinn left McCann’s office, she was in possession of a cashier’s check in an amount that was staggering.

  Quinn took 146 South and within two hours, she reached Galveston. As a child she had imagined they’d have to drive all day, maybe even take a ferry, but now that she realized that it took a mere two hours from Beaumont, she felt anger well up inside of her. Galveston, the place her father had always promised he’d take her, was nothing but a stone’s throw from her house, yet he had never bothered. She hated the fact that she felt resentment toward her father and so she thought of Nolan and the farm, where her anger felt more at home and appropriate. The fact that he was her only relation now made her feel untethered as if she was floating about without a binding thought in her mind. Suddenly being free someplace else—whatever that meant and wherever that was—seemed something she might consider. Maybe it was the check in her pocket, maybe it was the fact that there was nothing for her in Aurora, just like there was nothing in Beaumont for her either.

  The Galvez was just as she had imagined it: a majestic brick building with a stately lobby of Corinthian columns, decorated ceilings, and marble floors. There were potted plants everywhere, area rugs, and wicker furniture, and the windows facing the coast allowed abundant light to flood in. She couldn’t get enough of how it felt to sit in the oversized plush chairs, and every day she had her clothes laundered and returned pressed. On the grounds there were palm trees, a barbershop even, and boutique stores in the main lobby.

  Yet in the company of the other guests she felt out of her element. The restaurant was extravagant and other guests stared at her because she was the only woman dining alone. In the evenings the dining room of the Galvez was crowded with men in suits and women who seemed to have been outfitted by professionals. She assumed the ladies in white coats with large suitcases scramming through the endless hallways of the hotel were the ones styling the women. The dress she wore and considered fancy was nothing but an average sheath that seemed way too casual—the other women wore elegant dresses and jewelry and lots of makeup, even in the mornings—and Quinn felt as if she set the cup on the saucer a bit too forcefully; couldn’t help it when the knife scraped across the plate, making people flinch. Living on the farm for all these years—she did the math; eleven years in all—had made her rough around the edges. Her nails were chipped, her face freckled and burnt from the sun, and she always forgot to cross her legs.

  And then there was the food. Quinn thought she knew about food preparation, had in fact cooked for her father since she was twelve, before Sigrid entered the picture, but now her attempts at cooking—shocking beans to retain color and allowing egg whites to adjust to room temperature before beating—were nothing more than a clumsy effort taken from country cookbooks with bland ingredients. She came to realize that what had passed as a feast was merely a poor man’s meal.

  The tables stretched the length of the room and delicacies Quinn had never heard of or seen lined the walls; whole roasted pigs still turning on spits and Cornish hens arranged in zigzag patterns, their orifices stuffed with sprigs of rosemary; platters of fruits—one shaped like a star!—and nuts, cheeses, and breads, and all by the flickering lights of the overhead chandeliers.

  There was a masterfully arranged glazed ham on a bed of greens with pineapple slices in a vortex pattern; grilled trout with lemon on a bed of wild fragrant rice. A table—its very own table!—of breads; French baguettes in flower shapes; dinner rolls that looked like seashells; and in between side dishes so plentiful that she couldn’t possibly try them all. Quinn picked the trout and the rice, and when she returned to her table, a couple with two children had been seated. Quinn panicked, not wanting to hold a conversation with people such as them, rich and sophisticated—what was she going to talk about, after all, the farm and her husband riding around aimlessly on a tractor while he depleted the family’s fortune?—and Quinn used fortune loosely. As if claiming the large round table had been an audacity of hers, she had relocated to a smaller square table by the window when a waiter appeared and asked her for her choice of wine.

  “Madame? What wine would you like?” he said and bowed.

  “White,” Quinn said even though she preferred water with her meals.

  The choices he named—Chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, dry Riesling—confused Quinn and she busied herself removing the baked lemon, fiddling with the fish that had its head still attached. She froze. Her father was supposed to teach her how to separate the bones from the flesh but he never did. Using the butter knife, she made a clumsy attempt to remove the head behind the gills. By the time she pulled the body away from the head, her plate was a mess of bones and eyes and silvery skin. She picked at the rice and felt the eyes of the waiter on her as he removed the plate and in a harsh and snappy manner pointed at the silverware. Quinn left the dining room without dessert and from then on ordered room service.

  The next day she strolled across the boulevard to the beach and walked the shoreline. She wore shorts and a blouse and had tied a red scarf around her head to keep her hair from whipping her face. Large sunglasses hid her eyes.

  Quinn must have walked for over an hour, had long left the fancy hotels behind, when she came upon a group of people. Vans parked by the side of the road, and they had set up tents and coolers. Some of the women held babies, and there was a handful of children, some of them naked, playing nearby, building sand castles. A cold fire in their midst—a sign they had been at the beach all night. Quinn rested on a nearby jetty and watched the group of people chatting and laughing. The women had hair that reached all the way down their backs and they wore sandals and flowing dresses; the men seemed scruffy and wore long beards. Subculture they were called, Quinn then remembered, had heard on TV, men and women opposed to war and government and society at large. Quinn jerked when from behind a man emerged from the water, dragging his surfboard with him. He wiped his long hair out of his face and it stuck to his skull and back. He dropped the board in the sand and sat on it, catching his breath.

  “Strong winds,” he said and smiled.

  He leaned back on the board, his stomach concave, his body tanned and lean. He continued to make conversation even though Quinn just nodded and smiled. Eventually she engaged and he told her they traveled along the coast, and that they were on their way back to California. Cali, he called it.

  Quinn told him about the farm and Nolan and he called over a woman who was balancing a baby on her hip. The man, Jason, and the woman, Amy, weren’t married but lived in a commune in California. When Amy heard Quinn lived on a farm she perked up.

  “What do you grow? Do you have animals?”

  Quinn was embarrassed and named random produce. “No animals,” she added. “Tell me about the commune,” Quinn said, not really interested, just so she wouldn’t have to talk about herself and the farm. She wanted to leave; the surf was making her cheeks prickle.

  Amy told her about the dangers of chemicals in foods—“We grow all our vegetables and we don’t eat meat at all”—and how they lived secluded on a farm with horse wagons and outhouses, and all the women gave birth at
home.

  Before she knew what was happening, Amy handed her the baby. Holly was her name and she was mellow and settled into Quinn’s arms as if it was the most natural place to be. She smelled of sun and salt and something stirred inside of Quinn. She had thought she had wanted a baby before but this felt as if her wish had just been elevated and presented to her in a perfectly new light: I want . . . she thought. I want . . . and then an awareness manifested that she would settle. Settle for something lesser, less significant than her own child, but not in a sacrificial way, no, more like having what she wanted, just not in a way she had thought.

  Quinn knew her womb was dead, it had died a long time ago that day in the woods, and nothing more would come forth from it but blood and cramps and the smell of defeat and death. But with this baby in her arms she wanted to tuck away that sense of defeat nicely, along with the memory of the creek, the moment Bony Fingers submerged her. His hands holding her shoulders and her lungs busting, straining, and then inhaling water. She felt as if holding this baby, someone else’s baby after all, had allowed her to be born again with a new understanding of what needed to happen.

  The scent of the ocean was intoxicating, how it churned and whipped the waves like a vortex, drawing her in. And she tucked the memory away in an orderly fashion, away in the past where it belonged, and the ocean roiled and thrashed and she began to shake, not from cold or wind or not having eaten breakfast, but from the center of her being, and the only calm was Holly, sweet Holly in her arms, the perfect weight to keep her from exploding, keep her grounded. Calming like a mother’s cool hand on a fiery forehead, something she knew nothing about, having never met her own mother, but she wanted . . . just wanted to mother. To be that, be it, mothering, holding, and keeping someone safe. Salvation and generosity all in one. She wanted that. Even if the child wasn’t hers.

  She held the baby for a while longer, maneuvered her from hip to hip, from one side of her chest to the other, and eventually the baby fell asleep, and as much as Quinn wanted to remain in this moment of her epiphany, she was in a hurry now to leave.

  Everything had changed; she didn’t want to keep driving east to get away from Texas and Nolan and the farm, start her life over by herself, even though with all the money she had now it was possible. She didn’t fit with the women in the hotel, with their belted dresses and barrettes, purses and stockings, stiff and ladylike. And she wasn’t Cali either, wasn’t tall and slender, braless with sun-bleached hair and naked children building castles around her, growing vegetables and giving birth while other women cheered her on.

  She was Quinn, the wife of Nolan Creel of Aurora, Texas. And there was no need to see any more doctors—they had told her as much, short of calling her infertile, she might as well be honest with herself, as if she were a stretch of land without any rain, and littered with rocks, unable to sustain life—but there must be a way. Must. The money from the house, her father’s house, was in her pocket. A check for an amount so outrageous, she’d never even dreamed of so many zeroes.

  The next morning she left the hotel and got back on the road to Aurora.

  Anything was possible now. Anything.

  Part Two

  Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.

  —ACHILLES

  Fifteen

  DAHLIA

  THE house is on fire.

  I feel the heat through my mother’s door. My mind upturns—I no longer remember if I should open the door or not open the door but either way—I see gray smoke seeping through the gap underneath. It bellows and moves upward, hugging the walls.

  I yank open the door and simultaneously cover my nose and mouth with the hem of my shirt. I feel my way along the wall to the window and I open it. Smoke stings my eyes. Every breath I take, it gets worse.

  In the middle of the room sit boxes with haphazardly open lids, papers are strewn all across the floor. In the center of the boxes is a blackened metal bucket from which smoke bellows in black clouds. There are more boxes yet not much of them remains—some have turned to dust. The scorched wooden floor is covered with ashes.

  My mother stands in the darkest part of the smoke.

  This is not a fire that came about within the past few minutes—the amount of boxes smoldering, the scorching of the floor, even the curtain on the far window is on fire—but it seems my mother struggled with the flames getting out of hand for a while.

  Just when I think to call 911, I hear sirens in the distance. They get louder by the second, yet my mother just stands there, her apathy much more unnerving than the fire and the smoke. She is frozen, watching the flames as if she’s surrendering herself to the fire. She even takes a step toward the bucket, is about to take yet another, but I jerk her back by the only thing I can get a hold of, her cardigan. She breaks free from my grip; her cardigan left in my hand as if she’s determined to be consumed by the flames. Thick smoke billows black across the room, filling my lungs.

  We choke and cough; it is painful to breathe with my heart racing in my chest. The sirens become deafening and I scream her name as she bends down and picks up pieces of paper that are clearly on fire. She kicks the bucket. It tips over and the world turns into an inferno. The flames burn with kaleidoscopic colors—purples and blues and greens, shades of gold and yellow—and with each flare they lick across the floor as if there’s something highly flammable present, not just a fluke, not a candle or faulty wiring: she used an accelerant to start this fire. To burn things.

  Someone grabs me and pulls me backward. I can’t make sense of anything until I open my eyes again at the bottom of the stairs and I’m staring into the eyes of a firefighter in full gear, a mask covering his face.

  “My dog,” I scream, “where is my dog?”

  The mouth behind the mask moves but I can’t make out any words. I wiggle and kick, attempting to get away so I can look for Tallulah. The man’s grip is tight. He lifts up his hand and makes a robot-like gesture with it and it takes me a second to comprehend—thumbs-up—and I know Tallulah is safe.

  He carries me outside, across the street, where he hands me to another man. People scream, voices give orders, but all those human sounds turn into white noise and my world is nothing but movement: men in yellow coats and helmets, bystanders in housecoats. A piece of vinyl siding slides off the second-story exterior like a dab of butter in a hot pan. Through the open window flames escape into the darkness, casting their yellow glow into the night. The wind carries off the smoke and ashes rain down. More sirens approach, wailing as they come down the street.

  Air hisses into my nostrils. Another painful coughing fit shakes me, rattles deep down in my chest. Someone is pulling on my hands and I resist, jerk whatever I cling to toward myself, and clutch it in an embrace. I look down and realize that I still have my mother’s knitted cardigan in my hand. My fingers have dug into it, stretched the fabric into a distorted shape beyond recognition. It is singed, yet I hold on to it.

  —

  My mother sits on the back porch in a lawn chair. I sit on the back stoop, not sure what to say to her, where to even start.

  “Where’d you get the dog?” she asks, as if that’s the most pressing problem at the moment.

  “Her name’s Tallulah. She’s from the pound. They were about to put her down.”

  We both hear Tallulah yap and look up. She’s standing in front of a tree, shaking her head. She turns sharp to the right just to stand in front of the fence, not moving, tapping it gently with her nose.

  “The bitch’s blind,” my mother says.

  I’m taken aback by her chuckle, her entire demeanor. She should be remorseful, should show some kind of emotion, yet she doesn’t acknowledge the fire that could have burned down the entire house and possibly killed us. I had seen her medication bottles earlier in her bathroom—thirty days’ supply was halfway gone and she’d only been home for a few days. With all those meds in he
r she should be passed out on the couch, yet she is slightly subdued at best. She must have a tornado living inside of her.

  “No one told me she was blind.” I now question Tallulah’s eyesight even though she does make eye contact. But then there’s her inability to jump into a car, the way she freaked out in the backseat—it’s altogether possible that she is blind. “I’m not taking her back, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  My mother tilts her head as if she just remembered something. “Where are we going to live?”

  I want to know what she burned in that bucket, what was in those boxes, but none of those questions turn into words. “Why do you collect crickets in a jar?” It’s out before I can rein it back in. I watch her closely.

  Her eyelids twitch and she swallows hard. My mother laughs, deep, from the gut, almost diabolically. Then she just stares straight ahead.

  A firefighter approaches. His gear spooks Tallulah and she takes off into the house, up the stairs. He kneels down; his face is sooty, his eyes are bloodshot. He tells me that it would be best to vacate the premises tonight.

  “We have no place to go,” I say and we both watch my mother get up and take a sheet down from the clothesline. As she folds it, she leaves soot marks all over it. She gives up, sits back down, waiting for someone to tell her what to do.

  “I will allow you forty-eight hours to vacate. That should give you time to pack and make arrangements,” he says, pity in his voice. “The ambulance will take your mother to the hospital. Between the smoke inhalation and her demeanor, she should be evaluated, but they’ll sort that out at the hospital. Do not enter the upstairs bedroom. The floor is unstable and it’s dangerous. I understand there are pets on the premises?”

  “Yes, my dog.”

  “If you can’t take the animal with you, please contact animal control. Surrender the animal until you find a place to stay.”