“Sorry about the disturbance,” she says, the door hanging between us.
“Oh, that’s okay. I’m not here for that.” My voice cracks from the long, quiet drive. “I’m here to see Cici.” The woman nods and turns her face into the room, calling out for Cici.
I hear movement through the living room, and Cici says, “I still say you need to press charges, or the next time, he may shoot you for real.” She steps past the wall and meets my eyes. We stand for a split second before she breaks into a slow smile and comes forward. “Damn!” She pulls me into the house and hugs me, and all the tension washes down my arms. “What are you doing here?”
“I got your letter,” I explain, and hope it is enough. Smiling against her smile, feeling the glow that being in her presence always produces.
“My letter?” Her brows knit and then relax. “Of course, my letter. Well, come in. Come in, meet everybody. Damn, you look good.” She rubs her hand over my flattening stomach, and I fold away from her fingers. “You good?” she asks, her voice dropping, low and personal.
I am caught in the tractor beam of her, the way I always was back at Life House, held captive by the luminous nature of her attention. I nod, not able to speak, knowing that this question is about the baby. We step across the living room, and she points to and names the women I saw outside earlier. Darla, who is Cici’ s cousin, Connie, who answered the door, and Sybil, who is sitting next to Darla, looking tear stained and frazzled. Sybil barely glances at me, but Connie puts up a hand to shake mine and Darla nods, pulling the cloth away from her face, repositioning the frozen peas within it and replacing it over the swelling, red mound on her cheekbone, causing her eye to narrow and squint.
“We knew each other back in Missouri,” she explains, and I see Darla’s expression shift from unsure to knowing, and I understand that at least one of these women knows what Cici left behind.
I feel awkward as I sit down next to Cici, and realize that maybe I should have waited until the drama of today had melted down and been cooled before coming inside, but the conversation picks back up, as if there is no stranger in their midst, and I let their voices wash over me, feeling not strange, feeling at peace again among women after my lengthy drive. Sometime later, when the conversation has worn thin, I hear my name from far away. “Come on, Alison. Wake up.” I jerk up from my slump, realizing the other girls are gone and it is Cici leaning down over me. “It’s okay, you’re okay.”
She goes out to my car with me, and we bring in my backpack and the pillowcase stuffed with all of my clothes.
“When I wrote you the letter, I didn’t know Sybil was going to move in, but she and Eddie broke up and she needed a place.” I hear the undercurrent in her tone.
“I don’t have to stay. I just wanted to see you, you know?”There is need in my voice and clear my throat. “I needed a change of scenery,” I clarify, sounding more solid and independent. We pass through the living room, her a step ahead.
The man was Eddie, and “He’s Sybil’s piece of shit,” Cici says in explanation. We are upstairs in her room, and it feels strange and familiar at the same time. No longer with bellies before us, we are both leaner than the last time we saw each other. The past two days of driving and living out of pretzel bags has gone a long way toward removing the extra chub from my pregnancy.
I nod, about the piece of shit, and walk around the small ten-by-ten space that is Cici’s room.
“So, I didn’t know if you were coming, you know,” she says, and I feel it, that thing that has felt odd. “Well, Darla let Sybil move in, so she took your room.”
“I wrote you, told you I was coming.” Stupid. Who drives twenty-four-hundred miles on the whisper of a room in a house?
“I know, but Sybil was in a bad place. I mean, you saw Eddie. He is seriously unstable, man. But, hey, we’ll work it out. It’s not like we haven’t shared a room before, right?” Cici says, her voice sounding hopeful, nonchalant. “It will be like old times.”
“I think I shouldn’t have come.” I turn and look at her, letting all the weariness hang across my face.
“Don’t say that.” She squeezes my hand. “I’ve missed you,” she says, letting her lip pucker out. “You’ll love California. It will be okay.” Her eyes hold mine, her forehead a breath away. I see how sorry she is that I’m disappointed, that she let me down. “Why don’t you take a shower and get some sleep, and we’ll talk about it in the morning?”
I nod because I am tired. It will be okay. We’ll work it out in the morning. It’s not like I don’t have people now; I can go back to Illinois. I can go back to my grandparents or even the McGills’ place. She shows me to the bathroom, and I dig in the pillowcase for shorts and a t-shirt to sleep in, and then I let the water wash away the road.
She is waiting for me when I come out, my hair wrapped in the towel she gave me, my skin scrubbed clean. “You can sleep here tonight, and tomorrow we’ll go get you a bed. It’ll be great.” She is trying to make it okay, and I let it be.
The next morning rises through the window, and the scent of frying bacon tickles my nose. I am confused for a second, when my eyes first come open, trying to understand where I am, how I got here. I have sweated in the night, and my skin feels tacky. I take a quick shower and dress before I go down the stairs and into the living room. I notice everything I didn’t notice last night. There are four bedrooms opening out from the corridor at the top of the steps and a row of cabinets at the railing, painted white. The doors to the rooms are all open, and I see unmade beds and clothes but no sign of people. I hear voices from the kitchen and steel myself to meet everybody again.
Cici is at the stove, and the girl who had the cloth over her cheek yesterday, Cici’s cousin Darla, is setting plates on the table. “Hey,” she says and smiles, her cheek a mottled purple, a deep bruise swelling along the bone of her eye socket.
“Hey.” I nod. “That smells great.”
She nods, wiping her hands down the front of her jeans. She puts a hand out to me, and I give her mine, which feels crazy. “We didn’t really meet last night, ya know? It was a little nuts when you got here. Sorry about your room, but Sybil’s only gonna be here a couple of weeks, so just hang till then and the room is yours.”
“Yeah, I was just in a bind, but my ex will be out of my condo at the first of the month,” Sybil says, putting a hand on my shoulder as she passes into the kitchen. Eggs sizzle in the pan that Cici has just taken the bacon out of, and Sybil takes one of the greasy slices, passing it from one hand to the other before taking it in her mouth. “Asshole,” she says with a smile.
“So we can get a cot or something until then, or you can take the couch. You know?”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to make you all crowded.” Relief washes down over my shoulders when I catch Cici’s smile.
“The more the merrier,” Darla smiles, easygoing, and I see the family line that passes through the two of them. They both have the magnetism, that ability to make everybody else feel important or special. “Just no men. You can’t bring your men here.” She points to her battered face. “It’s best if they don’t know where you are.”
“Yeah, that was some excitement last night,” I say, cautious, but needing to know if that sort of thing happened a lot.
“Yeah. You know,” Darla says, “Eddie’s okay. He just doesn’t hold his liquor, ya know?”
“He your boyfriend?”
She laughs. “No. He’s my brother.”
“He’s my husband . . . well, my ex,” Sybil says, opening the fridge and drawing out a carton of orange juice.
“Oh. That’s complex,” I say, trying to work out the dynamics—why Darla is the one with the bruised face and not Sybil. Did she step in the way of the two? Is she the kind of woman who will step in front of a friend to protect that friend from danger? Did she just not think he would hit a sister like he would hit a wife?
“He got served yesterday. He was mad,” Sybil says, shrugging her shoulders, like it’s no big deal, like him being mad justifies his violence.
“He had a gun,” I say, because shots were fired and that seems like a big deal to me.
“Yeah, but he’s a bad shot.” Sybil shrugs and glances at Darla, and I see her taking in the bruise. There is something akin to guilt in her eyes.
Cici brings a steaming bowl of scrambled eggs, cooked with onions and peppers, and smiles her most infectious smile. “Let’s eat.” We sit around the table, and the conversation rolls around me, touching me with questions every now and again, but mostly just moving on, letting me fold into the pattern of the morning as best I can. They talk about what they have going on for the day; Sybil and Darla will be getting Eddie out of jail.
Connie has come in, her face red and wet from a morning run. Her hair is tied up in a ponytail, and her t-shirt has dark waves where she has perspired. She is still blowing hard, but looks happy and comfortable with her out-of-breath state. She has heard the last part of the conversation and says, “I work at ten.”
“How far did you go today?” Darla asks.
“Thirteen,” she says, taking a plate and adding eggs and bacon to it. She fills a glass from the tap before coming to stand over the table, holding her plate at chest height.
“Connie’s training for a marathon,” Cici says to me.
“Wow. How far is that?” I ask, because running isn’t something I’ve ever thought of doing. When I used to ride my bike from the trailer to town, that was about seven miles, and I felt like that was an accomplishment.
“A marathon? It’s 26.2, so I’m about halfway there,” Connie says between bites, and I realize that the underside of her hair is dyed purple.
“Wow. I’m impressed. How long does it take to run almost thirteen miles?”
“I’m not fast, but under two hours, which is okay. I’m not really worried about speed right now, just trying to build my distance.”
“That’s cool,” I say, nodding.
“You run?” Connie asks.
“No. I used to ride a bike about thirteen miles a day though..” It feels like an embellishment, although it is true enough, but nobody seems to think anything of it.
“You should run with me some time,” Connie says, swiping a piece of toast over her plate.
It sounds like an invitation, and I nod and say that I will.
“Connie is a nurse,” Cici says. “She cares about all the health stuff.”
“Really? That’s what I want to be,” I say. “I just got my CNA,” feeling proud because I did something. I’ve set a goal and taken the first step to getting there. “Where do you work?”
“Over at Palomar,” The word means nothing to me, and she must see it, because she goes on, “It’s the hospital here in Poway.”
“Do you think they’d be hiring? I mean, if I’m staying, I need a job.”
“Couldn’t hurt to apply.” As she passes by the table, she grabs another piece of bacon. “If you want to follow me over, you can.”
“That would be great,” I say, feeling a small click as another piece of my puzzle falls into place.
“All right. I’m out,” Connie says. She goes through the living room and takes the steps two at a time.