Chapter Sixteen

It wasn’t hard to say goodbye to Andy when I left for Christmas break. He wrapped up a poetry book for me for Christmas with no inscription. It was one I’d seen on his shelves. I gave him some wind chimes I bought from a street vendor, but the ceramic star that hung in the middle to strike the chimes had broken when he unwrapped it. We both apologized, but I had a feeling we wouldn’t be sharing the same room when I got back from Mississippi.

At the New Orleans airport, Daddy was waiting at the gate. He grabbed me so hard my ribs hurt. “Marilyn’s at home, cooking up a big batch of gumbo for y’all,” he boomed, so loud that people turned to look. I cringed. And then I saw Aunt Sylvia. People were already staring at her wild hair and sari, and one woman even pointed, nudging her husband who wore a string tie and alligator loafers. We were back in the South, all right.

Aunt Sylvia was either oblivious to the stares or awfully good at ignoring them. She wrapped her arms around me, and over her shoulder I saw Charlene walking toward us from the restroom. Her face wasn’t bloated like it had been in the pictures Daddy had sent. She looked like she always had, except there was a little blue pouch slung around her chest that she cradled with both arms. When I got close, I put an arm around her and leaned in to see. The baby opened his eyes, almost as if he’d heard me breathing.

Charlene lifted her son and held out his little red hand to me. “Say hello to your Aunt Jubilee,” she told him. Lonnie had a pink rash on one cheek and his ears stuck out beneath the yellow cap he wore, but he was beautiful. Charlene slipped him into my arms, a warm sweet weight. All I could do was stare at him, with a weight in my heart, too, for Charlene. She was happy, but it wasn’t the path she’d chosen.

In the station wagon, Charlene and I sat in the back seat, like children again, while Daddy and Aunt Sylvia sat in front.

“So Levi Litvak really did die in that car crash,” I whispered to her. We looked at each other like we’d found our way out of a desert.

The baby started to wail, and Charlene jiggled him, then stuck a pacifier in his mouth. He pulled it out and frowned against the sudden sunlight as Daddy turned a corner. Lonnie waved his hands angrily, battling the sun as if it were an attack of bees. Charlene pulled his hat down further over his eyes and he sucked hard on the pacifier, his thumbs tucked into his fists.

“Is he hungry?” asked Aunt Sylvia.

“Well, I’m starving,” I said, while Charlene fished inside a diaper bag and came up with a bottle. “I don’t think I can wait for Marilyn’s gumbo.”

“You look like you haven’t eaten since you left,” said Charlene. “You just about don’t have a rear end.”

“We’ll be home before you know it,” said Daddy, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “Robbie’s been asking about you.”

“Rob?” He must hate me for the way I’d ignored him. “How is he, anyway?” I tried to sound as if I didn’t care. Outside the car window, the scrubby pines still bent under the Gulf breezes, as if nothing had changed since the days when I would take the truck out on the highway and see how far I could get away before dinner called me back. It seemed I’d been away for years, that Rob might be different in ways I couldn’t imagine.

“He smokes,” said Charlene. “Camels.”

“Really?”

“He brought a Christmas present to the house. For you,” she said. “Looks like a record. The White Album, maybe.”

“You’re messing with my presents?” It was just like Charlene.

“No more than you ever messed with mine. I was making sure it was a real present, not just something he made. You better buy him something.”

“Stop it. You sound like a mother,” I told her, and hoped she knew I was teasing.

“Get used to it,” she said.

“Did Rob like State?” It felt strange to even say his name.

“How should I know?” She shrugged, the same old Charlene. “But he brought Lonnie a present, too. Look.” She dangled a pair of embroidered white mittens, so tiny they seemed like doll clothes. “Good taste, huh?”

“He looks like a hippie,” Daddy said. “I guess that’s what State will do to you. But he’s a good boy.”

My heart surged; I couldn’t wait to see him. How had four months changed him? I thought about Andy, but my guilt was over Rob.

“Art’s coming for Christmas,” said Charlene. “He’s picked out a ring. He asked me to have my finger sized.” She held out her left hand and wagged her ring finger. “Size six.”

Aunt Sylvia smiled and reached over the seat to pat Charlene’s leg.

“What about Lonnie?” I whispered. “Does Art like him?”

Charlene shot me one of her indignant looks. “How could anyone not like Lonnie? Of course he does. You should see the way he holds him.” Her eyes warmed. “He loves him.”

The car rolled along the coastal highway, and Aunt Sylvia reached to turn down the radio. As the sound faded, Lonnie cupped his little palms together as if trying to scoop the music from the air as it faded. He cried at his empty hands, waving his fists. “Turn it back up, Aunt Sylvia,” I said, and as the music rose, a gummy smile flashed on his face.

Outside the car windows, the brown Gulf waters were calm and flat. A few tourists in swimsuits walked on the beach, and one man splashed in the water, skinny legs kicking up white spray. “Yankees,” said Daddy, shaking his head. “Don’t they know it’s cold?”

This is a foreign place to those people, I thought, maybe even exotic. I remembered Andy, nude, diving into the crisp clear water in the Big Sur Mountains, and wondered for the first time what swimming in the Gulf would feel like in winter. Maybe I’d try it with Rob.

Marilyn was stirring the pot of gumbo when we came in, Daddy lugging my suitcase. She put down the spoon and hugged me, releasing the familiar, slightly sour odor of her sweat. It was the smell of the tornado, of safety. Over Marilyn’s shoulder, I could see outside the kitchen window, where Charlene’s sculpture of matchbox cars had rusted into a geometry of orange shapes. “A memorial to those God took,” Charlene had said then, and now it wasn’t funny. It seemed right, like something people in Berkeley might have done.

“It’s good to have you back,” said Marilyn. She leaned against the counter with one slippered foot over the other, and I realized that she belonged there, in our house, along with the smell of the food she cooked. It would be empty without her.

“I missed you,” I told her, surprised at how much I meant it.

She looked pleased and embarrassed, and turned back to stir the bubbling pot. “You don’t know how much we missed both of you girls.”

“Smells great,” I said. It was the old smell of bacon grease and coffee with chicory that the gumbo couldn’t conceal.

“Mrs. Guest brought over some of her combread. ‘Course, it’s not the best thing with gumbo, but her cornbread’s good on any table.”

I remembered how, after Mama’s funeral, a plate of that cornbread had sat on the dining room table, wrapped in linen napkins. No one ate it, and Aunt Martha had frozen it. Maybe it was still there, I thought, hearing the freezer chug.

Marilyn went on. “You must be hungry, coming all that way from California.”

“She’s starving,” said Charlene. “Just look at her jeans, bagging. She doesn’t have a rear end.”

“Get off it, will you?” I gave her a poke in the ribs.

“Girls!” said Daddy, but his eyes shone, like things were finally normal again.

Charlene put plates on the table, and I was starting to help when the doorbell rang.

“Jubilee!” Daddy called. “Somebody here for you.”

I knew it was Rob before he came in. His hair hung below his chin, not enough to be counted for much in Berkeley, but here it made him either a hero or an outlaw. Or both. A mustache shaded his upper lip, but behind his glasses was the same Rob, his eyes gentle on me. He wore a green shirt I’d never seen before, and the first thing I thought was that some girl had given it to him. I wanted to hug him, but he had changed so much. Even his shoes were different, desert boots that I’d never seen him wear.

“You look different. You’ve lost weight,” he said. “But you’re as beautiful as ever.” He rubbed my cheek with the back of his fingers, and when I put my arms around him, my head came to the same familiar point on his shoulder. If only that had been Rob hitchhiking in Marin County instead of Andy, I thought.

Rob stayed for gumbo while I answered Marilyn’s questions about Berkeley and my courses, how I’d pull all-nighters to study for finals.

“Until you’ve been up with a baby for weeks on end, you haven’t pulled an all-nighter,” said Charlene. “You don’t even know what an all-nighter is. You try an all-weeker.”

“Is that what separates the girls from the women?” Rob asked, and I slugged his arm gently. The muscles were harder, and his jaw seemed more set now, stronger. I hoped he would want to kiss me, when we could get away.

None of us wanted to talk about Joe Holliday, not in front of Daddy. His face shone with delight that both of his girls were back, but in the pauses between conversation, there was a silent knowing among us all. I wanted to tell Rob that I was finally free of Levi Litvak, but all I could do was smile awkwardly at him.

When we finished eating, Rob pushed back his chair and brought his plate to the sink. “Want to go for a ride?” he asked. At last, I’d have him to myself, and I could tell him how sorry I was. And I’d tell him about Joe Holliday, but I wanted to time it right, let Rob know that I was okay now, that things were as normal as they would ever be.

The troll doll was gone from the hood of his car, leaving a little raised spot of glue where it had been. “Where did the troll go?” I asked.

“Kid stuff,” he said. “A lot of things changed after you left.” He backed out the driveway and headed along the coast in silence while I waited for the right moment to tell him about Joe Holliday. Some new tourists were on the beach, now, men in wild patterned shirts and bermuda shorts, women in dresses that swirled around their knees as they waded into the cool water. They were laughing and they didn’t seem like Yankee idiots anymore, just tourists.

“You wanna go in?” I asked.

He glanced at me. “We’re from here, Jubilee. We already know it’s too cold.” But he pulled into the next parking bay and opened the car door. The wind smelled of salt water and conch shells, and I rolled up my jeans. The sand was cold and hard under my bare feet, and now it seemed silly to go wading. We walked instead, out onto a gray pier with missing planks where someone’s crabbing lines were decaying, hanging halfway to the water with frayed ends. Some night, I’d burn the scarf on the beach with Charlene, setting those poppies free, sparks that would disappear over the Gulf waters. I hoped it would feel good, but I wasn’t sure. Mama would’ve given it away, I knew, maybe to Pearl.

“You’re awfully quiet,” said Rob.

“I missed you,” I said, knowing how true it was. “There’s this guy I should tell you about …”

He squeezed my hand to stop me. “We don’t have to tell each other that stuff. Not now, anyway,” he said. “It’s my fault. I never should have stopped calling you.”

“I didn’t want you to stop,” I said, and my warm breath made a little balloon when I exhaled. We sat on a crooked bench at the end of the pier. “Levi Litvak didn’t do it.”

“Charlene told me.”

“She told you?” The balloon of breath expanded on the Gulf breeze, punctured. “You mean, you knew all during dinner?” Leave it to Charlene, I thought.

“I was waiting for you. I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it.”

At last, the words tumbled out. “It feels so good, no more secrets. I always wondered how Levi Litvak could’ve killed somebody he loved. You think he ran into that tree on purpose, trying to kill himself? He must’ve known Joe Holliday was after him next.”

“I think he was just running. He’d have gone to the cops,” said Rob. “Soon as he escaped that lunatic.”

I imagined Levi Litvak’s hair, blowing wildly on the swampy back roads near New Orleans before he crashed. Was he going to the New Orleans’ police? Was Joe Holliday close behind? It was hard to imagine his battered truck keeping up with that Thunderbird. “Levi Litvak must have been terrified,” I said. “He knew Mama was dying. Maybe he wasn’t thinking anything. It was just the Thunderbird and him and the picture of Mama in his mind.” The bat out of hell is what you’ll come up with every time. Loretta Holliday would know, I thought. In my own mind, he was speeding the way I had in the truck, with the accelerator to the floor and the road ahead. Until a curve caught him.

The wind off the water picked up, bringing a salty taste like tears in my mouth with it. I leaned into Rob, and he pulled me into the warmth of his jacket before he kissed me. He smelled different now, of cigarettes and coffee, but his lips were the same.

The White Album was playing on the stereo when Rob dropped me off, and Charlene and Aunt Sylvia sat at the kitchen table, listening. Marilyn had a beer in one hand, her feet up on a chair, dishes still piled in the sink. “Taking a break?” I asked.

“Just waiting for you,” said Charlene.

Aunt Sylvia said, “It’s none of my business, but Rob seems nice.”

“He was always nice, unlike some boys.” Marilyn glanced at Charlene with a sad look. “But he looks like a Communist hippie now. Who knows what those professors are teaching up at State,” she said. “Evelyn McCarty says demonstrators from up North are pouring into New Orleans for some kind of ruckus this week-end. Oughta send ‘em all to Russia.” She sounded as if she were tired of saying it, lines rehearsed too often. She sipped her Falstaff and got up.

Aunt Sylvia winked at me.

I smiled and looked out the window again at the sculpture Charlene had created long ago. Now, it glistened in the porch light, an arc of yellow. Rust coated the colors, the little cars indistinguishable now in a beautiful jumble, a coherent mosaic of patterns. Why had it ever seemed so weird?

Marilyn handed Charlene a dish to wash. “You too, Jubilee,” she said, reaching for a cup. “Come help wash these dishes. What on earth do you see out that window? You didn’t forget how to wash a dish out there in Berkeley, did you, honey?”

As I picked up the plate of cornbread, I remembered Mrs. Guest’s words at my mother’s funeral, the way she had put her hands on my head and Charlene’s, as if making a benediction. “Oh law, what do we know down here, anyway? What do we know on this earth?”

I thought of San Francisco and how time had seemed to dissolve in the Golden Gate Park tunnel, where we were all together in a slice of time, a slant of light. This was something I knew, something beyond words. It was the stillness beneath the motion, the vast vacuum behind the breath.

Levi Litvak appeared in my dreams one last time. He wore Joe Holliday’s camouflage jacket, and then he turned into nothing more than a solitary, toothless skull, unseeing eyeballs set into the sockets, the pupils light as bleached marble, like the blind choral group that had sung at our school in what seemed like eons ago.

… Everybody’s talking about a new way of walking, do you want to lo-ose your mind …

It was the dark side of the moon, a place where justice came, but in strange ways, where there might be something like holiness in the world, a place, I realized, that, wherever I was, I could call home.