Salvation Page 5

  The screen door was open. Beth froze, staring at it, trying to remember if she’d turned the lock that morning. There’s nothing inside. At least nothing worth a payoff for a thief or a meth addict.

  Then she noticed the beaten-up, orange Oldsmobile parked almost on the curb. Her mother was home. For the first time before eleven P.M. all week.

  Beth crossed the street and stepped through the doorway.

  “Where have you been?” Ms. Courant looked up from the open fridge. Her drab brown hair was pulled back in a flat tail, and she’d exchanged her uniform for a shirt with a rip in the hem. Crow’s-feet marred her eyes, the lines on her face deep for a woman only in her mid-thirties. “And what are you carrying?”

  Beth’s heart sank as she realized her mother had also gone shopping. There were two milk jugs and four grocery bags already on the counter. Beth had known it was a risk to go herself. But she’d had little choice. With the dearth of food in the trailer, it had been either that or invite herself over to Nalani’s for dinner a second night in a row.

  Her mother wrestled with one of the fridge drawers, then slammed it shut. “Just what are we supposed to do with three gallons of milk?”

  Which meant Beth wasn’t getting reimbursed.

  “I…I didn’t know if you—”

  “If I noticed there wasn’t milk for cereal this morning? You might have picked some up yesterday. If you were concerned.”

  The whistle on the kettle began to scream.

  “I used my summer’s work money,” Beth said.

  “Good.” Her mother left the fridge and hustled across the linoleum to lift the kettle. “It’s about time you pitched in.” She snagged the plastic coffee funnel and began rummaging in a drawer.

  Beth moved up to the cupboards, dug into one of her sacks, pulled out a box of coffee filters, and slid it across the counter, then began putting away groceries from both sets of bags. She shelved three jars of the same marinara sauce, four sacks of the same pasta, and two bags of the same generic cereal. At least she hadn’t wasted what she’d spent on fruit. Her mother never splurged on fresh produce.

  The sound of dripping from the coffee filter derailed Beth’s focus. “Look, honey”—Ms. Courant used the term honey only as a diminutive—“don’t you think you could at least pick up around here? I spend all day cleaning at that high-priced hotel. I really don’t have time to clean for you, too.” She chucked the coffee funnel into the sink: paper, grounds, and all.

  Don’t argue, Beth told herself. She’ll just use it against you. At least her mother hadn’t been drinking—not since the funeral. But she was never home. And when she was, she was always tired. Or stressed because there wasn’t enough money.

  Beth shoved a couple sacks of frozen vegetables into the freezer, then flicked on the radio.

  Fuzz blared.

  “It’s broken,” her mother said.

  It had worked yesterday. Beth reached for the antennae.

  “Not now.” Her mother toted the coffee cup out of the kitchen zone and slumped down on the sagging couch. She kicked off her shoes without untying them. “I have homework,” she said, making no move to retrieve any supplies. “Don’t you have any?”

  “I have an application.” But I thought you wanted me to clean.

  “An application for what?”

  “Regional college.” Beth opened the cupboard door and retrieved the garbage can. The smell was noxious.

  Her mother’s hand tightened on the back of her own neck. “Well, that would be a waste of your grandfather’s savings.”

  Dammit. Beth took out the garbage.

  It wasn’t her fault: the college trust—the fund no one could get their hands on except to pay for Beth’s education.

  Her grandfather had had money. At one time.

  He’d owned a big cattle ranch outside of town and run most of it into the ground, but he’d set aside enough in a trust for Beth to use if she went to college. It was her mother’s money, really—had belonged to her mother for a whole first semester at Notre Dame. Until she had come home pregnant.

  And Beth’s grandfather had sealed off every cent.

  She isn’t angry at you, Grandma would have said. She’s angry at him.

  Beth lifted the lid on the outside trash container, dumped in the odorous garbage, and shut the top. Then forced herself to breathe.

  I didn’t ask for the money. And I’m not going to feel sorry about it. She hauled the emptied can back through the screen door. Might as well get this discussion out of the way now. She spoke: “Regional is my safety school. I’m going to Stanford.”

  “Oh.” Her mother’s laugh was bitter. “Of course.”

  Stanford was Beth’s grandfather’s alma mater. He’d wanted his daughter to go there, but she hadn’t wanted any part of it. Beth didn’t know why. She figured it had something to do with wishing you would not become your parents.

  Or parent, in her own case.

  But her mother’s battles weren’t Beth’s.

  Family connections meant something at expensive schools. And it didn’t matter if the connection was someone your mother hated. Beth shoved the trash container into its cupboard, then plucked the plastic filter from the sink, dumped out the paper and coffee grounds, and turned on the faucet, letting the sound drown out the silence behind her.

  Maybe it wasn’t fair: attending a school that would cost twenty times what it would cost to put both her mother and her through community college. But Beth hadn’t made the rules. And she hadn’t broken them. She hadn’t been the one to throw away her chance at an education in exchange for an ill-fated relationship with some guy who had never forfeited anything. And she wasn’t going to allow her mother’s bitterness to ruin her own dreams.

  After all, Beth’s mother would eventually be glad when her daughter left the trailer. At least then there’d be a drop in the grocery bill. And one less person to remind Ms. Courant of the mistake that had wrecked her entire existence.

  6

  MY LIFE HAD STOOD—A LOADED GUN

  Death, death, death.

  The poems were all about death. Salva flipped through the ten-ton Norton Anthology, the practiced walls of his mind faltering in their attempt to shut out the humid space, cramped quarters, and banging clatter of the Laundromat. A nearby infant girl in her mother’s arms started to scream. Salva frowned. He’d spent enough Tuesday nights here, completing the family chore, that he could usually block out everything.

  “Dickinson or Frost,” his study partner had suggested yesterday at their second session. “Keep your hands off Whitman. He’s mine.”

  As if I’d argue over the rights to some dead poet. Salva had earned a B on his Milton revision. Enough to convince him the walking disaster area’s advice was worth heeding as he faced the Mercenary’s current mode of torture—an analysis of any poem by any poet from any era. He hated assignments without clear parameters. Which was why he’d asked Beth for advice.

  And he’d intended to follow it.

  Before he began to read. And flip. And read.

  His stomach rumbled, and he pressed his left hand to the football-practice-induced ache at the back of his neck.

  This wasn’t working. This wasn’t going to work.

  Even the poems with the happy titles. “After Apple-Picking”—what right did that have to be about death?

  He didn’t like Frost.

  “Salva!” Talia’s voice rang out. His name was followed by the double banging of his younger sisters coming through the Laundromat door.

  He shot a glance at his watch: 6:30 P.M. They weren’t supposed to be here. Char was supposed to keep them until eight o’clock on Monday and Tuesday nights. Salva had sibling duty on Wednesdays and Thursdays. That was the deal los padres had made after getting their new shift schedules.

  Casandra reached him first. A compact, passionate bundle of nine-year-old drama. “Today was the most awful day!” she declared, plowing into his stomach and sweeping her arms around his
neck.

  He dropped the anthology on the bench and endeavored to follow her words as she outlined the nuances of fourth-grade social structure—something about a friendship bracelet she had spent hours slaving away over for the new girl in class.

  “And then”—Talia arrived to take over the account—“I found it in the trash!” She stood, shoulders back, arms crossed over her chest. A slightly taller, more intense version of her ten-month-older sister. He had no doubt, based on their tone, that throwing away a friendship bracelet was the ultimate betrayal in nine-year-old-girl speak.

  Salva let them talk for the duration of a laundry cycle. He did his best to empathize over the bracelet thing, asked about their Girl Scout meeting, and checked over Talia’s homework.

  Which reminded him he had a paper to write. And if he didn’t start, he was going to wind up screwed. He had only an hour in the computer lab this week for typing up the revision, and he couldn’t go in early for extra access since he had to drop the girls off at their bus. Unless he called Char and asked her to take them. Which—no kidding—she owed him after shorting his time tonight.

  But he couldn’t help thinking she had ditched the girls early on purpose so that he would have to call. And he wasn’t going there. When Char latched onto a tactic that helped her achieve what she wanted, she didn’t know when to quit.

  He interrupted the third reprise of the Tale of the Friendship Bracelet to ask his sisters if they’d had dinner.

  Both nodded. At least Char didn’t sketch on that.

  He pointed them toward an empty spot on the half-open bench across from him. “Okay, then go read,” he said, “or draw or make another set of bracelets. I have to study. If you’re good, I’ll make tacos for breakfast.” Their eyebrows rose, no doubt because Salva wasn’t so hot at cooking. He could fry up bacon, potatoes, chilies, and onions, though, and stick them in a tortilla.

  “Or we could study this together.” He hefted the Norton Anthology.

  Both girls eyed the massive book with identical horror, then retreated.

  Salva opened up the anthology.

  Ten seconds later tween pop music came from the Laundromat radio.

  His head flew up to see Casandra dancing, dangerously close to a vibrating dryer.

  “Turn it off!” he yelled.

  The mothers in the room began to whisper, and the peeling wall poster of the Virgen de Guadalupe seemed to frown at him.

  But the sound lessened. Marginally. He rubbed his neck again. He shouldn’t have yelled. Lucia would hear about it, then scold him when she came home from community college. And he’d take it from his older sister because he deserved it.

  But at least Casandra was sitting now.

  He opened the book back to Emily Dickinson. She didn’t mess around like Frost—didn’t play with titles and pretend her poems were about something happy when they weren’t. Just started in with her own versions of brutality.

  My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun…

  Because I could not stop for Death…

  I felt a funeral in my brain…

  I heard a fly buzz when I died…

  The words of the fourth poem drilled through the hard knot in Salva’s stomach. He could hear that fly of death. He had heard it. It was the reason he was here. The reason his sisters had to be traded back and forth between houses in the evening. The reason Papá had to work such long hours.

  That was a hell of a poem.

  No way could Salva write about it.

  He swallowed the F—digested the green felt-tip poison as soon as the graded paper landed on his desk. Poems are about emotion, the walking disaster area had told him. Just write about the meaning and what it makes you feel.

  He had ignored her, point-blank.

  A second paper hit his desk. For a moment he thought maybe the Mercenary was assigning him extra work because he had failed so miserably.

  But she passed out the same photocopy to the person in front of him and the person in front of that. They couldn’t all be as inept as he was.

  “I thought,” the Mercenary said, her heels clicking as she continued down the rows, “that since most of you work harder to impress one another than your teachers, you might all benefit from seeing what one of your peers can accomplish. You may read it on your own. I assume all of you are capable of that, at least.”

  Salva looked down at the photocopy. He couldn’t focus. He’d never in his life gotten an F. Maybe he should try retaking freshman lit. Markham couldn’t force him to stay here, could he?

  Of course he can. One call to Papá and I’m a scorched enchilada stuck to the pan.

  No friends. No football. Nothing except AP English.

  The Mercenary was talking again, blathering about dark romantics versus bright romantics. Salva blocked her out.

  And the printed words on the photocopy finally slid into focus. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking: A Song of Reincarnation.”

  The paper was about death.

  Not the death Dickinson wrote about but still real—the death of something so beautiful that the narrator could no longer stay the same person after witnessing the loss.

  And the writer got it.

  Not the poet—though Whitman probably did—but the author of the essay, who argued that the narrator had to change. Because that was how death worked. You couldn’t just go on being who you were before, after losing something that important.

  “At least I can’t.” The paper ended.

  Salva read through the conclusion twice.

  She’d lost someone. Seen them die right before her eyes. Not the final moment, maybe, but all the moments leading up to it. And all the days after when that someone wasn’t there.

  And she’d done exactly what she had told Salva to do—written about how it made her feel. He pulled his gaze away from the final line and found himself staring at Beth.

  Who had she lost?

  “An F?!” Beth gasped. How could you have gotten an F? The roll of masking tape dropped from her hands, and she checked her balance in her crouched position on the stage. Okay, she hadn’t had time to read his paper because of the tight deadline, but she’d given Salva all the advice that was necessary. “What did you write about?”

  “‘Jabberwocky.’”

  “What?!”

  “The poem ‘Jabberwocky,’ from Alice in Wonderland—well, Through the Looking-Glass actually. Listen, it’s not your fault.”

  It darn well wasn’t. She scooped up the tape and unrolled it in a sharp slash, forming the final X for drama club rehearsals, then began looking for her stuff. She hadn’t risked her mental health by agreeing to meet him here every Monday so that he could ignore her advice and write a three-page paper about a monster from a poem about nonsense.

  “It was a stupid idea,” he said.

  She was the one who had been stupid. Why had he bothered to ask for her help? Was this some dare like in the movies where the guy hung out with the loser girl only because his buddies said they’d pay up? Or because someone told him she was easy?

  Right, Beth. Like he’d ever think of you in that context.

  Notebook, pencils, folders—she gathered them from the corners of the stage, stuffing the items into her backpack without regard for where they went.

  “Look,” he said, “I got the grade I deserve, I know.”

  Her copy of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.

  “I really do need your help.”

  Sure he did. Maybe this situation was good. Maybe this would finally get through to her idiotic heart.

  Beth shoved the book into her backpack, zipped the pocket as far as it would close, and headed for the multipurpose room exit.

  “Hey, wait!” At last he seemed to catch on to the fact that she was leaving. “Please.”

  “If you think—” She stopped at the door, reining herself in. There was no point in yelling. Really. He had no inkling of what she had risked by being here. She exhaled, then continued, “I’m sure you can
find someone else to help you with your homework.”

  Whom had she been kidding? Of course he could.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

  Beth pushed the handle on the door.

  And something hit the floor behind her.

  That dumb calculator! He beat her to it. “Listen,” he said, palming the device. “I just wanted to say, well…”

  She didn’t want to listen—didn’t need to listen. Let him flunk the class!

  “That took guts,” he said.

  Walking away from you?

  “The paper,” he clarified. “The one the Mercenary shared with us today. You wrote it, didn’t you?”

  All the certainty in Beth’s flight deflated. How had he known the paper was hers? The teacher had folded over the name in the top corner before running copies.

  But, of course, Beth had told him she was writing about Whitman.

  “Who was it?” he asked softly. “The person who died?”

  And Beth breathed. “My grandma.”

  He tilted his head. “The one who lived with you?”

  That was a surprise. Beth hadn’t expected him to remember her grandmother. “Yes.”

  “When did she die?” he asked.

  Beth would have backed away, except the door was right behind her, and…walking out on someone who was asking about Grandma wasn’t okay. “This summer.”

  He reached out slowly. Then instead of handing over Beth’s calculator, he lifted the strap of her backpack off her shoulder and pulled the pack from her arm. “She used to come to the school sometimes, right?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Beth blinked. Grandma had always been the one to find time to attend plays and conferences.

  He sat down, crossed his legs on the floor, and slid the calculator into the back pocket, then tried, futilely, to close the zipper. All the zippers were bad. “What was she like?”

  “She was awesome.”

  He unzipped the main section of the backpack and started ripping out the cheap vinyl seam binding that always caught on the metal teeth before the zipper would close. “What was awesome about her?”