Back to Lazarus

Chapter 8

8

Ten miles after exiting I-10, I had yet to see a sign announcing my imminent arrival in Lazarus. In fact, I had yet to see much of anything. My jeans were sticking to my legs, and I needed to stretch. I’d had a long day of driving already, the boring kind that made me wish I was a dental hygienist or a cable guy (cable gal?).

The pine corridors of the interstate, where a few trees effectively screen the clear-cut fields on either side, had given way to weeds on State Road 31. There were weeds in abandoned industrial parks, weeds in fields with lone rotting oak trunks and doorless barns of dishwater gray. Barbed-wire fence fragments curled at the edges of empty pastures, their years of rust the most vivid color in the slowly passing landscape.

I never did see a sign for Lazarus, but eventually one-story buildings of corrugated metal and concrete block appeared, along with motor homes and simple brick apartment complexes. I turned left when I came to a convenience store with two gas pumps, as Ida Pickett had directed. The word “diesel” was painted in white stenciled garage sale letters on one pump. The other pump appeared unlabeled and, looking at my half-empty fuel gauge, I was glad I was driving a rental car today. I try to be careful what I feed my own dear Cecil.

Maple Street had a few trees but none that looked like maples to my untrained eye. The houses were modest, almost uniformly painted white, with neat front porches and browning but appropriately cropped lawns. I thought I’d made a wrong turn when the street dead-ended at a twelve-foot high chain-link fence. Then I realized the street hadn’t dead-ended, but split so its lanes wrapped around the obstruction. A large sign on the chained gate had a “Warning” in red capital letters, followed by an alphabet soup of government agencies and numbers. It wasn’t until I had nearly passed the restricted area that I noticed the empty monkey bars and riderless swings swaying in the breeze.

Having just missed 915 Maple, I pulled the rental to the curb to walk back. I’d occasionally had glimpses of figures behind curtains and screen doors, but at 917 Maple I had my first confirmed human sighting since leaving the interstate. The man’s hair was fully gray, but the freckle-like moles spattered across his dark cheeks gave him a boyish appearance. He poured water from a gallon jug into a watering can, then walked to some soil-filled buckets and began watering the plants inside. It looked like mustard greens from where I was standing, but I couldn’t be sure. He noticed me as he began watering, gave a small nod of acknowledgment, but continued to watch as I walked up the front steps of 915.

The screen door rattled under my knuckles when I knocked. I could see the shadow of a form approaching, backlit from what appeared to be the kitchen. Isaac’s sister unlatched the door and pulled it open, standing back to let me enter. She wiped her hands on a dish towel as she spoke.

“Come on in. I figured you’d be thirsty after the drive so I made some iced tea.” My face must have reacted because she laughed as she put a hand on my shoulder and turned me toward the kitchen. “Don’t worry—I used bottled water. For the ice and the tea.”

Before stepping into Ida’s kitchen, I got a fleeting impression from the rest of the house of tidy surfaces, walls of photographs, and the faint scent of some kind of flower. She led me to a Formica-topped table, the kind with an inch of stainless metal fringing the edge. As a child, the narrow parallel grooves had made me think of lanes in an ant racetrack. Ida indicated a chair for me while she went to the refrigerator. She returned with a pitcher of tea and a Tupperware container of ice cubes.

“See, I wasn’t kidding about the ice cubes.” Ida gestured at an array of full water containers in the corner. “It’s a shame to have to live this way, but…” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head.

“I hope you don’t mind sweet tea.”

I sipped appreciatively and sighed. “Mother’s milk.”

That drew a chuckle from her. “I knew I heard a hint of the South in your voice.”

Her own voice was like slow velvet. She leaned back in her chair, draping one arm over its wooden back. “My tea used to be the talk of the neighborhood. I always put a little bit of fresh mint in it—blasphemy around here, but it tasted so good everyone pretended not to notice.” Ida set her tea glass down and rested her elbows on the table. “I don’t grow fresh mint anymore. I guess you saw Mr. Phillips next door, with his greens and tomatoes in buckets. The EPA man told him it wasn’t safe to eat anything that grew in the ground around here, but Mr. Phillips can’t give up his fresh vegetables. So he buys bags of soil along with his bottled water. He says it’s still better than the fake stuff they sell in the grocery store.”

“Ms. Pickett, I—”

She interrupted. “Please, call me Ida. I never was a ‘Ms.,’ and my husband Ernest died a couple of years ago. I haven’t felt much like a ‘Mrs.’ since then.”

“All right then. Call me Sydney.” She nodded and I went on. “Ida, I noticed the playground when I came in.”

Her eyes grew shiny with tears. “Kids can’t even play outside. If we had any kids left around here, that is. Most of the families moved away when the truth started coming to light.”

“How long has it been like this?”

Ida let out another throaty chuckle. “Well, now, that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? It depends on whose lawyers you’re talking to. The plant’s been here for about sixty years, but it’s only in the last twenty or so that we started to notice the people dying of cancer, women with miscarriages and children with birth defects. And there were other things too. More subtle things that nobody’ll ever prove.”

“Like what?”

Ida considered for a moment. “Well, I don’t know how else to put it. People acting crazy. Getting violent for no reason, or not much of one. I’m sure someone could come up with some big, societal explanation for it, and that’s probably part of it, but I can’t help but think… I don’t know. I don’t know how anyone could turn out right. I always wondered about Isaac and Vanda, growing up in the middle of this.” Ida leaned forward to pour me a refill from the sweating pitcher. “So Sydney, why exactly are you here?”

I considered her question, as I had during the hours of driving that morning. It’s one I’d known she would ask, but I could never quite come up with an answer. “Well, I’m not really sure. To tell you the truth, I think you might know better than I do.”

I waited. Ida began twisting the edges of the napkin she’d used as a coaster, shifted in her seat. She looked down at her handiwork and spoke in such a soft voice I had to ask her to repeat herself.

“What about the little girl?” Her head had sunk in her shoulders until her neck was barely visible, and she braced herself as if for a blow.

“Noel?” I asked.

“So it is Noel. I thought so, but then I felt sure they’d change her name when they got her.”

“She’s fine. Of course, she’s not so little any more. She’s about my age.”

Ida had the napkin in her hand now, gripping it, and nodded her head over and over. A sob exploded from her, an anguished sound from deep in her belly that would leave her throat sore when she was done. She left the room. I didn’t follow.

When she returned five minutes later, she had washed her face and had a damp washcloth in her hand that she occasionally applied to the back of her neck. Her eyes were swollen, and from the shadows beneath them I suspected she’d had about as much sleep as I had the night before. Two women who’d never met, lying awake staring at the walls, contemplating the ghosts of the past. I got lost in the image, and Ida’s voice startled me.

“You said she’s about your age, huh? So you’re what, nineteen?”

I blushed and started to protest, but Ida held up her hand and went on. “No, I’ve done the math. You’ve got one of those faces that doesn’t show its age for a while. Mine was like that. Everybody thinks you’re still in school until you hit forty-five. Then all of a sudden, time catches up with you.”

“So how many years until you start looking your age? Four or five?”

“Oh, honey, I like you. I do have a mirror, but I still like you. It’s true though. I didn’t have a wrinkle or a gray hair for the longest time, but the last few years just about did me in. Ernest being sick, and Isaac… So Noel wants to know about her daddy?”

“Something like that. When was the last time you heard from Isaac?”

“Oh, Lord. It must have been about six months before he died. I don’t remember how or why, but somehow he got in touch with me. Ernest was in the last stages of cancer then—he died just a few months before Isaac did—so I didn’t have much to spare for Isaac. But he was a comfort to me, in his letters.”

Ida’s eyes began tearing up. Her grief was so raw, I tried to take her farther from its source. “How did you know about Noel?”

She smiled. “I met her once. She couldn’t have been much more than five years old. Isaac brought her with him when he came home for our mother’s funeral, and they spent a couple of days.”

“They?”

“Just Isaac and Noel. He didn’t bring Vanda. She didn’t exactly get along with the rest of the family. Truth is, I was surprised to see Isaac show up at all, much less with Noel.”

“Was that the first time you’d seen her?”

“First and last time in person. Isaac had sent me a picture after she was born. No letter, no return address, just a picture. He couldn’t.” Ida must have felt my skepticism because she rushed to defend her dead little brother. “He’d made a deal with Vanda. Vanda felt that we disapproved of her. In hindsight, we probably did treat her that way, but I couldn’t see that at the time. And Mrs. Harrison had made her feelings about Isaac very clear.”

I tried not to laugh and ended up snorting. Ida grinned and said, “So you’ve met her?”

I nodded.

“Isaac and Vanda had gotten married young, and I guess they thought all their marital problems came from their families. Doesn’t seem that crazy if you’ve met Mary Harrison. In order to save their marriage, they left Lazarus and broke off contact with all of us. They didn’t even tell anyone where they’d gone. It was all very sudden. I suspect they’d just found out that Vanda was pregnant with Noel and wanted a fresh start.”

“How’d you track down Isaac to let him know about your mother?”

“Oh, it wasn’t that hard. When he sent the picture of Noel, Isaac didn’t use a return address, but there was a postmark. It was a small town. I called the post office there, and someone got a message to him.”

“Was that in Hainey?”

“No. No, I can’t remember the name, but that wasn’t it. I think they moved again right after Mom’s funeral. Noel mentioned that while they were here, something about going to a different school soon.”

“What was she like?”

“Noel? She was a quiet child. Not shy, but just not chattery like most children are. Very intelligent. When she spoke it was like talking with an adult. I don’t remember her playing with the other children either. She just seemed more comfortable with adults. I think she read a lot. When she and Isaac drove up, I remember she was reading a book in the car.” She paused, leaning back in her chair and closing her eyes to call up the memories. After a few moments, she opened them again. “She made me sad. She wasn’t a very physically affectionate child. I wanted more than anything to give her a hug, but I was afraid to.”

“You said Isaac and Vanda thought their marital problems were because of the family. But you thought it was something else.”

Ida pursed her lips and tilted her head, trying to see me from a different angle. “Do you work for Noel or not?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Can you come back tomorrow? I need to think about some things.”

“Okay,” I said. After all, how could I say no to another day in lovely Lazarus?