“We were a team from the start. I moved in, and Rivka fixed me up—got me a starter job at the opera. Now I’m head assistant to the costume designer! So I guess I’m redeemed for spending food money on a movie.”
This new Sweetie was nothing like the girls back at the river, or even the farmers’ kids who lived in houses. She was already special back then, pretty, well liked, clean. But now, her voice and mannerisms, her expectations, they were all different. She was like a girl in the movies, Janet Gaynor, the funny heroine. There wasn’t an ounce of Okie left in her. She could go anywhere, Jane thought.
Sweetie floated two more blankets over her, settling them in a warm cloud.
Jane liked her gestures, how much gentler she was than Rivka, who’d helped her on this night but with such a dark attitude that it scarcely felt like kindness. Sweetie made you feel you were being helped.
She straightened Jane’s covers at the edges of the bed and rose to go, clicking off the lamp. “We’ll find a place for you in the morning.”
Her mind eased from the pills and the bath and the bed, Jane thought, This is the place I want. This place—these blankets, this bed, this room, these crackers, that music, these pills.
She could bond Sweetie to her, remind her that though they weren’t blood, they were from the same clay. She sensed what Sweetie might want to hear and gave it to her.
“My daddy did this.”
Sweetie stood still and then sat back down on the foot of Jane’s bed, waiting without visible breath.
“He fought me.”
Sweetie’s body gave off a hum, like it was doing great work to stay so still, listen so well. Jane could hardly see her face, just sensed a blurry glow of energy. Jane closed her eyes, thinking how it might feel to tell Sweetie what happened, to trust someone. The muscles from the base of her skull to the edge of her shoulders relaxed imagining that.
But, even drugged, she knew she couldn’t tell the truth.
What she’d done to Daddy, what he’d done to her, would sound too bad. She didn’t know if Sweetie could understand how so many strands had wound together to create a rope Jane had to cut—had to!—just exactly as she did. Only a certain kind of person, someone like Jane, could understand that. A lie would be better for now.
Besides, there was something about the tension wafting off Sweetie when Jane said Daddy fought her, that he’d caused these injuries. It bothered Jane. She didn’t want to reward her morbid eagerness. She could blame Daddy, but she didn’t want Sweetie to do it. So she changed her story right there.
“Then your papa fought him over my momma,” she said. “He killed my daddy.”
Sweetie gasped, and the glow of her face shrunk to a pencil point of light Jane could hardly see. The air in the room flowed into that dot, after that shrinking face, altering the room’s pressure, tightening Jane’s lungs.
Would Sweetie believe her? Uno was a fearful man, but scared dogs bite. Somebody like that can do damage. He was cruel in the way a coward can be. This was his fault, she thought, though she knew that was a lie. She could feel the crowbar in her fingers even now.
Sweetie’s hand, which had been resting on Jane’s knee, now gripped it hard as she looked over her shoulder to the door and then back.
“Quiet! Don’t ever say that again. To anybody!”
She’d gone too far, but she could fix it.
“I won’t. Never.”
She put her own hand on Sweetie’s, but Sweetie threw it off.
“Rivka’s an important person. I can’t bring that into this place! It would ruin her, that mess! You want me to help you? Then don’t bring that in here, get it? I don’t need you throwing mud all over things. Nobody can know anything—especially that—about Papa. Nothing about Sacramento, the camp. Not your momma, your daddy, none of it!”
Jane’s throat burned, wanting to backtrack, make a new story, but instead she answered simply, “It didn’t happen. None of it.”
“Promise?”
“Promise. I’m gonna start over, like you. You’ll help me, won’t you?”
Sweetie groaned. “I’ll talk to Rivka.”
She understood how it would be.
Sweetie rose to leave the sunporch, and, when she did, Jane’s bones melted into the bed, the smell of ocean seeping through gaps in the windows like ether.
LIGHT speckled through salty windows onto her bed. For the first time in three days, when her eyes opened, she wasn’t thinking about pain.
On the first night she dreamed about what she’d done, a dream like a memory, a precise retelling of horrible facts, and woke to her foot throbbing, her whole body vibrating to it, especially her head. On the second night she dreamed about Momma, what she’d made her do, things she’d said, traps she’d laid, and in the morning her foot pain was more in the skin, less inside. On the third night she dreamed of Uno, and in that dream she got it the way it needed to be. His power—his cabin, his paycheck—had tempted Momma, causing her to push Jane and Daddy into the things that happened. In that dream Uno was nothing compared to the three of them, but still, it was his fault. They didn’t feel like her own dreams, not like the kind she’d ever had before, but like somebody else was dreaming them.
Through her windows were the backsides of several tall buildings, porches, and stairwells leading down to a patch of grass where a terrier and dozens of cats went to do their business. She pushed off the covers, examining her foot, sore but normal sized, swallowed another of Rivka’s pills, just in case, put on a housedress and pink slippers Sweetie had left for her, got Uno’s key, and opened the back sunporch door, walking downstairs to the square patch. She exited the back gate onto Clay Street. She hadn’t been outside since her arrival. The air was a salve, though people stared at her, like she’d escaped the county hospital.
She walked two blocks to Uno’s Ford, unlocked it, and got into the back seat, keeping her feet off the part of the floorboard where Daddy had vomited. She opened the hope chest and picked a notebook off the top of a pile nineteen-deep, a pile surrounded by real books stolen from libraries in Tucum-cari, Albuquerque, Holbrook, Flagstaff, Kingman, Needles, Barstow, Bakersfield, and Fresno.
When they’d been packing up the Studebaker to move to California four years ago, Jane had told Daddy she needed help finding paper because she was going to write up their trip.
He’d seemed to like this idea because it put a nice polish on it—an adventure, not a failure. So he had gathered wrinkled, pocket-stuffed, left-on-the-sidewalk handbills—MEN WANTED! GOOD PAY! LAND OF MILK AND HONEY! NO CHINESE!—printed in capital letters, underlined, bolded, always exclamation marked, stapled on road signs, tree trunks, and fence posts.
He’d stuck the point of his pocketknife under each staple to pry them off without tearing the edges. He’d tucked the sheets, folded once on the vertical, into the car’s glove box, so by the time he’d gathered enough, they all smelled of tobacco and motor oil. He’d gathered enough of those sheets for nineteen books.
While Momma made dinner, Daddy and Jane would heat a cast iron presser at the edge of the campfire, lay one piece of paper at a time on a flat rock, place a cotton picking bag on top, sprinkle it with a few drops of water, and then press the paper until the steam laid it flat, embossing a pattern of fine scars on the underside in the contours of the stone, so you could almost see the fish and ferns embedded there between No Chinese! and Men wanted!