Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [153]
“What’s that?” Melinda nodded toward something growing in the creek.
“Watercress?” Germaine said. Her black hair fell downward as she bent to see it, and for a moment Melinda thought of Persephone on her way back from the underworld. Germaine had the wildly intelligent eyes of a genius. “No, it’s just an unknown, anonymous weed. By the way, how close are we to the Mississippi? I have an appointment. Well, I think of it as an appointment. You might not.”
Melinda stood up straight, feeling the baby’s weight shift. He was making sucking sounds. “I had a visitor yesterday. Well, not a visitor. A man, an intruder. He looked like Eric Clapton. He walked right into the house. He said he used to live there. But he didn’t. He couldn’t have. His name was Augenblick.”
“You call the cops?”
“No.”
“I would have,” Germaine told her. “I’d have the law scurrying right over, with the cuffs and the beaters out.”
“He said Eric’s nursery had once been his own room. He said he knew things about the house, bad things. He said, this stranger, that I was desperate. Can you imagine?”
“He got the wrong address,” Germaine said. “He meant me.”
“Damn him anyway,” said Melinda. She pointed to an opening of the creek where the Mississippi River was visible. “There it is. There’s the river. We made it.”
“Yeah.” Germaine slapped at a mosquito on her forearm, leaving a little smear of blood just above her wristwatch. “Is this about your mother?” she asked. Her tone was studiously neutral. “This is about your mother, isn’t it? Maybe this guy lived in the neighborhood when you were growing up. Maybe your mother was known to him.”
Melinda stopped and looked at her friend. Seedpods from a cottonwood overhead drifted down onto her hair and into the water. “Oh, well,” she said, as if something had been settled. Melinda’s mother had been in and out of institutions. Melinda refused to come to terms with it, now or ever; a mad parent could not be rescued or reasoned with. Things were getting dark all of a sudden. “I’m, um, feeling a bit light-headed.” She felt her knees weakening, and she made her way to the side of the creek, where she sat down abruptly on the wet sands.
“Are you fainting?” she heard Germaine say, in front of, or behind, a crow cawing. “Here. Let me take your hand.…” The force of her friend’s voice drifted into her consciousness, as did her voice, someone turning the volume knob back and forth, as she held her own nausea at bay, her head down between her knees. Creek water was suddenly splashed on her face, thrown by her friend, to rouse her.
At certain times, usually in the afternoons, her father would ride the buses, but Melinda had no idea where he went, and he himself could not always remember. He said that he visited the markets, but one time he came back and said that he had knocked at the Gates of Heaven. He would not elaborate. Where were these gates? He had forgotten. Perhaps downtown? Many people were going in, all at once. He felt he wasn’t ready, and took the bus home.
This traveling around was a habit he had picked up from his wife, whose wandering had started right after the death of their first child, Melinda’s older sister, Sarah, who had died of a blood infection at the age of two. Her mother gave birth to Melinda and then went into a very long, slow, discreetly managed and genteel decline. One day, when Melinda was eleven, her mother, unable to keep up appearances anymore, drove away and disappeared altogether. She was spotted in Madison before she evaporated.
Back in her father’s house, Melinda went straight from the phone to her computer. She typed in Augenblick’s e-mail address and then wrote a note.
hi. i don’t know who you are, but you’re not who you say you are, and my father has never heard of you or your family. i shouldn’t be writing to you and i wouldn’t be except i didn’t like it that you said you knew me. from where? we’ve never met. you don’t know me. i hardly know myself. kidding, i mean, i’ve met you and i still haven’t met you. you’re a ghost, for all