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When Your Tabula Is Not Rasa

Chapter Sixteen
by Kaleigh Way

 

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"You'd find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair," said Anne reproachfully.
"People who haven't red hair don't know what trouble is."
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

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Lizzie, as it turned out, had been sick this entire time; she'd been hit and laid low by the flu. And where was she? Of all places, she'd been staying in a room in the same hotel as me. "She's in quarantine," Desiree explained. As it turned out, this wasn't quite the truth — or at least it wasn't the right use of the word.

The coincidence didn't surprise me. It irritated me quite a bit, but it puzzled me even more: why was a sick woman staying in a hotel by herself?

Desiree, after conferring with the other women, left with the container of soup, and returned soon after with a card key and Lizzie's room number. Her room was on the eighth floor.

The women had to get back to work — and so did I — but they stopped by the order window to have a good look at my face and to "see the hair."

"Oh, she's Lizzie's, all right," they agreed. "The face, not so much, but that's Lizzie's hair!"

One of them, a tall blonde named Gloria, said, "If you've got her uncontrollable red hair, I'm sure you've got her wild, unpredictable character as well! We have to be careful, girls: there's two kegs of dynamite in town!"

The women made me promise to meet them for dinner at the diner that night.

Arrow was over the moon when I called. "You've hit the mother lode!" he exclaimed. "Good work! Just be careful, now. Follow the protocols: keep the GPS charged, make sure you check in every day."

"I will," I promised.

"Don't let your guard down. That's the main thing," he cautioned. "When you're relaxed and happy — that's when they'll strike."

I scoffed in disgust as I hung up the phone. This is not my story! I exclaimed to myself. I don't want to do any of this!

What I really needed and wanted was a good hot shower and a few hours' sleep, but instead I took the elevator up to eight and knocked on Lizzie's door. I heard a soft, "Can you come in?"

The room was stuffy and the air was stale. The smell of old soup wasn't overpowering, but it was definitely strong. The shades were drawn, and the only light came from the lamps in the bathroom. The bed was so messy, it looked like a shipwreck, and Lizzie, who lay on her back in the midst of the wreckage, was not much better herself. She was pale, perspiring, breathing through her mouth, and looked utterly exhausted. Her hair, golden-red curls just like mine, spilled in twists and tangles all over her pillow. I understood instantly what Lane had seen in her and found unable to resist. Even there — lying ill in this low-end hotel room, with its cheap furniture and hard old carpeting, littered with empty food containers, napkins, and other debris — Lizzie, with her long red coils of hair, her full lips and round breasts, made the scene worthy of the cover of a romance novel.

I'm kicking myself in advance for the sexist thing I'm about to say, but her weakness and pallor made her look vulnerable, fragile, and quintessentially feminine.

When I first entered the room, her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. She was certainly sick, weak, and pale, but when her gaze came down and lighted on me, her eyes brightened, and she called out, "Is that you, Ur-Dexina?"

"Oh, God!" I exclaimed, almost without thinking. "Call me Dexie!"

She frowned, then smiled, and said, "Okay, Dexie. Hello, Dexie."

"Hello, Mom," I replied, and her eyes welled up with tears. Oh, crap, I swore silently to myself. Do we have to do the crying thing now? But thankfully, Lizzie took a breath, wiped her tears, and composed herself.

I didn't run over and hug her, and she didn't seem to invite or expect it.

"Sorry for the mess," she said, "But I've been sick. Actually, I just woke up before you came. My fever finally broke. That's why I'm soaked. The bed, too! I'm sorry that the first time you see me, I'm looking like this, but oh God, I'm so glad I'm not sick anymore! I'm finally through."

"That's great," I said. "You know what? Why don't you take a nice bath while I clean up in here and air the room out a little bit?"

"Would you do that?" she cried. "Oh, a bath would be so lovely!"

First I turned on the heat lamp in the bathroom, and ran the water in the tub to get it hot. As warm as it was outside, I didn't want her to catch a chill. Once the room began to feel like a sauna, and the water was running hot, I filled the tub and swooshed in some bubble bath. Lizzie made her way unassisted from the bed to the bathroom, but she took my arm in a firm grip as she stepped into the bath. "My head is still pretty light," she explained. As I looked down at her naked body, Arrow's words echoed in my head You'll see what you'll look like when you're older. Lizzie was at least in her late thirties, and she looked pretty damn good — even for woman who'd been sick. Lizzie certainly was "curvy" as Lane said — curvier than me — and her face was much prettier than Dexie's — I mean, prettier than mine. Still, it looked like I'd gotten good genes, at least from her side.

Once she was comfortable in the tub, I opened up the room, pulling aside the curtains, opening the windows — and the door, too, until it blew shut with a bang!. I gathered up the trash — all the old food containers, paper napkins, plastic forks, newspapers, and miscellaneous other crap. Carrying two bulging bags of garbage, I went out to the hall and found the housekeeping closet. After dumping the trash bags there (sorry, cleaning person!), I grabbed fresh pillows, bed clothes, and blankets. Back in the room, I stripped Lizzie's bed of everything, and shoved it all into a laundry bag. Then I flipped the mattress and made it up, clean, fresh, and new.

"Can I come out yet?" Lizzie called. "It's lovely in here, but I'm turning into a prune!"

"Just a little longer," I called back. "Did you wash your hair?"

"And this hot water is making me weak," she continued. I wasn't sure whether she'd heard my question until she added, "I'm washing my hair now, but then I've got to rinse off and come out."

I lugged the dirty laundry back to the housekeeping closet and shoved it in there. I felt badly about leaving work for someone else, but at least they wouldn't have as hard a time cleaning Lizzie's room.

There was nothing left to clean or straighten, so I closed the windows and moved one of the chairs into the sun. Lizzie came out, bundled in her bathrobe. I settled her in the chair and covered her with a blanket. She smiled, beaming with happiness.

"This is like a dream," she said, closing her eyes and letting her body drink up the sun.

"You look exhausted," I observed.

"Yes," she agreed, smiling, "but I'm not sick any more. I'm finally over that awful flu. It just wouldn't let go."

"I found your phone," I said. "The battery's dead, but I couldn't find the charger."

"Oh, yes. There was such a hurry to get here that I forgot, and left the charger at home."

"Where's home? Do you mean the Ark?"

Her eyes opened in amazement. She looked at me with mildly amused and puzzled expression. "The Ark?" she repeated. "How could you ever hear about..." then she realized "...oh, Lane." She laughed a throaty chuckle. "Honey, that place is long gone." She shook her head, smiling. "I can't imagine what Lane told you about it." She covered her mouth with her hand, laughing a little.

"You can't imagine?" I retorted, my anger suddenly catching fire. "Well, I'll tell you: he told me that you and the other women there were sleeping with men to lure them into your cult!"

I don't know whether you've ever had the experience of watching words come out of your mouth. Part of you is talking and another part of you is watching, and the part that's watching is thinking, Why on earth did I say that? I didn't mean to say that. I didn't want to say that. And I didn't. At least, not yet. Not at that moment.

So, why did I say it? Mainly because I was tired. I was so damn tired. Tired and irritated. Physically, I was tired from having worked eight hours in a hot, fast-moving kitchen. Mentally, psychologically, emotionally, I was tired of this whole Spokane experience. I wasn't Dexie, at least not the old Dexie. Lizzie wasn't really my mother, so I didn't need to be here. I didn't need to resolve any issues, or discover who I am, or any of the things that I suppose would torture someone who really had been born into such a life.

Besides that, I was angry about the way poor Dexie had grown up. I'd always been angry about that, and now I knew a hell of a lot more crap about it than I ever knew before.

This woman, for all her cuteness and light, had abandoned her own child — her own baby — to a strange couple. She barely knew Lane; she didn't know Lane's wife at all. She just dropped little Dexie off, like an inconvenient package; something delivered to the wrong address. Then she ran off, to indulge her "wild, ungovernable nature" and take her curves and crazy red curls back to Spokane... back to Spokane to do what? What the hell was she doing that justified throwing away her baby?

Even more than all that, I was tired of feeling like an asshole for not wanting to do the things that Dexie would have done. The things that Dexie would have been happy to have done. I resented them, and I resented feeling guilty about resenting them. Somehow I had to do all this for Dexie, even if Dexie was dead. The poor girl. Remembering her, of course, made me feel even worse. She was dead. She'd been cheated out of her life, and so much of it was my fault, purely my fault, really my fault, and to stand here, in her body, living the life that she actually and truly wanted to live — I felt like a thief and a fraud. Dexie would have wanted to be exactly here, exactly now. She would have been glad to see this woman who looked so much like her, who was her source of life.

I shook myself out of my reverie. Lizzie was inarticulate. She was shocked. Her head was shaking, her hands were moving, and she was very agitated and upset. Her face had gone deathly pale. She looked as though I'd punched her in the gut. She was actually trembling. God dammit! I cursed myself. Talk about bad timing! The woman is still recovering from being sick!

Feeling even more like a complete and utter heel, I knelt next to her chair, at her feet, and put my hands lightly on her arms. "I'm sorry," I told her. "I'm sorry... Mom. I shouldn't have said that."

At my touch, and at my repeated "sorries" she calmed down. Then she gave me one of those tender looks that only a mother can give to a child, a look filled with guilt-making forgiveness, and she ran her hand lightly over my hair.

"It's all right," she said. "It's just that I'm so... weak. Can you help me back to bed?"

She leaned heavily on my arm as I helped her across the room, each step driving me deeper into regret about the way I'd talked to her. After I'd tucked her into bed, she asked for another blanket, as warm as it was.

"Maybe I'd better rest," she said. "Can you come back later? I feel like eating some real food tonight. Could you bring me the meatloaf plate from the diner?"

"Uh... yes, of course," I agreed. "Are you sure that's not too heavy for your first solid meal?"

"Yes, I'm sure," she said, smiling weakly at me. "Make sure the door is closed tight when you go."

For a few moments I stood there, uncertain. Clearly she'd just asked me to leave, and so I'd go, but... something wasn't quite right. I understood that she was very sick, but I began to feel that I was being played somehow. Could all that weakness and trembling have been an act? I didn't think so... and yet.

There was nothing else to do but say a stumbling, "Okay, Mom." Then I left.

Home for me, at the moment, was only six floors down, and I was tired. I needed a shower and a bed, but the experience with Lizzie left me in a strange state. I wanted to walk, to digest it, to figure out exactly what happened up there. I could call Arrow and talk about it, but Arrow wasn't one for ruminating and considering. He would immediately find an explanation based, of course, on his strange ideas about women, and once he expressed himself, he'd expect me to go along.

That wasn't going to work for me. This was one of those things that needed to be turned over and examined from every side, like a diamond.

I took the stairs down, but after the first few steps my tiredness hit me like a wall. I tried to open the door to the seventh floor, but it didn't open from the stairwell. All the other doors, all the way down to the first-floor lobby were locked in the same way. You could get into the stairway from any floor, but the only way out was at the bottom. So I walked those eight flights down, took the elevator back up to the second floor, and collapsed on my bed with all my clothes on.
 

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I woke after an hour, feeling groggy, funky, and dirty, so I got up, showered, brushed my teeth, and fell back into bed. Before I sank into sleep again, I set the alarm for 6:30, then double- and triple-checking to make sure it was set for PM and not AM. I didn't miss my appointment with the women at the Happy Place.
 

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When I entered the diner, the five women waved me over to their table. They had the tendency to all speak at once, which meant that I missed things. They didn't seem to mind talking over each other, but it was very confusing for me. As far as names went, I already knew Desiree. Gloria was the tall blonde; Jean was the shorter blonde. The other two were Nancy and Iris, but I was never sure which was which.

First of all, they wanted to have a good long look at me. They touched my hair, lifted it, felt it. One of them said, "Lizzie doesn't like to brush her hair, either." They had me stand, and turn. They peered into my face as if I were a statue. It was weird, yes, but I didn't mind. I understood that they were looking for traces of Lizzie in me, hunting for all the similarities. They went so far as to hold up menus in front of my face, so they could isolate my mouth or nose or eyes, and look at the one feature without seeing the rest.

"You've got Lizzie's eyes and nose, but the rest of your face must be Lane's," was the general conclusion.

"I don't remember what he looked like," another said. "Do you have a picture of your daddy, hun?"

"No," I said. "I've never met my father."

"You never met your father? Didn't he raise you?"

"Lane raised me," I said, "but he isn't my father."

"Oh!" that stopped them cold, and for ten seconds there was silence. The waitress was passing, so I ordered the meatloaf plate while they digested what I'd said. I figured that if it was the first thing Lizzie asked for after her illness, it had to be good.

After the waitress left, Jean opened her mouth and cautiously, as if testing the water with one toe, she asked, "Then who is your daddy?"

Watching their faces carefully, I said, "I think it's Benevolence."

They didn't react. No, actually, they kept themselves from reacting. I felt as though I'd tossed a depth charge into the sea, and it was still sinking into the depths. It hadn't yet exploded.

"How do you figure that?" Desiree asked. She tried to sound nonchalant, but I could see she was irked by my using that name.

I hung fire for a moment, then told an easy lie. "A DNA test showed that I'm not Lane's child." That was a lot easier to explain than inheritance of blood-types.

"You may not be Lane's daughter, but that doesn't prove you're any child of Ben's," Gloria countered. "You don't have Ben's DNA to test, do you? I mean... you've never met him, have you."

Neither of her challenges were questions, so she didn't bother waiting for my answer. "As a matter of fact, you don't look anything like Ben. So it's laughable for you to pretend to be his daughter." The other women scrutinized me again, and it was easy to see: they didn't find any resemblance, either.

I burned a little at Gloria's response. Obviously, I wasn't "pretending" to be Benevolence's child — it was only a guess on my part. However, there was nothing to be gained from arguing the point, so I let it go. What was more important was that my depth charge turned out to be a dud, so I dropped another. "Then my father must have been one of the other men she slept with."

Gloria's eyes narrowed. "What other men are you talking about? Your mother is no angel, but she doesn't sleep around."

"Oh no?" I countered. My anger was starting to rise again. I'm not a mean-spirited person, but I wasn't going to pussyfoot around. Now that I'd met Lizzie, I was beginning to calculate how soon I could cut the cord. I couldn't wait to leave Spokane and everyone in it. So I told them, "I'm talking about the men that you were trying to pull into your cult."

Oddly, that didn't seem to connect. Gloria continued to look disgusted, but the others were genuinely puzzled. It took a few moments for Jean to suddenly get it. "Ohhh!" she said softly. "She's talking about back when we had the Ark... and the free-love days and—"

"Yeah, yeah, we got it," Gloria cut in. Her movements were brusk. She was angry now, and didn't try to hide it. "Look," she said to me, "I don't know what you've heard, or think you've heard—"

I interrupted. "I heard that you women were sleeping with men to try to lure them into your cult."

"Cult?" she echoed. "You've got quite a mouth on you, girl. You've been throwing around accusations and misinformation from the moment you walked in. You ought to check your facts before you start defaming good and decent people. We are not a cult."

Gloria was burning mad, but her anger didn't scare me. She could fume and fire all she liked, but it didn't bother me at all. I looked her in the eyes and asked, "So, nothing of what I said is true?"

The tall blonde sat up and squinted her eyes at me. She was clearly rearing back, getting ready to deliver a fire-breathing, earth-scorching reply, but Jean was quick to put a lid on it. She placed her hand on Gloria's and said quietly, "Let me handle this, okay?" Gloria's lips tightened, and her gaze narrowed even further. It was one of those if looks could kill moments, but of course, looks can't kill. Jean quietly prompted, "Gloria?"

At that, Gloria took a deep breath and let it go. She nodded to Jean, but she kept her burning eyes on my face. Jean turned to look at me. She smiled.

"I'll tell you what you want to know," she said, "but only if you're willing to listen." I nodded, so she continued. "Our group... whatever you want to call it, however you want to categorize it... has been active for a good long while — it started long before any of us were born. We — the five of us and Lizzie — we all joined around the same time. It was eighteen, nineteen—" she paused, caught by a realization "—oh, my God, it was nearly twenty years ago! Well!

"Anyway, at the time, we were about your age. Can you imagine that? But we didn't have the advantages that you have. Some of us didn't have a good home life. Some of us never finished school. Some did, some didn't, but whatever our history, we didn't know everything about everything, the way you seem to think you do." She delivered that line with a smile, and she sounded kind. In any case, I wasn't offended. Technically speaking, I was more than twenty years older than anyone at the table, and though I don't know everything about everything, I do know a lot more than they'd expect.

Jean took her hand off Gloria's and glanced around the table. Our food arrived, and once we'd all eaten enough to take the edge off, Jean picked up the story again.

"There was a very short period of time... a year or so before you were born... and as I said, we were all about your age. And, as I said, we didn't know everything. We hadn't seen much of the world or done much in it. But we were adventurous, we were curious, and we had each other. Also at that time, we were worried about the state of the world. It might sound funny now, because back then most people were doing pretty well. But we thought that everything we knew could easily unravel, and we wanted to be ready."

"What do you mean unravel?" I asked.

"Everything. The global economy for one. It's all based on promises and loans. It's a giantic Ponzi scheme, and if one country decides to step out, the whole thing will fall apart. Another thing we worried about was war. Nuclear weapons. Disorder. Chaos. And I guess last of all, we worried about natural disasters."

"Natural disasters happen all the time," I objected. "You can't live in fear of that."

The women glanced at each other, looking somewhat embarrassed.

"Okay," Jean admitted. "This may sound silly, but we thought California was going to drop off into the ocean."

I didn't react. It wasn't the first time I'd heard that, even though I didn't believe it.

Jean's cheeks reddened slightly as she spoke. "Back in the 1930s, a psychic named Edgar Cayce predicted that California would fall into the sea. We had reasons to believe that it was going to happen around the year 2000, and we wanted to be ready."

"All you had to do was stay away from Califorian," I pointed out.

"If California disappeared, it would have a devastating effect on the economy, to say nothing of the incredible number of people who would die. We thought that disorder and confusion could trigger the breakdown of society."

Gloria bristled. "All of that can still happen," she declared.

"In any case," Jean continued, with a little dismissive hand-wave, "Our little group bought a farm. We thought we could live off the land, get off the grid. Let the rest of the world fall apart. We could disappear and be self-sustaining. That was the Ark, which Lane must have told you about. It was an experiment, and one that didn't last very long."

"We could have tried harder and smarter," Gloria declared.

"None of us knew anything about farming," Desiree put in.

"And — most important of all — we didn't have the money to keep it going," Jean told me. "When we couldn't pay the property taxes, we had to leave. That was all it took to sink our little Ark."

"That," Desiree added, "and the fact that we had no idea how to do anything at all."

"Anyway, while we were out there, out in the middle of nowhere, we didn't have a whole lot to do. We had no TV, no radio, no town nearby, nothing. Nothing to do." She fell quiet, so Desiree picked up the story.

"We decided to try free love. No set partners, no rules about sex. Anybody could sleep with anybody. It was an experiment. It was fun for a little while..."

"And then Benevolence decided to send you out into the city to troll for men?" I asked.

"No," Gloria retorted. "That was somebody else's idea. In fact, Ben didn't like the idea at all, but he let us try it."

Desiree, in a much quieter voice, explained, "We had a shortage of men out there. It really wasn't working out."

Gloria's words repeated in my brain: somebody else's idea. Was there another puppet master? Someone behind Benevolence? It was a question worth asking.

"Wait a minute," I told them. "You said it was someone else's idea? I thought Benevolence was your leader."

"He is," Jean acknowledged.

"I told you, girl," Gloria said scornfully. "We're not a cult. Ben's our leader, but that doesn't stop anybody from having their own stupid ideas and running off on their own account."

"So, whose idea was it?" I asked.

Gloria gave out a scoffing laugh. "Take a wild guess," she challenged, smiling.

I opened my hands, shrugging. How could I possibly know?

Desiree came to my rescue. "It was Lizzie's idea," she confessed.