Chapter Five
Rockie was in my car when I got in. At first she just grinned at me. I don’t have trouble with her popping in and out of my mind or my car. What I have some trouble with is when she goes off into unreasonable territory. I was calmly driving down Main Street and just pulled away from a stop sign when she said to me, “What do you think of my mother?”
I slammed on the brakes and was nearly rear-ended by one of the Sweet boys, who laid on his horn like I was committing a crime. “What do you mean, your mother?”
“Thea,” she said (she is the only one ever called me Thea, real or imagined). “What about your own mother? Wouldn’t you like to know who she is?” This was an old game I played with myself. It went like this, Felicia is not my mother. My real mother is somewhere living in a mansion and she misses me or she was kidnapped by aliens and is living on Mars, or she died when I was born. There are so many versions of this story that I can’t keep track of them. I used to play the game with Rockie, too. She would whisper that my real mother was living in Chicago or New Jersey or Delaware. “Delaware,” I’d say, “nobody lives in Delaware.”
Sometimes we played the game about my father especially after one of Mama’s boyfriends got mean and whipped me. “My real daddy,” I would say to my imaginary teen-aged African American best friend, “wouldn’t spank me like that.” Rockie would hold me and say hush-a-bye. “Your real daddy lives in a castle in Ireland.” And I would say, “My real daddy is a leprechaun.” It made me laugh. It helped me survive.
I always believed that Felicia was my real mother even if I didn’t want her to be. But my real daddy–I could dream him to be anything I wanted him to be. Knowing, even in my little girl heart, that reality just isn’t very often near as nice as all the things I could dream probably kept me from looking for him for a real long time.
The day I saw Faith, Susie, and Shaherazade at the cafe, I had mainly gone to town for groceries, those items Harlan and I didn’t grow for ourselves on the farm. I was a bit dazed by hearing them talk and by Rockie hopping in and out of the shopping cart like a little girl. I stared at mustard and navy beans like they were going to speak to me, which was something that had actually happened when I was high on acid once a long time ago. They were silent, but I bought them anyway.
“Did you get everything you need today, Aunt Cynthea?” Becky Arratola asked as I came up to her checkstand. Becky’s dad, John, owns the grocery. Her mom, Angie, is Harlan’s sister. We trade produce to them for groceries. They keep a running tab on the balance of our trade. Sometimes Arratola’s General Store is ahead and sometimes the McCoys are. It balances out.
Becky is in a punk rock band called the Kowboy Killers along with one of Sheriff Sweet’s sons, the youngest one, Ezra.
“I think so,” I answered her. “Tell Ezra Sweet when you see him that I’m sorry about stopping so sudden in front of him this morning. Poor guy just about rear-ended me.”
“I will.” Becky stared at the items moving down the conveyor toward her scanner. “Are you having a party? Look at all the mustard.”
I felt my cheeks turn red. What ever made me put five quart jars of mustard in my cart? “Just stocking up,” I said. I wasn’t worried about what Harlan would say. It wouldn’t be the first time I came home with some strange purchase I couldn’t explain.
“What do you think about The Bones, Madame Zorro?” Becky asked as she finished ringing me up. “That’s $65.” She pulled our tab out of a drawer and I signed for the charge. Making a note of our balance.
“I know some people think they know whose bones they are,” I said, ignoring that she called me by my newspaper pen-name. “Shaherazade’s mother, Rita, for one, thinks they are her long lost uncle’s.”
“No kidding. Wow!”
I knew that would keep the tongues wagging in Germaine for awhile. I didn’t know that the news that Faith Applegate was back in town, and that she believed the bones belonged to her Charlie, was already spreading like wildfire.
Of course, I didn’t mention Rockie and what she said about Faith being her mother. Rockie belonged only to me. She was my secret. My invisible friend. Being imaginary she doesn’t have a mother. The fact that she appeared to me sometimes as real as anyone flesh and blood, or that I could feel her arms around me when I was small and needed more than anything for someone to hold me, someone for me to hang onto, didn’t mean she was an actual person—or ever had been. But I thought she was trying to tell me something. I’d learned to look at Rockie like my subconscious and to listen. What was she trying to tell me about Faith Appplegate and Charlie LaFontaine?
After I put away my groceries and had a few minutes between soaking the beans for supper and bringing the clothes in off the line, I opened up the little wooden box I keep my treasures in. The Germaine Van Bibber Geode sits on top of my birth certificate. The earring I had made of the crucifix is cradled in the geode. They call them thundereggs here, and it is actually the Oregon State Rock, if you can believe a state has an official rock. I like the myth the Indians tell. Something about the mountains and jealousy and throwing rocks at each other. It’s supposed to be about the volcanos, the ones the Europeans named St Helens, Mt Hood and Mt Adams. Willie Walkingstick said the first people called them LaWalaClough, Wy’east, and Pahto. Wy’east and Pahto were fighting over LaWalaClough. He said the story changes all the time, depending on who is telling it. Sometimes it is said that the thunder spirits living in the Cascade Mountains get angry with each other and they steal eggs from the nest of the thunderbirds. Willie told me these stories one time when I was at Germaine’s Grotto. There is a tacky place there called the Little Shop of the Grotto and they sell these Thunderegg Germaines like the one I have. Only the ones in the shop don’t have the little commemorative plaque on the bottom.
I set the Germaine egg with the plastic crucifix in it aside and took out my birth certificate. The line for my father’s name had not magically filled in. Still blank. I stared at it for a long time and then I said, “Well, hell. Why don’t I just go to Baker City and find that old doctor. Maybe he will remember. Maybe there is something in his records that will lead me to my father.” I didn’t want to feel the anticipation rising up in me. Only losers hope like that. “So, maybe I’m a loser,” I said back to myself.
“You’re not a loser,” Rockie said from the bed, where she sat with her legs crossed. She was wearing that stupid cheerleader outfit, with OPHS in big raised letters sewn on the front of it. She got up and walked through the bedroom wall out into the yard and disappeared into the weeping willow tree.
In spite of the number of times I considered doing it, if not for Faith I might not have gone to Baker City and then I wouldn’t have passed the place on the road where Rochelle drove her Ford Fairlane into a cattle truck at ninety miles an hour. But all the things that I have learned by taking that trip I might have learned anyway, and all the things that have happened since then would surely have happened, also. But I do know that Rochelle did not mean to end her life and that Faith believes me.
It must have been hearing Faith talk that brought up the dream. The first morning I woke up after the dream I remembered just scraps and pieces. It was odd because it was kind of like a movie. I was seeing it, but I wasn’t there in it—not the first time I had the dream. I was there in later dreams, but not at first.
There is a dark brown man wearing a white t-shirt and blue jeans, in a bedroom and there’s a suitcase on the bed. He keeps packing it and unpacking it. There’s a knock on the door and someone calling out his name, “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.” Over and over. Then the man is standing on the bed like it’s a stage and he bows and when he stands up straight he’s got a sax in his hands and up to his lips and he blows and it’s so loud a picture falls off the wall and the alarm wakes me up.
