Day Eighty-Nine #2
It was odd, but so this date was becoming.
Harlan had told her in one of their early meetings all the stories he’d heard, tall tales about strange occurrences in these parts.
She’d listened with rapt delight, even forgetting Norman in the moment, a kid again at summer camp fawning over a counselor a few years older telling tall tales.
He told her of the Yucca Man, a being at least eight feet tall who wandered in the night unseen, the only warning of his presence a foul stench that preceded him.
He told stories of people gone missing in the mountains, Boy Scouts and Marines and experienced climbers.
A famous actor, even. Some had been found, alive or dead, some merely a pile of bones.
Some never at all. Eventually he heard himself and apologized, not sure why he was filling her head with such spooky nonsense when her brother was missing.
It took her a minute to understand that her reaction should be one of discomfort, so lost was she in his eyes.
But he hadn’t mentioned anything about light; to Lally this idea was new.
“You must have a theory.”
Edith surveyed their surroundings, so Lally did, too.
Aside from the military contingent, there was a couple in their eighties, the man picking at a potpie.
A young mother scrolling through TikTok on her phone, her child trying and failing to get her attention.
Their waitress talking to a middle-aged man by the window who had opened an umbrella indoors and placed it upside down on the floor as if he were leaving it open to dry despite there being no signs of rain.
No one was listening to them, but Edith leaned over her tea to whisper as if the whole diner was bugged.
“The light calls to you. You step in it, and…” She snapped her fingers, but her creped skin didn’t make much of a sound. It was eerie.
Lally rubbed her bare arms. The air-conditioning was strong enough that if a warm light shone down she would understand the urge to bathe in it.
She could see goose bumps on her olive skin and hoped they were from the vent over their table blasting cold air and not this woman’s uncanny behavior.
Lally decided not to press on what amounted to hearsay.
“You loved your son,” she said. Edith nodded so subtly, if she hadn’t been staring right at her, Lally would have missed the response.
“Other than the light, can you think of any other reasons he might have gone missing?”
“His father was Black,” she began when she finally spoke.
Lally was confused by this statement, as it seemed very much beside the point.
But she listened. “I loved my son very much, to me he was perfect. But I always forced myself to see him through the eyes of other people who thought him less so. Maybe that was overprotective, but that was my job as his mother, keeping him safe.” This confession broke Lally’s heart.
“That will make sense when you’re a mother. ”
“It makes sense now,” Lally assured her, gently crunching some of the ice from her tea.
She bit her cheek accidentally. Not hard, but she almost wished for sharp pain.
“I’m not sure being a mother is in the cards for me,” she said, almost swallowing her words instead of her drink; she didn’t want to go off on that particular tangent. Fortunately, Edith didn’t push.
“And your brother?”
“He’s Italian,” Lally blurted, confused by what Edith was asking. “We both are.”
“I meant, does he have kids?”
Lally’s cheeks grew warm. Yes and no, she wanted to say—it was one of the reasons she was so desperate to find him. But for clarity she said, “No.”
“Mmmm.” It was impossible to say where this woman’s head was at.
Was her son taken by something supernatural, or a victim of racists, the bright lights she warned of little more than the obnoxious headlamps of some pickup truck catching him at night on the side of a road, like Twentynine Palms was some sort of sundown town?
For all she knew, maybe it was. Lally thought hard to remember the other posters; as far as she could tell, the others missing, like Norman, were white.
“Edith, are you all right?” It was a loaded question, given what they were there to discuss. She hoped the older woman knew what she meant.
But the only reply was a question. “Are you?”
Lally had to really think about the answer.
For so long she had thought of the embryos as her last chance at happiness, but that was only true (and perhaps only mostly true) because she had let other opportunities pass by.
Her entire adult life she had run from commitment, afraid to love anyone fully after Robbie’s death.
She couldn’t bear to imagine loss again in the way that Edith was facing it now, this woman across from her sipping tea with the quiet stoicism of having no regrets.
Edith wouldn’t go back in time and not have a child just to make her current life less painful.
It would have been too high a price. Yet Lally had made that trade without thinking.
Traded a life to avoid feeling heartbreak.
“No,” she admitted. “And I don’t think I have been for some time. ”
Edith’s eyes shone with recognition. “We all do the best we can.”
Lally agreed. The travel, the flying, the running, the hiding.
All of it could pass as healthy to someone not paying attention.
But there weren’t that many people who paid attention to Lally.
Norman may have been the last one. In fact, this stranger was the only person who even asked her if she was okay lately and sincerely expected an answer.
Not even Harlan did that, not explicitly anyway.
Lally was operating under the assumption that everyone had it more or less together, that she somehow, chronically single, childless, lonely, was the only one in danger of spiraling.
But sitting here in this diner in Twentynine Palms, with the woman missing her biracial son, the man with the upside-down umbrella on a day with nary a cloud in the sky, the woman ignoring her child in favor of a few minutes of peace, the waitress who thought that toast was not enough, Lally realized she had it all wrong.
No one is okay, not a single one of us. The world had simply become too painful for anyone to feel unabashed joy.
Maybe leaving, like Norman and this woman’s son, was the only sane response to a world like the one they were in. There had to be a better place.
Again, Lally offered Edith some toast; this time she accepted, as if suddenly aware of a deep hunger that had been inside her for years. She even peeked through the jam caddy as if it contained some hidden delights.
“You will make an excellent mother,” Edith said to Lally as she gnawed on her toast; Lally wished she felt as certain, and it must have shown. “I have a sense about these things. You’ll see.”
Despite Lally’s increasingly pessimistic worldview, she was not really looking for a way out. She was looking for a way in before it was too late. She was looking to live her life, what was left of it anyway. So in that regard, come hell or high water, Edith’s sense was right.
An excellent mother Lally was determined to be.