“You’re welcome to stay a little while, get your bearings. If go you must”—the phrase sounded oddly formal to Serena—“there’s still a bus route back and forth to town. You can catch it just down the road.”
Serena finished the coffee, gave Wander a sincere hug—“See you down the road,” Wander said—packed up and left. She could sense a spiral of depression like a cloud above her head. The day was overcast, promising rain. The trailer park depressed her, poor souls in bad shape trying to pretend otherwise. She had to beat it. Her fantasy of Tulsa was fading like the afterglow of a peyote high.
When the bus arrived, quiet and electric, better maintained than she expected, she was surprised that nobody inside wore a mask. But then she remembered that she had been tested. She relaxed. Tulsa was safe. Like Oz.
The bus stayed along the river for a while then turned into a neighborhood with gardens and an arboretum whose greenery almost seduced her into descending. She resisted the impulse and stayed aboard.
When in doubt, go.
***
When Ava finally made it to the kitchen, Tess was gone. There was a note on the fluted linoleum kitchen table. Coffee in the pot, hon. Clean up, will you? Ava shrugged, feeling an obligation, and drank coffee while she tidied up, scrubbing for Tess the way she had done for too many men. By the time she was done, she was done, too many scrubs and spit shines in her life, but the fridge was agleam, foodstuffs on the shelves rearranged by type, floor mopped on her hands and knees, soiled or dirty clothes—Tess, carefully attired on the job, was a slacker around her house—gathered and thrown in the wash. She drank coffee the whole while, mind racing, but stayed busy until she was done and had to think.
She didn’t want to spend another night—the sex with Tess had left a sour taste in her body, which was listless on the methadone—but she knew that she wouldn’t be capable of refusing her benefactor. She also understood how fragile she was, that a relapse could happen by impulse. And she wanted to draw that flier for Serena, get it photocopied, staple it on telephone poles and fence posts and bulletin boards.
She sipped coffee, a liquid lunch, thinking. She had an ache in one eye, a twinge that wouldn’t stop. She still needed a buffer from life. She would stay put. The sex was only a price to pay. Besides, it was consensual. She couldn’t remember complaining, except afterward, when Tess wanted certain things that Ava didn’t particularly feel like doing.
Hell is other people, she remembered reading. That’s all it is. I’m sick of them all.
Okay then. She sent Tess a text asking her to purchase a sketch pad and colored pencils. Will pay you back, she wrote, to keep a shred of self-respect. She held the turquoise earrings in the palm of one hand, admiring them, what the light did inside the sky-blue and greenish stones, the glint of the silver settings. She put them back, regretfully but righteously, where they belonged. Besides, the inexplicable rage that had incited the theft was gone.
She was wiped out. She had a headache that wouldn’t quit and felt her insides rumble, an incitement to riot. She knew that she could have methadone. Not, she decided, and returned to the mattress with its thin sheet and ratty blanket in the garage to imagine what Serena might look like all these years later. It was a zero-sum game she played: She couldn’t have the methadone if she wanted Serena. She wanted to find her daughter; therefore, she had to sweat out the poison.
Get back to the garden, she thought. G-a-r-d-e-n. Left hand, 5; right hand, 1.
***
Tulsa is paradise, Serena snickered. What was I thinking? She could feel her day shaping up as a senseless lump of clay. On the way downtown, she spied small gatherings of people out in the streets but stayed on the bus until it reached something called Cathedral Square and a street sign that declared the square bordered Historic Route 66. She descended from the bus with her gear and stood across from a stone fortress that she realized was a church near another smaller building with a dome on top. She wandered about the deserted streets past a posh place called the Petroleum Club. Oil, even now, was big in Tulsa, she remembered. There were several churches with steeples. There had been plenty of God-haunted folk in Fargo, and now she realized she was smackdab in the middle of the Bible Belt.
She despised religion but liked good deeds. I can be a Christian, she thought, if it means a hot meal and a cot. She realized she wasn’t in the part of town where she would find homeless shelters. Where were all the people, the festivity and fantasy, the carnivalesque utopia that was Tulsa?
Her stomach grumbled. More bullshit. That’s what it was.
She walked a mile or so, made a note when she passed an employment center, noted a large arena as a landmark, and wandered into a rundown part of town, the wrong side apparently, where a woman in jeans and a bomber jacket walking a big, mangy dog directed her to a building with a big sign out front that read “Need Help Getting Back on Your Feet?”
A pale man with big ears in a funny, makeshift church collar brought her into his office, gave her a cup of coffee, and told her she could return at dusk for dinner and a cot. The place was called the Lost and Found Ministry. He took down her name to save her a place—no ID needed—and even let her leave her duffel with the tent attached in a closet in one corner of the large room that smelled of mildew. The room had a wooden desk with its white paint peeling and piles of old clothing and shit that he acknowledged with a wave of his hand. “Yours for the taking,” he said. “Anything you need?”
Serena felt an irrational urge to kick him in the balls and felt her face flush with embarrassment at the impulse. She wiped her forehead of sweat. She must look a mess. “Thank you,” she said, though saying the words was difficult. “No thank you. Just a meal and a place to sleep.”
“My name’s Heimlich,” he said. “But most people call me Weezie.” He struck a pose as if on stage. The fooling around made her see him differently, as a personality and not a functionary. Her mood changed; she laughed and meant it. His pose was a gesture meant to put her at ease, she could tell; she realized her anger had nothing to do with him. He was kind, generous. It was the old clothes; they had brought her Nana to mind.
She was enraged that her Nana was gone. She wanted to kick the world in the balls, she realized, and any substitute at hand would do. She smiled his way, though not at him. He took it like that, though, and appeared to be pleased. “I appreciate the help,” she said, meaning it.
He nodded. “A warning,” he said. “We’re using potatoes as protein in dinner tonight, I’m sorry to say. That’s just the way it is. If you want something with more meat on its bones, you had better eat it out there.” He stared at her, a finger to his chin, as if sizing her up. “You know, we need somebody to help out, keep the place clean. Room and board and chump change.” He tilted his head and opened wide his face, raising his hands as a question mark.
“Huh,” she said. “Can I chew on it?”
“Sure thing. Have a good one.” Weezie—the name was growing on her—reached down for a sheaf of papers and turned away from her to a filing cabinet.
***
It took Ava almost a week to get her bearings. Tess continued to be helpful and kind. The sex wasn’t any kind of demand. Rather, Tess made it clear that a bed partner was welcome on Ava’s own terms and left it at that. The two became companionable. Ava withstood her cravings and nauseas, drank plenty of liquids, ate mostly soup and salad, used the toilet as a porcelain throne when needed, and did housework with a vengeance. She found herself counting letters in words less frequently.
She drew a portrait of herself in charcoal, a snapshot of her taken by Tess, and a drawing of Serena as a young child and a young adult—as she imagined her—with colored pencil. Tess thought it came out good, and took the final draft to work with her on a Friday to photocopy. “I’ll staple some to utility poles,” she said, “and you can take it this weekend from there.”
Only problem: Reality was flat, two-dimensional, gray. Nothing much mattered. She tried to care but found herself not giving a crap. About anything. She knew it was process, part of the cure, or whatever a clinician might call it, the serotonin balancing out dopamine; but knowing something, even in her visionary moments, never did much good.
Maybe she was due for a change.
***
In Fargo, all roads lead to Tulsa. Lots of people said it, some with passion; some, Serena now realized, with sarcasm. She had such high hopes crossing the prairie, the plains, the mountains, sparse desertlike terrain, sagebrush and tumbleweed, crops and cattle.
Tulsa was a shithole. She should have stayed with the nomads, maybe followed their lead—rebuilt an old truck into a living space, lived everywhere and nowhere, found seasonal work.
Instead, this: The Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan Centers were closed until further notice, Cain’s had a padlock on its door and an empty calendar. Downtown, the Art Deco buildings were elaborate and worth her time as eye candy but closed off to people like her. She knew there were people worth finding; that the rumors were bound to mean something; that she could find friends, a place to stay, a job; but the heart inside her felt like it might die. Wherever you go, she thought, there you are.
She had expected the streets to be full of vendors, groups of celebrants, cowboys and itinerants, singers and good cops, men her age to flirt with and kiss. Where was everybody?
There were restaurants near Woody Guthrie’s place, a few open for business, so she had jerk chicken and a salad with fried okra in it. The waitress, with a Jamaican accent, was kind. While she ate, she browsed a battered large paperback anthology, Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan, with a photo of a very young Bob Dylan on its cover sitting at a piano in what must have been his house at the time, surrounded by blankets and books and knickknacks. The thought of him made her cry because it reminded her of her Nana, who had often listened to his music as they drove without a destination.
After the meal, standing outside on the street, Serena felt like she could sleep for a week. She headed back for the Lost and Found Ministry. She would find them, the people who could matter to her.
***
Ava spent the weekend stapling fliers wherever she could around the parts of town where she figured Serena, if she came to Tulsa, might hang out. Bulletin boards in coffee shops and shelters and community centers. Employment centers and temp job agencies. Restaurants where food was cheap. The library. Without a recent photo, there was no point in asking strangers if they had seen a young woman she couldn’t describe. “Somebody who looks like me, only not so strung out.” Yeah, that would help. That would do the trick.
She sat on a wooden bench facing an empty lot to catch her breath. Tulsa is a broken world, she thought, like everyplace else. It’s a broken world.
