LITMIR.BIZ

       8

       A MOMENT WITH MELISSA

      SEVERAL MILES AWAY FROM the place where her daughter lay unconscious in the grass, Melissa Quackenbush was out in the backyard of 34 Followell Street, cleaning the barbecue after work. It was a task she hated: scraping pieces of burned-to-charcoal chicken meat off the grill, while the armies of ants that had been devouring the remains scattered in all directions.

      Of course, it was always her job, never her husband’s. The Lump, she called him behind his back, and not fondly. Right now he was sitting inside, slumped in front of some game show that he was only half watching through a haze of beer. In the early days after his being laid off, his lack of motivation to get up and find himself a new job had angered her. But now she was resigned to it, just as she was resigned to scraping off the remains of last week’s barbecue from the grill. It was her life. It was not what she’d wanted, nor what she’d dreamed for herself—not remotely— but it was all she had: the Lump, and the kids, and a barbecue grill caked with carbonized chicken.

      And then, just as she was finishing with the task, she felt a gust of wind coming from somewhere far, far off. She’d worked up quite a sweat as she scraped at the caked meat, and the wind was welcome, cooling the beads of perspiration on her forehead and the back of her neck, where her graying hair had stuck to her skin.

      But it wasn’t the temperature of the wind that made her close her eyes and luxuriate in it. No, it was the smell that it carried on its back.

      Absurd as it was, she could smell the sea. It was impossible, of course—how could the wind be carrying a smell over a thousand miles? But even as half her mind was saying: This can’t possibly be the sea that I’m smelling, the other half was murmuring: But it is, it is.

      Another gust came against her face, and this time the smell it brought, and the feelings the smell evoked, were so strong they almost overwhelmed her.

      She dropped the can of cleaning spray. She dropped the metal spatula she’d been using to scrape off the meat.

      As they hit the paving stones, a memory came into her head from some long ago. It was a memory she wasn’t even sure she was pleased to be conjuring up. But she had no choice in the matter. It came into her mind’s eye so powerfully, so clearly, that it might have happened yesterday.

      She remembered rain, battering down on the top of the old Ford truck she and Bill had owned when they’d first been married. They’d run out of gas in the middle of the rainstorm and Bill had gone off to fetch enough gas to get them running again, leaving her alone in the middle of the downpour that had come out of nowhere. Alone in the dark and the cold.

      Well, no, that wasn’t altogether true. She hadn’t been completely alone. There’d been a baby in her belly. As Melissa had sat in that cold truck waiting for Bill to come back, Candy Francesca Quackenbush had been just an hour from being born. It was two in the morning and Melissa’s water had just broken, and so, it seemed, had the waters of heaven itself, because to this day she could not remember being in a rainstorm so sudden and so intense.

      But it wasn’t the rain or the cold or the kicking of the unborn child in her womb that she was remembering now. Something else had happened; something that the smell of seawater now pricking her nostrils had brought back into her head. The trouble was, she couldn’t remember precisely what that something had been.

      She stepped away from the barbecue—away from the smell of burned chicken and cleaning fluid—to get a breath of purer air.

      And as she did so—as she inhaled the sea air that could not be sea air—another piece of the vision snapped into focus in her mind’s eye.

      She’d been sitting there in the truck, with the rain beating a crazy tattoo on the roof, and suddenly, without warning, there had been light everywhere, flooding the old Ford’s interior.

      Melissa didn’t know why, but this memory—the vehicle filling up with pure white light—was somehow connected to the smell in the air. It didn’t make any sense. Clearly her mind was playing tricks with her. Was she going crazy? Crazy with sadness and disappointment. Her eyes had started to sting, and tears now ran down her cheeks; ran and ran. She told herself not to be silly. What was she crying about?

      “I’m not crazy,” she said to herself softly. Nevertheless, she felt suddenly lost, unanchored.

      There was an explanation for this, somewhere in her memory. The trouble was that she couldn’t quite reach it.

      “Come on…” she said to herself.

      It was like having a name on the tip of her tongue, but not being able to bring it to mind.

      Frustrated with herself, and more than a little unnerved (maybe there was something wrong with her, smelling the ocean in the middle of Minnesota; maybe her life was making her nuts), she turned her back on the open sky and returned rather deliberately to the cloud of sour but familiar smells that hung around the barbecue. They weren’t pleasant, but at least she understood them. Wiping her tears away with the back of her hand, she told herself to forget what she thought she was smelling, because it was a trick her nose was playing on her, no more nor less than that.

      Then she picked up the spatula and the can of cleaning fluid that she’d dropped, and she went back to her weary and unhappy work.