Freeze Frames Read online

  “Which directory should I load?”

  “Notebooks.”

  A list of files appears on the screen, each named for the design on the cover of a given book, Balloons, Cats (one, two, and three), Fractals, HappyFace, Moons, OldCars, Puppies, Roses (one and two), Spirals, Stars, VenusViews. The computer clicks and purrs, waiting for commands.

  “Open file Moons. Go to end.”

  Text pops up on a designated page unit of the screen.

  “Keyboard mode.”

  A keyboard rises, tilting to the correct angle, from the desktop. Soon after she started transcribing the notebooks, Leslie quit trying to read her mother’s crabbed and twisted writing out loud. She was hesitating and stammering so much that the computer beeped continual error messages at her. She could, she supposes, read each section of a notebook to herself first, just to figure it out, then read it to the computer. She could even read them all first. If she does so, she can find out what happened in the painfully absorbing narrative of her mother’s last year, come at last to the climax of the story.

  Considering, Leslie picks up a narrow spiral-bound notebook whose cover gleams with embossed silver crescent moons, each with eyes and a smile. She’s already looked ahead. In order to sort the notebooks out into chronological order, she had to glance through each one and get some idea of the overall shape of her mother’s story. Everyone in Goldust knows how it came out, death by alcohol poisoning in a MedEvac helicopter as it churned toward a hospital in Sacramento. Knowing so much Leslie doubts if she’s in any hurry to reach the story’s end. She turns to the slip of paper that marks where she left off typing, but cannot quite remember how far down she’d got.

  “Read last page.”

  The brisk voice, so unlike her mother’s, begins.

  “The technique worked again tonight. Wrapped in a blanket like a TB patient in Mann’s book. Cold out here in the mountains at night, but it seems you must be outside. Stars are necessary. Well, feel necessary. Maybe just using them to focus? Must try this when it’s overcast, won’t be long now it being almost winter. Had a long wait, checked time at 2150 2212 2234. Just after last check when I felt accompanied.”

  Accompanied. All through the notebooks Leslie’s mother used this awkwardness to signify the touch of another mind on hers. Until this point, the Moon notebook, which must have been written a year and eight months ago, the touch came only rarely.

  “Search full directory indexes. Term equals accompanied. Give file location.”

  The short list gleams on the data window beside the page on screen. Until the Moon notebook, three instances, one unclear. In the Moon notebook, four so far with some twenty pages still to keyboard.

  “Give context of search results. Each instance. Two lines plus or minus.”

  The window expands to allow for the new data. Words spring to Leslie’s attention as if they’d been highlighted: pressing, pressure, fullness, warm, warmth, pushing out.

  “Clear screen.”

  The computer beeps twice: recognition error. Leslie breathes deep, twists her hands together, and steadies her voice.

  “Clear screen.”

  The screen wipes itself into clean blue.

  “Exit work area.”

  Icons appear.

  “Off.”

  A square of pearly darkness hangs on the wall. For a moment Leslie thinks she sees an alien face forming in that shadow. When she twists back, half-rising, the face disappears. It was her own reflection.

  She gets up and begins pacing through the long living room. She had to check it out, had to know, and now she does know, though she would prefer to believe that she knows nothing. Her experience in the car must simply be some coincidence, perhaps the beginnings of a headache which she simply described to herself in her mother’s terms. Most likely her mother’s drinking had given her headaches, which she then misinterpreted. Most likely some kind of neurological weakness rims in the family.

  When her stomach growls and twists, Leslie walks into the kitchen, then hesitates in front of the tiny green refrigerator. Just because she’s upset is no reason to eat like a pig, she reminds herself. Reflexively she runs a hand down her thigh and feels the lumps that she believes are fat deposits under the skin. It would be better to go for a walk, get some fresh air and work off some of the flab instead of adding to it. She heads for the back door, grabbing a pink sweatshirt from the kitchen table.

  Outside the stars hang low and glitter in a night abnormally warm for May. She stumbles across the dark redwood deck to the steps that lead down to the yard, but there she hesitates. Her day has left her tired. Walking her usual couple of miles looms like torture. If she stays on the deck, she’ll at least be away from the refrigerator and the treacheries of food. She finds a padded chair and sinks into it, leaning back to look up at the arch of the Milky Way. Seeing how close it seems to float makes her wonder if her mother’s delusions stemmed in part from feeling like part of the sky. Up in the high mountains it does seem that you could reach up a hand and touch the stars, or that they could indeed reach down and touch you.

  All at once Leslie finds herself on her feet without really being aware that she’s stood. She knows, however, that she no longer wants to be out under the inquisitive stars. She wanders back into the living room, still golden with the light of lamps, finds the remote, and flops down on the sofa in front of the TV. All night she flips channels, picking a careful path between Fundamentalist preachers and movies filled with gunfire to find cartoons and news, until at last, round midnight, she falls asleep to a tape of the day’s session of the California legislature, debating something called the “Christian anti-crime bill.” The videocam provides an insert of the opposition, stately men in gray suits from some liberal organization or other, a Catholic priest with his dog-collar shirt, and an Orthodox rabbi, his long gray sidelocks and beard bristling, his black eyes snapping, ready for a fight. As Leslie nods off, she thinks for a moment that the rabbi looks straight out of the screen, and that somehow he can see her.

  o~O~o

  The tanker arrives round 5:30 in the morning, rumbling into the station, stopping with a squeal and hiss of pneumatic brakes. Richie throws on a pair of jeans and a sweater, grabs his socks and boots, and runs outside carrying them to find his father there ahead of him in the chilly grey light. Richie sits down on an upturned crate by the Coke machine to put the boots on. Yawning and stretching the driver climbs down from the cab, a tall man and as grizzled and paunchy as Big Rick himself. The shirt of his blue uniform hangs wrinkled over his belt.

  “Hey, Earl,” Big Rick says. “Damn glad to see you.”

  “Bet you are, yeah. Well, they sent you a full load to make up for the delay. Enough eth here to fill both tanks right up to the top and any of them little transporter cans you got, too.” He glances at Richie. “Better round up all the empty pop bottles.”

  All three of them laugh, just softly under their breaths.

  “Good to hear,” Big Rick says. “With summer coming on, think the delivery schedule’s going to get on track?”

  “Up to the front office. I put in my two cents’ worth for you, hell, for all my regular customers, but damned if I know what’s going to happen. I figure I’ll be lucky to have a job five years from now.”

  “Things that bad?”

  “Well, if the legislature keeps talking about phasing eth out. Goddamn eco radicals and Greens, yapping about pollution all the time! Never think about people’s jobs.”

  “Nope, they sure don’t. But I dunno. Lot of talk against eth, when they first come up with it.” Big Rick shakes his head. “It’s that damn agribusiness. Just about damn all owns this state.”

  “Well, they make a lot of money off corn for the refineries, yeah.”

  “You hear things, how they rammed the eth bills through.”

  Earl sighs and rubs both eyes with the heels of his hands, so thick with callus it looks like he’s wearing tan gloves.

  “I dunno,” Earl says.
“Little late now to be worrying about that.”

  “Maybe so. But you wonder.”

  Richie gets up and goes into the office to fetch the keys that open the hatch over the tanks’ input valve. They’re locked into a drawer of the gunmetal desk, scattered with papers, tools, and his dad’s old computer. Next to the computer sits a shortwave radio, so Big Rick can keep track of emergencies out on the roads. Just outside the four-paned window stands an old pine. Some of its lowest branches hang bare; on others, halfway up the trunk, brown needles cluster. Only the top, high above the station roof where the wind takes the fumes away, grows green.

  Filling the tanks takes hours. While the men finish up, Richie’s mother, Barbara, gets on the telephone, calling friends and customers with the news. The line forms fast, stretching out of the station and down the dirt shoulder of the highway for a couple of hundred yards. All morning Richie and Big Rick pump eth, watching the gallons tick off, taking cash, taking credit, taking vague promises to pay in a few cases, like Jack Dougherty whose wife just had premature twins. By noon they’ve sold enough to make the effort of unsealing the tanks worthwhile. Since Barb has fixed him lunch as well as breakfast, Earl’s glad enough to hang around and pump a refill.

  “Do that after we eat,” Big Rick says. “Rich, you better call Leslie.”

  “Good idea. Thanks, Dad. I nearly forgot.”

  Big Rick raises a bushy eyebrow as if he doesn’t believe a word of it. Richie flees into the office before he blushes.

  Although Richie lets the phone ring nineteen carefully counted times, Leslie never answers. He hangs up, calls again in case he punched in a wrong number, gets the same result. He hangs up, spends a minute staring out the window and chewing on his lower Up. No real reason to be afraid, he tells himself. She goes out walking all the time, or riding her bike. She was expecting his call, wasn’t she? But she could be in the shower washing her hair or down the road visiting neighbors for a minute or two. No need for this sudden flood of cold down his spine, this clench in his stomach as he wonders why in hell she didn’t answer her phone. He throws the feeling off with a toss of his head and goes back outside.

  “Leslie coming down for her car?” Big Rick says.

  “Dunno. She didn’t answer the phone.”

  “Ah. Probably out for one of her walks. She’s kind of a strange kid, Leslie. But I like her, mind. She’s a real nice girl.”

  Richie finds himself smiling, a slow smile that refuses to go away. Big Rick laughs and punches him on the shoulder.

  “Let’s go eat. I’m starving.”

  And in the end, Richie’s fear does come to nothing when Leslie rides in on her multi-gear bicycle, all gleaming chrome and a flash of red enamel. She heard about the delivery from old Arthur down the road, it turns out, just before Richie called, and headed on down.

  “Oh, and I called your grandmother like you said. I’m going over tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Great. She’ll like that.”

  Leslie smiles, takes off her wraparound sunglasses, and wipes them off on the hem of her blue polo shirt. Richie watches, thinking that he’s never been so happy in his life, that she’d take his advice about something.

  o~O~o

  Maggie lives three miles up the hill from her son’s fuel station in a rambling grey house that was built back in the 1920s, about a hundred years ago now. Pine trees stand dark round the gravelled path that leads to the back door, standing open. Leslie peers through the screen door into a laundry room with an ancient washer and dryer. On scuffed linoleum stand bags of dry cat food, boxes of soap, winter boots, a bucket and a mop. Even though she’s met Maggie several times before, she feels awkward about simply opening the door and going in, even though Richie told her to do just that.

  “Hello?” she calls out.

  “Come on in, honey.” Maggie’s voice answers from some distance away. “Just shut the screen behind you. I hate flies.”

  Leslie does so, carefully. On the other side of the laundry room lies the kitchen, the floor tiled in warm terracotta. Sunlight winks on white appliances and the blue and white tile round the sink. Dressed in jeans and a red bandanna print shirt, Maggie stands smiling at the counter by the sink. Her years of hard work have left her erect and slender, but her face is a web of lines and folds, a network of years hard-wired round her blue eyes. She wears her white hair cropped off, just above her collar.

  “Coffee or tea?” Maggie says.

  “I’d love coffee, if there is some. I mean, I don’t want to use it up or something.”

  “I wouldn’t have offered if I didn’t have plenty. Have a seat while I get it started.”

  Leslie sits down at the round oak table by the big window. She can see out to the vegetable garden, where a tortoiseshell cat is taking the sun between rows of carrots. On the table lie a photo album and a manila envelope that looks like it might contain some papers. Maggie brings over dark blue mugs and sets them down.

  “Take milk?”

  “No thanks. I like it black. It’s got no calories that way.”

  Maggie hesitates on the edge of a smile. Leslie braces herself against the usual “but you’re not fat.” Instead Maggie sits down, considers her for a moment.

  “Well,” Maggie says at last. “Whatever.”

  They drink for a moment in silence, savoring the coffee, which has suddenly become a rare commodity, thanks to the latest revolutions in South America. Leslie finds herself watching Maggie’s hands, the skin wrinkled like a pair of loose gloves over strong tendons. The hands set down her mug, then reach for and open a maroon leather photo printout album.

  “Too much trouble to use the computer,” Maggie says, flipping pages. “These are clear enough for me, anyway. I do remember, you know, much as I hate to admit it, when all photos came on paper. Here, Les. Here’s your mom the first week she moved up here. We had a barbecue and invited her over to be neighborly.”

  In the photo Laurel leans back laughing in a lawn chair, shades her eyes with one hand while the other holds a glass of orange soda. In the sun her soft grey hair gleams like two wings on either side of her face.

  “She sure looks good.” Leslie feels the familiar tears rise, chokes them back. “Was she drinking already?”

  “Good God, no! She never really drank much before she started writing in those notebooks. A beer or two, maybe, if there was a barbecue, or she liked a glass of wine with her dinner, when she could get the real nice kind, but nothing you’d call real drinking.”

  “Oh. Did she tell you about the notebooks?”

  “Well, a little. Psychic research, she said. After we got to know each other, she used to drop by in the afternoons, just now and then, and we’d sit here and talk about all sorts of things. She didn’t mention the notebooks until she’d been up here for a long time.”

  Leslie has a sip of her coffee and considers. Maggie seems perfectly at ease; when she said the words, psychic research, her voice had none of the twist or sarcasm that Leslie would have expected from her mother’s other friends, the ones back at the university. On the same page lies another photo, this one a little too dark, taken in this kitchen. In the chair Leslie is occupying now sits a handsome dark-haired woman in a tailored shirt; across the table sits Laurel, who is talking to a blonde girl in her teens standing nearby.

  “That’s my daughter, Janet.” Maggie points to the dark-haired woman, then to the girl. “And her daughter, Mandi. They were up for the weekend from San Francisco.”

  “Richie’s aunt, then.”

  “She is, but she’s only Big Rick’s half sister.” Maggie suddenly grins. “I had what they used to call a wild youth, down in San Francisco. I named the baby Meadow Sunlight, but she changed it to Janet, as soon as she was old enough. I can’t say I blame her.”

  Leslie laughs, nods in agreement, goes on staring at her mother’s face. Laurel’s mouth is half open, caught in the moment of speaking to someone else’s daughter.

  “She looks so happy.”
<
br />   “She was then, yeah.”

  Maggie turns a page in the album. Among pictures of Richie and his sister lies another of Laurel, standing, this time, wearing jeans and a baggy sweatshirt and holding a grey kitten while she smiles at the camera.

  “That was taken a couple of months later,” Maggie says. “I found that kitten in the parking lot down at the Safeway, and I was trying to talk your mom into taking him home.”

  “She loved cats, yeah.”

  “Well, I couldn’t palm that one off on her.” Maggie hesitates for a long minute. “She said the damnedest thing. I can’t remember it exactly now, of course, but it was something like she was afraid something would happen to him, something bad, I mean, because of her research. And I said something like, what are you doing up there, inventing a new kind of bug spray? And she laughed and just kind of changed the subject.”

  Leslie sets her coffee cup down very carefully. She remembers her mother’s notebook entry about the grey kitten. It came just after the second time Laurel felt “accompanied.”

  “She didn’t want anyone in the house with her,” Leslie says. “She thought something was going to just show up. Some kind of being, I mean. She thought someone had told her psychically that it wanted to visit. Or something. She was real vague about the message. Well, if it was a message. Did she say anything to you about that?”

  “Not then. A lot later she mentioned something about aliens from outer space. That’s when I started to worry.” Maggie flips pages in the album. “It must have been about the time Richie took this one.”

  In the photo Maggie and Laurel stand to either side of a Christmas tree. Since it’s a full-length shot, Laurel’s face is small and hard to read, but she stands slumped, her head turned as if she’s refusing to look into the camera, her hands clenched into fists at her sides.