Taylor stares. "Are you kidding me?"
"Listen, I don't know why everybody in the world isn't doing this. My boss only found out because I left some messed-up bills in the trash once."
Taylor feels a little shaky. In these moments when Barbie's surface cracks, the feelings inside seem powerful and terrifying. Taylor wonders what it must have taken to turn someone's regular daughter into such a desperate, picture-perfect loner.
"Isn't that a federal crime?" she asks.
Barbie examines the end of her ponytail. "Oh, probably. I don't know."
"Are we going to start seeing your picture in the Post Office?"
"No way." She flips the ponytail behind her back and lies down again. "My boss won't press charges. I'd tell his wife what he tried to pull on me one day in his office."
Taylor glances down at Turtle, who unfortunately is taking everything in. "I don't think it's your boss you have to worry about. I think it's the U.S. Treasury Department."
"Well, don't you think they've got criminals to catch? I mean, it's not like I murdered somebody. I just stimulated the economy."
Taylor is never sure when to argue with Barbie, who behaves like a tourist from another solar system who only read a toy catalog before arriving here. You can't argue with someone like that about family values. But Taylor wishes Turtle weren't hearing this. The casino robbery seemed adventurous, like piracy or Robin Hood, but photocopying money sounds like a simple crime of greed.
Barbie, with her eyes carefully closed, presumably to get an even tan on her eyelids, feels around for the plastic glass near her elbow and rattles the ice cubes into her mouth.
"So why did you leave Bakersfield?" Taylor asks.
"They started putting up these signs in all the shopping malls, like 'Warning, warning!' I guess they started noticing the bills in their cash registers. Maybe when they tried to turn them in to the bank. I don't know. So I'm like, forget this! I have to leave town just to spend my money!"
Taylor doesn't know what to say. She would try to argue with Barbie, but she is bone-tired from driving the Handi-Van all day, strapping down wheelchairs and engaging in powerfully depressing conversations and enduring the superiority of seeing-eye dogs. She feels oppressed now by the ugly concrete patio. It's hardly big enough for a dog to turn around in, with a high brown fence separating it from the identical patios of the neighbors. She wonders if the color scheme of brown is some sort of international code for poverty. It would be more cheerful back here if she had a few plants, at least. A red geranium in a pot, or a tomato plant, something to use the free sunshine and give something back. But it will be weeks before they have even three extra dollars to spend on something like that. In the meantime, she thinks, who knows? Maybe Barbie has the right idea. Use the free sunshine yourself. Use whatever comes your way.
On Saturday, Kevin and Taylor and Turtle buy ice-cream cones in Pioneer Square to celebrate Taylor's first paycheck. Taylor is not in a party mood: the check was much smaller than she expected, after what fell out for taxes and Social Security. She's working full time, and has no idea how she's going to cover both rent and food, unless Barbie helps. She's not crazy about using Barbie's money, either, considering the source.
"Look, Turtle, lick the side toward you. Like this." Taylor licks the crown of her own pistachio cone to demonstrate. Turtle nods, but goes right on turning her ice cream cone upside-down to lick the opposite side. A growing dampness is spreading outward from her chin onto her T-shirt like a full, green beard. Kevin, inscrutable as a traffic cop in his mirrored aviator sunglasses, has been ignoring Turtle.
It's a hot day, but the sycamore trees, with their mottled brown-and-white trunks leaning like the necks of tired giraffes, seem to know it's almost fall. Their leaves are browning mournfully at the edges, starting to give up the ghost. Quite a few have already fallen. They curl together in piles like brown-paper lunch bags, and Turtle kicks up noisy crowds of them as the three cross through the little park under a wrought-iron gazebo. Listless men and women sit on the benches in every kind of clothing--some in grubby overcoats, some in thin cotton trousers--but still they seem alike, with weathered faces and matted hair, as if these clothing styles were all variations of the uniform of homelessness. Kevin leads Taylor away from the benches toward the street, past a parked car that must have come from somewhere less rainy because it is covered in a deep tan fur of dust. Someone has written WASH ME across the rear window. Kevin takes this opportunity to explain to Taylor that the eastern part of the state is a virtual desert.
"Mom, here," Turtle says, holding up the lumpy remains of her ice cream.
"What, don't you want the rest of it?"
"I don't like ice cream."
"Turtle, sure you do. It's good for you. It's got calcium and helps your bones grow. Who ever heard of a kid that didn't like ice cream?"
Turtle looks at her mother with sorrowful eyes.
"Okay, there's a garbage can." Taylor takes the sodden offering and throws it away.
They cross the street in the shadow of a huge totem pole that overlooks the park. Taylor thinks for the first time in several days of Annawake Fourkiller. She imagines being quizzed on which kind of Indians carved totem poles, which ones lived in teepees, which ones hunted buffalo, which ones taught the Pilgrims to put two fish in the bottom of the hole with each corn plant. She feels ashamed. She has no idea what she should be telling Turtle about her ancestors. These days she hardly has the energy to tell her to eat right and get to bed on time.
"Yesler Way used to be called Skid Road," Kevin explains. Taylor notes that the green ice cream on his mustache makes it more noticeable. "They changed the name recently. This was actually the original skid row. In the old logging days they skidded the logs down this hill to the waterfront, to load them onto the ships, and I guess it was kind of a natural congregating place for out-of-work loggers, looking for a handout." He laughs thinly. "As you can see, it still is."
Across the street from them, some formidable paintings of Jesus adorn the windows of a storefront soup kitchen. Turtle pulls Taylor forward stickily by the finger, up the hill toward the imagined beach.
"I can't believe this sun," Taylor declares. "Two days in a row, even. I was starting to go crazy with all the rain."
"They thought changing the name of the street might clean the place up," Kevin says. "It doesn't help that those projects are right on the other side of the hill."
Kevin doesn't know that Taylor lives in one of the so-called projects. Kevin lives with his parents. His eight dollars an hour minus taxes goes mostly for home-computer equipment, from what Taylor gathers.
To reach Kevin's car they cross through another small park with two more totem poles: a gigantic wooden dog and man, facing each other with outstretched arms. They might be tossing an imaginary ball, but they don't seem happy. Their open, painted mouths are enormous, as if they might swallow the world. Taylor's eyes slip toward a woman on a bench with two stunned-looking children beside her. The woman has swollen knuckles and a stained red blouse and she bluntly follows Taylor with her eyes. Taylor looks down, feeling exactly as if she were carrying something stolen in her hands.
In Kevin's sleek blue Camaro they continue the travelogue up Yesler. "That's the Smith Tower," he says, "the white building with the pointy top. That would be the oldest skyscraper west of the Mississippi."
"Would be?"
"Is, I mean."
Taylor says nothing. They pass a grocery-deli, the school that will soon require Turtle's attendance, and a lot of signs in Chinese, then turn onto Martin Luther King Way, where the frame houses have peaked roofs and little yards of leggy flowers. She knows these streets. A man on her route goes to Rogers Thriftway every other day for Coca-Cola Classic, microwave popcorn, and Depends, Kevin doesn't have to tell Taylor that just a few blocks away, closer to the lakeshore and farther from Skid Road, the property values skid upward rather drastically.
They take Rainier Avenue south into a
neighborhood where Taylor can't read any of the signs. Thai and Chinese, according to Kevin. "You wouldn't want to live down here," he says from behind his mirrored lenses, "but they have great noodle soup at that Mekong place."
"We lucked out with this sun," Taylor says. "I don't know if I'll ever get used to how cloudy it is here. I was thinking I might get that disease the Eskimos get from not seeing the sun enough. Where they go insane and start eating up their shoes."
"Never heard of that one," Kevin says, running a hand through the side of his white-blond hair. "Now this is the place to live."
Taylor can't argue. The lakefront neighborhood is breath-taking: elaborate houses with cedar-shake roofs and gardens of bonsai and flowering trees in the yards, banked steeply down to the street. It seems like you might need a passport to come over here from the other side of the hill.
They get out of the car and cross a long grassy area to the lake. Turtle is excited. She didn't have a swimsuit, but Barbie, in a generous moment, sacrificed a piece of blue lame she'd been saving for a Prom Date ensemble, and turned out a bikini with impressive speed. Taylor had argued against a bikini for a six-year-old, but Barbie ignored her. Turtle runs ahead of them now, her feet flapping duckishly in Barbie's thongs. She pulls off her T-shirt as she goes, revealing a bony brown torso and two puffy bands of shiny blue fabric. She looks like a Mardi Gras dropout. With Taylor in tow she climbs down the concrete steps into the lake and stands knee deep on the pebbly bottom looking up with knocking knees and joy on her face.
"You like that?"
Turtle breathes in through shivering teeth, and nods.
"It's not too cold? I'm going to pull you out when your lips get as blue as your swimsuit."
"Okay," Turtle agrees, hugging herself.
"Kevin and I will be right over there, and I'll be watching you, okay? Stay here where the other kids are. Don't go any deeper."
Turtle shakes her head vigorously.
Taylor retreats to the beach towel Kevin has spread in the sun, without ever taking her eye off Turtle. Kids of every color run around her, screaming and jumping off the steps, but Turtle is immobile except for her shivers, only watching.
"Doesn't she know how to play in the water?" Kevin asks.
"She always takes a minute to get her bearings."
"So, is she one of these adopted Koreans, or what?" Kevin pulls four different tubes of sunscreen and an apple from his backpack and bites into the apple.
"She's adopted, yeah." Taylor sees her own stunned face in his reflectors, stupefied by the rudeness of a person who would bring a single apple on an outing with other people. Her shock doesn't seem to penetrate the lenses to sink into Kevin.
"Well, don't knock it," he says. "At least those people are industrious."
Taylor wasn't about to knock it. She would like to change the subject, though.
"I went out with a Korean girl once," he says. "I repeat, once. She was the valedictorian of our high school class. Kind of pretty. But Christ, what a tragedy, that family. You should see where they lived. Mung Bean Row."
Taylor unpacks the sandwiches she brought to share. She seriously resents having spent fifty-five cents on a can of tuna for this guy, after she and Turtle ate peanut-butter sandwiches all week. "Don't you think it might be possible to be a decent person but still not get anywhere?" she asks.
"Oh, sure. Some people are just not born with all that much upstairs. But Christ, if you know how to turn on the water faucet you can clean yourself up, is what I always say."
Taylor's stomach feels tight, like the beginning of a twenty-four-hour flu. She passes it off as merely a growing hatred of Kevin and nerves about Turtle in the water. In her mind she calculates the number of seconds it would take her to bound across the grass and down the steps, if Turtle should slip under.
"You know what I mean," Kevin says, with his mouth full of apple. "With all the opportunities that are available, and somebody's still sitting around staring at his navel on a park bench, you've got to admit they must be that way partly out of personal choice."
He should have gone out with Barbie, Taylor thinks. The two of them could jabber at each other all day without ever risking human conversation. She watches Turtle climb slowly onto the lowest step and jump back into the water, landing stiff-legged, following the lead of two tiny girls whose swimsuits are nearly as strange as hers. Taylor wants to tell her to bend her knees when she lands.
"You like tuna salad?" she asks Kevin.
"Okay," Kevin says, wolfing down the sandwich without looking at it, then licking his fingers with an appearance of slight distaste. He wipes his hands on his cutoffs and carefully takes off his sunglasses in order to rub clear, glossy sunscreen that smells like dog shampoo onto his face. He uses a different tube, white stuff, for his arms and legs. Taylor watches with very mild amazement. He pulls off his shirt and hands Taylor still another tube, marked Number 28.
"A lot of it's just poor money-management skills," he says, lying belly down on the towel, crossing his arms under his chin. "Know what I mean? Could you be real careful with the sunscreen? Don't miss any spots. One time I missed a little triangle on the bottom part of my back and it was there for the entire summer and fall."
"Poor money-management skills?"
"Well, yeah. It's a matter of putting in the effort, and being careful what you spend, right? And just having the basic attitude of going out and getting what you want."
"If you can dream it," Taylor says, "you can be it." She toys with the tube of sunscreen in her hands, reaching a conclusion that makes her stomach feel better instantly.
"Basically, that's the American reality," Kevin says. He closes his eyes and looks as if he plans to sleep.
Taylor rubs dry hands over Kevin's sweaty back, taking her time, until he begins to snore softly. Then she opens the tube of sunscreen, applies it to one finger, and carefully writes across his back: WASH ME.
The apartment is dark when they get home. Taylor clicks on all the lights to try to make herself feel less dark inside. "I guess Barbie went out, huh?"
"She probably went to get some Cheese Doritos with her pocketbook money," Turtle says.
"That's a safe bet. You feel like a peanut-butter sandwich? We'll go to the grocery tomorrow, I promise. I've got a paycheck, babycakes! We can buy anything we want."
"Chocolate cookies!"
"Lamb chops!" Taylor says.
"What's that?"
"Lamb. You know, baby sheep."
"Does it hurt the lamb to chop it?"
Taylor closes the refrigerator door, reluctantly. There is hardly anything inside, but she doesn't want to lose the light. Turtle is standing in the doorway, her eyebrows raised in their permanent question mark.
"Yeah," Taylor says. "I'm afraid it does. I don't know that it hurts the animals a lot, but they do kill them, before we eat them. That's where meat comes from. Didn't I ever tell you that?"
Turtle shrugs. "I guess."
"So how about peanut butter and strawberry jam?"
"Do they kill the peanuts so we can eat them?"
"No." Taylor thinks about this. "Well, yeah. I guess. A peanut isn't an animal, though."
"No, it's a plant. It's a seed. If we eat it, it doesn't get to grow up."
"Turtle, this is too sad. We can't just give up on eating. Let me make you a sandwich."
"Mom, I'm not hungry."
"At least a glass of milk, then, okay? They didn't kill anything to get milk, they just drained it out of a happy old mama cow."
"Mom, my tummy hurts."
"Okay, sweetheart. Go get ready for bed, if you want. I'll read you a book."
"We read all the books already."
"Back to the library tomorrow then. Promise."
Turtle leaves the kitchen. Taylor's stomach has begun hurting again, too. The sky outside the kitchen window is the shade of dark blue a blind person might imagine.
Turtle is back in the doorway, big-eyed. "Mom, why's it so clean in he
re?"
Taylor tries to understand. She follows Turtle into the living room. "I'll be darned, Barbie finally got in the mood to pick up all her stuff."
They are both quiet for a minute, not wanting to look any farther. Then Turtle goes to the door of Barbie's room.
"She cleaned up her room, too," Turtle says. "She took the sheets and everything."
"Damn it!" Taylor says. She sits on the broken brown sofa and tries hard not to cry. Those sheets were Taylor's; she brought them all the way from Tucson.
"Did she leave a note, Turtle?"
For a long time there is only the sound of Turtle opening and closing dresser drawers. She comes back to the living room. "No note," she says. "Remember when we found that note on our car? That said I'm sorry I didn't see you at Migget's and here's fifty dollars?"
Taylor begins to laugh or cry, she's not sure which. "Yeah," she says. "Barbie should have left us a note like that, don't you think?"
Turtle sits next to Taylor on the sofa, but stares into the darkness. "Mom, did I make her mad?"
Taylor pulls Turtle onto her lap. "Turtle, you had nothing to do with this. Look at me now, okay?" She strokes Turtle's hair and gently turns her head toward her. "Look at my eyes. Can you look at me? Don't go away."
With a great effort Turtle pulls her focus out of the darkness and fixes it on Taylor's face.
"That's it. Stay right here with me, and listen. Barbie liked you. She's just a nut case. She's the kind of person that can only think about herself, and she just decided she had to move on. We always knew that, remember? We decided we'd give her a ride that time in Las Vegas, but we always knew she wasn't going to come with us the whole way. Remember?"
Turtle nods.
Taylor rocks back and forth with Turtle in her arms. "Don't worry, you know I'm not going to leave you alone. You'll stay with me. Tomorrow's Sunday, I don't have to go to work. And maybe on Monday they'll let you ride the van with me. You can help me drive, okay?"
"I don't know how to drive."
"I know, but we'll think of something." Taylor has no earthly idea what they'll think of. She knows it's against every regulation of the Handi-Van company to bring family members on board.
"Before you know it you're going to be starting first grade," she says.