When they found themselves delivered onto an escalator that was drawing them up some seventy or eighty feet toward a gigantic mosaic Phoenix bird rising up out of its ashes, she understood what it would be like to stand before the doors of Heaven, and knew how small a thing was an earthly life.
She held Miranda’s hand, and also carried the child’s brand new plaid suitcase. Miranda was silent for now, cowed by their surroundings and a little stupefied because she’d been sleeping in the truck during the ride over from Stevie’s. But a waxing alertness communicated itself through her tiny hand, as she sensed the nearness of toys and candy and doodads for sale to weary travellers. Mrs. Houston tightened her hold.
“Maybe tomorrow’s paper’s already out,” Stevie said. She held Baby Ellen against her belly in a Snugli, a kind of reverse knapsack for infants that Mrs. Houston had never seen the like of before. “There’s something new every day,” Stevie said, but she wasn’t talking about a Snugli, she was talking about the Houston Gang in the papers. Her eyes wore the pink and bruise of grief. Anyone could see she’d been destroyed by all this.
But it was happening for the third or fourth time to Mrs. Houston, and she bore it well. “It’d be today’s paper now,” she said. “It’s already three o’clock Thursday morning.” Turning to speak to her daughter-in-law, she fell to looking over Jeanine, the last of them in line on the slowly moving escalator. Jeanine looked like a young starlet heading for the cameras, very tanned and clear-eyed in her sleeveless white party dress. She did not carry the big blue Urantia Book tonight. She was about to become a Hertz Rent A Car girl in San Francisco.
As they stepped off the escalator and took their bearings, Stevie unzipped the baby’s travelling bag and made certain everything was inside it. “Just give her a bottle around four-thirty — or whenever she wants one, if she really starts bawling. There’s an extra one, too. And some Pampers, but you won’t have to change her, probably. There’s some Gerber’s beets in there.” She handed Jeanine the blue canvas bag. “She loves those beets.”
“You mean four-thirty our time, or four-thirty their time?” Jeanine said.
“It’s the same time, honey.”
“It’s California,” Jeanine said. “It’s a whole different zone.”
“Not in the summer,” Mrs. Houston said, “’cause we’re not on the Daylight time. We’re on God’s time.”
“How am I going to recognize their dad?” Jeanine asked.
“I guess he’ll recognize them, won’t he?” Stevie said.
They were approaching the entrance to the flight gates and security area — its conveyor belts and austere efficiency and X-ray eyes. Mrs. Houston ignored a wave of apprehension that she’d be tortured. “Here’s one,” Stevie said, and stepped over to an all-night gift shop and bought a newspaper. “There’s something new every day,” she explained to no one.
“It’s always on page one or page two of the local section,” Mrs. Houston said. Still holding Miranda’s hand, she maneuvered around behind her daughter-in-law, who held the paper out at arm’s length and tried to read over Baby Ellen’s head. Ellen was awake and alert, and appeared to be trying to strike Stevie across the cheek with a rubber pacifier she gripped stiffly in her left hand. “Transferred to the Death House,” Mrs. Houston read out loud. “I can’t believe it.” She turned to Jeanine. “1 won’t believe this is the will of God.”
“I don’t know. Nothing makes sense,” Jeanine told her.
“As of tomorrow, he won’t be in CB-6 no more,” Mrs. Houston said. “They’re going to have him in the Death House, in some kind of waiting room. Well,” she said, “it’s about time he learned to wait.”
Instantly Stevie was angry. She shoved the paper at her mother-in-law as if jettisoning everything connected with their misfortune. “Don’t you understand they intend to kill your son in two more weeks?”
Mrs. Houston was scornful of the idea. “The soul of a man don’t die.” She waved the newspaper around at the entire airport. “That’s what this is all about.”
Tears spilled from Stevie’s red eyes. “Well I just want to smell him. I can’t smell his fuckin’ soul.”
She cried for a minute while they all stood there waiting for her to stop. “I’m talking about James,” she told them.
“I know,” Mrs Houston said. “But at least he ain’t going up for the capital punishment. You’ll see him soon as he gets well. And you’ll smell him if you really want to.” She looked down at Miranda, who was tugging on her hand and saying, Mizz Houston, Mizz Houston? “We’re almost at the plane,” she told the child. “What do you want?”
“Does it say in the papers that my mother is dead?” Miranda asked.
The three women were silent. Jeanine finally said, “What?”
“Does it tell about that she died?” Miranda repeated.
“No, honey.” Jeanine was at a loss. “No — your Mom’s not dead. She’s just resting.”
“Resting means when you’re dead,” Miranda informed her.
“She’s resting in a hospital to get well, she’s not resting like she’s dead, or anything.”
Miranda bunched her new dress up between her legs. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Jeanine took her into the bathroom just this side of the security area. While she waited for Miranda, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was starting to grow long again, and she’d just had it permed. Her dress was white on white. She wore red lipstick. Knowing a killer had taught her that she must live.
“Stevie?” Miranda called, her voice echoing out of the stall.
“I’m not Stevie, honey. I’m Jeanine.”
“Oh,” Miranda said. Then she said, “Jeanine?”
“What is it?”
“Um…” The moment seemed to take place under water. “I’m almost done, Jeanine.”
“Good,” Jeanine said.
When Miranda was ready to leave, Jeanine turned on a faucet and insisted she wash her hands. Standing on tiptoe, Miranda thrust the very tips of her fingers momentarily beneath the rush of water, then stood under the electric blower letting the hot air wash over her face.
The blower ceased, and she stood there. She was wearing a white dress almost exactly like Jeanine’s, and they were alone in the sudden tiled silence of an empty public place. She held out her arms to Jeanine. “Will you lift me up into the meer?”
For a beat she didn’t understand.
And then she understood, and lifted the child up before the wide glass. Above the row of identical porcelain sinks that seemed to diminish into a haze of tiles, Miranda saw herself. She studied herself carefully in the mirror, turning her face this way and that within its indefatigable duplication of everything. “That’s not me,” she told Jeanine.