Star Magnolia

Rosie set the bags down in a heap and stood by the front desk of the hotel, waiting uncertainly. Pluto walked over to the coffee machine and started opening the creamers one by one and gulping them down.

“Stop it,” she said.

The child ignored her. He needed a haircut again, though it was barely two weeks since the last one.

There was a bell on the counter, but she couldn’t stand the sound. “Hello?” she called out. “Anyone here?”

A loud groan came from behind a partition, followed by the sounds of laborious movement. Several minutes later, an elderly man appeared, leaning on a sturdy cane. The smile he gave her made his face crease like a bulldog’s.

“Sorry,” he said. “The arthritis is hellfire today.”

“That’s okay,” said Rosie. “I have a reservation.”

“Last name?”

“Aberhart. That’s A-B-E-R and heart with no E.”

“Continental breakfast is from six to ten in the dining room, and the pool is through that door. There’s a bunch of teenagers using it at the moment. Hopefully they’ll be done soon so we can have it to ourselves.”

Rosie looked up at him, startled. Was he coming on to her? She couldn’t tell.

“Mom can’t swim,” said Pluto.

The clerk handed over a room key in a tiny envelope. He said, “If you need anything at all, I’ll be here.”

As they hauled their bags into the elevator, Rosie said, “Why did you tell that man I can’t swim?”

“You don’t even have a bathing suit,” he replied.

“I could wear shorts and a T-shirt.”

The window of Room 229 looked out over the parking lot, where all the spaces were far too narrow, the cars jammed together like rows of teeth. Beyond was a city park with a small pond in which geese were drifting.

“Mom,” said Pluto, “it says right here you can’t smoke in the room.” He was holding up a little green card. “If you do, you’ll have to pay two hundred dollars.”

“Of course I’m not going to smoke in the room,” Rosie said. Pluto was a frustrating child. Sometimes he did things he should know not to do, like drink all the creamers, but other times, he acted like he was the adult and she the delinquent offspring.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she said, “and I don’t want to be interrupted.”

“You never take baths,” said Pluto. “That’s another reason I know you can’t swim.”

*     *      *

Later that night, after takeout from the Chinese place across the street, Rosie said, “Come on, let’s take a walk.”

“I’ll stay here,” said Pluto. He was enthralled by the TV, where a woman with wild hair was gesticulating in front of a wall of hieroglyphs.

“Not by yourself, you won’t. Come on.”

He whined and dragged his feet all the way down the stairs and out into the parking lot, where Rosie lit a cigarette. They stood underneath a tree with big, white, haphazard blossoms. The fallen ones smothered the asphalt like frosting on a cake.

“I knew it,” said Pluto, looking at her accusingly.

“Oh, shut up,” said Rosie. “I’m just having one.” She inhaled and held it, looking up at the skinny moon.

“Did you know that we were basically built by people from space?” said Pluto. “Thousands and thousands of years ago, this happened. Aliens came down to earth and made the pyramids and also Stonehenge, and they genetically modified us out of monkeys. Then they left again.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Rosie. “Where’d you even get that?”

“This scientist doctor lady said so.”

Rosie shook her head. “You can’t believe everything people say. Hey, what kind of tree do you think this is?”

He studied it, his forehead furrowed. “I don’t know.”

“It’s real pretty. Maybe we should plant one at home.”

A man passed by, walking something that looked like a cross between a terrier and a naked mole rat. He stopped and stared at them for a moment. Rosie turned away, but she could still feel his gaze on the back of her neck.

“It makes sense to me that we were created by aliens,” said Pluto. “Sometimes I feel that way.”

The man with the dog had unsettled Rosie, and she no longer felt like walking. Once she had finished her cigarette, they went back inside, passing by the pool on the way. The front desk clerk was doing laps. Despite his painful gait on land, he was extraordinarily graceful in the water.

“Howdy!” he called out, seeing them in the corridor. “Come on in, the temp is perfect!”

Pluto darted into the room and stripped down in seconds. He was wearing swim trunks underneath his clothes. Holding his nose, he did a cannonball into the deep end. Reluctantly, Rosie followed and sat crosslegged at the pool’s edge. The smell of chlorine was sharp in her nose.

“So,” said the clerk, “what brings you two to our neck of the woods?”

“Mom’s got a baby growing in her, and she needs to get it removed,” said Pluto.

“Oh my God,” said Rosie. “Who told you that?”

“There’s a special doctor for it and everything,” Pluto told the clerk. “It’s really easy these days.”

“You’re a bright young man,” the clerk said.

“I’m an alien,” said Pluto.

“That tree in the parking lot, the one with the white blossoms,” said Rosie, “what’s it called?”

The clerk thought hard. “I’ll have to look that up,” he said. “Hey kid, want to ride on my back? I’ll dive down to the bottom for you.”

Pluto locked his arms around the man’s leathery neck, and the two of them vanished beneath the surface. Rosie watched their forms shimmering against the white concrete, warped in strange ways by the water. She could not distinguish one from the other.

*     *     *

Rosie dreamed that Grant came to her in the dead of night and held her close and fucked her tenderly. He was all lean muscle and sunburn, but the scars were new. He told her he earned them in a dogfight with another pilot.

“They only hurt when I forget about them,” he said.

“Don’t forget,” Rosie begged.

In the dream, the police came and battered down the door without warning. They handcuffed Grant and dragged him away from her. He said, “I can endure years of incarceration as long as a piece of me, my flesh and blood, is free in the world.”

Rosie thought, a child is inevitable. The child will be Pluto. For a moment, she wished for some different, easier son and felt ashamed. Waking, she could not determine whether it had been a nightmare or a memory.

*     *     *     

They stopped for continental breakfast on their way out of the hotel. The offerings were bleak. Rosie tried some eggs that tasted like they’d been canned, a sausage that was more grease than meat, and a muffin with the slightest suggestion of blueberry about it. Pluto crunched through three waffles with dry granola sprinkled on top.

“In space,” he explained, “ everything you eat comes in little packets, and it’s all been liquified.”

“Did you learn that on the History Channel, too?” said Rosie.

“Also, they clean themselves with wet washcloths.”

“Gross.” She felt suffocated, as if she’d been shrink-wrapped.

At the table next to them, a young couple was feeding their toddler bites of banana. She accepted each mouthful but spat it out on the sly. The floor beneath her high-chair was covered in pale globs.

The father had brown skin and a cloud of curly hair. There was a gap between his front teeth, one of those slight flaws that makes a person more desirable. “Heads up! Here’s the banana plane,” he told the little girl. Watching his careful movements, Rosie wished she could transpose herself onto his partner. The strength of this longing alarmed her.

The woman saw her looking and smiled. “They’re so contrary at this age,” she said. “I think it’s because all the options are binary right now. It’s either yes or no, you know what I mean? All or nothing. She doesn’t understand that she doesn’t have to eat the whole banana. Or that she could ask for melon instead, if she prefers.”

If binary was a choice between two things, Rosie wondered, then what was it called when there was no choice to be made? Monary? Unary? She said, “Mine always seems to know exactly what he wants, and good luck convincing him otherwise.”

Pluto was across the room, putting Splenda into a cup of orange juice. He was obsessed with food in small packages. It was so wasteful.

“My name is Oaklynn,” said the woman. One side of her head was shaved, an elaborate pattern etched into it.

“Oakland?” said Rosie. “Like the city?”

“No, Oaklynn. It doesn’t mean anything. My parents were hippies.”

“I’m Rosie,” she said. “My son is Pluto.”

“Oh,” said Oaklynn, “so you get it.”

Rosie wondered whether the continental breakfast was disgusting to everyone, or whether the intruder in her womb had irreparably warped her taste buds. The other guests seemed to be having no trouble. She choked down another bite of wet egg.

“How old is your daughter?” she asked.

“We had her twenty-three months ago,” said Oaklynn. “It was a difficult labor. Life-threatening, actually. The doctors told me I shouldn’t consider having any more. That’s it for you, they said, like I was a bar patron after closing time.”

“All done,” said her handsome partner. He finished off the rest of the banana in one bite.

Across the room, there was a commotion. Pluto had spilled his orange juice onto someone’s laptop. Rosie jumped up to deal with the victim, who stood there holding her dripping device at arm’s length and breathing heavily. Later, when the thing was settled, she looked back at the table to find the young couple and their child gone.

*     *     *     

Outside the clinic was a crowd holding signs that accused Rosie of terrible things. She pulled up to the curb across the street and watched as a tall woman and a short man started up the ramp toward the clinic door. The crowd screamed and spat at them.

The woman walked on, head held high. The man turned and said, “Don’t you all have something better to do than harass people already going through hell? Shame on you.”

Someone called him an unrepeatable word. Rosie felt sick. She rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke out into the toxic city air.

“What’s wrong with them, Mom?” Pluto asked. “Why are they so mad?”

Rosie said, “They think everyone should have babies even if they don’t want to. Even if they can’t take care of them.”

“Oh,” he said. “Are you going in?”

“In a minute.” She had not expected this furor. The town where they lived was small and quiet; people did not gather outside businesses to shout obscenities at strangers.

“Did you want to have me?” said Pluto.

She turned to look at him, heart in her throat. He gazed back at her guilelessly. She intended to say, “Of course I did.” What came out instead was, “I was very young when you were born. I didn’t know what I wanted.”

“Oh,” said Pluto. Rosie thought he might say something else, something profound and revealing about life, but he turned to the passenger side window and started knocking his forehead against it.

“Don’t do that,” she sighed. He didn’t stop.

Rosie finished her cigarette and started the car, making a U-turn in front of the screaming people with their signs. They drove back to the hotel in silence. As they entered, the clerk said, “It’s a star magnolia.”

“Pardon?” said Rosie. She had never felt so tired. The fetus, though still miniscule, was like an iron ball in her insides.

“That tree you were asking about, the one in bloom. I looked it up for you.”

“A star magnolia,” she repeated.

“That’s right,” said the clerk, “and it’s seventy-eight years old. Doesn’t look it, though, does it?”

“Yes,” said Rosie, “I think it does.”

*     *     *     

That night, she dreamed she had gone through with the procedure and was lying on a bed in a white room while doctors dug around in her belly with cold, bare hands. “No fetus in here,” one of them said, “but there’s lots of flower petals.” He pulled out handfuls to demonstrate and laid them on the table beside her, miraculously white.

“You’re not supposed to say ‘fetus’ anymore,” a second doctor told the first. “It’s too impartial.”

In the dream, she remembered that she’d left Pluto somewhere in the clinic, and she got up and covered herself in blossoms and ran out of the room to look for him. The hallways all twisted in on themselves like gopher tunnels. At last she found her son with the hotel clerk, both holding up signs. Pluto’s had a picture of an alien on it. The clerk’s said life is short.

“I’m very excited about our wedding,” the dream-clerk said. “I think you’ll find I’ll make an excellent husband.”

Rosie tried to explain that she was already in a relationship, albeit with a man who was married to someone else, but the words would not emerge in any intelligible way. All her life she had been trying and failing to explain.

*     *     *     

At 7:30 AM, in a light drizzle, they packed up their belongings and carried them out to the car. It was sandwiched between two identical black SUVs, with barely enough room to open the doors. She would have a hell of a time pulling out.

The man with the ugly dog walked by again. He was wearing a cowboy hat and suspenders, and he waved to her. Pluto said, “Morning, mister! Want to see me disappear?”

Rosie thought: this second child, too, is inevitable. And she didn’t know how she would manage, when she was already stretched so thin. She saw the young couple coming out of the lobby. The father was carrying the toddler in a bundle of blankets on his shoulder, and the mother wheeled their luggage. They were both laughing; they looked so beautiful in the rain.

She imagined sending Pluto with them. They were loving people. He would be safe and happy with them. He would have a future. She’d raised him all wrong, but the next one would be different. She could feel it.

“Look, Mom,” said Pluto. “I’m vanishing.”

“Sweetheart,” she said, “would you bring me one of those blossoms?”

DESIREE REMICK

Desiree Remick is a creative writing student at Southern Oregon University and the fiction editor of Nude Bruce Review. Her debut short story was the runner-up for the 2020 Chester B. Himes Memorial Short Fiction Prize. Her work has also appeared in Unlost, MockingHeart Review, and Gravity of the Thing.