Dirty Blonde

CHAPTER 35

Cate’s was one of the few cars on Route 61, which had been plowed and salted, its shoulders triangles of clumped snow. She felt fortified by a fresh cup of Mobil-station coffee, her windshield newly cleared by a cheap scraper. The route snaked around tree-covered hillsides into the town of Ashland, and she traveled the main drive, which ended in an immense bronze statue of Whistler’s Mother, sitting atop the peak of the hill. She looked away as she passed its pedestal, which read: A MOTHER IS THE HOLIEST THING ALIVE.

The road was a single lane each way, and the modest houses were built close to the street. She drove through the entire town in about ten blocks, then traveled straight up a steep grade and reached the mountain that signaled she had arrived home. A tall, white sign marked the spot, but it didn’t bear the town’s name. Instead, this sign read: WARNING-DANGER.

Cate felt an angry twinge inside her chest as she passed the sign, following Route 61 as it had been rerouted to the right, and traveled to the summit, where the school and church used to be, sitting across the street from each other like family at a holiday table. St. Ignatius Cemetery was off the road on the left; her mother was buried there, but Cate wasn’t ready for that yet. She drove ahead, down the valley, passing the abandoned landfill, where it had all begun. Locust Avenue, as this stretch had been called, used to be lined with two-story row houses, but the houses were gone. Cate descended into the valley and encountered a sight that looked like hell on earth.

The trees were dead, their tops stumps and their branches reaching brittle into the gray sky. Green street signs remained, jutting pointlessly from the new-fallen snow. Billowing smoke burned from various holes and wafted in white drifts that rolled across Locust Street. The smoke looked as innocent as the homey white curls from a chimney, but it contained carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and toxic steam. Its stench, acrid and sulfurous, seeped into Cate’s car; the odor defined her childhood, along with baking apple pie and Play-Doh. It used to make her light-headed, and her mother had been among the first to realize that it wasn’t her child who was sick. It was the town.

A fire had been raging underground for decades, fueled by a seam of anthracite coal that lay under Centralia and the surrounding towns. The fire started back in 1962, in the dump behind Cate’s school, and state and federal governments botched chances to put out the fire when it was still possible. As a result, row houses that had housed fourteen hundred people had been demolished, and the town had ceased to exist. Whoever said you can’t go home again must have been from Centralia.

Cate took a left, then another, driving up the street, the toxic smoke momentarily engulfing the Mercedes. She held her breath and pulled up at the top of the street, where her house used to be. Under the snow, only a rim of black asphalt remained of their sidewalk, and a sinewy trail of poison smoke snaked from where her living room had been. The gases had seeped in through their basement, causing her mother to fall asleep in her recliner at night. The Fantes were told that the gas levels were safe, but they still kept the windows open on the coldest winter nights and shared a gas monitor with neighbors, placing it in the basement, so that its alarm would wake them before the poison gas sent them to a more permanent slumber. Cate eyed the snake of poison smoke in the middle of the ghost town that was her hometown.

Time to go. She turned around and drove to St. Ignatius Cemetery, set among the bare trees. Steam rose everywhere around the graves. Local lore always held that the mine fire never reached underneath St. Ignatius, but Cate doubted it. Her mother had still wanted to be buried here. Cate drove through the gates, left open, but the asphalt road up the center hadn’t been plowed. She cut the ignition, got out of the car, and steeled herself. The cold air hit her fully in the face, along with the awful sulfur odor, and she flipped up the collar of her coat. She approached her mother’s grave, her jaw set and her chest constricted. She stood almost immobile at the corner, her feet in warm slush, reading a monument she had never seen before, because she could never bring herself to visit.

DEIRDRE FANTE, it read. APRIL 10, 1937-FEBRUARY 23, 1989. Underneath was BELOVED MOTHER, because that said it all.

Cate bowed her head, and her gaze fell upon the rounded monument next to her mother’s, a tiny, white angel, its cherubic cheeks pitted from the natural and unnatural elements in the air.

WILLIAM FANTE. JANUARY 11, 1970-JANUARY 11, 1970.

Cate’s baby brother, stillborn. He had been born severely underweight, his brain underdeveloped. Her mother didn’t have the heart for the autopsy, she would tell Cate much later. The cause of death was filling their nose, and making their eyes water, anyway.

Cate felt suddenly stiff as she looked at the miniature tombstone. Her brother’s birth and death marked the Before and After of her mother’s life. Before, her mother had been a vital woman, a natural force, a blonde of the flashiest magnitude, her star brightly set in relief against this dark, grimy mining town. Cate remembered her as laughing, dancing, and making jokes-before the baby was born, and died. Her mother never recovered, blaming herself, the gases, the mine fire, and the borough council. Her father left them just after.

Cate bit her lip, realizing she hadn’t brought any flowers for either of them. This cannot be was still all she could think, and then tears came to her eyes, too persistent to deny. She was sniffling, getting a snootful of sulfur dioxide, when she heard the sound of a car door slam. A red Toyota was parking in front of the cemetery, and an older man in a gray cabbie hat had gotten out. She wiped her eyes with her hand and heard crunching behind her as the old man made his way up the road, stooped and with difficulty. He seemed to be heading in her direction, and she moved aside to give him room to pass.

“Hello,” the old man said, giving her a friendly little wave, a pass of gray wool gloves with brown leather palms.

“Hello.” Cate wiped her eyes again, remembering that people in small towns always said hello. She had been in Philly too long. When he drew closer, she asked, “Am I in your way?”

“No, not at all.” The old man smiled pleasantly, his teeth even, and brushed back a sparse, flyaway white thatch that had fallen over his lined forehead. His light blue eyes flashed with liveliness behind his bifocals, and he had a bony nose, pink at the tip. “Pardon me, but aren’t you…Deirdre’s daughter, Cate?”

Cate’s felt her lips part. “Yes.”

“My, my. You have your mother’s good looks.” The man smiled again, offering his handshake. He was tall, almost six feet one, and too thin, even in a navy blue down jacket. He wore tan Timberlands with his brown slacks. “How nice to meet you, finally. My name is Ed Pell.”

“Hello, Ed,” Cate said, though she didn’t recognize the name.

“Deirdre was very proud of you. My condolences on this very sad day.”

“Yes, thank you.” Cate felt mystified. “How did you know my mother?”

“Deirdre was an old friend of mine, a very dear friend. We knew each other after you left for college.”

Cate thought back. “I didn’t see you at the funeral.”

“You were too upset to see anything that day.”

Mr. Pell’s eyes strayed to the grave, and Cate watched them move across the headstone, reading it. After a moment, he said, “It’s funny, all the fussing and the fighting, the things that matter so much in life, all come to nothing, in death.” He grew suddenly sad, the crease from his nose to his chin deepening. “Excuse me, would you?”

“Of course.”

He shuffled to the head of the grave in the snow, and Cate reached out to support his elbow as he leaned slowly over and placed a bouquet of pink carnations at the foot of the monument. “All my love, dear,” he said softly.

What? Cate had no idea who this man was, so she asked him.

And she almost didn’t believe the answer.