How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

  She sticks the key in the ignition, drowning out any answer I might possibly have mustered anyway. The Jellymobile spits and coughs but finally chugs to life, rivulets of smoke blooming in the tiny desert backyard, sending up clouds of dust.

  The girl-bug blinks and blinks. A mess, she says. A mess!

  Blood is blood.

  11 days, 12 hours

  THE NEXT MORNING IS Saturday. Shayna and I tiptoe around each other, not saying much in the Jellymobile. On the way to what is my mom’s favorite sell-point, Shayna stops at Grunyon’s for lattes. I see some kids from school inside, so I duck down a little in the front seat. The alpacas, John, Paul, George, and Ringo, stare at me steadily from beyond the fence with their sleepy eyes.

  Shayna stays in the Airstream a little longer than necessary, gazing at the alpacas through the window. I can see her standing there, sipping one of the coffees, and I wonder what’s got her so fascinated with John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

  At the sell-point, we unload our cooler of water and lunches and snacks, and I show her how to set up the hand-painted sign next to the truck, how to use the credit card machine, how to log sales in my mother’s favorite ledger.

  We unload the jars, arranging them inside the truck on the shelves. Shayna takes a long time making the jars look just so on the front counter of the sell-window.

  And then we wait. There are fans inside the truck to keep us cool, and a small air-conditioning unit hooked up to a petite generator.

  It takes about five minutes for Shayna to whine, “This. Is. Boring.”

  “I brought books.” I hold up two Stephen Kings, and Pride and Prejudice.

  She heaves a deep sigh and sips water, adjusting the brim of one of my mom’s hats. I’m not sure how I feel about her wearing something of my mom’s, but I stay quiet. I guess I want to keep things on an even keel after yesterday. I feel like we were close to something dangerous.

  “There are reservations out here.” She gazes at the landscape. Dry desert, blue sky, white puffs of clouds.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are there a lot of Native kids at your school?”

  “Some. My friend…Kai. He’s half Navajo and half Japanese.” It still hurts a little, saying his name.

  Shayna whistles softly. “That’s a helluva combination. Is it rough for him?”

  “I don’t know.” I think about the question. We’ve all been in school together forever, and Mesa Luna has lots of different kinds of kids, because it’s the only high school for miles, so tons of kids get bused in from other dinky towns, but maybe there are problems I never really noticed.

  “I mean, he never says anything about it, anyway.”

  “Well, did you ever ask him?”

  “No, I mean, he’s just Kai. His skin color doesn’t matter. His character does. We listen to the “I Have a Dream” speech every February during Black History Month.” I like listening to MLK’s voice streaming from the speakers in each classroom.

  Shayna snorts. “That’s some very hunky-dory peace-and-love shit, Tiger, but his skin color does matter. And he’s not Black; one ethnicity isn’t like, one size fits all, you know? You can’t just pretend color doesn’t matter because you think it shouldn’t, because you were born with white skin and privilege. And you can’t pretend to not notice racism because you listen to the one famous Black guy every single year. That’s not enough. There are terrible, terrible people in the world. Kai’s life will always be vastly different from yours.” She takes a sip of water.

  “Also, there was a significant pause between the words ‘My friend’ and ‘Kai,’ so it sounds like there’s something going on there. He your boyfriend?”

  My face reddens. “No! It’s not—”

  Her phone pings. She looks down. “Dude,” she says softly. “You. Will. Not.” She starts texting.

  “Who is it?” I ask.

  She grimaces. “Ray.”

  Ray again. Maybe I can get more from her this time.

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “Like I said, it didn’t end well. He’s not quite ready to say ciao.”

  “Why not? What happened? What’s he do for a living?”

  I went too far. Shayna gives me a look and changes back to me. “How far did you get with the Kai guy? You got all red, so I know there’s a story there.” She’s looking curious now.

  I slide my hat down over my face.

  “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Sexual intercourse is the bomb.” She laughs.

  “Stop! We didn’t do that! We just kissed! And then my—”

  “What? And then what?” Shayna leans forward, tugging her skirt down a little.

  “Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry

  “You kill me. Why are you so embarrassed?” She pokes me in the shoulder and then leans out the window suddenly.

  “Company. It’s go time.”

  Relieved, I show her the ropes. The couple who emerge from their camper have southern accents, they comment on the dryness of the heat, want to know how long we’ve lived here, what’s in the jams, how long can they be kept unrefrigerated, do we have a website, how lucky we must feel to live out in all this wide-open beauty.

  It goes on like this for the next couple of hours. Cars pull up every fifteen minutes or so; people get out and buy jams and drinks from the cooler. And Shayna can talk. I’m impressed. They love her, all these people, hanging on her every word. They think she’s funny and friendly. Someone tells her about her chemotherapy, and Shayna darts out from the truck to hug her. A man says he’s buying jelly for his brother, who’s broken a hip and lives in San Diego. They’ll eat jam sandwiches, just like they did when they were little, he tells us. He’s old. The brim of his straw hat is cracked, and his car makes an unpleasant sound as he drives away. I wonder if he’ll make it.

  Shayna clucks her tongue. “Poor old dude,” she murmurs. She checks her phone. “Ray! Gah.” Her fingers fly.

  Watching her, I feel happy and sad at the same time, because she’s like my mom in that way: people open up to her, they spill their souls.

  On the way home, she’s very chatty. The money makes her happy, I think. Or maybe relieved.

  She decides we should get pizza and watch movies, so we pick up some frozen ones at Stop N Shop with the card Karen gave us. After my shower, when I’m sliding pizza slices onto plates, she comes out of the bedroom in her sexy pink pajama outfit and settles on the couch. She has no problem sitting there, but I still do, so I tuck myself on the beanbag my mother got me when I turned twelve. It’s purple and yellow and reminds me of a cupcake.

  Shayna flips through the channels until she finds a movie with a lot of car crashes and bad language and we stay that way, watching movie after movie. I don’t eat much of the pizza, but Shayna doesn’t seem to notice.

  I’m thinking, while pushing pizza around on my plate, that I kind of feel okay about things, about her, and us, that things might be fine after all, like, baby steps, I guess, even if it takes a while, when my sister drowsily raises her head from the couch and peeks over at me.

  “I might drive into Tucson tomorrow. Borrow your mom’s car, okay? I need some wheels. Just to have a look around. That was cool today, out in the truck, but I don’t know if that’s totally me. We should keep our options open, okay?” She gives me a searching look, then drops her head back over the armrest.

  I tear the pizza crust into tiny, tiny, tiny bits.

  12 days, 16 hours

  CAKE STARES INTO MY closet. My sister’s in the front room, watching House Hunters and enjoying a close, personal relationship with a bag of potato chips.

  Cake says, “I can’t believe you never even looked in here. You weren’t the least bit curious?”

  I hold my pillow against my chest, trying
to sniff the air subtly. My mourning dress is taking on a kind of salty, deep smell. It might be time for another wash.

  “No. You knew Mom. There didn’t seem to be a point in snooping around. She was…” I search for the right word. “Intractable.” Another word from Hoffmeister’s class.

  “True,” Cake agrees, gently pushing some of my mother’s clothes to the side of the closet. “But maybe there are clues in here. She must have kept something.”

  Cake has spent considerable time Googling my mom’s full name and birth date. She’d called, on a whim, the University of New Mexico archive, where my mom used to work, and talked a woman named Laura into telling her a little about my mother.

  “She cried when I told her your mom was de—” Cake stops talking, glancing back at me, her face frozen.

  We stare at each other. “You can say it,” I tell her. “It’s not like it’s not real if you don’t say it. You know?”

  “It’s hard to say,” she says, biting her lip. “I don’t want to make you…” She stops.

  “Sad?” I say. “Too late.”

  Cake says, very softly, “Okay.”

  We stare at each other again.

  “Dead,” Cake says firmly. “She cried when I told her your mom was dead.”

  “There,” I say, trying to joke, even though hearing the word coming from her mouth hurts. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  We both know it is, but it’s like a hurdle we have to jump, I guess.

  She turns back to the closet. “She was her supervisor and said your mom was really nice, and a hard worker.”

  Her voice is muffled from inside the closet. “She said your mom had a boyfriend. That must have been your dad, and that they fought, and your mom left without notice and she never saw her again.”

  “But,” Cake says, emerging with a bag and inspecting the contents, “she also said your mom said she grew up in Phoenix. Did you know that?”

  I shake my head. I guess I always thought she was from Albuquerque.

  Cake looks up from the bag. “I mean, do you think she had a will?”

  I look at my Boxes of Mom, as if to ask her, Did you?

  Of course, she doesn’t answer.

  “Does a will cost money?” I ask Cake.

  “I think so.”

  “Then I don’t think my mom had one.”

  We smile at each other. “Good point,” Cake says.

  Cake pulls out paper bags labeled Christmas lights and Halloween and then crawls so far into the closet I can only see the soles of her Mary Janes.

  She backs out on her knees, the bottoms of my mother’s dresses falling over her face. “Here,” she says breathlessly. “Look through here.”

  “Those are just me,” I say, eyeing the brown shoeboxes she pushes toward me. “I’ve seen those boxes before. It’s just old school photos of me and stuff.”

  Cake does a quick run-through to make sure. She holds up my kindergarten picture. Missing teeth, puffy pigtails, that awful desert vista backdrop with the jackalope. Then she brings out a photograph of our class in the third grade, the year she moved here.

  “Mrs. Hervey.” Cake nods gravely. “She was the worst.”

  Mrs. Hervey was always telling Cake to sit down, but Cake was already sitting. She was tall, even when we were eight. And Mrs. Hervey refused to call her “Cake,” only “Katerina,” and so Cake refused to call Mrs. Hervey “Mrs. Hervey” and called her “Mrs. Mean” instead and it was not a good year, except for the fact that Cake became my friend.

  Cake stacks the shoeboxes and reaches deeper into the closet. Her voice is muffled by clothes and darkness. “I can’t believe you never snooped around. You’re, like, the most incurious person I know.”

  “That’s not true! I read,” I say defensively.

  “Incurious about real life, then.”

  I shake my head. “Again, not true. I just didn’t have a lot of chances.”

  Cake looks back at me.

  “You know how Mom was.”

  Was. It burns my mouth that I said that, that I made her past-tense.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  She comes all the way back out and swipes some hair from her face. “I would have been all over this, though, looking for some clue.”

  Here is what I want to say to Cake, but I don’t have the courage: Maybe I don’t want to unravel this mystery just yet. I’ve been through the biggest thing you can go through, losing a parent, and I’m not sure I can handle knowing more than I ever thought possible about my mother, especially if some of it turns out to not be so, well, good, like the possibility that she’d wantonly and knowingly stolen a married man from his family.

  It’s very hard to think of your parents as people. Full of bad checks and bad decisions, fistfights and broken hearts, all of it.

  Because if they can’t goddamn take care of themselves, how will they take care of you?

  And I’ve already met enough kids with parents who can’t take care of them. Or don’t want to. And if my mother’s only problem was that she wanted to take too much care of me, well, then I was lucky.

  There it is again. Was.

  I feel really tired all of a sudden. Like I want to be alone in my room, and not talking, and not treating my mom’s life like she’s an episode of Forensic Files or something.

  “Cake,” I say. “When are your parents coming back?” They dropped her off to go shopping in Sierra Vista.

  She grunts from deep in the closet. “I don’t know.”

  The ends of her purple hair are tangled against her shirt. Suddenly I remember the first time her mom let her dye her hair, when she was twelve. Cake had been having a tough year. Some kids were bullying her pretty hard that fall because of her weight gain, and she was starting to get angry, talking back. Rhonda brought home the dye and did it herself: bright pink with chunks of lime green. For some reason, having that unusual hair gave Cake some sort of strength. Kids looked at her differently, with a kind of awe. Some kids still tried to harass her, but she felt different, that was the thing. Kind of like what LaLa said, that people can get braver when they have on armor, like different clothes. Or dyed hair, in Cake’s case.

  My mom kind of disapproved of letting her have dyed hair so young, but Rhonda said, “Sometimes you need to let them make their own decision, June. They need to find a safe way to rebel or to feel special. I’d rather she start dyeing her hair than smoking weed or hurting herself because she feels hated.”

  In all my life, I’ve never gotten to choose my clothes or even my hair.

  I sink down farther in the bed.

  Cake emerges from the closet, a dust bunny stuck to her cheek. “Here,” she says. “This looks promising.” She hands me a wide blue box.

  I slide the lid off the box. On top, in round childish writing, someone has written, Property of June Tolliver. Open This Box Under Penalty of Death.

  Inside are photographs in plastic baggies, a manila envelope, and a folded square of newspaper. I shake open the envelope. Gold and silver medals fall out, along with some brightly colored competition ribbons. I smooth them out and read the cardboard tags on the back.

  1st Place, Dressage, June Tolliver

  1st Place, Beginner Novice, Eventing, June Tolliver

  There are so many awards. Some of the ribbons are huge, with big satin rosettes at the top. I run my fingers over the raised horse and rider on the front of one. In the baggies, there are photographs of a girl, sweet-faced and smiling, wearing a velvet hat with a roundish peak and a chin strap, and a cute businessy-looking shirt and jacket. She’s hugging the neck of a beautiful horse. She looks insanely happy. I peer closer at the smiling girl in one photo. My hands start shaking.

  The loopy handwriting on the back of the photograph says, June, age 9. Phoenix Invitational.

 
; I touch the girl’s face, my mother’s face, with my finger.

  I’ve never seen my mother as a child.

  She has a giant, shit-eating, I-just-won-this-whole-thing grin on her face. My mother, a happy little girl who rode horses. No wonder she loved the horses at Randy Gonzalez’s ranch. She’d grown up with horses. She’d loved them since she was a little girl.

  My heart hurts, and my eyes burn with tears. I look at the Boxes of Mom and think, Why couldn’t you have just told me this, this one memory? Why?

  Cake’s breath is warm on my cheek. “Whoa,” she says, taking the photograph from me. “Your mom was adorable. You have the same cheeks.”

  As I rifle through the shoebox, my mother’s childhood reveals itself: horses, and a red-brick, ranch-style house with a pool, and a curvy slide, and two nice-looking people named Ed and Crystal. My grandparents. The ones who died when she was in college.

  Ed wears glasses and has two pens in the pocket of his shirt, always, and Crystal has blond hair, like my mom’s, and she’s always holding a cake with candles, or handing my mother a Christmas present, or standing next to a big piece of meat on a grill outside.

  Grandparents mail you ironed dollar bills inside birthday cards, one for each year you’ve been alive. Grandparents give you butterscotch candies and soda when your parents aren’t looking. They raise you, at least as far I’ve seen in Mesa Luna, when your parents die, or one disappears, or maybe one drinks too much or gets hooked on drugs. There were always a lot of grandparents on parent-teacher conference day at Davidson Middle School, shuffling into the building in fuzzy slippers and too-big checkered shirts, squeezing awkwardly into those seats that attach to the desk.

  Ed and Crystal seem like nice people, from the photographs, and I feel a longing for them that I’ve never felt before.

  My grandparents. People who kept pens in their pockets, liked barbecue, and bought my mother a horse named Charlotte.

  Which I learn because there’s a newspaper article folded into a tiny square, about one of my mother’s wins, that she and Charlotte were on their way to some sort of championship in Texas. When the reporter asked about the name of her horse, my mother said, “Well, I named her after a character in my favorite book, Charlotte’s Web. You know, the spider? The spider and the pig are great friends, just like me and my horse.”