How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

  She answers, “Go shower. Dad’s calling you. In exactly twenty-three minutes.”

  I stare at her, my heart soaring and falling all at once. Her face softens. “Hurry. He only gets ten minutes.”

  My heart thud-thud-thuds like a hammer in my chest all the time I’m in the shower. I pull on my clothes, nice ones, simple stuff. Tank top, shiny basketball shorts that feel great, and comfortable. Shayna got them when she went to Tucson to get the utility stuff straightened out and to open a checking account. She stopped at the mall on a whim, she told me.

  “Next time,” she’d promised, “when we’re there and settled, you’ll come with me. School clothes, right? Probably not all at the mall, because that’s pretty expensive, but I found some good thrift stores. But you can pick your clothes yourself, okay?”

  I wait by her phone. She’s discreet, staying in the bedroom, cruising her laptop.

  The phone rings. A nasally voice says, “You have a call from the Springer County Correctional Facility. Will you accept the call?”

  I say, breathlessly, “Yes,” just like Shayna told me to.

  Dusty Franklin says, “Hey, Grace.”

  My dad.

  My goddamn dad.

  I say, “Hi.”

  There’s a big pause.

  He says, “I’m sorry about your mom.”

  He says, “It’s all real hard to talk about, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry about everything. Grace. That’s a pretty name. Your mom had a good way with words, you know?”

  “I know.” My hands are shaking so badly the phone is knocking against my cheek. There’s so much to ask, but I don’t know where to start, or what to ask, exactly, and we only have these few minutes.

  “I hear you’re a reader. Your mom was a big reader, too. Me too. I read a lot in here.”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence.

  “You used to be a teacher,” I say.

  “I did. I was good at it, too, until I wasn’t.” He pauses. “Things get away from you sometimes, and you can’t get them back.”

  I don’t know what to say about that.

  The silence is hard. It almost hurts.

  “Will you tell me about her sometime? Can I…can I talk to you again?” I ask.

  His voice is gruff. I think he might be crying.

  “I would like it if you’d call me, Grace. I’d like that very much. I can tell you some things you should know. Yes.”

  A voice cuts in. Two minutes.

  I blurt out, “Tell me, Richard Pryor or George Carlin? Kiwi or avocado?”

  And he’s off. His voice brightens. He says “Oh boy, that’s not hard for me. I mean, Pryor, all the way, am I right? I love Carlin, he’s so bright and angry and spot-on, but something about Pryor was so intense, you know? Especially after the burning thing. And don’t get me started. Avocado all the way. Kiwi is an aberration.”

  He takes a breath. “How do you know all that stuff, anyway? The comedians. You’re way too young for them.”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s just in my blood.”

  He laughs, but it’s kind of sad sounding.

  “I’ve got to go, Grace.”

  “Okay.”

  “You take care.”

  “You too.”

  The line cuts out.

  I know he’s done bad things. Hurt people. Messed up a lot. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t matter to me, to the puzzle of my life. He has a place somewhere with me and within me, he’s a piece.

  My sister comes out of the bedroom.

  “All good?” she asks.

  “All good,” I answer. “It’s all good.”

  65 days, 17 hours

  ON THE DAY SHAYNA and I are finishing up the packing for the move to the new house, I find The Video.

  Bonita thought it might be a letter, one on crinkled paper, that my mom would leave me. A letter Cake scoured the closet for.

  But it’s not anything like that, at all.

  Shayna’s out to Cucaracha for carne asada burritos and Cokes and she left me in charge of cleanup. The moving company, or, as Shayna prefers to call them, “the Three Amigos also known as Grunyon, Boots, and Chunk,” are set to arrive any minute, ready to bumble around, break our lamps, bend our curtain rods, drop boxes and shatter plates, and mostly destroy whatever else we own while shoving it in a truck Grunyon bought on Craigslist, determined to start his own business.

  What they don’t kill putting in the truck will surely die a thousand deaths on the trip to Tucson, where our meager belongings will be installed in a corner adobe of a six-unit courtyard in a run-down neighborhood near a Pep Boys, a bowling alley, and a bar called the Bashful Bandit.

  At that very moment, Cake and Thaddeus and Mae-Lynn are in the adobe house, scrubbing toilets and cabinets and doing some last-minute painting.

  Cake has declared the house “cute as all get-out and I can’t wait to stay over and go thrift shopping on Fourth Avenue with you!”

  I stand in the front room, boxes piled against the wall, broom in my hand. Mr. Pacheco certainly isn’t going to give us our deposit back, I’m sure of that, so I’m not entirely set on how much cleaning I really want to do. The little pine kitchen table is piled high with boxes; my bed’s been taken apart and the mattress and frame are leaning against the wall.

  This leaves the couch. The last thing in this world—in our house, anyway—that held the body of my mother.

  We aren’t taking the couch. Shayna and I haven’t discussed it, exactly, but after she signed the lease on the house and took an inventory of what things we’d need to get at thrift stores and on Craigslist, and what we should leave behind, she casually said, like it was no big deal, “The new place has a pretty big living room—I mean, compared to this one—with one of those round fireplaces, what are those called, the cute ones—”

  “Kivas,” I’d said. I’d been stacking books, sorting ones to go to the Bookmobile. Rhonda was going to drive the bus now. Cake would be her assistant.

  “Yeah. So, I was thinking, maybe a sectional? You could have space to stretch out, and I could have space? All at the same time? I mean, I think you’re cool and all, but I don’t want you on my lap.”

  And as casually as she said her part, I said mine.

  “That sounds good. Perfect. Roomy.”

  I heard her breathe a sigh of relief as she crumpled a package of Little Debbies and went on sorting dishes and cups. I didn’t know if she could hear my sigh, too.

  I’m glad to leave the couch. I’m glad to move, to be honest.

  I take a deep breath and push aside the couch my mother died on to sweep beneath it, and that’s when I find her cellphone.

  The one we haven’t been able to find all summer. The one I keep leaving voice mails on, because I’m lonely, and want to hear her voice.

  I sink down to my knees, my heart in my throat.

  I scoop the phone up in my hands and scramble around my backpack for my charger. I practically stand above it, willing it to charge faster. I mean, I don’t know what I’m looking for, maybe I just want to see her photos, or our texts, or something, but as soon as I start scrolling the gallery, there it is.

  She didn’t write me a letter telling me everything she’d kept from me. She made a video. And there it is, plain as day, the only video on her phone. And when I press the white arrow, my mother floods back to life.

  Hi, Gracie, she says, and my whole world shivers and splits.

  There she is, my pretty mom, her spiky blond-and-gray hair, her pink cheeks that always got pinker when she was upset. She’d propped the phone up on something in the red kitchen and was sitting on one of the barstools. I can tell by the cookbooks behind her on the kitchen counter.

  My mother takes a big breath an
d her eyes get really wet and she says, “Baby. Tiger. If you’re watching this, I’m gone. And if I’m not gone, and you are watching this, you have a very, very macabre sense of humor, my dear girl.”

  She says, “Before I start, I need you to know, wherever I am, I am with you, Gracie, I promise you. I will always be right next to you, even if you can’t see me, okay?”

  I feel the way characters do in fantasy books and movies. Like when tremendously powerful forces move through them. Like, giant lightning storms or thunder clouds of electricity or power, or something like that, whips through the person, momentarily paralyzing them, and then when it’s done, they fall to the ground, hollowed out, and usually another character rushes in to find them, and picks them up, and takes care of them, and looks all around, like, What the hay just happened?

  That is happening to me.

  I am paralyzed, watching my mother, hearing her voice, her words thundering through me, a great and powerful force filling the comically huge hole in my heart.

  My mother has been gone for exactly 94,620 minutes, and yet she’s been right here all along.

  And then something else happens.

  Teddy said at the group home that sometimes you have to open your heart to the miraculous.

  When I reach a trembling finger to touch my mother’s face as she talks to me from the past, the screen kind of ripples, and she pauses, smiling in an amused way, and moves her head just so, right at the moment when my finger touches her cheek on the screen.

  Like she can feel it.

  She says, in an entirely different voice than moments before, a voice that sounds like she is right here in the room, and not 109,270 minutes in the past on a cellphone video, Hey, you.

  Like she’s here.

  The life in her voice races through me.

  And the whole force of touching my mother, and seeing her eyes glisten as she feels me, too, rips through me, and I crumple to the floor, carved out by the universe and my sorrow and this whole new world that Mae-Lynn calls Grief Life, in which I can touch my dead mother through a cellphone and she feels it.

  That’s where my sister finds me, the video still going. She drops the sack of burritos and sinks down next to me, feeling my head for blood or a fever, breathlessly asking me what’s happened, until she sees the video, my mother’s voice a tinny, ethereal thing, still talking, as she tells me everything I ever wanted to know and they are so many words filled with pain.

  Died when I was eleven, not in college. Nobody wanted me. Passed around relatives for years. Just a shoebox and a suitcase.

  Never rode a horse again. Never wanted to lose you. Had to keep you close.

  My sister says, “Oh. June.”

  She turns off the video and wipes away my tears. She pats my back and hugs me as I sob so hard I think my ribs might break.

  I will never be able to tell her my mother was alive again, for just one moment. She’ll never believe me. But that’s okay.

  My sister says, “It’s too much, honey.”

  And she’s right.

  Sometimes you’re so hungry, so thirsty for something to fill you up, you’ve craved it for so long, but when you finally have it, it hurts going down. It’s not a medicine for what ails you. It might just be the thing that is keeping you sick.

  All the things I wanted to know about my mother are right here, and I’m not ready.

  Shayna says, “I’m here, Tiger. I love you. I’m gonna take care of you, okay?”

  And then she tugs on my hair gently and says, “Come on, kid. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home.”

  ON THURSDAY NIGHTS, I sit with twenty-six other people in the basement of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. I’m writing this, this, well, whatever it is, or will be, I guess a primer, because the woman who runs our grief group says we need to find outlets for our sadness. Our grief. Our ghostly feelings.

  So I’m filling composition books, one so far, with things I want to remember.

  Twenty-seven of us sit in the basement of Our Lady of Guadalupe, twice a month, on hard and squeaky chairs, clutching teddy bears.

  Lupe Hidalgo comes with me. I still don’t know the whole story of her brother, Crash, or what led to his suicide, but one thing I have learned from this group is that people need time to say what they need to say.

  When people die, it’s like they kind of take your ability to form words with them. You come up empty a lot of the time.

  The very first meeting we had, the leader, Felice, asked us, “What would you say to your loved one, if you had just one more chance, just one?”

  The basement of Our Lady was dim. The bulbs in the ceiling lights needed replacing. The children’s chairs for Sunday school were stacked in the corner. Plastic bowling pins and balls spread across the floor. I didn’t know what they were for, exactly. Were we supposed to bowl for salvation? I was still a little confused by my new life, to be honest, and sometimes, frankly, my thoughts drifted.

  Lupe and I are the youngest people in the group. There are people who’ve been going here for years, who’ve lost more than one person, which I can’t imagine surviving, then or now, because after someone dies, what more do you even have left inside? What more can possibly be taken from you?

  I mean, for God’s sake. Come on.

  Some people started to cry after Felice asked her question and some people ducked their heads over cardboard cups of coffee or tea. It was always someone’s job to bring the coffee and tea. A platter of tiny and sugary cookies. I was still new, so I hadn’t had a turn yet.

  People murmured, I forgive you.

  They whispered, I love you.

  They said, You don’t have to worry about me.

  My fingers trembled in my teddy bear’s fur. I always picked the same one: a grungy-looking brown thing who was missing one eye and had lost a leg. Where the leg was, there was just a tiny patch of denim.

  The last thing I said before they took me away from my mother was this: Please come back. Please don’t leave me. I will always remember that.

  I didn’t say this out loud in the group, though. At that time, I hadn’t said anything yet. Felice told me that was okay, too. “Words come when words come,” she said with a shrug.

  There was a silence and then Alice, the oldest person in the room, cleared her throat. Alice has watery eyes and fluffy white hair and favors sweatpants and sweatshirts with glittery stars and flowers. Alice lost her mother when she was ten. That is a whole lifetime without a mother, to get used to not having a mother, and yet here she is. All these years later. Still grieving.

  Alice said, “Write me a letter telling me how to live for the rest of my life without you.” She paused.

  “That was sixty-four years ago, and I still would like to know.”

  I’m writing this down because someday I will be Alice, with a whole lifetime spent without a mother, a lifetime of walking around with a Grand Canyon of grief in my heart, and people should know what that feels like.

  * * *

  • • •

  Shayna’s AA meeting is next to the church in a run-down office building. A dental office is on the ground floor, a tax person on the third. Her people meet on the second floor.

  After, we go to dinner at Denny’s. Lupe always gets the Philly cheesesteak. Shayna gets the Caesar salad and a giant ice cream sundae, at the same time. I usually get a bowl of soup and some crackers. I’m eating more, but not a lot.

  My sister and I, we can be quiet together, eating, and it feels okay.

  It’s a little family, but it’s ours.

  * * *

  • • •

  Sometimes Shayna and I drive around the city, trying to get our bearings. She waits tables in the morning, and when I get home from school, she’s still wearing her apron, counting her tips.

  We go to Eegee’s and get brightly col
ored icy drinks and drive. She likes to drive toward the Catalina Mountains on a series of curvy roads with long wooden fences and lots of trees.

  There are horses there, grazing, and a sign that says Lessons.

  I miss Opal with a fierceness that feels hot and alive, and someday, I am going to come back to this place, and get a job, and be with horses again.

  Because that is in me, for real, and I got it from my mother.

  * * *

  • • •

  My new high school is a lot bigger than Eugene Field. Sometimes I feel really lost, walking the halls, my books against my chest. I wonder about all the kids, and what kind of homes they go back to, the people who are supposed to care for them. Are they like Thaddeus and Leonard and Sarah? And me? Cobbling together families with what we’ve been given? Making homes from scraps.

  Parents shouldn’t die before their kids get old, but they do.

  Parents shouldn’t beat their kids, and break their backs, or lock them in dog cages, or let them live in cardboard boxes by the 7-Eleven, but they do.

  I don’t know how to live now, knowing what I do, but I have to keep going.

  Sometimes I feel like those guys in that weird play Hoffmeister made us read.

  I think about what those two odd guys said.

  You must go on.

  I can’t go on.

  You must go on.

  Because what other choice is there, really?

  You have to make friends with the dark.

  * * *

  • • •

  I feel like I was one girl before my mother died, and another girl after, and now, at the end of this story, still another girl, crawling out of the jar, but keeping her wings close.

  There’s so much I wish I didn’t have to know about living.

  ONE NIGHT IN GROUP, we talk about what I was wondering about, way back at the beginning of the summer.

  If your dead come to you. That.

  Phil is in his thirties. His face is gutted from teenage acne and he wears a black leather vest bearing the insignia of his motorcycle club. His forearms are a testament to ink and time spent in jail. But he cries when he tells us about spooning vanilla ice cream into his mother’s mouth just before she died, because she wanted to taste sweetness one last time. Her cancer made eating incredibly painful, and nearly impossible, at the end.