“Why do you think they’re involved?” she asks. “There’s not a real connection here. Ann’s sister dies and a month later Lionel does. I don’t get it.”
I take a deep breath, getting ready to explain it, but realize I can’t. “I don’t know either,” I say. “It’s a hunch. I know something is going on here. We need to talk to them.”
Helena is quiet for a while, I can hear her breathing on the other end so I know she hasn’t hung up.
“So we’ll go talk to them,” she finally says.
“How? I’m super grounded.”
“I have an idea but need to think it through. When do you think you’ll be back at the bookstore?”
“Ummm… Well… I had a bad day today, so definitely not tomorrow. Maybe Tuesday, Wednesday for sure.”
“Wednesday it is then,” she says. “I’ll see you then.”
33
Monday, July 18, 1977
I can handle food today, but only the bland and the boring: plain oatmeal, dry toast, a banana. I’ve got that fluey feeling again but not much of a fever. This symptom could be from the leukemia or it could be from the chemo or a combination of the two. It’s not that bad, my nausea is only mild and for me on chemo, that’s a good day.
My mom takes the day off from work—I told her I was well enough to be on my own, but she insisted. In some ways it’s kind of nice. We linger at the breakfast table and talk, the plain oatmeal left in my bowl congealing into an unappetizing mass of glueish substance. I clear it from the table and then we sit. I’m sipping chamomile tea and Mom is drinking coffee.
“You know, I’m really sorry about the craziness,” I say after the chitchat has died down for a while.
She smiles, it’s somewhere between rueful and compassionate. “It’s not your fault that you have leukemia.”
I nod. “Yeah, but not just that. The whole teenage thing…” I don’t elaborate, I know she knows what I mean. The sneaking off, the running away after seeing her and Doctor Rogers all kissy, the pushing on the wall of silence and secrecy that surrounds our family. And even by mentioning it, I realize I’m doing it again—pushing on the wall.
Mom looks hard at her coffee, it’s a nice tan color, she takes lots of cream but no sugar. It’s warm in the house but she’s still got on her big fluffy pink robe. “Henry told me to expect this,” she says, still not looking up. Henry is my dad, it’s a little odd for her to use his first name with me.
“What?”
She looks up and meets my gaze, a thin smile on her face. She’s still got those dark circles under her eyes which makes me worry. “He told me that if I stayed home you would want to talk about one of the five things you brought up yesterday.”
“I… Well…” I stammer, rolling the conversation back in my mind. I hadn’t actually asked to talk about those things, but I was building up to it. She had beat me to the punch. “We don’t have to.”
My mom is beautiful. Maybe all sons think that of their mothers, but I think on an objective scale that she must be considered beautiful. She’s got long brown hair and piercing blue eyes with well-manicured eyebrows above them (that women plucked their eyebrows sure freaked me out the first time I saw my mom doing it, not to mention the curling of eyelashes). She has an oval face with high cheekbones and expressive lips. All of this arranged symmetrically in a way that seems to be pleasing to the eye.
I know her face well, and as I study her reaction I see a variety of emotions at play. The fatigue from the last few weeks as represented by those dark circles I’ve mentioned. A shyness in the way her eyebrows twitch and her lips purse. An appraising gaze as she studies me, maybe having a hard time seeing me change in the ways I’ve changed recently. And then I see fear in those eyes. She’s scared. Of my Cancer, of course, but maybe at bringing these things out into the open, of wondering how I will take it. And most of all, fear of the future.
I’m taking a breath to speak again when she says, “No. It’s time. We do need to talk about some of these things.”
“Thank you, Mom.”
Her lips form the briefest sneer before she says, “Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t heard what I have to say.”
My exhausted body dumps a pitiful amount of adrenaline into my bloodstream as I feel the fear from that statement. My heart races a bit and I feel my blood pressure rise.
“But not right now,” she says, getting up. “I need a shower and I need to get dressed.” She looks out to our backyard. “And I need the sun for this conversation.”
My feet seem to be dragging as I come back down the stairs from my room. I took a shower, got dressed, and tidied up my room. The whole time one thought going through my head: What have I done?
Sure, I was getting what I asked for, starting those conversations that Helena urged me to start. But what would I find when the dark corners of my family were suddenly illuminated? My mother and her boyfriend. My mother believing me about ghosts. My third occurrence of leukemia.
The realization I had, felt deep in my gut while I made my bed, was that it couldn’t possibly be good stuff. I had gotten so upset I found out about the secrets, that my family wasn’t it the “Leave it to Beaver” family that I thought it was. Was I ready to find out what it really was? Was I strong enough?
When I go downstairs and into the kitchen, Mom is already out on the patio, the sliding glass door open letting in the warm air of the morning. It’s about 10 a.m., a pleasant time to be outside this time of year. Mom’s sitting at the table with two glasses of iced tea. She is wearing capri pants made out of a light denim and an old white button-up shirt. Next to her glass of iced tea are a pair of gardening gloves and the kneepad. She’s getting ready to pull weeds.
She doesn’t seem to notice me and I find myself staring at her. She doesn’t seem shy or nervous now. Her back is erect and she’s gazing out into our yard with a blank expression.
I take a deep breath and walk out, sitting in the white metal chair next to her. It affords me a good view of my old swing set, which makes me think of Pastor West and the Edwards.
“Where shall we start?” Mom asks, taking a sip of her tea, leaving a pink stain from her lipstick on the rim.
I blink and stare. It’s one thing to ask to be treated like an adult. It’s a whole other thing to be treated that way. She is asking me to lead, to start the conversation, to solicit the information I want.
Before the swing set got me thinking about Lionel, I think I would have asked about her and Dad. But, honestly, I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet. “Can we talk about ghosts?” I ask.
She bites her lip briefly and then scoots her chair so she is facing towards me. I do the same.
“Why not.”
I’ve said a bunch of times here that I don’t understand my mother, that it’s my father that makes more sense to me. Today I gained understanding for her and lost some for him.
“I saw ghosts when I was young,” she says, an expression on her face that kinda looks like a smile and kinda looks like a frown at the same time. “It’s that simple. That’s why I believe you.”
And there it is, short and sweet. I can’t speak.
“I was young when I could see them. It started around four, ended around six. There you go.”
Something’s not right. That weird expression on her lips, that fearful look in her eyes. It’s the truth, but not all of the truth. She doesn’t want to tell me the whole story.
“What did your parents think?” I ask. It may sound strange that I didn’t refer to them as “Grandma” and “Grandpa,” but I never knew them. They both died when I was very young. I think I might have met them as a baby, but I have no memory of them.
She blinks and her nostrils flare briefly. “You have to understand, this was Tallahassee in the forties, it was a different world.” Her eyes meet mine briefly and it is clear that she’s scared, that these are hard memories.
“Tallahassee is more Georgia than Florida. It’s the South.” Her voice is sl
ipping, some of the southern accent that you usually never hear in her voice bleeding through. I know this happens to her sometimes when she is scared. “Mama had a paddle, about this thick.” She holds her thumb and forefinger about three quarters of an inch apart. “It was four inches wide and had a few large holes in it, looking when I was young like some odd piece of swiss cheese.”
She takes a deep breath and drinks some tea and then looks at me. In her eyes is the question, “Are you ready for this?” I don’t know and I’m glad she doesn’t actually ask.
“Mama believed in paddling. It was the way we were raised. Don and I got the paddle when we were bad. She would whack us good on the b-hind and we would cry. It worked well for me, but not so well for your Uncle Don.” Her accent is full-blown southern now. It’s strange to hear her this way, maybe it’s the memories doing this to her.
“Tallahassee is older than Cedar and bigger. Lots of ghosts wandering around. There was one of a little girl named Adeline that was around my age, four, when I met her. She was haunting the house next to ours, and when I saw her, I thought she was just a normal little girl. She had this pretty little white dress on that never seemed to get dirty and her brown hair was made up so nice in these big curls.”
She pauses, her eyes looking out at our backyard, but far, far away.
“Adeline and I played and played. She told the strangest stories and—”
“Wait. You could hear her?” I ask.
“Yes. I could hear her and see her, just fine.”
“In the daylight?”
Mom nods and then continues. “But no one else could see Adeline. At first my mama thought it was cute that I had an ‘invisible friend.’ But then I started saying some of the things that Adeline had told me. Like that time Pa was drunk and slapped her hard after Don and I were in bed.”
My heart’s pounding. “Leave it to Beaver Land” is far, far in the rearview mirror. I miss the innocence of it.
“Ma was real religious, Southern Baptist, and prayed a lot. She was so mad when I asked her about it, I got the paddle right then and there and didn’t understand it. Before long I began to understand what Adeline was. What the other ‘see-through folk’ I came across were. I’d find things out. I would sometimes tell Pa or Don and it would get back to Ma. She would use the paddle on me, but not in the normal way. She would beat me with it hard on the b-hind and the back of my legs. It would leave bruises, horrible bruises. I would have trouble sitting for days.”
The summer light doesn’t seem so bright anymore and I take a sip of tea so I don’t have to say anything. I never thought I would find out something like this. Ever.
“She thought it was the work of the devil,” Mom says. “When the paddling got bad, I started ignoring Adeline, although it broke my heart—and hers. I stopped talking about them, and after a time, I stopped seeing them.”
She takes a deep breath and smiles at me, like she is trying to tell me that all that stuff was in the past and she is okay. But her eyes make it clear she isn’t okay.
“I… I’m sorry that happened, Mom,” I say.
She shrugs and gives me one of those fake smiles again.
“That’s why you freaked when I saw those ghosts when we were at the cemetery when I was four?”
She nods but doesn’t say anything.
It’s silent for a while, only the jangle of the ice cubes in our glasses and the sound of a car passing out on our street.
“Now, I have a question for you,” she says, her southern accent gone. “And I need the truth from you.”
“Sure, Mom. Sure.”
“You’re still looking for this ghost’s murderer, aren’t you?”
“Oh my god! What did you tell her?” Helena asks on the other end of the phone. I was once again in the pantry late at night sitting in the dark talking to her. I had filled her in on my mom’s ghost history. When Billy was over earlier, he had had a similar reaction, but it had involved liberal use of the word “shit.”
“I told her the truth,” I say.
“What… Wait… You did not.”
“I did. I had to, after what she had told me.”
There’s silence on the line and I’m afraid I’ve lost the connection, but I can hear her breathing.
“What happened?” she finally asks.
“We came to an understanding,” I say. I’m being deliberately vague. I’m kind of enjoying her surprise and want to draw it out.
“What? That you never leave the house again in your entire life?”
I laugh. “No. That I tell her everything we are doing. Everything we are planning. Everything we learn.”
“You’re shitting me.”
I shake my head. “Nope. Mom’s part of our little gang now.”
“Wait,” Helena says, “back up. Back way the hell up. Start from the beginning and tell me everything.”
I take a deep breath and tell her.
When Mom asks me that question, I can’t talk. I try to drink some tea to buy some time but end up aspirating a bit of it and having one of those awful choking/coughing fits. I thought that would get me out of answering but it doesn’t. After it is all over, she repeats the question, this time with a serious look on her face and her arms crossed in front of her.
“Yes,” I answer.
She nods. “Thank you for telling me the truth.”
I look at her closely. She doesn’t seem to be freaking out. Her arms are uncrossed, and she looks kind of relaxed. “You’re not mad?”
She shakes her head. “I am worried, though.”
“Well… I…” I stammer. “There’s good reason… I mean, I have to do this. I—”
She smiles and holds up her hand, cutting me off. “I heard your arguments for this when you told your father and I understand where you are coming from.”
“Okay…”
She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.
“I also realize that you have a thick head, just like your father.”
I nod, but don’t say anything. The proverbial cat is out of the bag and I’m not sure if saying anything else will make it worse or better.
“But I will make you a deal.”
“A deal?” I ask.
She nods and smiles. It’s not a real smile, but better than when she was talking about her childhood, so that’s something. A breeze comes up and plays with the stray brown hairs that halo her face and have escaped her ponytail. “You tell me everything you know, everything you’ve planned, and keep me in the loop on what you find out.”
I wait for more, but she takes a drink and stares out into the yard. “Um… that doesn’t sound like a deal.”
“Oh…” she says as if startled from a dream or something. “You do that, and I will handle your father.”
This is making me very uncomfortable. The breeze is warm and I’m sweating, the sun is starting to get kind of intense. The iced tea glasses are sweating too, covered in cool droplets of water. I bring mine to my forehead.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Fine. Just a little hot.”
She gets one of those pinched motherly looks on her face and hustles me into the kitchen out of the sun. I am a bit disoriented. I’m used to my father taking the lead on things. For him to tell me he’s going to “handle” my mother. It’s a strange role reversal.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask. “Aren’t you worried about the risk like Dad is?”
“Of course I am. But I would rather you have an adult you can call on than to be doing it all on your own in secret.”
“And Dad?”
She shrugs. “For now, we don’t tell him.”
I sip a little more of the tea. There’s no sugar in it, so it’s got a bit of a bite. It’s the way I like it. “Are you and Dad okay?” I ask quietly.
She gets a weary expression on her face and rubs her eyes. “Yes, Aaron. We are okay. Even in the best of circumstances marriages can be challenging.”
What she doesn’t
say is, These aren’t the best of circumstances. Far from it, really.
“There’s something you should understand about your father,” she continues, looking at me. I give her a nod. “He’s not comfortable with my emotions. Not the strong ones, at least.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s not unusual at all. But I bet you’ve noticed that women—your Helena, for one—express their emotions more often and with greater strength than you do.”
I smile remembering when I met Helena, her screaming at Jeff Tate out on Main Street in the middle of the night.
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” she says, leaning close to me. I can smell her rose perfume, which for some reason doesn’t trigger my chemo-nausea and never has. “Having emotions and letting them out is not a sign of weakness.”
I just blink, my mouth opens a bit. My mother’s treating me like an adult. She’s confiding in me. She’s telling me secrets of the female gender. I love it. It’s scaring the hell out of me.
“I’m stronger than he thinks,” she says, her arms crossing over her chest.
I remember Helena saying, Just don’t treat me like I break easy, okay? I think back to my parents’ relationship. My father seems to want to handle the difficult things. He wants to protect my mother and me from harm. That’s natural, isn’t it? I ask her about it.
“Your father does his best to protect me from certain things. And I appreciate that, I do.” She takes a deep breath and lets it out in a sigh. “But when it comes to you, I don’t want to be protected.”
Our glasses are almost empty, so I get up and get the pitcher out of the refrigerator and pour us both more. Mom thanks me with a pinched smile.
I sit back down and tell her everything I know. About the night Lionel Malak was killed. About the interview we had with Vincent Long. About what Pastor West told us about Joe and Ann Edwards. About how Helena is cooking something up for Wednesday.
A Boy a Girl and a Ghost Page 23