“You feeling well enough to hike in the morning?”
“Doctors say exercise,” Mom said, rubbing her swollen ankles. “They say rest, and they say exercise. The hell.”
I stayed on the porch after Mom went to bed, watched the sky above the canyon fade to black, the stars begin their shimmer. When I was pretty sure she was asleep, I got my computer, which I still plug into the phone modem here in the canyon. My brother, Andy, a former cop, is in state prison. He was convicted of falsifying evidence in a number of local cases down in Loveland, lying under oath. For a while, before he got caught, Andy was the big man on the force, the go-to, the crack investigator who always got the bad guy. Mom was so proud of him, her reputation elevated by his. Andy still denies the charges, claims innocence, but I'm pretty sure he did it. The danger of investing in reputation alone is that it's easy to put it above a sense of ethics. Andy wanted to be the best crime-stopper so badly that he started to invent criminals to stop, didn't see until it was too late the way that made him a criminal himself. I don't condone the choices he made, but I understand them.
Mom took Andy's side, the last person to recognize that he really had gone crooked, even as the evidence stacked up. Bobby Jackson wasn't cooking meth at the old sugar mill. Sally James did not embezzle any funds from the United Way. I try to give Mom credit for doing the right thing eventually, calling Andy out, but her sudden shift seemed cowardly to me, a move made solely to protect her own reputation from the downfall of his. The worst part of all of it is that Andy's wife, Leah, has to raise their little boy on her own now. She lets Mom and me take Tyler to McDonald's every so often, but she can't forgive us any more than she can forgive Andy. Mom gets indignant about that, but I don't blame Leah one bit.
I pay the fees required for me and Andy to send emails back and forth, or at least, for me to send him emails. I write about the doctor's visits and the prognosis, about Mom's dry cough and how much weight she's lost. He almost never responds. A few days ago, I wrote about myself, about the pregnancy, and when I pulled up the system, he'd gotten back to me.
Wish I could be a fly on the wall when you tell Mom.
I closed my laptop, buried my face in my hands. Andy never cared much about feelings. Not mine. Not anyone's. “This is tough love,” he'd say, his face heavy, emotionless. “You'll thank me someday,” but I don't. Life is hard enough without everyone you love trying to harden you further. When my baby is born, I'll be all marshmallow. Feather down. Fleece. I'll be the softest thing my baby touches, the softest thing that touches her.
I HAVE A FLOOD story about Mom, too, a different one, but I don't tell it to anyone but myself. When Dad left us in January of 1990, it hit me differently than it hit Mom, in that I felt, generally, that I was better off without him, a feeling I've managed to project onto the men I've dated since, none of whom have stuck around long. Mom kept food in the fridge, drove us to school, put on a brave face at the library. Everyone admired her strength in adversity, but at home she stared out windows, absent, her body with us but her mind gone cumulus. I turned fifteen that year, on Valentine's Day, a few days before the giant molasses tank in the Great Western yard ruptured, sent a knee-deep flow of molasses, glacial and viscous, across Madison Avenue, which was much less glamorous than it sounds, the bankrupt sugar mill on one side of the street, a well-kept little trailer park on the other.
I will admit that my memories from childhood, even those teen years, are shady at best, but I do think the moments I remember at all are the moments that built me. One early teenage Easter, I wore the dress I'd worn the year before, because there was no money for a new one. When I came downstairs, my father choked on the beer he'd taken to drinking with breakfast, and said to Mom, not to me, “She's not going to church looking like some sort of whore,” and then he stormed out to the lawn chair he kept on the front porch. Dad got laid off from the sugar mill the same time everyone else did. He had been distant before, easily irritated, but the layoff turned him mean.
I pulled at the seam of my skirt, trying to stretch it past mid-thigh. Some sort of whore. Mom shook her head. “He's right, Lottie. That dress is a goddamn invitation. Go change.” I'd had no idea, in that moment, what I might possibly be inviting.
I remember Dad catching a Whitesnake video on MTV, Tawny Kitaen dancing on the hood of some car. Andy had turned it on, was practically drooling, but Dad pointed at me and said, “That's nothing but cheap,” as though I were the one doing the splits, turning my come-hither eyes toward the long-haired glam rockers.
Later, when celebrity gossip told us Tawny's marriage was on the rocks, Mom nodded like she'd known it all along. “She'll have a hard time finding anyone else with that reputation. Don't forget, Lottie. You are the choices you make.” I think about that all the time, the impossible bar Mom set for me when I was nothing but a confused teenager, all my inevitable bad choices still ahead of me.
During the molasses flood, we got stopped behind a blockade of fire trucks, police cars, even an ambulance, though the lights weren't on and the paramedics were outside, standing around with everyone else, shivering. We joined half the town, all of us out of our cars, lined up along the edges of the flow, mesmerized, speechless. Molasses fumes and frigid air stung the inside of my nose. Dogs barked in the distance. I drug my toes, pinched into Andy's old moon boots, across the cold asphalt of the road. The molasses had picked up a worn tennis ball, the soft green fuzz almost glowing against the amber liquid. I felt an urge to grab that tennis ball, to rescue it, but I didn't want to go knee deep into the molasses. Mom shivered, and I did too, imagining myself trapped in the suckery flow, the entire town watching from the sidelines, all of us sick from the fumes, from the inevitable sticky mess.
Our town, Loveland, makes a big deal about Valentine's Day, like it somehow belongs to them, like if you name a place for love, there will be more love there, which is objectively ridiculous. It still happens, a tradition. The Rotary Club sells big red plywood hearts in town every February, and you can pay to have things like Liz and Albert 20 years or I ♥ Tony spray-painted on them in white stencils. Dad didn't get Mom a heart, that year or any year, and I hadn't told her that my boyfriend, Jason Alles, had paid the thirty dollars to get one for me.
“Don't expect anything else,” he had said. “This is Valentine's and your birthday—two birds, one stone.” The heart said Jason + Lottie 4-eva, and the 4-eva part wrapped anxiety like iron chains around my heart. Jason had been my first kiss, New Year's Eve, and now he wanted sex. He'd started out with sweet, declarations of love, I'll take care of you, baby, but the longer I held out, the meaner he got. There's plenty of girls calling me, Lottie, who know a lot more than you. I knew what Mom would say, that I'd invited this, that I'd put myself in this position, that I'd already made myself that kind of girl. Still, I wanted something from her, some pearl of wisdom I could use. I didn't want to give Jason up. Mom was lost in some sort of funk, and Andy was nearly as mean as Dad. Jason's attention came in like high tide just as my family receded. Mom never gave me the language I needed for that moment, and I was too young to learn to speak it on my own.
“Hey Mom,” Andy said, pointing up at my heart, “check out what Lottie's loser boyfriend did.”
Mom looked long enough to register, but then her eyes dropped back down toward the molasses. The road was a mess of molasses and debris from the trash piles outside the mill, old fence posts, broken pieces of brick, warped brake rotors, a box spring. All of it was soaked, coated, heavy and disgusting—sticky as all hell. I willed my mother to look my way, save me, show me how to save myself. She grabbed my arm hard then, pulled me back from the crowd in slow, smooth motions so that nobody would notice a thing. It was everything I wanted, her full attention.
“You're smart enough to know better than Jason Alles,” she said. “That whole family is nothing but trouble.” I'll never forget how cold Mom was in that moment, the ominous scratch of her whisper,
the absolute threat it contained. “And I'll tell you what else. If you get pregnant, Lottie, I'm going to make you keep that baby. And it will Ruin. Your. Life.”
Maybe Mom was terrible in that moment, but I was too. “You're just jealous,” I said. “If you are your choices, then how do you explain Dad?”
You can't take words like that back, Mom's or mine. They are always something you said, forever.
Mom turned her back to me, rejoined the crowd. The molasses was slowing as it cooled, settling in. It captured the pattern of the sunlight and lightened in honeyed rays. It was as hard to look away as it was to keep looking. My breath left my body as a howl, but I must have been the only one who could hear it, because nobody but Mom took any notice of me.
Mom would never recognize herself in my story, but that doesn't make it less true. There are some floods that threaten to suck you under, carry you away, and some floods that trap you in a way of thinking. Mom has both her feet in molasses, stuck forever with the version she tells herself, which is that she did everything she could to protect me, that she was always carrying me up some tree, that I was always, always, resisting her.
IF YOU WANT TO hike in Rocky Mountain National Park in the summer, it's best to rise early, beat the crowds. The sun was just up when Mom and I parked outside the Wild Basin Ranger Station, cinched up our hiking boots. A mangy-looking coyote scampered across the trailhead and disappeared into the pines. An invisible mountain bluebird sang its dawn song, unmistakable in its repetition: one clear high note and then a trill down the scale. The plan was to make it to Calypso Cascades, not quite two miles, one-way. I only ever chose the out-and-back routes now, no more loops. With Mom, I needed shortcuts, a clear way back.
“Morning, Lottie. Beth.” Ed Mayne was a park ranger, mom's age but hearty, rugged. Ed and I weren't always in the same trainings at work, but when we were, I liked to sit next to him. I liked the way he crossed his arms in front of his chest, glared at whichever bureaucrat was leading the trainings, started almost every contribution he made with “With due respect” in a tone that made it clear he had no respect at all. “Keep an eye out this morning. Got reports of an aggressive moose near Copeland Falls.”
“Bull?” Mom asked.
“Cow,” Ed said. “Twin calves.”
Mom and I both nodded, waved Ed away. We started along the trail, silent except for Mom's wheeze, which she gets now with any movement, walking from the living room to the carport, from the bedroom to the kitchen. She hides her pesky cough well enough so far by sucking on LifeSavers. There on the trail, I saw her double up, pineapple and cherry at the same time.
“You're going to rot your teeth,” I said. “Isn't there another way?”
Mom laughed, a cackle. “My teeth,” she said, shaking her head. “Only you, Lottie.”
“I'm worried,” I said, knowing it was the wrong thing to admit. Mom saw worry as a sign of weakness. Worry has no place in the tough love philosophy.
“I'm not going to live long enough for my teeth to matter.”
“You could,” I said, my own heart suddenly ponderous and full, my own systems blocked. There was a rustling in the brush. A cold patch of air, the kind that gets trapped by conifer needles, dislodged and passed over us both. Mom shivered. We both turned, expecting an angry moose, but whatever it was, it was invisible to us.
“Lots of ways to deal with this, Lottie,” Mom said. “Denial's the worst choice.” Her voice was harsh, her eyes rolled, and I felt my belly sinking away from my lungs. I have always hated the way she speaks to and about me at the same time, the way she has of making me feel small and ashamed even when I know better. I thought then, as I had so many times before, that if she were not my mother, I would not spend time with her at all.
We arrived at Copeland Falls, snowmelt water tumbling off low boulders into a churning pool of white water, the river flow gentling quickly as the bed widened, smoothed. It's a small waterfall, relative to others, the crash and foam still loud enough that we had to half shout to be heard above it. All but the loudest noises in the forest drop into the rush of the water, which focuses any scattered sensory attention on the unrelenting press of water against rock.
We weren't even a half mile from the trailhead. Mom had gone pale, her dry cough muscled past the candy. We sat on a downed tree, and she covered her mouth with a white bandanna. When she pulled it away, the phlegm was tinted pink.
“From the candy,” she said. I wanted to shove her own words back into her mouth, ask her who was in denial now, but instead I pulled her into a side hug, felt her body relax into mine.
“Mom,” I said, “I'm pregnant.”
Her shudder ran electric along the side of my body. “By who?” Which was of course the first thing she would say.
“Ed Mayne.” Not that I hadn't thought about it, with Ed. I'd made honest efforts with the other available men in the canyon. It was a shallow pool, sparsely populated. There were plenty of moments when Ed looked just as good as anyone else.
Mom pushed away from me then, her eyes flashing. “That old goat. He knew you in diapers.”
“I'm kidding,” I said, waving my hand uselessly in the air, giggling, feeling my face burn red. Mom's lips were pursed, no hint of smile in her whole body. “Jesus, Mom. It's not Ed. It was a cowboy passing through town with the rodeo last month. A one-night thing.”
“A cowboy?”
“What? He was.” I had no plans to tell her about his wedding ring. He hadn't bothered to take it off, and I had been so grateful for his rough hands on my belly, my thighs, for the respite from my wholly unintentional celibacy, that I didn't ask questions.
Silence. Mom was stone-faced. I felt desperate, fluttery. I wanted to be able to describe the thorny truths of my life, to have Mom accept them without judgment.
“You seem a little old for a lesson in contraception,” Mom said.
“Shit happens, Mom.”
“If you let it, Lottie.”
I stood then and walked toward the water, arched my back into a stretch. I caught the staggered song of a dipper bird, its joyful bouncing along the river's edge. Dippers make hunting look like dancing, keep their life requirements playful. There's a lesson in it. I took a deep breath, turned back toward Mom. “You're not even a little happy?” I asked.
“That's not the point,” she said. “This is a hard road you're on. You need to find this rodeo clown. For the money, if nothing else.”
“Cowboy, Mom. Not clown.”
“You think you can do this all alone?”
I thought of the pink phlegm on Mom's bandanna, the fluid collecting around her ankles, her congested, gummed-up heart. “Looks that way,” I said. “Looks like I don't have much of a choice.”
“Look harder,” Mom said, doubling over into a coughing fit gone totally out of control, and I added this reaction to my list of things I want to forgive but can't.
I HAD SEX WITH Jason for the first time underneath a set of bleachers on the football field. The early crocus bulbs were in bloom, the grass starting to green its way out of dormancy, but the nights were still frosty, cold air that burned bare skin. I'd snuck out. I remember that it hurt but not that bad, that Jason made fun of me for not knowing how to manage a condom, that the bright white of the moon seemed ominously far away and too close, moonlight so bright it blocked out the stars. Back home, I hid under my bedcovers, thinking that was it, I'd never get to have that night again, my virginity gone forever to the wrong boy in the wrong way. I felt all the shame I'd been taught to feel, resigned to the loss, bound by it, like that one yes meant yes to every future encounter, like I'd lost the right, somehow, to say no ever again. You are your choices. I took a bath so hot my skin stayed red for an hour after.
Mom was at the kitchen table with a plate of buttered toast and a mug of black coffee, watching a squirrel devour the seeds she'd put in the bird feeder.
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“Morning, Mom,” I said. Everything felt awkward, new, like I had been taken apart and reassembled, all my joints just a little off where they once were.
“Sleep well?” Mom asked.
I scanned her face, trying to see what she knew, what she guessed, but she was inscrutable.
“Not really,” I said.
Mom smiled, shrugged, turned back to the window. Nothing was going to happen. I didn't know whether the adrenaline rush I had then was terror or relief.
Jason took to coming over pretty much every night. My room was in the basement. I'd unlock the back door after Mom went to sleep. We'd have hushed, quiet sex, and he'd sneak back into his room before his dad got home from the night shift. I wanted it until I didn't want it anymore. It felt like something separate from me, like I was watching an unrecognizable movie version of myself. I have trouble explaining all this, even to myself, even now, until I remember that I was only fifteen. There's no explaining the naked human frailty of fifteen.
I tried saying no one time, but Jason put his hand over my mouth, entered me anyway. I know he heard me, but he never acknowledged it, and I didn't confront him. After that, it was less heartbreak to pretend I wanted it than to say no, have to endure him taking it anyway.
At school, Andy punched my shoulder. “Heard you been writing love letters,” he said, “heard they're all about how much you love having Jason Alles inside you.”
I had to struggle to stay upright, fight the urge to curl my whole body around the tightening I felt in my gut. “I didn't write that. I wouldn't ever.” Jason. Jason wrote it. I knew the truth of it right away, what it meant for my reputation.
Andy was a natural skeptic, but I think he recognized something honest in my reaction. “You swear?”
“Of course I swear. Who do you think I am?”
“Not the same as I thought you were yesterday,” Andy said. “Nobody thinks of you the same as they did yesterday.”
I nodded, prepared myself to absorb this new person the world believed me to be. I didn't confront Jason, because it was exactly what everyone always told me would happen, something I believed I deserved. I watched the crocus fade, the daffodils and tulips bloom, the buds on the tree branches swell and pop open, the dandelions, half bright yellow beauty, half jagged green weed, carpet the backyard, where the neighbors couldn't see them. I started leaving the door locked so Jason would have to knock on my window, make a racket. I craved the day Mom would walk in on us, the day she would show me how to end it. I wanted a reboot of Mom's flood story, wanted her to drag me, screaming, ungrateful, into the safety of the pines.
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