Mormama

by Kit Reed

  After Dr. Wood came, Mama turned her back on me and spoke to him in a voice so low that only he could hear.

  “No,” he said, and I did not understand it. “Only until she gets her period.”

  Then Mama said, as though she wanted me to hear, “And when she doesn’t?”

  He tried to make it sound as though he was joking, “Now now, Mrs. Ellis, let’s not trouble trouble until trouble troubles us.”

  I heard her hiss at him and thank God I couldn’t make out what she said.

  He scowled at Mama, or was he scowling at me? She put her head close to his, whispering buzz-buzz-buzz until he said, “Not in front of the girl!” and she nodded and thanked him and they left.

  After Dr. Wood went away, Vincent came upstairs with a hammer and nails and a special lock and Mama brought in Bella the seamstress to make Roman shades of white organdie to cover every window in the front bedroom. As though it was all right for light to come in, but nothing that goes on in here could go out. Like the thing that was starting to happen inside me was catching and it would poison the world.

  * * *

  Mama says I’m in here for my own good, but I know. I’m in this bed in the nicest bedroom because she never wants to see me again. Last night I asked, “At least let Papa come visit,” and she turned on me.

  “Dear Lord, Leah, you don’t want your father to see you like this.”

  For a while, my sisters slipped notes under the door for me, or one of them did, but Dakie died in the war and Randolph ran away and Papa never comes, and I don’t know if they hate what happened to me or they just hate me because they always did, and Mama doesn’t say. Tillie says Mama told them that visitors would upset me and it’s due respect, but I know better.

  * * *

  Last night Everett came up and pestered Tillie when she brought my supper tray. I heard that mean, weedy voice of his, “What are Leah’s symptoms, is she going to die, will I catch it, what if she infects us all?” Everett was too sickly for the army, too sickly to go to college, too sickly to go to work in Papa’s office down town. Even here in our very own house, he puts toilet paper down on the seat, he’s that worried about germs. He’s Mama’s precious, so she followed him upstairs that night although she seldom comes. She caught him outside my room. I heard her out there, playing on his fears to keep him close.

  “Everett Robichaux Ellis, you go back down to that dinner table and don’t come up here again. You’re in delicate health, darling, and your sister has a disease. It isn’t safe!”

  She cares about him so much that she caught him right outside my door but she never bothered to come in.

  This is how bad it is. Mama hates Mormama, but she won’t even let her come, even though she wants Mormama to catch something awful and die. If I really did have scarlet fever or the pox, that would kill an old lady, Mama would have said oh yes mother, you go right on in.

  The one time I asked she said, “Your Mormama is much too frail to be in here with you,” but then she couldn’t stop herself, she said, “She’d just be in the way,” and I thought: like me. One girl too many, she called me when I made her cross. No matter what bad things my sisters said or did, Mama always punished me. She would shake me hard, with her mouth all tight and her eyes all squinched up and her face too close, so only I could hear her hiss. “I swear, Leah Ellis, you are the last straw!” Then she’d smile for Everett and my spiteful big sisters who know I am the prettiest, “And don’t you forget it!”

  She didn’t want Mormama in this house any more than she wanted me and Mormama knew it, so we’ve always been close. The night after I got hurt down there, Tillie brought in my supper with a different smile, and she tilted her head and tapped the tray in a certain spot before she put it down on my lap. I lifted the napkin and found this very notebook, with my name inked inside the front cover in Mormama’s shaky handwriting, along with the date, so I know that at least one other person in this house loves me, and whatever happens, I have this to show.

  * * *

  These days Mama comes to my room only when Tillie pleads, and on these visits she makes it her business to say, “You are living like a princess in the finest room in the house,” but she is wrong. I am in prison here and Mama is bitter, bitter, as though this change in my body is happening to her, and when we’re alone she says awful things to me. Last night she said, “Stop complaining, idiot child. You brought this on yourself!” Then she left.

  I can’t help it, I cried. Tillie came in and put down the tray and sat down on the bed and hugged me until it stopped. “Honey, save your tears for better things. You were the very last baby, and it made her mean.” That’s what Tillie says, and I did, because Mama’s always angry.

  * * *

  When she comes to see me Mama wears a mask, although it’s clear now that my ailment isn’t catching. For the first few months I knew that in addition to the tearing, I was different, but she claimed I was contagious until my body stopped doing what it used to every month, so even I know exactly what I have.

  I have part of Laury growing inside me like a tumor that will change everything about my life. I started checking myself in the long mirror every night when the lines began to change. Then I stopped looking because I love Laury, and I don’t want him to see me like this!

  I will be beautiful.

  If he came tonight, good Lord, if he came tonight I would tear up these lavender sheets and make a ladder to let down to him; I would run out on the roof in my bare feet to join my only love, and then, and then …

  We met last June at Sallie Priddy’s summer tea dance, the first dance Mama allowed me to attend because Brucie Patterson invited me. She said, after all, the Pattersons are one of Jacksonville’s first families, you may want to … I don’t want to write about what she whispered to me then.

  The last time I begged her to let me go downstairs and live my life, she said, “Oh Leah, Leah, look at yourself! No decent man will want you now!”

  Oh, but that afternoon at the yacht club, they did want to look at me; I saw their heads come up. I saw them trying to get my attention as soon as we came in. I had on my yellow organdie, and this handsome boy was heading my way as Brucie Patterson trundled me onto the dance floor, he was trying so hard, that suitable, fat old thing. My handsome boy pushed Brucie aside so fast that my head rattled!

  And I knew. This one was important to me. He pulled me to him with that smile, and with such force that I fell in love. We danced and danced until Papa cut in all of a sudden, which is not done, and right in front of everyone Papa whirled me out the door and to the far rail of the veranda, harshing into my ear. “He’s a bad lot, Leah. You’re well away.”

  Then he rushed me through the garden and bundled me into the Nash.

  But I saw Laury again, I knew I would. When you are in love, you find your ways. Notes, tucked in the second urn under the porte cochère. Necessary visits to the archaeology section of the library. Accidental meetings at the next party and the next, and the next, and whispered promises; our one sweet night in the wood room underneath the big back porch. I know he loves me and I know his baby will be beautiful, and if he doesn’t come for me soon, I will take the note I’ve written on the last page of this gift from Mormama, I call it my book of sighs, and I’ll make Tillie take my note to Vincent to carry to the cigar store that Mama so disapproves of because Mr. Archambault Senior is the proprietor. Tillie loves me and she and Vincent understand too well that it’s a private, personal matter, specific to Laury and to me.

  Then my beautiful Laury will know that it’s nothing he did, and I’m so terribly, terribly sorry that I screamed. Then he’ll come to 553 May Street and take me away and I’ll never have to think about it again. Oh Laury, then you’ll come back and sneak up to the frilly guest room and pick me up and take me out of this ugly life in this terrible house; please come get me, Laurence DuBois Archambault. Come back, my dearest love. Come back to Mama’s house and find your way in over the front porch roof, for I am
her prisoner up here, and you, and you alone can save my life!

  Then I’ll get shut of this miserable bedroom and run free with the man I love. We’ll get married in Valdosta tonight and go on up the coast as far as we can, go house-hunting in Savannah or get the money to buy back Mormama’s old house in Charleston, where we can be happy, the three of us all alone.

  Oh, Lord it’s time. It’s way past time. I’ll ask Tillie to take it to Vincent tomorrow. I don’t have anything to give her but she loves me, so she will. I don’t know how long it will be until Vincent gets his day off and he can deliver it, all I can do is hope that it reaches Laury soon.

  Until then, all I can do is write in my book and wait for this part to end.

  * * *

  Oh Miss Leah, Tillie says, and she’s been crying. Bad news for the city of Jacksonville. They’re burying that nice Mr. Archambault today, Miss Manette threw away the newspaper so you wouldn’t know. She done made Vincent burn all the letters so’s you think he ran away.

  Then Tillie cries out for all of us.

  Honey, a car mashed him into the railing on the downtown bridge!

  * * *

  So if this thing inside me isn’t Laury’s, if it’s a malignant tumor and not the last, dear part of Laury Archambault that I have left in this world, I hope it gets big enough to split me wide open and kill me dead.

  Mama and I will both be glad.

  CHAPTER 18

  Lane

  “Poor Leah!” She’s back. She was here from the second I put down the book. I won’t see her, but I know.

  She is your great-great grandmother.

  Mormama, in my personal space. No point telling her to go away, Lane. Say the obvious. “Terrible story, but. What does it have to do with me?”

  You are the last girl in the family line. As though she knew we were coming before we did. As though she engineered this to destroy me, she says, Get out while you still can.

  “I’m trying!” Yes I am pissed off at her.

  This rips into my brain like a bolt of ice: I’m not the only soul trapped here.

  CHAPTER 19

  Mormama

  I tell them and I tell them, but they won’t listen to me—unless they can’t hear me at all.

  Children, the house smells new blood.

  The last of dear Leah’s descendents, but she won’t give me the time of day. The girl turned on me in her fury of denial. “Go away!”

  Yes you are still a girl, at least in this dimension. So much for you.

  Now, you …

  Boy, wake up. Wake up or I’ll snatch you bald-headed, you hear? I’m not the talking scarecrow that you think I am. I’m warning you!

  Go ahead, fool. Put your head under that pillow and pretend that you don’t hear.

  I’m telling you.

  Little Manette was born with a greedy spirit. Get. Take. Keep. I can’t swear that my daughter embodied, or was, or became the element that keeps us here, but it grieves me to tell you that it entered the house with her on that first day, and it entered my daughter on her first day in the world.

  Now, here we are.

  In the matter of Little Manette, I have been less than forthcoming. Yes, she emerged from me in a rage. She tore out of me with a vindictive screech. Yes I thought the racket would never end, and until Mother swanned in with her velvet cloak and that ridiculous golden reticule, it did not. She swooped down on the child and took possession.

  That baby stopped howling the second my mother picked her up, mesmerized by her perfumed charm, and I thought My God, my God. Then Mother, who never had a soft word for me, rocked her, crooning, “Manette, my Little Manette.” She stamped my daughter with her given name. Passing it down like a gypsy curse, and I could swear the evil passed between them, dark and visible, like smoke.

  Little Manette was never mine. She was just something I had.

  I knew it and she knew it too.

  Mother sealed it with the locket. It was a little gold heart. Little Manette was born with her grandmother’s lust for luxury. Mother took over, bringing out the worst in her. Together they had the power, but it was in the matter of sweet Billy, my adorable little boy, who loved me so much, that the monstrous emerged in Little Manette. Then.

  Oh, dear God, I am not ready to tell you that.

  Hush, boy. I was never here. Now, go about your business.

  I am not ready to talk about it. Yet.

  CHAPTER 20

  Dell

  Now that he has everything he wants, he doesn’t want it. He wants all the electronics to go away. The toxic flash drive. The laptop he scored. It’s charging via a network of extension cords he ran from a socket behind the ancient glider on the back porch tonight, snaking it through the floorboards to here via openings he made at the crack of 1 A.M., when even Ivy was asleep. Hey, he did all that and brought it this far with nothing but a Maglite and a multipurpose tool. He took his time pulling cards out of the motherboard, carefully cutting his new machine off from the world before he plugged it in.

  Belt plus suspenders, he thought when he switched it on. Disable wifi in Settings. Laptop, you will never know the Internets. Do this one job and then you die.

  Then habit kicked in. He needs to teach the new machine all the tricks he’s taught every PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone he ever owned as soon as he opened the box. Dude, you know a lot of shit you forgot you knew. Take your time. Never mind that as soon as you’re done doing what you have to do, your new toy is junk. This is who you are. He dinks until he gets everything just exactly how he wants it. Wait. There’s more. He messes with this, tries that— until there’s nothing left to do but start.

  He stretches, temporizing.

  OK then. Stick this flash drive you never asked for and do not want into the USB port and find out what …

  Stick it in. Retrieve memory. His mouth floods, the way it does before he has to heave.

  Long night, getting everything the way he wants it. He probably needs coffee first. The screen glares at him in the dark. You’re showing too much light. “Shh,” he says, and shuts it down.

  It sits there on his upended carton like a live grenade.

  Not today, man. It’s probably too late to start. Do this when you’re fresh. The bitches shuffle out at first light and you need silence to do what you have to do. As in, nothing going on to break your concentration, no chance of the kid busting in or some unknown element … What? Head injury last winter, remember? Everything in your head blurred. You need to be sharp when. OK then. Tomorrow.

  Conscience needles him.

  Today, after you get coffee? No way. Too many distractions out there. Truckers bring their rigs into the lot next door whenever. All that backing and filling. Air brakes. Plus yard men and garbage guys come into the neighborhood early, people all up in your face. Big racket. Leaf blowers: sandstorm and flying weeds. Shut your new toy down and wrap it in plastic, secure it until.

  For crap’s sake, get coffee, you’re too fucked up to think. It makes no sense to do it in the Ellis kitchen, either, but he’s too scattered to go out. He skins up through the hatch outside the dining room and enters the house, transits via the pantry, scopes the silent kitchen: no problem, it’s cool.

  Dell is standing over the big gas stove just before dawn, willing the water to boil when, oh, shit!

  A dry a-HEM rivets him: the sound of an old lady hocking up gobs. The spoon he’s holding flips before he can drop it into the folded paper towel he’d fixed to filter his coffee, and the family’s stale Maxwell House flies. Stale, but, hey, any port in a— never mind.

  She hocks up words. “Who’s there?”

  Oh, holy crap. No need to ask, it’s Ivy, he can tell by the hum and the double thud as her scooter noses over the sill. Too late to douse the stove. If she screams, he’ll have to— he doesn’t know what he’ll have to do. He says, “Hey. It’s me.”

  “What are you doing here in the dark?”

  He counters. “It’s four o’clock in the
morning. What are you doing here?”

  This time she hocks until gunk comes up. Then she says through her fingers, “They forgot.”

  He doesn’t want to know what that was. Busying himself with the coffee, he says, “How could that happen?”

  “I’m sad to say they forgot about me.”

  He turns; it’s OK, she’s folding it into a handkerchief and shoving it up her sleeve. “Are you all right?”

  “It happens all the time.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “What are you doing in here, puttering in the dark?”

  “Making coffee.”

  She brightens. “Well, let’s have a little light on the subject.”

  “Don’t!” Can she reach the switch from that scooter? He doesn’t know. Think fast. “Want some?”

  Ivy scoots into the kitchen. “That would be lovely.” Old. She repeats these things because she’s old. “Let’s have a little light on the subject!”

  “Shh!” He flicks on his Maglite. “We don’t want to wake them up. This is our secret.”

  She giggles. “Our secret! And the Russian tea biscuits would be lovely too. Right there on the counter, in the tin! And when we’re done, you need to wheel me back where you found me and clean up as though this never was, and we were never here.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Theo

  Mormama is getting weirder and weirder, wow. You don’t rightly see her face, you probably won’t ever, but she’s definitely real, and now that we’re getting used to each other, she talks to me. Usually it’s like lunchroom gossip, except with relatives instead of other kids. She’s been around forever so she’s full of stories, which. It’s almost fun.

  Some of them, I don’t even want to know.

  She shows up in my room and just starts telling them, and you never know which kind you’re going to get.

  It started the night Mom and me got back from Staples and the skinny old great-whatevers pounced before we got in the door. They were all, “Where were you Little Elena, where did you take our Teddy, we were worried to death about him!” and, “You leave without telling us one more time and we’ll put you out on the street,” while Ivy ran her scooter back and forth in front of them with her face all up in a twist, like she was protecting us from death or dismembering, and it didn’t matter what my mother said, it just got worse and worse.