Mormama

by Kit Reed

  It was Saturday, and my little Teddy … Oh, dear God, my dear God, where were you that day?

  I don’t know what he stood on to reach the top of the pier table or how he got down without breaking the bowl, but he sneaked out the back door with Dakin’s matches while John’s back was turned, and by the time we came home the screaming had died and then … and then …

  “No!”

  What’s that? The boy cries out in his sleep. “Oh, lady, you don’t have to say it!” As though the first Teddy inhabits him.

  Oh, yes. I do. You know full well that I do.

  Dakin had them rake the spot and pour cement over it the very next day, as though anything could protect Teddy now. We stood down there with the servants, Dakin and I and his remaining children, everybody but Everett and, of course, Manette, to see it done. We stood and watched as the men edged the cement and scored it, and we had to stand there and wait for the cement to dry so nobody would try to carve initials into it, do you understand?

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  Teddy is here among us. I know. In my grief I knew, and that night I knelt down on the ground and I made him a promise. I will take care of you.

  “What?”

  Take care of you, child.

  Oh Teddy, oh child, I thought that when I died, I would lift you up and we could fly up to God’s kingdom together, free at last, but that was more than a hundred years ago. I left my body a long time ago, but I’m still here. There are too many souls trapped here in Manette’s monstrosity, along with scraps of my lost boy, the last bits of hair and bones and the soul of my poor, dear Teddy, sealed into the cement. All those years, and I must stay for as long as I am needed. No. For as long as this loathsome house still stands.

  CHAPTER 44

  Theo

  Mormama was all up in my face again last night, she dumped a shitload of words on me, like a stealth bomber zoomed down and trashed me in my sleep. It never stopped, she wouldn’t go away, talk about death sitting on your face. I still don’t know what it was about, but I think I yelled at her at the end and I know she barked at me. Whatever, old lady. I’m over you.

  Plus, it’s early as fuck, her barking woke me up. At least the rain is gone. Half past sunup and I’m bang awake, which totally sucks.

  I’d rather sleep, because in my not-a-ship’s-cabin in this dusty house that smells like death and mildew, this is how you keep your crap life from killing you.

  I lie there halfway between sleep and real life, and I pretend that I’m anywhere better than this, like I’m in my bed back in our real house that the bank took, or I could be up in Atlantic City with Dad, I mean Barry.

  As long as I stay in this half-life called somewhere better, he didn’t leave us, it was government orders and he had to go. They sent him on a secret mission, he just came back from Special Ops and everything is fine and tomorrow I’ll wake up back home in my own bed, just like before.

  But I won’t. It’s the fucking crack of morning and I’m bang awake in their shitty old house, with my guts screeching and no way home.

  OK, Mormama, did you really yell at me on purpose or did all that stuff come out of you accidentally, like vomit or shit? No idea what she was telling me, no idea what it meant, I just know that we’re trapped, and she says …

  She says we have to get out. Like, how?

  Get up, stupid. Plan.

  Gotta warn Mom. Help her pack up her stuff pronto, and make her hurry. Go ahead and tell her what Mormama said. She said get out of this fucking house before the Big Bad comes down, and do it fast, and if Mom thinks I’m crazy? Tough. We have to go. If we have to sleep in the car and live on rainwater and crap food out of machine cities in crap gas stations to make it, OK, fine.

  It isn’t safe.

  “Damn straight!”

  The house rocked and creaked all night and I twitched every time I heard another crash, all, what’s that? It was probably shutters banging in the wind or junk flying around, but the worst part is, the rain stopped some time last night but the noise is still going on. Stuff cracking, like the foundation just heaved.

  The storm moved on and the sun came up like it’s supposed to, but I can hear their house shifting and groaning like an old, old person that got sick of carrying us and now its joints are so bad that it can’t sit down.

  Child, stop dithering!

  “OK, OK!”

  She’s a fucking ghost, asshole, get a grip. Go downstairs and shove food in your mouth, you’re not dead and everything is fine.

  It’s so early that I can probably snag a box of Pop-Tarts and the milk carton and get away clean before the aunts bushwhack me with fried Spam on oatmeal, or old Rosemary dishes up something even worse.

  Take it out front and eat while you scope the terrain. Which shutters fell off. Whether any of the junk that the wind threw around last night landed on our car. Go on down to the street and pull it off before Mom sees it. Then go wake her up. Be cool about it, so she won’t think you panicked. Get up and get ready, Mom. We can’t stay here.

  Weird.

  The first part is easier than I thought. You know, grabbing food. No aunts on the main floor, not a sign of them, not even Aunt Ivy whimpering like she does on days when they forget. You can hear her through her bedroom door down here but you’re not supposed to go in and check on her because she doesn’t want you to see her like that, but if she was in there crying and I walked on past, I would just feel bad.

  Today she’s not anywhere, so, cool! Plus, there’s an unopened box of raspberry Pop-Tarts sitting out here on the pantry counter, just asking for it. There’s milk in the fridge, but, yuck. Sour. No water either, as it turns out, at least nothing you’d drink, just thick brown used-to-be water with gunk floating in it. Good thing this is our last day in this heap. So I’m thirsty, but it’s OK. I do what you do when dumb things happen. I open a hundred-year-old can of pineapple slices and throw out everything but the juice and take the can and the carton out front.

  So I’m cool, it’s all cool, the house is still rocking like the wind never died but I’m cool with that until I open the front door. Everything looks OK, but it isn’t. Flood water’s mostly gone, nothing bad fell on our car but, holy crap, there’s mud all over the street and mud filling up the gutters and creeping over the curb, and this isn’t just an annoyance, it’s more like a disaster.

  Mom’s hatchback is up to its fucking knees in mud.

  Don’t panic, Hale. Sit down and eat. Think. Shovels, you need to find out where they keep the shovels and if they don’t have any, steal Mom’s running-away money and buy them at that creepy corner store. Then get Dell out here to help us dig out the car.

  If that sun comes up the rest of the way like it usually does, by the time we’re done packing, it turns half that mud into dirt. Sun dries up a foot or more mud before we start to dig, and that makes it easier, right?

  So, what if it takes all day? With three of us on it, we’re cool. Yeah, I said three. Dell owes me. I left the damn note for him. He owes me, and he will damn well help us dig. Shit, we’re his ride out of Jacksonville hell. There are suits on his tail. Those feds or whatever came around twice that I know of, and they’ll be back as soon as the city’s Zambonis or whatever vacuum the streets. That means, run. It’s all in the note.

  Plus, his father forgives him for that thing he did.

  Whatever it is. I underlined that part in the note. Fuck yes he’ll dig us out. Then he and I will throw our backs into it and push until Mom gets traction. Then we catch up with the car at the corner and jump in.

  If he saw the note.

  If he came back last night.

  If he came back last night and saw the note.

  Part of me wants to go down there right now and check on him but it’s too early, and you can’t just walk in on a guy like Dell. Piss him off and he flips the knife, which he did so fast that you don’t even know if you’re still friends. Last time it was just a warning.

  At least I think it was.
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  This is bad.

  Wait, Theobald, Theophane, Theophilus, Theodorus, Theodasshole, shit!

  Chill. The dude didn’t come back last night, why would he. Dell is not stupid. He would have waited it out in a warm, dry place. He’ll get coffee before he heads home. Just sit here and wait. Your man Dell will be coming back from wherever soon. Give him a minute to go into his place and find that note. Then you can, like, wander down and knock because last time, you didn’t, and that was your mistake. Your big mistake. Give him five minutes to read your note and forgive you. Then …

  Wait!

  What’s that?

  CRACK. Holy fuck! The trees! That whole row of trees at the far end of the porch, the tall ones that hide the truckers’ parking lot? They’re fucking shaking!

  CRACK. The surface of the earth breaks. Shit, no way! Then, shit, shit!

  The trees just, they just … WHAM!

  Drop. Bang out of sight.

  “Mom.”

  The whole freaking house shudders, but the noise coming out of the hole where those trees stood a minute ago? The sound that the mess of sliding rocks and gravel makes following the trees into deep nothing? Just. Stops.

  Like God electrocuted us.

  Except I’m not dead.

  Run to the end of the porch, asshole.

  Asshole, look.

  I’m afraid to look.

  CRACK!

  “Mom!”

  Everything on the far side of the driveway is gone.

  “Mom!”

  CHAPTER 45

  Lane

  A scream knifes through hours of work and anxiety. It penetrates my thin layer of bad sleep. Theo! It lodges in my heart, quivering, and I jump up.

  “Theo!” Is he all right?

  But I hear my boy shouting all the way up the front stairs, “Mom,” on every step. “Mom,” “Mom,” “Mom!” He comes pounding along the hall, trailing words that I can’t make out. We smash into each other and stand, shaking, shaking.

  “T!” Not dead. Not hurt, thank God.

  “Ow!”

  “What’s the matter?” I run my hands down his arms, testing. “Hold still!”

  “Outside!”

  “What is?”

  “Everything, Mom. It’s gone!”

  “Theo, let go!”

  But he throws his back into it, tugging me along. “I can’t!”

  He has me thudding down the front stairs behind him. On the bottom landing, I dig in. “I said, let go!”

  Then my boy turns on me with a glare that I will never understand. He grabs my shoulders like a crazy person, all spit and fury.

  “You don’t get it. Half the planet is gone!”

  He leaps the last two steps and runs outside. OK, kid, OK. I don’t know what to be afraid of but I run after him, although from here, it doesn’t look that bad. The front yard is trashed about the way it always is after a Florida storm, more or less situation normal, except for.

  “Oh, shit. The car!”

  “It isn’t just the car.”

  Weeks of anxiety on no sleep, followed by this insane wakeup call, OK, I turn on him, screaming, “You woke me up for this?”

  I don’t know when it happened. My boy is taller than me. He stands over me, glaring, with his hinged jaw hanging like a furnace door. With both hands he turns me and points, roaring loud enough to wake up the world. “Not that, Mom. OVER THERE. Half the planet is gone!”

  My God. My God!

  Where there used to be a tall green line of Florida cypress trees rising between 553 and the cyclone fence, the tin shed and the truckers’ parking lot next door, there’s nothing. Correction. The trees are gone. The fence between us is gone. Half the parking lot next door is gone. The columns that support our old porte cochère are standing on the verge of a gaping hole.

  On the far side of the rim, what remains of the trucking company’s property lies on a gradual slant, which means that whatever chunk next falls off the earth will probably drop off the Ellis property, porte cochère, driveway, hedges, then …

  How fast do these things move?

  “What is it, Mom?” Theo is a live wire, borderline panicky.

  Deep breath, Lane. Be matter-of-fact. “Sinkhole. Like on TV.”

  “Mom, Mom! What the fuck?”

  Calm, lady. Calm. “Theo, you didn’t get this in school?” Yeah, I overexplain. “See, this is at sea level. The whole state of Florida is layered. Layers of topsoil over a layer of dirt over a layer of I forget, oh, crap, they built a lot of Florida on fill, like, they dredged up…”

  He grabs my arm. “Stop.”

  But I’m going all kindergarten teacher on him. “Anyway there’s a limestone layer at the bottom, that holds everything else in place…” Oh God. “Look. Has anything else moved since it fell?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know!”

  “Shh, honey, it’s cool. You’re cool, it’s just.” It takes all my strength to keep him in place. I use factoids to calm him down. “See, whenever it floods, which it does a lot around here, a little more of that limestone washes away, until…”

  “Mom!”

  Hang on, don’t let him know how scared you are. “It’s OK, These things don’t happen overnight,” I tell him, although sometimes they do. “You’ve seen it on TV, like that one that swallowed up all the cars? Lots of times these sinkholes take days to finish. It could even take weeks, nobody knows how fast this one will go.”

  “Mom, shut up. We have to get out.” T. says the obvious. “We have to get it out.”

  And I don’t get it. “What it? You mean the aunts?” The aunts I was supposed to love and never liked. Hateful Iris, in her wretched walking cast. Rose and Ivy. Ivy. “I suppose we do.”

  And my son turns on me. “Not them, asshole. The car! I’ll get shovels.” Then my boy surprises me. “And Dell.”

  The car is a lost cause, but I say, “Dell? How?”

  “Not sure.” T.’s face changes colors: ashen to red. “He might be in his place.”

  Play dumb. I know. I’ve always known. Before I can say, “Don’t bother,” he’s on the run.

  By the time I reach the back door he’s halfway down the steps, yelling, “Emergency, emergency!”

  Then, from the far right, I hear, “Tell the child not to bother.”

  “Ivy!”

  She’s down at the end of the back porch where naked sky replaced the line of trees, serenely watching the progress of the void. She turns to me, smiling. “His lovely friend isn’t down there any more…”

  “Shitshitshitshit”: Theo, pounding back upstairs.

  Ivy is sweet, so very sweet. “But he nicely rolled me out here before he went.” That smile!

  T.’s face does that thing that breaks my heart. “He took everything except my note.”

  I do what I can. “He’ll be in touch.”

  Ivy lights up. “He will, he will!”

  “Fuck no he won’t.”

  She says kindly, “He will, dear. He hasn’t gone far.”

  “Let’s go back inside and get started,” I say, trying to figure out what to do next.

  All of a sudden my big boy looks smaller. “OK.”

  “It’s cool, we’ll be fine. Give me a hand with Aunt Ivy, OK?”

  He’s trying. He says, “Sure.”

  Then Ivy looks up at us with that smile that makes her so different from her dread sisters and says, “No thank you, I’m perfectly fine right where I am.”

  I look at her, at the no-trees, at the yawning earth where the property ends. Does she know what this is? Does she know what it means? I think she does know, sitting there with a mass of knotted scarves and ribbons and, I think, clothesline in her lap, cradled between her knees. “Are you sure?”

  “Lovely morning, children,” Ivy says, and it is, except for the yawning sinkhole. Is that thing bigger? I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t want to know but Ivy knows, I think, and for the first time since I came back to May Street, she looks
perfectly happy. “I’ll just wait for him here.”

  T. says darkly, “But he’s gone.”

  “Why, no, Teddy. Your friend is right here.” Ivy makes a beautiful smile. “He’s upstairs in the attic, dear.”

  “OK, Theo. That’s it. Let’s do this.” I buck him up the way his father would, all man-to-man, pulling him to my side because we are the corporation now. Mother and son against the world. Do what we have to do, and the rest will come later. I love you, kid. “Let’s go.”

  But in the doorway, he turns on me. “I can’t.”

  I grab his wrist before he can pull away. “Where do you think you’re…”

  He tugs, but I cling. We are up against it now. “Attic, OK?

  “It’s not OK.”

  Then he jerks free. My son Theo, in command. “You get your stuff. I’m getting Dell!”

  CHAPTER 46

  Dell

  Crazy, but it’s steamy up here: direct sunlight on the sodden roof, he supposes. Deep inside the attic at the top of the creaking house, Dell crouches in front of the heap of objects he rescued from the rising sludge in his hideout at ground level. He’s here under orders. She. It? I am a presence. It said, Put it back.

  He’s been here all night.

  Thinking, if you could call it that.

  He won’t need any of this stuff. He won’t take Dakin’s journal with him when he leaves this place because given what he knows now, it is useless to him. He’ll put it here for her. He won’t take his stolen laptop or any of the other items he wrapped so carefully and taped inside layered garbage bags to keep them safe. They’re foreign objects now.

  He neither needs nor wants the mysterious flash drive the so-called suits were so crazy to retrieve; they’re just his father’s tools, dispatched to collect his property, which his father thinks Dell is. He will spare the old man the most important item stored on that memory stick, which is not incriminating financial records that he pulled off the senior Calvin Leighton’s hard drive before he wiped the machine. He was never Dell, he is Cal Leighton, in flight from that life.