Someone is here, I thought, though somehow I no longer expected my father. That would have been reason enough to hurry up the stairs, but instead I took a step closer, compelled by something stronger than logic, stronger than fear. A color had caught my eye, a color barely visible in the weird blue light, until I took another step into the room. I stared long and hard at the kelly green fabric slung over the arm of the couch. Momma’s sweater. And scanning the room again, I began to recognize other items that had belonged to her: the sewing basket, a Raggedy Ann doll lying on its side on a shelf.
Behind that inner door I heard water draining, and my heart pounded. I pressed close against the wall, not hidden by anything but the shadows of the room. And when the inner door opened, someone thin and ghostly pale walked into the room. A woman in a bathrobe, leaving a trail of wet footprints.
Only now did I let myself think it: Momma. I didn’t realize I’d said the word aloud until I heard my own voice. I quickly covered my mouth, afraid she’d heard me, too, but she continued on toward the couch, and clicked on a small lamp on the side table. The lampshade was covered with a scarf, so that corner now glowed warm like a fire.
Momma.
Her face was not as soft or full as it had been, but there was the orange hair twirled on the top of her head and held there with bobby pins. It was her. And still, I could not move, feeling I’d now waited too long to know how to begin.
My mother. I found her.
Again, the dizziness. I swayed a little and held to the wall, wondering what exactly I had stumbled upon. It was all stranger and more terrible than I had imagined. She propped a magnifying mirror on top of a pillow and leaned into it to cover her face with cold cream. But soon, her hand froze in place as her eyes slowly opened wide and found me.
“Momma,” I whispered, feeling so nervous I thought I’d collapse. “Momma, it’s me.”
It seemed to take a very long time before she answered in a trembling voice, “Of course, oh darling, of course it’s you.” She frantically wiped her face with a washcloth, and cold cream smeared in her hair along the edges. “It’s okay, darling. It’s such a wonderful thing to have you here. It’s just that you surprised me. You were so quiet.”
I smiled, finally —a shy smile with my shoulders hunched. Momma closed the gap at the top of her bathrobe, covering her sharp collar bone. “I wondered when you’d find me,” she said, and she tapped the far corner of the couch. “Come sit here.”
This was the singsong voice she used when she tucked me in at night, and I remembered her holding me tight, whispering as she spun above me, I don’t deserve you, Bear. All I can do is ruin you.
“Come on over. I have a spot for you right here.” She moved a few items onto the floor to clear a spot. “Here, I want to fix my face,” she said. “I look like such a mess.” And with shaky hands, she fumbled through several clear plastic bags until she found the one she wanted.
I held my hands in my lap, feeling afraid, glorious, ashamed—all of this.
She dug into the bag filled with makeup, then colored in her eyebrows with a copper-colored pencil. She shook a container of liquid black eyeliner and drew a line along the inside of her bottom lashes.
“I stayed home from school today,” I said, realizing the strangeness of mentioning an entire world she’d not been a part of. “I’m feeling better now,” I added, and smiled into my lap, watching her out of the corner of my eye.
“That’s good. That’s very good.” She painted her lips a shimmery pink inside the red lines she had drawn, then asked, “Would you like to try some lipstick?”
I nodded and cupped my hands. Momma set the lipstick in them and closed my fingers over it. Her touch was warm like bathwater.
“We’re having such a nice visit, but soon it’ll be time to run along.” She took the lipstick from my hands, uncapped it, and colored in my lips. “You’ll need a note for school, right?”
I wondered if she thought it was daytime. How could she know in this room without windows? And what was happening here?
“We had a splendid time,” she said, reaching for a pen and notepad among the stacks on the floor. She wrote something down and then looked at me very seriously for a long while. “Now, you can’t mention this to your father. This has to be our secret.”
I’d been waiting to hear if she’d mention his name. Something about the way she said the word father gave me chills, as if she were warning or protecting me. There were questions forming deep in my gut that I couldn’t yet put into words, a feeling that I was on the verge of learning something terrible that would change everything.
She handed me the note. “Remember: Not a word to your father.”
In perfect handwriting, she had written: Please excuse Tillie from missing her classes. She was with her mother. Mara Harris.
I read the word “mother” and the name “Mara,” and felt an emotion so strong I wondered if it was joy. But it seemed more complicated than that—something that rumbled deep down, like the dehumidifier right outside the door.
Back in my bed, I lay there, restless, thinking and not thinking, staring and thinking again. My mother lives in our basement, I thought. How long has she been there? And what did she mean, “Don’t tell your father?”
My head hurt. I felt hot and kicked off the covers, then immediately felt too cold and curled up by the pillow, my legs shaking. I had to tell someone.
I crept down the hall and peered into my brother’s room, which was darkened by an American flag draped over his window. I wanted badly to see him—his schoolbooks on the floor by his Eagles and Bad Company 45’s, and on a shelf over his head the pyramid of beer cans he pulled from dumpsters.
“Phil.” I could barely hear myself.
If I could just see him, I’d know this moment was real, that my mother was real, that this whole strange night was true. I took another step into his room.
A little louder I said, “Phil?”
At first, he only turned over as if he’d go right back to sleep, but then he woke up, startled. “What are you doing in here? Get out!”
“Phil, I found a secret room that lights up blue, and Momma’s in it.”
“Would you get out of my room!”
“It’s blue because of the TV, and she put makeup on me and said she knew I’d find her.”
“Stop bothering me,” he said. “I mean it. Get out of my room.”
“Phil, listen!”
“You’re sick,” he said. “And I mean sick in the head.”
“No. I saw her.”
He turned over, threw the covers over his head.
“Phil, you have to listen to me!”
And then he sat up violently, the covers falling to his waist. “You didn’t see her,” he said. “And you know why? It’s because she’s gone. Because she left us. Get it? It’s why we don’t visit. She didn’t want to be here.”
“You’re wrong!”
I took a step backward, moving away from his doubt, as if it might find its way into me. He had always been the smarter one, the one you could believe. Maybe it was all too impossible, too strange to be true.
“I said, ‘Get out!’”
I felt my face heating up again. When I was back in bed, weighing his words against mine, I didn’t know which to believe. I rolled it all through my mind—the blue light, my pale mother, her voice, the perfect handwriting on her note. The note! I searched on the floor and all around my bed, felt in my pockets, checked the hallway, but it was gone. And rather than searching anywhere else, I crawled under my covers while the memory of our time together was still fresh, so I could fall asleep, believing.
16
Poem about the Moon
I GATHERED THE POEMS I’D watercolored and took hesitant steps down the stairs for breakfast. I tried to remember how to walk like an eight-year-old getting ready for school, how to hold in the electricity of knowing things I wasn’t supposed to know, of doing things I wasn’t supposed to do. When I walked into the
kitchen, I didn’t look at my father, in case this wonderful, terrifying secret showed in my eyes.
“Feeling better?” Dad asked.
I nodded, looking only as high as the bars on his uniform, then poured some Grape-Nuts into my palm and stuck my tongue out until it was covered with little nuggets. At the sink, I filled my hand with water and took a slurp, my mind straining to understand what I’d uncovered.
I think the fight they had, the one Phil overheard, could be when it happened.
Hope was right: Whatever crime my father had committed must have happened just after the fight Phil told me about. But what exactly happened, and how did Momma survive it? Had he locked her in and left her to die? Did she play dead, and he closed the door, believing he’d hidden her body? When did she give up trying to escape?
“Did you hear me?” Dad asked. I turned off the tap, noticing the sink was now filled with water. “I said, ‘Don’t forget to empty all the wastebaskets before you go to school.’”
“I know.”
“Did you finish your homework?”
“M-hmm. I did it.”
When my brother walked through the kitchen, Dad’s spoon stopped short of his mouth. “Trash day, Phil. Don’t forget to take the cans to the street.”
“Right,” he said, but bristled because he took pride in doing his chores without a reminder. He grabbed a stack of books and used them to push open the screen door.
“Wait for me,” I said, sprinting into the living room.
“Not so fast, Tillie.”
“I know. I know. The trash.” I heard the screen door close behind Phil, so I hurried through each bare but spotless room, grabbing paper bags.
“Hurry!” he called. “You have to get those bags on the street before the truck comes.”
I whispered it as I went through the house and out the door, bags in hand and bare feet mashed into my sneakers: Villain. I threw the bags by the curb, and chased after Phil, calling, “Wait up!”
He slowed only enough for me to know he’d heard me, but kept walking.
“I said, ‘Wait!’ Dad says you’re supposed to walk me to school.” I was out of breath by the time I caught up to him.
“You’re old enough to walk by yourself, you know.”
“Just tell me something,” I said, panting as I spoke. “Do you think Dad was angry enough at Momma to try to kill her?”
Phil stopped and finally turned around. “Do I think what?”
“Well, what if he tried to kill her but she survived? What if he thought he killed her, but he didn’t?”
“Do you even know how retarded you are?” He shoved me hard. I slipped off the curb and fell on the street, scraping my leg. I didn’t cry. Tears didn’t come easily anymore.
“Stop running to me with all your crazy ideas,” he yelled. “She’s gone. And you know what? I don’t care where she’s gone to, either. She could be lying on a beach working on her tan for all I care.”
I thought of the windowless room, where no sun could touch her. How dare he think she was lying on a beach. How dare he forget she couldn’t tan but only sunburned.
“You know what else?” he said, starting toward the school again. “Stop tagging along all the time. You’re starting to get really strange.”
I stared at every bump of gray and black in the road until I could see patterns. I bit down hard, wishing I had something between my teeth. Phil didn’t deserve to know any more about my time with Momma. He had given up. Believed the worst about her. And since that was how he wanted it, I would keep her to myself.
I took my time straightening my homework papers, then boldly I stood up and walked to school. Phil was out in front, and I let the gap between us grow. I concentrated, instead, on showing my poems to Mr. Woodson—sorry I couldn’t also show him the note from Momma.
• • •
“We missed you yesterday,” Mr. Woodson said. “How are you feeling?”
There were no words I knew of to answer his question. I stood there, silent, and after some time, I simply handed him my assignment. The school bell rang, but he didn’t make a motion to start class. He read each page, studied every picture, turning very slowly to the next. I watched closely when he got to my favorite poem. It was about the moon, about trying to catch it with a string and pulling it down to see if the face was friendly or more like a goblin’s. Mr. Woodson’s face was tense with concentration, and I waited where I was until he reached the end.
“Well, it’s a good thing that you’re standing right here,” he finally said. “I was thinking of writing ‘See me’ at the top of your … report … and now I don’t have to.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No. You’re not in trouble. But you understand this wasn’t exactly what the assignment was, right?”
I nodded.
“Because this was meant to be a one-page science report,” he said. “You wrote down the assignment, didn’t you?”
I nodded again.
“Tillie.” He sighed and flipped through the pages. “I’d like to hold on to this and give it a more careful look. Right now, my thinking is that even though you didn’t follow the assignment, not even close, actually, I’ll simply have to give you an A.”
When he started to smile, my whole face burned like the fever had come back. “I was with my mother yesterday,” I blurted out. “She wrote you a note, but I can’t find where I put it.”
And now another sigh and the crooked crease that showed between his eyebrows when he was thinking hard. “You have a tremendous imagination, Tillie. There’s a great deal going on inside that head of yours.” He drummed his fingers on top of my poems. “I think it’s time I start class. What do you say?”
I nodded, beaming.
“Next time, let’s see what you can do if you read the directions a little more closely.”
I nodded again and turned to walk back to my seat. Some people, not many, can reach the most tender spot within you and hold you there—sometimes without even knowing that’s what they’ve done. As I made my way between the desks, I felt so good I thought the sound of the bells was coming from me. But it was Shirl, clapping her shoes together under the desk.
I’d been unable to explore the basement during the day; someone was always home. And I just couldn’t make myself stay up late enough at night to avoid Dad. Instead, I paced the house, trying not to look suspicious. Sometimes I wondered what our neighbors thought—if they knew anything about us beyond our comings and goings. Had they seen my mother that day she went into the house and never came back out? Did they wonder where she’d gone or what had happened to her? I supposed these questions—like asking who you voted for or how much money you made—were the kind polite people didn’t ask.
When Friday finally arrived and I’d finished school and my chores, I raced my bike up the street to talk to Hope, who was drawing on the sidewalk with chalk. “I saw her,” I said. “My mother! You’ll never believe where I found her. Come see!”
Hope finished the bubble letters in her name, each one connected. “You found her?” she asked, setting down the chalk.
“Yes! Come on!”
“Where are we going?”
“My house. The basement.”
I pushed off, and now she jogged alongside. “Dead or alive?” There was an excitement to her question, and I could tell she wanted a gruesome discovery.
“Alive,” I said, irritated. “She’s been locked in the basement closet. But it’s not a closet. I’ll show you where it is.”
“Who would lock your mom in a closet?”
I dragged my feet until the bike came to a stop, then threw it to the curb. I led Hope down the side steps to the basement door, feeling sick with too many thoughts, all terrible and implicating my father.
As we approached the basement door, Hope hopscotched on the walkway.
“Sh!”
“O-kay!”
“Don’t let the door slam.”
“Okay. Okay.”
We walked cautiously through the basement door, as we always did, because we knew we weren’t allowed down there. Now, the danger seemed greater, something darker than rats or stepping on a nail, a danger harder to identify. I tiptoed along the drywall. “That’s the door,” I whispered, pointing, but not going close.
It seemed impossible that Momma could be in there, behind the door that so clearly seemed to lead to a closet or storage space.
“Well, let’s see,” she whispered. “Open it.”
I paused, thinking of how Momma hated visitors, and how pale and thin she looked. I worried that Hope wouldn’t find my mother as wonderful or pretty as the stories I’d told of her. She might even regret all of our searching.
“I don’t know if we should go in,” I said. “Momma gets very nervous with company, and I don’t want to upset her.”
“Wait, she’s still in there?” she asked. “You found her and left her there?”
Hope always came up with the most horrifying thoughts, things I never considered.
“Don’t you think she’s probably starving to death?” she asked.
“I’m going to feed her tonight,” I said, panicked and angry that I didn’t think to set her free when I’d had the chance.
“It’s awfully quiet in there,” she said, and gave a grim but smug expression, as if pleased that she was right.
“Well, I’m not going to let you in to see her,” I whispered more loudly. “You can forget about meeting her.”
“That’s because you made it up,” she said.
“I did not!”
I grabbed her arm, squeezing hard, and pulled her to the other side of the basement. I tugged on the string to open the door to the clubhouse, and we climbed into the damp and dusty room, where Hope wrapped her hands around the fattest pipe and swung her legs back and forth.
“It’s all a bunch of BS,” she said. “I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Why don’t you just go home?”
“Sure,” she said, jumping down from the pipes.
Up from the Blue Page 13