What She Inherits

by Diane V. Mulligan

  The woman scrunched up her face and said, “I swear, you look so familiar.”

  “Yeah, I get that sometimes,” Casey lied, somewhat absurdly. Who could possibly mistake her for someone else—the hair dye, the tattoo, these were rather distinct.

  The man raised an eyebrow. He, like the woman, was in a plaid shirt and dark skinny jeans. He, too, sported ironically geeky glasses, and he wore an ever-so-trendy beard.

  “I do know you!” the woman said. “CJ, right?”

  Kim, who had been cleaning the espresso machine, turned to look at Casey.

  She hadn’t been CJ in twenty years. That was what she’d called herself back in high school, a refusal of her given name, a small act of rebellion against her mother. Her birth certificate identified her as Cara-Jayne Seaver. Her mother was a trendsetter in creative spelling and unnecessary hyphenation.

  When she started high school, she realized she had a chance to rename herself, so she chose CJ, which struck her as sort of edgy for a girl. There were lots of boys who went by initials; J preceded by any number of other letters: AJ, BJ, DJ, EJ. Why couldn’t she be CJ? She had gone to a very small elementary school, so she hardly knew anyone in her class at the big regional high school. It was easy to introduce herself as CJ without being questioned. Even most of her teachers called her CJ.

  When she fell in with the tattoo artist and his crowd, she reinvented herself again: from CJ to Casey Jones. In that tattoo parlor, no one used their real names. They all had tough names like Mad Dog and Big G. Her guy went by Montana, although as far as Casey knew he wasn’t from Montana. She never even knew his real name. The day she’d walked into the shop in response to the Help Wanted sign in the window, he’d asked her name and then said, “No last names, and not what your momma called you. Your real name. The name that is you.”

  At seventeen, that struck her as profound. She didn’t even have to think about it, “Casey Jones,” she said, which was what her best friends used to call her back at school, a name that riffed on her initials and the famous song by one of their favorite bands.

  Having christened herself Casey Jones naturally led to everyone in the shop calling her Trouble, after the Grateful Dead lyrics. Everyone except Montana. He called her Jonesy. So she’d chosen a name for herself and nobody called her by it anyway. It was okay with Casey—their names for her were nicknames derived from the name she gave herself, they were signs of affection, signs that she was part of the club. Except, of course, she wasn’t. She was the girl who slept with Montana and got paid under the table for cleaning the shop and manning the phone and whatever else anyone asked her to do. The arrangement didn’t last long, and when it all fell apart, Casey was inked outside and in. Outside she had the work of art across her arm. Inside she had the name Casey Jones written on her soul. Everywhere she went after that, she introduced herself as Casey Jones without a moment’s hesitation. It had taken Rosetta a little while to get used to it, but Rosetta understood the art of self-reinvention, so she accepted it.

  “You’ve confused me with somebody else,” Casey said to the woman who was studying her so intently now.

  Casey took the tray into the kitchen and let the door swing shut behind her. She set down the tray, rested her hands on the counter, shut her eyes and tried to place the woman, but she came up empty. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the thing she’d feared for so long had happened, and she was still standing. The ground hadn’t opened up and swallowed her. She hadn’t vanished into nothingness at the mention of her name. Someone had recognized her, but it hadn’t altered anything. And besides, she’d brushed the woman off with ease. Even if the woman went home and called up other people she knew from school and said she saw someone she swore was CJ Seaver, it wasn’t as if people were suddenly going to storm Devil’s Back to verify the story. She probably already was a sort of legend at reunions: Whatever happened to CJ? I heard she went off the rails after you know…. If her legend grew as the result of a possible sighting, fine. Give the people something to talk about. Everybody loves a rumor.

  Still, she called the inn, described the couple, and checked to see if they were staying and for how long. Just one night. She’d let Kim manage the counter alone tomorrow morning. No need to test her luck with a repeat encounter.

  ***

  That night, as Casey tried to stop her racing thoughts and fall asleep, all she could think about was her mother, all the times she flashed her brightest smile, and said, “Hey there, Carrie-Bear, I have a surprise for you.”

  When her mother was having her good days, she had called her Carrie or, on really good days, Carrie-Bear.

  If her mother said, “Hey there, Carrie-Bear,” when she came down to breakfast, she knew she could relax that day, because her mother was in an upswing. When her mother was in a downswing, she called her by her full name, Cara-Jayne, or she ignored her altogether. Those were the memories she held onto, that was how she preferred to remember her mother. Angry, irrational, incoherent. She could tell herself she was better off without her, as long as she didn’t think about the good days, the chocolate-chip-pancakes-for-dinner, surprise-we’re-playing-hooky-and-hitting-the-beach, I-love-you-my-sweet-precious-girl days when her mother had been kind, fun, and spontaneous.

  When she thought of the good days, her anger lapsed into grief and sorrow. In her first days on her own, grief and sorrow sometimes led her to call her mother and attempt to reconcile, but Maureen was unrelenting. Eventually she realized her life would be easier if she shut out the good memories and let the bad ones vaccinate her against the childish desire for her mother’s approval.

  She wished Jason would show up and give her something else to think about, but no, for the first time in days, he stayed away. Without his infuriating presence her mind was full of her mother.

  They had had some good times, a million years ago, back before Ed, despite her mother’s condition. The thing about Maureen was that when she was in a good mood she was positively high on life, full of energy, ready for adventure, and Casey was her partner in crime. When her mother was happy, she adored Casey, and nothing in the world felt better than having her mother’s undivided attention and unconditional love.

  Sometimes those upswings lasted weeks, and sometimes less than a day, but they always ended with spectacular crashes into depressive cycles that were every bit as extreme and usually more prolonged, which meant every memory that started good ended badly.

  Casey would never forget her ninth birthday. That morning, her mother woke her up before dawn by entering her room with a cupcake topped with a candle, singing happy birthday. Once she blew out the candle, her mother announced that her birthday wish had come true. They were leaving immediately for the airport to fly to Disney World. Despite her half-asleep confusion, she was beside herself with joy. She had wanted to go to Disney since she first heard of its existence from classmates back in kindergarten.

  The Magic Kingdom! That place where fairy tales do come true! Somehow in her mind, she had also concluded that a trip to Disney would cure her mother of the demons inside her head that made her act so strange and unpredictable. She was going to meet Snow White and her mother was going to be fixed and they’d come home and her mother would be like all her classmates’ mothers. Disney World was the key to normalcy.

  The trip to the airport was smooth and easy, the flight was on time, and they arrived in Orlando midmorning to a perfect blue-sky day. Maureen talked excitedly the entire time, telling her about her own childhood trip to Disneyland, in California, the summer her father got laid off from his job and decided to pack the station wagon and drive the family across the country, because if he was going to end up bankrupt anyway, he may as well go in style. Looking back, Casey could see how her mother may have inherited her mood disorder from him.

  Maureen had booked them a room at the Contemporary, and Casey could still recall her sense of wonder when she saw the monorail glide through the modern structure. It was like stepping into a brilliant futu
re.

  Everything went all right that first day. They checked in, rode on the magical monorail to the entrance of the park, and passed through the gates into Disney’s Main Street, the most optimistic version of Anytown, USA ever imagined. The air was heavy with the scents of popcorn and freshly baked cookies, and a horse-drawn wagon clopped up the street, parting the throngs of people milling about. She had her doubts when she saw how crowded it was. Her mother did not do well in crowds. Later, she learned that actually, on that Tuesday in April, when children everywhere were in school, the park had been practically dead compared to how crowded it got in the summer or over Christmas.

  Still, crowds and all, her mother’s mood was buoyant. They got pictures with the statue of Walt and Mickey and in front of Cinderella’s Castle. They rode the carousel, tea cups, It’s a Small World, the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, Space Mountain. No rides left unexplored. Her mother acted more like a kid than a parent, grabbing her hand and practically dragging her from attraction to attraction. They stayed in the park until the nightly fireworks, and she fell asleep on the short ride back to the hotel. Her mother carried her to bed.

  The next day, though, things started to go wrong right away. They went down to breakfast at the hotel, and her mother started complaining about the prices. This, she knew, was not a good sign. As much as she would have loved to order the Mickey Mouse Chocolate Chip Pancakes, she tried to soothe her mother by ordering cereal, which was the cheapest item on the menu. Her mother ordered coffee, nothing to eat, and she knew they were in real trouble. She could see rage simmering behind her mother’s eyes as she drank the coffee, and twice she commented that it would be a long time before they had anything else. The day before, she’d offered to stop for snacks at nearly every vendor they’d passed, but today, clearly that wouldn’t be the case.

  Maureen rallied some as they got back on the monorail to go to Epcot, and Casey thought, despite all past experiences, that perhaps her mother would snap out of her funk and be happy again. As they made their way from one pavilion to another, she tried to impress her mother with her interest in the various nations represented there even though she wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about any of them, but her mother, clearly, had no desire to be interested.

  Around noon, Maureen announced that they would have lunch at the Mexico pavilion. This might have been a good sign. Her entire life with Maureen was an endless effort to correctly interpret signs so that she could adjust her own behavior accordingly so as not to upset her mother. She tried and tried, but the signs were fickle things. What was a bad sign one day was a good sign the next, and so reading the signs was an imperfect art at best.

  The restaurant was inside a building that looked like a Mayan pyramid, but it was made to look like it was evening, outdoors, in a plaza surrounded by a charming Mexican town. The Mexico ride, which was a boat ride, passed right by the restaurant, a little river inside the building. Surely this would cheer her mother up, she thought when they were seated. Her mother told her to order whatever she wanted, another good sign, except that Maureen said it in a harsh whisper.

  They ate in silence, a growing knot of fear forming in Casey’s little stomach. She found it increasingly difficult to swallow her food as she watched her mother eat in a way that could only be described as vicious. She was shoving food into her mouth and chewing as if she were a conquistador preparing for battle. A few times she noticed Casey pushing food around her plate and told her to stop being so ungrateful and eat up.

  The explosion occurred when the bill arrived. The waitress set it on the table, and Maureen, in a forced, toothy grin, opened her purse, put on a show of frantically fumbling through it, her demeanor changing from fake-happy to genuine hysteria in about five seconds. Then she began to scream that her money had been stolen. Casey shrank in her chair, willing herself to become invisible, while her mother shouted and carried on. The waitress came over, and then the manager, and as quickly as they could, which was not very quickly given the state of distress Maureen had worked herself into, they ushered the two of them to an office, where Maureen tearfully explained how she’d brought her daughter for a birthday surprise, and how they weren’t wealthy people, but she had scrimped and saved, and she’d had over three-hundred dollars cash in her purse when they arrived that morning, and now it was gone, gone, all gone. She wailed and moaned as if she believed every word she was saying, although Casey knew for a fact there was no three-hundred dollars in her mother’s purse, and every aspect of the trip had been paid with credit cards.

  The grace with which the manager took all this in was astonishing. He assured her mother they would comb security footage and try to identify the thief. He also, gently, but not gently enough (there was no gently enough), counseled Maureen to consider Traveler’s Checks in the future, which were safer than cash, and then he told her that her meal was on the house, and even gave her fifty “Disney Dollars,” before suggesting she go back to her hotel and refresh herself.

  Maureen pocketed the “Disney Dollars” without a hint of grace or gratitude and stalked away, leaving Casey to scurry along behind her so as not to get separated. They went back to the hotel where Maureen told her to go down to the pool. Casey doubted she’d be allowed into the pool without an adult. At nine years old, she had enough understanding of the world to know that children her age were supposed to be supervised when doing things like swimming, but she put on her bathing suit and left her room without a word. As she expected, the lifeguard turned her away so she wandered around the hotel for a while and then went back to the room.

  Thankfully, when she knocked, her mother let her in, and she didn’t ask why her hair and bathing suit were dry. Maureen was sloshed. She had ordered champagne from room service and knocked back most of the bottle. She insisted that Casey get into bed with her and cuddle, and then she launched into a familiar old lament about how everyone in the world was out to get her, and life wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t supposed to be like this, and on and on while Casey tried not to breathe in her stinky booze breath. Eventually her mother passed out, and Casey climbed into her own bed and cried herself to sleep.

  The next morning they flew home, and when she went to school, she got called in to the office to explain her absences, as her mother had not alerted the school that she would be out, nor had she returned any of the school’s phone calls.

  She lied, protecting her mother like she always did, and said that they both had the flu. She knew the principal didn’t believe her, but he also didn’t really care. She went back to class, and at lunch, instead of making her classmates jealous with news that she’d been to Disney, she stuck by her story, the flu, the flu on her birthday, what terrible luck.

  Back then she hadn’t understood her mother’s condition. She knew only that her mother wasn’t like other kids’ mothers, and that sometimes she got sick and had to go to the hospital. Casey would spend years thinking of that miserable birthday trip and asking herself how her mother had gone from luxuriating in the happiest place on Earth to raving over the great unfairness of the universe. What had she done, what had she done, what had she done to make her mother so unhappy? They had gone to sleep happy that first night, hadn’t they? So why had her mother woken up so angry?

  Later, she knew, intellectually, that none of it had been her fault, and that the joyous nature of the first day had been as much a symptom of her mother’s faulty brain chemistry as was the disastrous second day, but what she knew and what she felt were two very different things. What she felt was that somehow her mother’s misery was her fault. If her mother hadn’t wanted so badly to give her a spectacular birthday gift, she wouldn’t have spent all that money she didn’t have on the trip to Disney, and she wouldn’t have been reminded of all the ways her life was a disappointment to her and so wouldn’t have had a public meltdown.

  When Maureen was medicated, the great big swings flattened out into a steady state of overall apathy. Nothing made her particularly happy
or particularly sad. She was just there. Those flat times were calm, and in that way a relief, but also it was as if some essential part of Maureen’s nature was missing, and weirdly, Casey found herself missing her mother then almost as much as when she was unmedicated and spiraling downward. It was as if she could not have both a calm life and have her mother, and that was a tragedy she had never gotten over, because she wanted her mother.

  How many times had she longed for her mother to hold her and tell her everything would be okay? Who didn’t want that? It was the most basic human instinct, and one, it seemed, she had never outgrown, because right now, at thirty-seven years old, Casey still wanted it, but it was no longer something her mother willfully withheld. Now her mother was dead, and there was no hope in this world that she’d ever experience her mother’s loving embrace again. As much as she felt like her mother’s death shouldn’t hurt so much, it did, and there was no escaping the deep ache she felt in her chest.

  Since she was a teenager, Casey had lived with the fear that she had inherited her mother’s bipolar disorder. Every time she felt unexpectedly happy or sad, she thought, Is this it? Am I going crazy? The last summer she spent on Devil’s Back as a teenager, she’d confessed her fears to Rosetta. Right around when she hit puberty, she began hearing things sometimes, like voices or strange sounds, and she thought she was losing her mind. Her friends would tease her that she needed a hearing aid because she was constantly saying, “Did you hear that?”

  She’d been terrified to admit to anyone her fears that she was going crazy, but Rosetta had explained that most women in their family heard voices like that, and none of them suffered bipolar but Maureen. Rosetta said the voices were spirits trying to communicate, which Casey found hard to believe, especially since her mother said the same thing, and her mother’s impressions generally couldn’t be trusted. Unlike her mother, however, Rosetta had taught her to meditate, and with practice, she learned to let the voices pass through her like running her hand through smoke. If she didn’t try to hold on to the voices, they evaporated. Rosetta’s meditation techniques worked far better than Maureen’s suggestion that she talk back to the voices.