by Sara Hosey
She looked into the darkness and continued, “But what is true is that I can’t stop it with the drugs. I’m clean now, baby. I am, I swear. I would’na come here if I wasn’t. But that ain’t gonna last. I’m just trying to be honest with you right now. You know. If I could, I would. I woulda come home and taken you away from that bastard. You and me, we always got along. That’s true. I never loved nobody the way I loved you.”
I felt my face growing hot, my eyes filling with tears again. I was glad for the dark.
“So, yeah, I used to plan to go back and get you and take you away with me. But I couldn’t never get it together, you know? You know I got pregnant when I was eighteen, Iphigenia? You know that I was just a baby? I didn’t think so at the time,” she laughed mirthlessly. “I mean, I was happy, just happy to get out of their house, really, I didn’t even care. You think your father is a bastard? Believe me, your father is a saint compared to what I grew up with. But, whatever. I’m not making excuses. I’m just saying it was hard is all. But when you come along, I changed. I took real good care of you, no matter how bad I was feeling or how bad it was for me. You were always fed and clean and I always told you I loved you and played with you and stuff.” I could hear a real smile in her voice. “I read you books. Do you know I read to you all the time? We always went to the library and we’d come home with a whole stack of books. I mean, I never even had a library card before, but I got one so that I could take out books for you. Do you remember that? And I took you out to the park. And I let you get away with everything. Your dad said I spoiled you and I would say, yeah, well, she’s my baby, of course I’m gonna spoil her. I wasn’t gonna do to you what they did to me.
“And you know, before you were born, I said, I’m gonna turn it all around. I am going to go to college. I am doing this for my baby girl. And you know I did that. I went to school for a while. Before you were born and for a little while after too. Got good grades too.”
She paused. “You remember me at all?”
I couldn’t speak, so I nodded.
“Good. You know where your name comes from?”
I shrugged.
“Greek myth stuff. Girl gets sacrificed by her father. So the winds will blow his ships.”
I stayed quiet.
My mother looked at me and even in the darkness of the evening, I felt she could see me. See right into me. A chill ran down my spine as she added, “But her mother avenges her, Iphigenia.”
What she had said, what she was saying, revolved in my brain. It was like food that was too rich—I wanted to slow it down, take it in smaller portions. But I sensed our time together was limited; we had to get it all done now.
“It’s a big name,” she said, ruminative. “It’s a big name and you deserve it. You can carry it, girl.” She paused and then her head twitched and she was angry again. “I gave up everything for that son of a bitch and all he ever did was run around on me. And get me started on the drinking and all that.” She pounded her fist, hard, on her leg and then left the fist there, clenched. “No, that’s not true. I think I was always wild, Iphigenia. But he didn’t help. He was a bad influence. You wild, Iphigenia? Are you wild too?” she demanded angrily.
I shook my head, no.
“Good. You better not be. You better watch yourself. Your father. He still with that tall bitch?”
I nodded.
“She looks like me, though,” she said, but not to me. It was as though she was talking to someone else, someone I couldn’t see. “But she’ll never be me. So funny that she looks like me.” My mother made a noise like a laugh. I had never thought, not once, that my stepmother looked like my mother.
“It was right after you were born I got really sick. Couldn’t get out of bed I was so depressed. But I did it,” she pointed her cigarette at my chest, “I did it for you, little girl. I kept living for you. And I made it through that time. But that was just the beginning.”
I watched the red end of the cigarette and then watched her stub it in the dirt. I suddenly became terrified that she would leave.
“You hungry?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“I got beans,” I said. “Let me open them.”
I turned the lantern on and she didn’t object and I took out a jug of water and handed it to her. She drank from it as I opened the beans. I got two spoons and I put some on a paper plate for Angel and I put another portion on a paper plate for myself and I put a spoon in the can and gave my mother the rest. Angel ate hers in one gulp and then held the plate between her paws while she licked it and gnawed on it. I shoveled the cold beans into my mouth, drinking water to wash them down, thinking of them as raw energy, strength, fuel. What I would need to get through another night, to get through another day. To stay alive. To do whatever it was that I would need to do next.
We didn’t talk while we ate, but as soon as the food was gone I felt the need to do something else, to keep us busy, to keep her with me. I started straightening up and said to her, “Stay here with me tonight. Stay with me in my tent.”
“What is all this anyway?” she said. “Bookshelves?”
I shrugged, embarrassed. “The bookshelves are just a joke,” I said. “I just … I made a camp for myself.”
She shook her head, not understanding. “Yeah, that Danny told me where you might be. I really had to look, though.”
“Danny told you? Danny?”
“Yeah. Why? Who else you got looking for me?”
I didn’t want to tell her about Dougie, that I’d met him. I shrugged.
She asked, “You disappointed now that you found me?”
I squeaked, “No. Not at all. I’m glad I found you.”
She stared at me and said, “You been safe around here?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Angel is good protection. And I got a gun too,” I said.
“A gun?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“What’s going on, Iphigenia?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Nothing.”
Her eyes bored into me.
“Really,” I said. “There’s, I don’t know, there’re a couple of people I have to watch out for is all.”
“Oh yeah? Like who?”
I shook my head.
“I’ll stay here tonight,” she said. “But I’m not going to your teacher in the morning.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I was flooded with relief and I had to stop myself from sobbing. I swallowed hard and said, “I …” I had to stop. I tried again. “You know? I just …”
“I know,” she said. And she embraced me again. “I think I know, baby.”
Chapter 37
It was as good—even better—than I had ever allowed myself to imagine. She held me in her arms as we lay in the tent and in the dark it was easy. I told her things, about myself, about my life, about the kinds of foods I liked and the movies I liked and some of the bad things that had happened and some of the good ones. She listened so hard and told me some things about herself too. That when she was a kid, she’d wanted to be a farmer when she grew up, but then, later, she fell in love with books and decided to be a teacher. That she’d majored in English when she was in college.
It wasn’t enough; it wasn’t nearly enough. But it was something. I felt a shift inside myself as well as an even more keen longing, as though filling the empty space inside myself a little bit let me know just how big that space was. My heart was a bird, wings hitting the bars of the cage.
After so much talking, we fell silent. I thought she had fallen asleep. Then she asked, “You gonna go to college, Iphigenia?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want to?”
“I guess.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“I’m just thinking,” she said after a while. “About that one book you loved so much when you were a kid. D
o you remember that one?”
“I don’t know.”
“The one with the bunny and it lived in the woods?”
Something stirred in me, like a tune I knew I knew but couldn’t quite remember. “I think I do,” I said. “I think I do remember.”
“God, you made me read it over and over again. At the end there was something about curling up and dreaming about the spring.”
“Yeah,” I said, ready to cry again, “Yeah, I do remember that. ‘I curl up in my hollow tree and dream about the spring,’ I think.” I could see the picture of the rabbit in its tree and it seemed like the rabbit was us, curled up, together and safe.
“That’s why you love reading so much,” she told me. “You’re just like me.”
And then she was quiet again and this time I thought she really was asleep. And so I said, “Mommy, I need to tell you something.”
She didn’t say anything. I imagine her eyes closed in the dark. I felt her breath even on my neck. So, I said, “I think I might be pregnant and I don’t know what to do.”
She was suddenly even more still, so I knew she was awake. She made no response for a moment, but then, “Baby. What do you want to do?”
“I mean, I don’t want it. I don’t want to keep it. If I am pregnant. I think I am. But it’s not … it’s not a good thing,” I told her.
I felt her head moving in a nod. “I didn’t want to be pregnant either, but you were the best thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “I know I messed it up. But I didn’t mean what I said before. I wouldn’t take it back, take you back, if I could. I’m glad I had you even though I wasn’t ready. You were the best thing that ever happened in my whole life.”
I didn’t respond. Finally, I said, “But.”
Her breath was even and I wondered again if she’d fallen asleep when she said, “Whatever you decide is gonna be the right thing.” She turned onto her back. “I know that. I can feel it in my bones. Either way you go, it’s gonna be the right thing. You can have a baby later. I know you’d be a good mom. But maybe later.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t you think I know you?” she said sharply, but not unkindly. “And here’s what else I know, Iphigenia. You know why the trees lose their leaves in the winter? ’Cause they have to save their energy. They got to let those leaves die, they let that part of themselves die, so that they can survive. So that they will be strong again in the spring. So, you don’t have that baby right now, Iphigenia, because you need to make sure you are going to make it to spring. Because you are my baby. I need my baby to make it, do you understand?” She reached out and her grip was strong on my shoulder and back. My breath was sharp in my lungs. I nodded.
“You’re like me. You’re like me, Iphigenia, only you’re better. You’re like me. We’re strong and we have to be free, Iphigenia. And we have hearts of steel.”
I was suddenly very light and dizzy and I felt myself rising, gliding, blowing a hole and flying right out the top of the tent. She was right. I had wings, wings that would carry me away and would take me somewhere else, where I would know it hadn’t all been for nothing.
I wasn’t alone anymore. I was with my mother.
Tears streamed from my eyes, but I was smiling when I put my hand on her cheek and then moved it to her ear. I rubbed her ear lobe between my thumb and forefinger and I put my other thumb in my mouth and fell asleep.
I woke up before dawn, still facing her. She was on her back, with an arm flung across her face. She was snoring softly. I wanted to stare at her, but I was afraid she would feel my eyes and wake up. I was afraid that she would leave.
I took the gun from where I had tucked it next to me and I gestured to Angel, who was watching me intently. We slipped out of the tent. The birds were calling, the sky was just beginning to lighten.
And then Angel started barking.
It had been so quiet. I had been waiting and waiting, and it had been so quiet and then suddenly they all came at once.
My stepbrother was staring at me, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Shoot, I been looking all night and here you are,” he said. He had a baseball bat slung over his shoulder. “So, Iffy. Long time, no see,” he sneered.
I didn’t answer. Angel stood growling next to me, hair standing up all down her spine.
“You know, I didn’t even know what to think when I heard that message,” he said. He laughed. “You know, I forgot you even existed. But I just had to check it out.” He dropped his smile. “Because me and you, we’ve got some unfinished business.”
“We do,” I agreed.
“So, I heard you were looking for your bag lady mother?” He laughed again, nastily. “Yeah, that’s what that dude Dougie told me. I knew you were fucking crazy.”
His eyes roamed around the campsite, taking it in. The tent and the bookshelves and the little firepit.
His gaze settled on me and I took the gun from behind my back.
“Huh. No need for that, now. I come in peace.”
“That why you brought a baseball bat?”
“This?” he said, bouncing the bat on his shoulder. “Thought I might play a little ball while I was out here in the park. Thought maybe I could get in a little practice.”
“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” I said. I was calm and I looked him in the face. “Don’t you see?”
And it was true. When I was a child and I had a fever, sometimes I had felt like this, like my brain was so quiet I could hear the blood in my veins. “You don’t scare me anymore.”
And I saw on his face a flicker of fear.
Everything seemed to be moving very slowly. So slowly that I had time between each word and each breath to think and to understand. And I was so relieved. Relieved because even though it wasn’t how I imagined—I had imagined being full of rage and fury—it also wasn’t going the way I feared it would. I had been afraid I would have become small again and I had seen myself, my hands shaking, my head bowed, my pants wet.
I cleared my throat and made a little noise to test my voice.
“Put the bat down,” I ordered.
He laughed. “Aww, don’t be like that. Come on, Iffy. You ain’t gonna shoot me. Is that even a real gun, sweetheart?” He was so cocksure. He put up a pacifying palm and stepped closer, looking at me and casting a wary but casual glance at Angel, who crouched by the tent, watching. “You really messed my business up for a while there,” he said. “That was really a problem for me, you know.”
I cleared my throat, again. “Yeah, I heard you went to jail. You find your own stepbrother in there or what?”
He stopped in his tracks, confused. “What?”
“Probably even harder for you. You know, the shame and all. Asking yourself what it was you did that made him think you were asking for it.” I forced out a sound like a laugh. “Did he say you should be thanking him?”
I’d been thinking of that line for a while. But I was surprised, again, by my own reaction. It didn’t feel good to say it.
And then I realized that even though I still wasn’t scared of him, I didn’t want to do what I’d thought I wanted to. I realized, too late, that I shouldn’t have brought him to the park at all.
His face was ugly and angry. Suddenly, he came charging at me, lifting the bat, aiming for my head. I ducked, fell to the ground, and rolled away, and he raised the bat over his head, ready to bring it down on me, but Angel launched herself at him, her jaw ready to sink into his arm.
I watched from the ground as he slammed her in midair, chopping at her body with the bat. She cried out once and fell with a thump.
I sat up, fast and slow, somehow, at once. I pointed the gun at him. “Stop,” I said. “Stop.”
He swung and he hit the gun out of my hand as though he was hitting a baseball. I heard the pop of my fingers breaking as I wat
ched the gun fly through the air and land near the tent.
He stood over me, the bat angled over his shoulder, his elbows jutting out, ready to play ball, his face closed. I wondered, sincerely, what I had done to make him hate me so much. I looked at Angel, who lay not far away, one leg jerking. I shut my eyes. I put my face in the crook of my arm.
The crack was deafening and I kept my eyes squeezed closed. When I took my arm away and opened them again there was only the trees and the sky.
My ears were ringing, but I could hear my stepbrother screaming. He was sitting on the ground, looking at his leg, his eyes and mouth wide. He was bleeding. My mother stood holding a gun, the one that had flown from my hand.
My mother walked over to him, the gun trained on his torso.
“This is the one that hurt you, Iphigenia?” she asked.
I started to stand but got tangled in my own feet and I fell again to the ground.
“Stop, Mommy. Stop.”
She approached him. As she spoke, she thrust the gun at him in sharp, aggressive bursts. He winced each time.
“You hurt my baby?” she asked. He put his hands on the ground behind him and tried to drag himself backward. “You touched my baby? I should shoot your—”
“Mommy,” I called again, finally getting to my feet and standing a few steps behind her.
She kept the gun pointed at him and spoke without turning to me. “What do you want me to do, Iphigenia?” My stepbrother was alternately begging and swearing, sometimes trying to rise and then putting his hands back on the ground behind him, his wounded leg straight out before him. Before I could answer, my mother shouted, “Shut up!” He brought his volume down to a whimper.