My heart roars. Lub dub, lub dub. I am at the front door. Lub dub, lub dub, lub dub. I test the knob. Why is it open? Lub dub, lubdublubdub. I step inside. Close it softly. Lub dub, lub dub. The baby’s car seat is abandoned on the floor, lying on its side, and her keys are on the floor next to it, like she dropped them there in a hurry. In her hurry, she forgot to lock the door—something Mo would not take kindly to. His business needed locked doors, and guns, and thugs. Where were his thugs? The house is empty. Lubdublubdublubdub. I walk through the kitchen. Messy counters: food, plates, cat hair. A giant spider scuttles up a bottle of vegetable oil and sits on its lid. The house smells like pot and cigarette smoke and mold. Same as the eating house, minus the pot. A steak knife covered in mayo lays on the counter. No. Too messy. I follow the hallway to a door I believe is Vola’s and Mo’s. I’m emotionless, calm. For a moment I stare down at the brass knob. I can see my reflection on its surface. It’s warm when my hand touches it. It’s smooth when my hand turns it. She doesn’t see me right away; she’s too focused on what she’s doing—beating the crap out of a baby.
I lunge forward as her hand is suspended mid-air. I have no plan, no choice of action. In fact, I feel as if I’m not acting at all, just watching my body from a far removed corner of the universe. I grab her braid. It’s long and thick. She’s not expecting my attack, so she starts to fall backward. Half my weight, and a foot shorter, she feels hollow and light. I yank her off the bed, her braid wrapped around my hand. She falls on her rear, her cry of surprise drowned out by the baby and the music. Her mouth is open, her eyes wide as she stares up at me. I glance up at the bed to make sure Little Mo isn’t about to roll off. His eyes are open, and he’s sucking his fist.
The sight of him trips a switch in me. I can almost hear it. Click. My brain suddenly stops warning me that I am going to lose control, though I do not in fact lose control. I am about as calm as I’ve ever been. A smooth river. A sleeping baby. The melody of a harp. My body moves naturally. I don’t just want to stop what’s happening. I want vengeance. The same voice that urged me in here is telling me that she needs to pay for what she was doing to Little Mo.
I drag her by her hair to the dresser, chipped and old with sharp edges. There are bottles of nail polish lined up on top of it—blues and turquoises. Vola is over her initial shock, struggling to get away from me. I wind her hair tighter around my fist and lift her knees off the ground ‘til she’s in a half-standing position. Her mouth is moving, her lips curling over words that I can’t hear. Her fists slam into my sides and stomach, anything that she can reach. She’s ineffective, a light breeze trying to move a tree. I look down in her empty eyes for long seconds, trying to drag answers out of them. No answers. She’s sick. Demented. Physically beautiful. Not worth the life she was given. A predator. A bully. I see my mother in her gray ghost irises. And then, as hard as I can, I slam her left temple into the corner of the dresser. She falls at my feet. Limp. Flesh and bones, but I took her soul.
I smile gravely, and somewhere deep, deep inside of me I know that what I am doing is not normal. I look over at the bed. Little Mo’s unfocused eyes are on me. I calmly walk to him and pick him up, holding him against my chest, rocking him side to side. “Shh,” I say. I rub his little back, kiss his temple. How long had she been doing this to him? I thought there was something wrong with him mentally, but now I know that’s not true. His unfocused eyes, the limpness of his body when you hold him, the way he doesn’t really hear your voice—it’s all her, what she’s done to him.
When he’s asleep, I lay him in his crib. There is a stool in the corner of the bedroom. I drag it over to the dresser and place it in between the wall and Vola’s body. Then I go to the closet to look for a shoe. I find a plastic flip-flop from Old Navy.
Then I go to the kitchen to find the spider. It’s on the wall above the sink, not far from the bottle of oil where I first saw it. A furrow spider. I cup it in my hands and carry it to the bedroom. I let it crawl up the wall above Vola’s body, watching it zigzag a path. I never once think about the grown-up Mo, downstairs cooking his crack. At any moment he could walk into the bedroom, but I am not afraid. I do not care about anything except the spider. When it’s almost to the ceiling, I climb onto the stool and hit it with the flip-flop, making sure to smear it across the wall. A dramatic death. Poor spider. I wipe the flip-flop clean of fingerprints, and position it in Vola’s limp hand. Then I turn the stool on its side, glance at Little Mo one last time. He sighs in his sleep, the deep and raspy sigh of someone who spent the evening crying.
I close the bedroom door softly behind me so as not to wake him, and rub my sleeve over the knob just in case. On my way out, I straighten the car seat, put the keys neatly on the kitchen counter, and lock the door from the inside.
I smile halfheartedly at the crescent moon. Some people see a thumbnail clipping, but I see a curved mouth. The moon is wicked, jealous of the sun. People do bad things in the dark, under the hollow gaze of the moon. It’s smiling at me now, proud of my sin. I’m not proud. I’m not anything. An eye for an eye, I tell myself. A beating for a beating.
THE RAG is full of muted colors. Everything faded, plaids and flower patterns rubbed on the knees and elbows, an ink stain on a sleeve, a coffee stain where a woman’s breast had once been pressed. It is depressing to touch the things that people do not want—the washed out, misshapen, frayed. But today, the day after I killed a woman in cold blood, everything in the Rag seems overly bright. I want to close my eyes against the onslaught of colors and patterns. I want to be somewhere still and quiet to go over the details of last night.
I think I’m crazy. Not the crazy that most people are proud of: Girl, you are so crazy!
I’m the kind of crazy that no one knows about. Jeffrey Dahmer crazy, Aileen Wuornos crazy, Charles Manson crazy. All the people I’ve Googled at the local library, and then subsequently read books about, crazy. Had they known the extent of their insanity? Or had they justified their behavior? Narcissists. At least I know. Right? I am not justifying what I did.
I fold clothes, I put cash in the register, I carry a bag of trash to the dumpster out back. I do all of the day-to-day things, trying to grasp a sense of normalcy, while my hands tremor, and my stomach rolls itself into a knot. At any moment I expect the fat, greasy cops of the Bone to come storming into the Rag to arrest me. But the most I see of the police are a couple cruisers stopping across the street to get lunch from the food truck.
Sandy shoots me looks throughout the day, asking me what’s wrong, bringing me a bagel from the food truck. I smile and shake my head. Feign a headache. I fold clothes, I dust shelves, I empty bags, I push buttons on the register. I go to the bathroom and lean against the wall, trying to imagine what prison will be like.
I am only nineteen. I had a life ahead of me, and I had to go ahead and ruin it. I try to imagine last night going differently. I come up with dozens of scenarios in which Vola lives, and Little Mo is taken somewhere safe. All I needed to do was run to Judah’s house to call the police. But then what? Mo would have come after me. Not because he didn’t believe it was true, but because that’s just what you did. If someone upset your family dynamic, you made them pay. I could have shown him video of Vola beating his son, and he still would have punished me for being the messenger. And what if the police hadn’t taken Little Mo? What if Vola convinced them that he had fallen or he was sick? Would she have taken her anger out on him when they left? And if they did believe me, and they took the baby to a foster home, would they have been better to him than his own crack-cooking, psychotic parents? No matter how hard I try, and no matter how afraid I am, I cannot convince myself that I did the wrong thing. That’s the part that makes me like the others: Wuornos and Dahmer and Manson. I do not regret my choice; I stand by it.
There had barely been any questions after they found Vola, limp and cooling on Mo’s bedroom floor, her eyes open and staring off into a corner. The police had come and gone, their flashing blue
lights bringing the neighbors to their windows and lawns. All ten inhabitants of the bad people house, smoking cigarettes in their wife beaters, making the small lot look like a prison yard. And then, when the paramedics declared her dead, the morgue van had come—old and white, rolling down Wessex like a stately, timeworn gentleman. Had the scene staged in the bedroom been that convincing?
I heard people talking around the neighborhood and in the Rag. The spider turned into a rat, the rat turned into a possum, but there was no alteration to the story in regard to Vola. She had tried to kill whatever vermin was in her bedroom in an effort to protect her baby, and in the process had hit her head and died. What was there for the police to investigate? My little setup had worked. That both mortified me and delivered a sick sense of power. I could do something like that in a place like the Bone and get away with it. Had Vola been someone else, somewhere else, there might have been an investigation. But, here in the Bone, where fathers cooked crack in their basements, someone could hit their head on the corner of a dresser, in an attempt to kill a spider, and die.
Before he called the police, where had he hidden the drugs, his cooking equipment? Had he thrown them away? He had an alibi for the time Vola died. He was listening to music in the basement with two of his buddies, smoking pot and drinking vodka and Red Bull. None of them heard the thud Vola’s body made when it hit the ground because the music was too loud.
He found her when he came upstairs for another bottle of vodka, and called down to his friends to call the police. The police searched the house, I saw them do it, but by that time, Mo had already gotten rid of anything that could incriminate him. Slimy bastard. But I was glad he hadn’t gotten caught. If he had known what Vola was capable of, he might have killed her himself.
At eight o’ clock I lock up the Rag and walk home. I am too sick to grab my usual cup of coffee, so I bite my nails instead. I expect to see a gaggle of police cars outside the eating house, but when I turn down Wessex the only thing different is Vola’s car is missing from Mo’s driveway. I stop by the crack house, my hand hesitating for a moment before I knock.
Mo opens the door. His eyes are puffy, and it looks like he’s been drinking.
“I don’t have nothing today,” he says. “Had to get rid of that shit before the police came.
“I’m not here for that,” I say quickly. “I wanted to see if you needed some help with the baby. I can take him for a bit if you need some time.”
Mo’s expression softens. “Yeah, thanks,” he says. “He’s sleeping now, but maybe in the morning. He was messed up today. I think he misses Vola.”
“Yeah,” I say flatly. “That’s expected.” I can hear music pounding from the basement, and I wonder how many people are down there while the baby is upstairs alone.
“I’ll come back in the morning,” I say.
As soon as Mo closes the door, I sneak around the side of the house to peek in the bedroom window. The lights are off, but I imagine the baby curled up. Asleep. Safe. And, for a little moment, I feel sated. I did the right thing.
WHEN I KNOCK ON MO’S DOOR THE NEXT MORNING, a woman answers. She is heavily perfumed and wearing gold bangles all the way up to her elbows. Little Mo is perched on her hip, his mouth open and emitting wails of discomfort as he tries to pull away from the jewelry digging into his side.
“Yeah?” she says, running her eyes over my jeans and tank top. “Who you is?”
I draw back at her use, actually misuse, of English, wondering if this is Mo’s side pony. Vola had been very well spoken, rarely using contractions, even when screaming swear words across the front lawn. YOU ARE A FUCKING LAZY ASS NOBODY. WHAT YOU NEED TO DO IS GET A REAL JOB, YOU DRUG-DEALING LOSER, AND TAKE CARE OF YOUR SON THE HONEST WAY!
“I’m here to take Mo for a few hours. Mo the baby,” I add. She hands him over without further question and calls over her shoulder. “Your babysitter is here.” Mo yells something back about a diaper bag. She reaches into the kitchen and hands me a paper sack with a diaper and two sweaty bottles. I take it from her without a word. She seems relieved to be free of the baby, dusting off her shirt, and pants like she regrets touching him.
The baby stops fussing once he’s in my arms. I feel a strange satisfaction that he feels comfortable with me. I walk him down the driveway and over to Judah’s house. Once in Judah’s living room, I lay him on the couch and start stripping off his clothes.
“What are you doing?” Judah asks, glancing over his shoulder to where Delaney is washing dishes.
“Looking for bruises,” I say.
“Why?” He wheels his chair to where he has a good view of what I’m doing.
My hands pause briefly before I pull off Mo’s onesie; maybe I imagined the whole thing. Then I step back, giving Judah a view of his chest.
Dark, plum-colored bruises mark his ribcage and arms where I saw Vola pinch him. The rest of his body looks unscathed despite the beating I saw him take. Slaps, I think. Not hard enough to leave lasting marks. Wasn’t that typical of child abuse? Put marks where you can hide them—under clothes. Slap and punch just hard enough to hurt and not stain.
“What is that from?” Judah asks. He reaches out a hand and touches the marks with his fingertip.
“Bruises,” I say. “I think his mother … I think someone hits him.”
Judah draws his hand back like he’s been stung. “He’s a baby…”
“And you think people don’t hit babies…?” I wonder after Judah sometimes. How having a more loving mother than the rest of us seemed to increase his naiveté.
I glance at him sideways. His mouth is pinched like he’s tasted something terrible, and his eyes stay glued to Mo.
“Do you think Mo—”
“No. I don’t think it was his dad.”
“Then … you believe his mother…?”
I grit my teeth. He’s putting things together pretty fast. At this point he’ll have me pegged for first-degree murder by lunchtime.
“I just noticed these. The other day. I wanted to see if he had new ones.”
I gently put his clothes back on and lift him into my arms. The entire time I was examining him, he never made a sound, just stared up at me with those darkly unfocused eyes. I hold him close to my chest, wanting to hug away the first eight months of his life, but as soon as I do, he stiffens, pressing his little hands against my chest and pushing away.
I read an article once about orphans in China, who were left so long in their cribs without human contact that people actually flew there from other countries and volunteered their summers to hold them. Those babies were unused to touch. But Mo associates touch with pain, which is why he stiffens and pulls away when I hug him. It makes sense now. What I had thought was a disability was actually a consequence of abuse. I rub his back and feel the muscles there stiffen and retract.
I suddenly have the urge to tell Judah everything: how I heard Mo crying as I walked home from the Rag, what I saw through the bedroom window, how I walked into the house with not even the slightest falter in my step, and how I slammed Vola Fields’s head into the side of the dresser. I want to tell him that I’m glad she’s dead, and how I want to take Mo and run away from this place forever. I open my mouth, the entire confession ready to fall off the tip of my tongue, when Delaney walks in, drying her hands on a dishtowel and shaking her head.
“Poor little guy,” she says. “Everyone needs their mother.” She realizes, too late, what she’s said, and her face turns red. “I’m sorry, Margo … I—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “She wasn’t much of a mother.”
I am shaking, just my hands. My mother is dead, and despite the fact that she was lousy at the job, she was it for me. I am alone now. I pull Mo close to me and smell his head. I don’t want him to be alone.
LYNDEE ANTHONY is a liar. I am standing behind her, chewing on a piece of my hair as she pays for her Virginia Slims at the Quickie Mart. Knick Knack is hitting on her in that pothead sort of way,
where he laughs at everything she says and punctuates his sentences with ‘damn.’ He sees the SpongeBob fob on her keychain and asks if she has any kids.
Oh my God, Knick Knack, I want to say. Don’t you watch the damn news? I wait for her to break down; I even hold my breath as I imagine her tear ducts opening, releasing the full force of her pain. Instead she laughs and coyly shakes her head no. No? I am still in shock and trying to work out her angle when she leans over the counter to grab her change from his hand. Maybe she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s Nevaeh Anthony’s mother. Maybe she’s tired of the looks, and words, and the pity. Knick Knack holds her change just out of reach so that she has to jump for it. He’s watching her chest with the rapt attention of a man watching his dinner approach. She seems to be enjoying the play—doe-eyed Lyndee Anthony, who can make Bambi look like a stone cold killer. Playing and flirting like her little girl isn’t dead.
That’s the moment I decide she’s a liar. And if she can lie about not having a kid, a kid who’s goddamn dead, what else is she lying about? Maybe I’m being too hard on her. I entertain the thought that she’s pretending to be someone else to escape. When Knick Knack has his fill of her bouncy breasts, he hands her the change, and she giggles all the way out the door.
“That’s Nevaeh Anthony’s mother, you shit,” I tell him.
He plucks a box of healthy cigarettes off the shelf and scans them under the gun.
“I know,” he says.
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