I set my hand against the glass of a lighted showcase filled with a collection of paperweights. The colorful millefiori catches my attention—a compact arrangement of delicate pink and sapphire-blue flowers surrounded by vibrant green stalks and leaves.
“Millefiori. Italian for a million flowers,” my dad taught me a long time ago. I love the idea of a million flowers all contained inside the glass.
Hannon raps his fist against the outside of the shop window.
I don’t want to get back in the car and drive to Clear Lake.
“We’re going. Come on!” he yells.
Goddamn it. I wish we weren’t so far from home.
I wedge myself into the backseat. Before I can even buckle my seat belt, the orange Camaro squeals out of the gas station. The driver, Jay, looks back at me from his rearview mirror. His eyes are deep green and sandy, like the kelp that my brothers and I used to pull from the water at Agate Beach. He asks me if I like antiques.
“I do,” I say.
“Yeah, me too,” he says. “I love that old stuff with a history.”
Wow, this guy might be more interesting than I imagined. Before our conversation even starts, Hannon, hardly discreet, reaches behind me and snaps open my bra.
“You don’t need that thing on,” he says. “Marty, here, will agree.”
I cast him an angry look and he laughs at me. His laughter pulls at the back of my neck with the tension of a taut slingshot. I fall silent again and turn my attention to everything outside the car—the blur of redwoods and pines, the late-afternoon sun blinking and finally setting behind us.
It’s dark by the time we pull into a narrow dirt driveway. The cabin in Clear Lake is not what I expected. There are bare bulbs hanging from yellow electrical cords, a few pieces of furniture, and several thin mattresses tossed on the floor. Jay explains that it’s kind of a party pad until his parents get the flooring and plasterboard in.
“This is fucking awesome!” Hannon calls out. His voice echoes through the empty rooms of the house. “This is like the ultimate place to get hammered, dude.”
Hannon and Marty are slaphappy, checking out the place.
“We’ve even got a brew freezer,” says Hannon, high-fiving Marty and Jay. He’s an idiot when it comes to drinking.
Hannon tosses a can of beer at me from across the room. I let it fall on the flimsy mattress at my feet. I want to be a thousand miles from here, and I don’t know how to say it.
In the bathroom, I apply a line of black eyeliner and paint my lips with tinted lip gloss. I catch my distorted reflection in the cabinet mirror propped up against the shower stall. My mom told me that it’s “unfortunate” I inherited my father’s nose, but that I could always get it “bobbed” when I turn eighteen. If she hadn’t said that, I might feel okay about my nose. It’s my entire body that I hate lately.
I want to change. I want something to wake me up. I don’t want to be with this guy. But I am the one who packed a toothbrush, a change of clothes, and a new stick of black eyeliner, and then stepped into the orange Camaro. I am the one who lied to my dad and told him I was spending the night at a girlfriend’s house.
Hannon bangs on the door. “I need to take a piss,” he says.
I’m not friendly to him. It’s freezing in this shitty cabin.
“Why aren’t you out here getting hammered?” he says. “Come on, drink up.”
“I don’t really feel like it.”
“Whoa, what’s up with you?”
I walk past him outside to the porch and he follows. A layer of thick fog has surrounded the cabin since we arrived. The tall pines overhead rustle in the dark like the spirits of old men.
I am precise with my words. “I’m getting tired of this whole getting-wasted thing. Is that what you really like? Is that all you want to do?”
“Fuck yeah. That’s what we came here for.”
“Well, I’m not sure that’s what I want anymore.”
“Well, what do you want then?”
This is always where I chicken out. The question that silences me.
“I don’t know. Maybe I just want to go home.”
He laughs. “Well you’re shit out of luck on that.” His cockiness warns me that the alcohol has already settled in.
“Home?” he says. “I mean what the fuck is at home for you? Your dad is most likely out drinking at the bars. Hammered. Your mom doesn’t even live in the same state. She’s so smart that she knows every word in the dictionary. But remind me again, what is she doing now? Is she still sticking labels on tuna cans? And your brothers? They’re going off the fuckin’ deep end.”
“It wasn’t tuna, Hannon. She’s a cocktail waitress now.”
“Damn,” he continues. “You ever heard that saying that the apple never falls far from the tree? You think you’re something special?”
He knows how to snap my ribs without even hitting them. I look up at the sky for visible stars that might save me from believing his words. I can smell his breath, predict what’s coming next. He moves in close to me. “I’ve got to train you better.”
I’ve heard this speech so many times. How he “trained” his parents to respect him and now he’s got to train me. I hate that I don’t fight back. But I am the peacekeeper, the nice girl, the skinny toothpick holding up the whole house where my dad and brothers and I live.
Jay swings the door open. “You guys coming in or what?”
Hannon looks at me. “Suit yourself, but I’m going to get drunk and have fun—fun with a capital F.”
I sit down on the makeshift mattress-couch and watch the three of them laughing, drinking, and passing a joint back and forth. The dinner is cheese puffs, Red Vines, and a tub of pepperoni sticks. I tell Hannon that I will have a beer after all, and he brings me an open can from the freezer. I sip on it just to keep the peace while the guys launch into a rowdy game of quarters. Maybe if there were another girl here, things wouldn’t be as bad. Jay says his girlfriend ditched out at the last minute. Then again, I’m used to being the only girl. I live in a house of boys.
Hannon gets up, plants a sloppy kiss on my mouth, and runs his hand along my waist.
“How are you feeling? Did you like that beer?” he asks. He takes the can out of my hand and tilts it back and forth.
“There are still a couple more sips in here.” He’s smirking. “I put something special in it for you—a little upper to keep you happy.” He squeezes my thigh tightly.
I want to jump up and hit him. But then I think he must be lying.
“Please tell me you wouldn’t do that.”
“Just a little something.” He winks. “It won’t hurt you.”
My body starts shaking. And then my stomach curls into a knot. I want to vomit. I should punch him in the mouth.
“You fucking bastard!”
The room is silent. All three of them stare at me. I stand up and walk toward the door, trying to contain myself. When I reach for the doorknob, I can see myself in two places at once. I’m sitting with the guys back on the striped mattress. But I’m also standing in front of the door. It’s like I got up too quickly and walked out of my body. I stand still for a second or two, wondering how to reconnect myself, how to snap my parts back together. And then I walk out of the cabin with no idea where I’m going. I don’t care if I get lost this time.
I hear Hannon’s voice trailing, “Don’t worry. She’s fine. She just needs to mellow out.”
My high heels clack against the pavement on the main road. Who the fuck does he think he is, tricking me, putting something into my drink to alter my state? He’s held onto me by belittling me constantly—threatening that if I ever tried to break up with him, he would simply “erase me” from his mind. He said it would take him exactly two weeks, and then it would be as if I never existed.
The problem is, I’m weak. I’m desperate
for someone to like me, approve of me, stay with me. I wanted a boyfriend so badly that I took the first offer that came along. Doesn’t matter that it also happened to be the crappiest offer. He likes to remind me that I could never do any better than him.
The sound of my heels clicking in the stillness of the night starts to unnerve me. I pick up my shoe and rub my finger along the bottom where the metal point has pushed through the white leather. I put the shoe back on and move toward the dirt path alongside the road. Headlights creep up from behind me like a stage spotlight. I won’t turn around because I’m not going to talk to him or his fucked-up friends. The headlights grow wider and fill the landscape with light. I refuse to turn my head, refuse to be mocked. The noisy engine edges up almost parallel to me.
“You lost, sweetheart?”
It’s a man’s voice. A voice I have never heard.
I turn my head and am startled by the paleness of the man’s face staring at me. A man with thick lips and a deep, receding hairline—skin that looks as though it has never seen sunlight. He looks almost familiar.
“Can I offer you a ride?”
I don’t stop walking or change my pace.
His car is a long, maroon sedan of some sort. A Buick or a Plymouth. What does it matter really? I smell the gasoline fumes as he idles alongside me. A Pontiac, maybe? I am acutely aware of how I must appear, walking alone down the road on a chilly night. I’ve got on a pair of scuffed-up white pumps, a thin gauze skirt, and a tiny sweater with no bra.
“No, that’s all right,” I say.
“You look like you’re lost, Little Sheba,” he says.
Did he really just call me that? So maybe he’s a creep, but what if this is a chance to actually catch a ride out of here? When my mom used to pick up hitchhikers, it would scare the hell out of me. She said she’d look carefully at their eyes and use her best judgment before letting them in the car. I don’t recall her ever turning someone down. What else did she consider in those moments before making her decision?
I take another glance. And then I realize what’s familiar about him. He looks like the Joker from the Batman episodes my brothers used to watch after school. A chill runs up my spine. I’m not getting in the car with the Joker.
“I’m just walking home,” I say.
If I keep my feet moving and keep talking to him, I can to get to the next lot where there’s a cabin.
“Do you live around here?” I ask.
“Sort of,” he says.
My breath is erratic and visible. I’m wondering what exactly was in that pill anyway. Is it just the mystery pill that’s got my heart pounding?
Keep walking. Keep talking to the Joker.
A yellow light ahead, a single halo on a wrap-around porch.
“Get in,” he says.
“I live right here. I’ll see you. Later.”
And I’m sprinting like a deer across the grass and toward the light. His car stays idling on the side of road. I can feel him watching my back, waiting to see if I walk in that front door. I can’t knock and have nobody answer, so I step onto the porch and then run toward the back of the cabin. Crouched beneath a darkened window, I grab onto my arms to stop them from shaking.
Half a minute and I creep off the porch to the woods behind the house. I keep moving, my heels pushing into the soft dirt, my hand touching the branches of trees as I walk. I travel backward in the direction that I came from, staying away from the main road because I never want to see that creep again. I imagine him tricking me just like Hannon tricked me, this Joker showing up on the trail in front of me, grabbing me, pushing me down into the earth, my hand grabbing at the dark soil, my scream silenced by the stars.
I still my thoughts and quicken my pace.
It is the orange Camaro sitting like a tiger in the overgrown grass that tells me I have found my way back to the cabin.
I sit outside on the steps of the deck, shaking and cold, but afraid to go in. This night has been all about being in the wrong places. I know this. There are lyrics from The Beatles playing in my head—“Nothing’s gonna change my world.” All my spinning thoughts come down to a single sentence. I repeat it to myself so that I will never forget it. This is not what I want. This is not what I want.
The back door opens. It’s Jay.
“Hey, you’re back.”
I stay glued to the porch steps.
“You ought to come in. Hannon is totally passed out.”
Thank God, I think to myself and stand up. Jay stands in the doorway, his shadow filling the frame. He must be pretty drunk.
“You are beautiful. You know that?” he says, moving closer to me. I look up at him. His green eyes, kind and surprisingly focused, rearrange my thoughts. Nobody has ever called me beautiful.
Beautiful is not a person. It’s an object in an antique store, a pink tea rose, a hillside covered with buttercups. All at once, I am a thousand flowers beneath the glass. A millefiori.
“Beautiful,” he repeats. There is heat coming off his body and I want nothing more than to be warm. I let him kiss me with his drunk, sweet lips. I’m kissing the wrong guy. He has a girlfriend. He moves his hands across the skin of my back like he’s putting the final polish on his fender. Nice, I think. I let him kiss me some more.
He lifts my chin and says, “Man, you deserve better than that jerk.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“I can’t stand up anymore. You want to lie down with me?” he asks.
I kiss him again. “No, I can’t. Maybe someday though.”
He staggers into the cabin and falls onto an empty mattress.
I crawl to the space opposite Hannon and lie down on my back. His mouth hangs open like a Venus flytrap waiting to snatch its prey. But he also looks harmless, the way he sleeps with his hands quiet and curled near his chin. No, he’s still a jerk.
Wide awake, I stare at the dark wooden beams above me. I stretch my arms out across the mattress as if they are wings that could carry me to another place. Something inside me is creaking open like an old iron gate that has been wrought with vines and rust for a long time. Nothing touches me as I close my eyes—not my clothes, not the cold air, not the mattress beneath me. I am floating out of this place and into another place, a better place. Because an apple can fall far from the tree. Because this is not what I want.
NOW
darkness
Instead of going back upstairs, I push open the screen door and exit my mom’s blue house. I need to walk, to feel my feet against the hard winter ground, and shake the numbness from my body. The field where the ponies roam is three hundred yards away. I venture into the darkness with only the moon as my light. For all I know, I could be standing outside the cabin in Clear Lake twenty-five years ago. But I am here outside my mom’s house where the cold air blankets my body and reminds me how alive I am in this moment. My mom won’t ever experience this sensation again. Is this what it feels like right now for her? Is she stepping out into the dark or the light?
I feel my mom here with me under the stars. I lie down on my back and stare up at the sky. I am not afraid. This ground will hold me up. This same ground will swallow my mother’s body. I suppose I will always be the girl looking for answers in the stars and the bent trees overhead. If I had the fortitude, I’d pull myself off the ground and go shake my mom awake and tell her how much I love her. But I can’t yet.
I lie still in the pasture, listening to the sound of the ponies breathing and the leaves rustling. I remember the feeling of being eight months pregnant with my first baby—my belly full and taut, my insides being kicked and pulled and stretched. The sensation was both magical and frightening. I imagine my mom lying down in an open field like this with me kicking around in her belly. What did she hope for? Was it too frightening for her? How strange it is to imagine that I once swam in the warm darkness of her belly. Her eyes we
re the first I knew and trusted. Here in the night field, grass and earth beneath my body, I listen for my mother’s heartbeat. Her breath and mine, connected. What else is there left to do except open myself to every possibility?
By the time I pull myself from the ground, my whole body is cold and I hurry back inside the blue house. Upstairs, with my mom’s letters in hand, I find myself wondering what kind of mother I will be when my children hit adolescence. What will my children say about me? That I held them too tightly? Or that I let them fly from the nest on crooked wings?
For several years during my adolescence, my mom became even more distant. Maybe it was difficult for her to suddenly see her little girl growing into a young woman. Maybe I was pushing her away.
A letter titled “Dear Mommy” sits in the file of letters never sent. Maybe one of the letters my mom wrote while she was in rehab—since it’s a letter written many years after her mother died.
Dear Mommy,
I try to remember you ever holding me, and I can’t. Who’d want to hold a brat? I remember spitting at you after you spanked me. I also remember thinking how beautiful and perfect you were—until I was ten or so and I saw your lipstick was on crookedly one Christmas in Florida. And I hated you and felt pity for you after David was killed.
Have I always missed having a mother? How many horse shows did you come to, Mommy? [None.] How many riding lessons was I late for because you were not into taking me—or not into me, period? You were always sleeping through my nightmares unless Jo woke you up.
We won’t even mention the years of your drunkenness. You were gone then—really gone. Get your spirit together and help me for once in this life. Release me. Please, please, please. I know you weren’t a very happy person—you had so many demons. I am sorry—really I am. But I have suffered your demons, and I am tired, tired, tired. Please help.
Your daughter,
Mikel
History repeats itself again and again. The past and present collide in my mother’s words. Daughters never stop longing for their mothers. So where does this thread of broken mothers begin and end? And if it’s true that things are fated to repeat themselves, what did I think I would find different here in Olympia?
Pieces of My Mother Page 20