Elaine, the SowenCon author liaison, came hurrying up, her tall pointy witch hat askew, her glittery blue satin dress swirling and glowing like galaxies. Her whole outfit seemed to have turned into a portal to another dimension. I felt as though I might fall right into it.
“Miss Bowen?” she said, and by her expression it wasn’t the first time she’d tried to get my attention. A halo of stardust seemed to float around her face.
“Yes?” I replied. My tongue felt too big in my mouth. It felt huge as a tuna, and it might wriggle free and go swimming across the sea-green carpet. I’d have to chase it down in the gaming room, tackle it near the Munchkin tournament. The idea of that made me laugh out loud.
“Did you eat one of the black raspberry cookies?” Elaine was frowning, looking worried. Her face was getting wrinkled up. I wondered if she was going to turn into a bat, too.
She’d been by a half-hour before with a big basket of homemade Halloween cookies for all the guest authors and artists. A whole spread of tiny frosted tombstones, snickerdoodle ghosts, gingerbread cats. And black cookies, each decorated with a single blue candy eye. I have blue eyes, and after three hours of sitting at my table, the thought of devouring my own flesh had started to appeal to me. So I took two, and gave one to my friend Heather, who’d come with me to the convention to help schlep books and maintain my sanity.
“Did you eat one of the black cookies?” Elaine repeated.
I nodded slowly. “It was tasty. But the frosting was a little bitter.”
“Oh no.” She leaned in over by books. “Listen. I meant to give you a treat, but you got a trick by mistake. You’ve just consumed a fairly large dose of a hallucinogen. Those black cookies were for our ritual tonight, but our initiate got the batches mixed up.”
Elaine’s eyes were swirling, glittering, dark as a black pearl ring my mom used to own. It was always her favorite. She lost it in the ocean the same day she got her first diagnosis.
“My mom died five years ago today,” I blurted out. “She had two kinds of cancer and ehrlichiosis and cryptosporidium and it all killed her. It was like watching Boromir get shot with those black arrows. She never did anything halfway, not even dying.”
“I’m . . . I’m really sorry to hear that. But the hallucinogen—”
“On Halloween we’re supposed to remember the dead,” I said. “But how can I not remember my mom dying? How could I ever not think about that? So she could have died any other day and I’d still remember. Dying on Halloween was just . . . overkill. But hey, that’s Mom! Never do things halfway.”
“I’m truly sorry about your mother, but listen!” Elaine was speaking very slowly and clearly, as if she were addressing a learning disabled child. “The hallucinogen is going to give you visions. It might last five or six hours.”
I had a moment of rational clarity: “I take antidepressants. There’s a bunch of stuff I’m not supposed to take with them. Is the cookie going to make me sick?”
“I don’t think so.” She sounded profoundly uncertain, and her voice echoed as if she were in a large cavern. “Many of us in the coven are also on antidepressants and nobody’s had a problem. But you do need to drink a lot of water. I’m going to call someone to take you back to your hotel room and keep an eye on you. I’ll get someone else to watch your table for the rest of the day. Everything will be fine.”
“I have a panel on zombie poetry in an hour,” I said, watching tiny stardust pixies dance around her hat.
“Don’t worry about the panel—”
“But I have to warn them.” I gazed up at her, suddenly realizing it was not merely another convention panel but a very important personal mission. “I have to warn them all that when you write poetry, you are letting the brain eaters into your mind. You are letting them into your mind!”
“Listen, don’t worry about the brain eaters. Just come around the table take my hand and we’ll get you back to your room and get you some blankets and water, and—”
“VICTORIAAAA!”
Heather was zooming down the carpeted aisle full-speed on her electric, candy apple red mobility scooter. Startled con-goers were dodging right and left to get out of her way. She’d had surgery on both feet four weeks earlier and while she’d been okayed to walk short distances, the vastness of the convention center was just too much.
Her eyes were hugely dilated, and she had a sweaty look of determination I seldom saw outside end game rounds of Iron Dragon. In her free arm, she clutched a brand-new skateboard decorated with the colorful unicorn logo of one of the role-playing game companies that was sponsoring the convention. As far as I knew, she didn’t skateboard and certainly wasn’t in any condition to do it now. Had she bought it? Won it? Stolen it? Was this Grand Theft Skateboard?
She plunked it down on the floor beside my table as though she were throwing a gauntlet. “Victoria! The Ghost of Trick-or-Treat needs us!”
“It does?”
“Yes! Come with me if you want to save The Great Pumpkin!” Her words rang with irresistible authority. I was needed. Summoned. Destined.
“I don’t think—” Elaine began. Nervous purple fairies orbited her head.
“OK!” I jumped up and stared down at the skateboard, which was undulating slightly, like a cat that was about to hork up a hairball. “What now?”
“Get upon this flatfish steed and grab the back of my Harley!”
I was sure that the skateboard might vomit all over my shoes, but a good soldier in the Halloween army honors the call of duty. I stepped on the wobbly board and grasped the back of the scooter’s seat. The black vinyl bubbled up between my fingers and hissed at me, but I held fast.
“Oh, Miss Bowen, no—”
“To infinity!” Heather punched the scooter into high gear.
We zoomed past the laughing liquid racks of vendors’ books and games, faster and faster, the colors streaking and boiling with sparks as we approached light speed. And then with a blast of outer space cold, we were in the Haunter’s Hall where cartoon ghosts whooshed above the bloated foam animatronic zombies and shrieking funhouse mansion-fronts. Heather’s speeding wheels kicked up a storm of autumn leaves that made me sneeze from the smell of wood smoke and pumpkin spice. The leaves swirled up around us in a rattling vortex of reds and oranges and browns, their brittle serrated edges lashing my face and arms, and I let go of the scooter to shield my eyes—
—the skateboard squirted out from beneath my feet and my arms windmilled as I fell forward through empty darkness—
—and I face-planted onto someone’s frosty lawn, the air whoofing out of my lungs.
“Clumsy,” a man above me said. “A princess shouldn’t be clumsy.”
I pushed myself up onto my knees. My arms were tiny, and I was wearing a pink princess outfit made from cheap satin and stiff crinoline with stars made from glue and silver and pink glitter. The dress was loose. I’d outgrown this costume when I was five or six, and my mom gave it to Goodwill.
I looked up at the man, whose face was obscured by mist. The only thing I could see clearly was the Budweiser longneck in a blue coozie in his right hand.
“Papa?” I asked uncertainly. Mom had burned all his photos after he left us when I was five, and all I could really remember about him was the beer he always seemed to have. But before he decided fatherhood and marriage weren’t for him, he had taken me trick-or-treating when Mom was attending night classes after her waitressing shifts to become a computer operator. It was possibly the least he could do. But he did it.
“Well, get up, Whoopsy-Daisy, and let’s get you some candy.” My father held out his free hand, helped me to my feet, and picked dead leaves off my dress.
Decades later, during an online search, I learned that he died in a drunk driving accident in Mexico about two years after he left us. If Mom knew about that, she never let on. She’d been so furious and hurt that not only did she destroy all evidence of his existence in the house, she changed both our last names back to her ma
iden name. Alex Ronson had given me nothing that lasted except some DNA and a couple of hazy memories.
If he’d sobered up, he might have called or written me. He might have come back and tried to be a father. A lot of things could have happened, but of course they didn’t. The brief article I found just listed his expiration date and the cause; it didn’t say if he’d died instantly in his smashed fast car or if he’d lingered in pain in the hospital as my mother had.
“Did it hurt?” I asked him.
“Did what hurt?” he grunted as he led me up the sidewalk of our old neighborhood toward Mrs. Robinson’s house. She always had the best candies for trick-or-treaters: full-sized Kit-Kats and peanut butter cups and Almond Joys.
“When you died,” I said. “Did it hurt?”
“No, it didn’t hurt at all.”
His voice had changed. I looked up, and saw the man was now my mom’s boyfriend Joe Moreno. He looked the same as he had when he was thirty or so: angular face softened by his gentle brown eyes, his thick black hair parted down the middle and feathered back like it was still 1988. He worked as an ER nurse. He met my mom when I was seven, and they stayed together until he suffered a massive heart attack in the hospital parking lot and died.
He took a long drag from his Lucky Strike and puffed smoke rings into the chilly autumn air. “Well, that’s a little lie. It was the worst crushing cramp in my chest you can imagine, but my knees buckled and I fell and cracked my head on a concrete parking block. Knocked me clean out, and I didn’t feel anything after that. They found me quick and brought me back into the ER; it took me maybe a half hour to die while they were working hard on me. They busted nearly every rib and I didn’t feel it. As deaths go, mine was totally ironic, but I got off easy pain-wise.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, gripping his warm hand more tightly. “You were only forty-five, and it wasn’t fair.”
“Don’t be sorry. I got to help a lot of people at the hospital. Save little kids. I got to be worthy. And I had a good life with Donna, and after a while I thought of you as my own daughter. Even if I always told you to call me Joe. I did my best to be a good dad, but I never figured I had the right to claim to be your father unless Donna and me got married, and we didn’t.”
I blinked, surprised at the regret in his voice. “I thought you never wanted to?”
Another, longer drag, and more smoke rings. The smell of his tobacco in the air made my heart ache at how much I’d missed his calm, steady strength in my life the past thirteen years. He was the perfect balance to my mom’s passionate volatility and he’d mediated plenty of arguments between her and me. Without him around, not much could stop Hurricane Donna. I loved my mom and I knew she loved me, but when I had the chance to move across the country for a job, I took it. And, later, I lay awake at night wondering if my absence meant she hadn’t gone to the doctor when she needed to.
“I thought about marriage plenty,” Joe said, “but things were good the way they were, you know? Marriage changes things; it’s like a mutation. Sometimes your relationship gets superpowers, but sometimes it goes malignant. I didn’t want to risk the good thing we had. And neither did your mom, not after the ways your dad changed.”
If Joe had lived, he might have spotted signs of Mom’s cancer earlier when it was still treatable. He would have been able to go with her to appointments and advocate for better care.
If he’d lived, maybe they’d both still be alive.
“You were always good to us,” I told him. “I’ll never forget that.”
Joe smiled around his cigarette. “That’s the best thing an old ghost like me can hope for.”
I felt myself grow bigger as he led me to Mrs. Robinson’s house. By the time we reached the front door, I was adult-sized again and my princess dress was gone, replaced by my usual outfit of jeans and a black tee shirt. Joe pulled open the screen door so I could knock.
After two raps, the door swung inward, but it wasn’t Mrs. Robinson’s living room. It was the cluttered den in my mom’s sister Catherine’s split-level in Maine. The smells of warm apple cider and popcorn wafted from the kitchen. My aunt’s six-year-old twins Noah and Natalie had dressed up as pirates and were shrieking with glee and chasing each other around the room with foam cutlasses.
I hadn’t seen Catherine since my mom’s funeral; the twins were still in diapers, and she’d left them at home with her husband. She only stayed for the funeral and reception. Seven hours at the most, and then she was back in the air. I’d only seen her kids in photos and videos on Facebook, but they looked like a real handful for a couple of forty-somethings. Somewhere I read that older mother’s kids inherited weakened mitochondria, but Noah and Natalie seemed to have enough energy to power an entire city.
“I’m not taking you trick-or-treating if you don’t calm down and put on your coats!” Catherine yelled.
I tried to take a step forward into the house, but found myself blocked by an invisible wall.
“Just as well,” I muttered. “They don’t know me anyhow.”
“They could know you,” Joe said. “You could be there right now.”
I shook my head. “She didn’t have much time for me before Mom died, and later . . . well, she acted all weird after I tried to kill myself. Acted like . . . like the crazy would rub off on her or something. Facebook’s as close as she wants me, I guess.”
“She did say to visit any time.”
“Yeah, but . . . come on, she didn’t mean that. She was just trying to be polite.”
“She can’t know that you even want to visit if you don’t try. And your cousins won’t remember you if they never get to see you.”
“It’s too hard.” I stared down at my black Chuck Taylors, still dusted with purple and silver glitter from the princess dress. “I can’t put myself out there and have her reject me again. I just can’t.”
The light dimmed. I looked up, and realized that Joe and I were standing in a cramped efficiency apartment between a drab brown couch and a flatscreen TV tuned to a cheesy 50s horror movie. The room stank of spilled beer, garbage, and unwashed laundry. A sallow-eyed woman in a blue bathrobe was sitting on the couch, blankly staring past us at the screen; she didn’t seem to know we were there. Her face was bloated, and so it took me a second to realize that the woman was me. A broken-down me 15 or 20 years in the future, fifty pounds heavier with an alcoholic’s reddened skin. This was surely what giving up looked like.
“Well, shit,” I whispered.
The coffee table in front of her was cluttered with empty bottles of Budweiser and cheap whiskey along with crumpled Taco Bell and Halloween candy wrappers. She pushed through the mess until she found a mostly-full bottle of Wild Turkey and a bottle of Tylenol. The sad woman started tossing back the painkillers by the handful, washing them down with the whiskey.
“Fuck, no, stop!” I stepped toward her, but the invisible wall blocked me again.
“She’ll be dead in days,” Joe said. “I saw my share of people who decided to commit suicide like this. It’s effective, cheap, and an awful way to die. The alcohol and acetaminophen turns your liver to dog food. There’s no help for it except an emergency transplant, and almost nobody can get that. Not without money, and . . . well. Doesn’t look like there’s much of that around here.”
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. “Shit.”
When I dropped my hands, Joe and I were standing in a darkened hospital corridor. It seemed familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Hospitals all look pretty much the same. The walls were decorated with cardboard Halloween witches, pumpkins, and black cats. Most of the rooms were dark and their doors closed, but the light was on in one open room toward the end of the hall.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get any trick-or-treat goodies.” Joe reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and pulled out a colorful package of candy. “Here you go.”
I took the proffered pack. The cartoon ancient Egyptian on the wrapper gripped a blue Tropical F
ruit Punch mummy that looked more like a board he was going to use to surf some dunes. “Yummy Mummies? Really?”
Joe shrugged and grinned. “Hey, I’m stuck in 1988, what did you expect?”
His grin faded and he nodded toward the lighted room. “You should go see her now.”
My stomach churned. “Is . . . is Mom in there?”
“She is.”
“I . . . I can’t.” I shook my head. I couldn’t go back to that night. It was my worst failure. I couldn’t.
“Vicky, I can’t make you. But you know what happens if you don’t try. The guilt will keep eating you from the inside out.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “Okay.”
I tucked the pack of Yummy Mummies into my back pocket and slowly walked down the hall to my mom’s room. My dread increased with every step. I’d had nightmares about this nearly every week for the past five years, and now I had to face her.
She lay mute and too sick to move in the bed just as I remembered her. And the smell—the hospital antiseptic overlaying the stink of diarrhea and vomit made me want to gag. The veins in her arms had collapsed and she’d gone into kidney failure, so they had stuck a quiver of painful-looking needles into the pulsing vessels in her neck to hook her up to various IV tubes. One was for saline, another for an antiparasitic drug, and the rest for dialysis. The surgical tape over the needles hadn’t held properly and blood had slowly seeped out in a sticky, uncomfortable-looking pool spreading across the hollows of her collarbones and down her cleavage. Futile silver bags hung on the IV tree above her.
And I—the five-years-younger version of me—sat in the chair beside her. Staring at her with a dazed expression. Just staring and watching her die.
“C’mon,” I begged myself. “Get up and call a nurse to come sponge her off. Get up.”
But I couldn’t hear myself and just kept sitting and staring. I know what I was thinking. The nurses during the day had buzzed around my mother with impatient efficiency and I’d just tried to stay out of their way. At night, I hadn’t been able to shift to realizing that now nobody else was checking on her and I needed to do something. But I felt like a bystander, an observer. I felt helpless in the face of all those needles and tubes and malignant cells I couldn’t stop. It never occurred to me that the extra bit of discomfort my mother was suffering was something I could stop.
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