It wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d imagined sitting by her bed in a chilled hospital room, holding her hand, listening to her breath, to the beep of machines and the drip of IVs, the overhead calls to doctors in code. The soft pad of nurses in clogs in and out, checking charts, adjusting meds. Everything a cool blue light, like the inside of an aquarium.
My mother died alone. In her own bed.
Later, the doctor told us it was her heart, not the cancer, and not her lungs.
It happens, he said. Sometimes, it’s just too much strain on the body.
She’d refused further treatment after her voice box was removed. What else? she’d whispered to me. What else can they do to me? What else can they take away?
I’d leaned over to light her cigarette for her. We sat that way, all morning. Quiet, smoking. The clink of her coffee cup on the glass tabletop.
When someone dies at home, you call 911, and they take them to the hospital, even when they know that the person is dead. Even when that person is your mother. They kept me on the line, and I was okay, I was numb, sitting there in her room on a padded oval-backed chair, watching her stillness.
911, what’s your emergency?
My mother is dead.
When my father found me in the hospital waiting room, surrounded by other people waiting to be seen for emergencies and births, the bustle of deliveries, flowers, carts with lunches on them, orderlies and nurses and doctors walking together, he told me I was the woman of the house now.
I was holding a pen that a nurse had given to me, a click pen that said ENFAMIL FORMULA on the side. I kept opening and closing it, an undone word-search magazine on my lap. The nurse had given me that too, to keep my mind occupied, she said. She was an oncology nurse. Short and round. I wondered how many motherless girls she’d ushered through the last days.
And then Doe plunked down beside me on a vinyl chair that was connected to all the other chairs in a row.
Well, you’re the woman of the house now, he said. It was eleven thirty in the morning and he smelled of whiskey, of sweat, and sex.
I jammed the pen into the back of his hand, deep enough to stick. I wished it had gone all the way through.
Because we were in public, he barely uttered a sound. He grimaced, and looked murder at me, and I could hear the stuttered click of his teeth clenching.
I walked out. I walked all the way down Route 8, without a jacket, to Rayelle’s, where I didn’t want her; I didn’t know what I wanted. Something was different in me the instant I turned over my mother’s body. The instant I realized I was alone, without her.
Why? I asked my aunt Carleen. Why would that happen? I hadn’t seen it coming. Couldn’t have known that was how it would be.
The heart has funny ways, Carleen said.
I knew it. Rabbits can stop their hearts out of fear, if in danger, or cornered. It saves them from the grisly death that was coming; like flicking a switch, they just turn themselves off and die on the spot. I thought about my mother lying in bed, about my father coming in anyway, smelling like booze and someone else’s pussy, even though he said he hated the room, the light, the flowers, the pretty gold leaf in the wallpaper, the satin sheets. I’d hear it, the movement of their bed, the running water. Her dry, voiceless cough. He’d move to the couch after, and I’d hear him snoring.
What had decided for her? Her brain, or her heart? Which one threw up the white flag and gave up? Imploding. Cornered. Saved from something more grisly.
I wished I had been there. I should have been in that room with her. I should have held her hand, stroked her head, given her water, rubbed her feet, anything, anything but left her alone in that room, trussed up like a dead body, where he came and went as he pleased. I hadn’t heard her last breath. I hadn’t seen her heart break. She’d been alone. Used up and broken. All of her shitty forty-four years, dead babies and miscarriages, Nudie with a goddamn bomb to his face, her unstoppable hound of a husband. All of it, too much strain for the body.
No one should have to die that way.
five
RAYELLE
Summer was born in the dead of winter. The house, a little clean-to-the-baseboards ranch that Eli’s parents owned and rented to us, was so cold in January that I would undress Summer in front of the heat duct. I laid out her changing pad there, even the little blue plastic baby tub, with the dry forced air blowing on her, her skin crisscrossed white and pink, her lower lip shivering.
I felt like I made the house dirty, just being in it. The white walls, the sealed wood floors. The new windows. Like my dirty bare feet left tracks everywhere.
We moved in when I was eight and a half months. I hadn’t told Eli until I was already six months. Not because I wanted to trap him. I didn’t even want the baby. I’d just never been regular, and didn’t know until I was pretty far along. It was nothing for me to miss a period. Sometimes, they’d come every ten or twelve weeks. So when I saw him again, when he came into the bowling alley where I was still tending bar, not quite showing, but hiding underneath a billowing shirt, he took one look at me and said, I sure am glad you’re here, because, he meant, I was fun, because he knew what it meant: a ride in the car, windows down, legs up, parked by the pines along the lake.
I’m glad you’re here too, I said, and handed him a Coors Light. I’m pregnant.
Well, shit, he said. I remember him rubbing the back of his neck, not looking me in the eye for a long time after that. I said I hadn’t known how to reach him. But his daddy was the pastor at South Lake Baptist. If I’d been crazier, or desperate, I might have rolled up in front of the brick building, and the Sunday morning congregation, looking for Eli, my belly big. His mother might have fainted. Elijah got the bartender pregnant.
June Carol did pitch a fit. I was the worst thing that had happened to them. At the very least, she wanted us married. But really, she didn’t want me at all, a trailer park Reed, a bowling alley bartender, living in her house with her only son, raising a bastard child.
Just let us get settled, Mama, Eli said to her. It might have been the first time he’d stood up to her. I know you think it’s that official paper that makes it real, he said, but right now, we need to take care of this baby.
That is not what makes it real, Elijah, and you know it. It’s the sanctity of marriage.
I never saw her without mascara and lipstick both. Her outfits were meticulously matched. Her nails, tasteful and immaculate. She gardened. She cooked every meal to include each food group. She had perfect handwriting and always wrote thank-you notes.
I had never even felt very feminine. I thought about my own mother, in her jeans and ponytail, with her cigarettes and gin. The way she drove her Grand Prix like a motherfucker on the highway, speeding and listening to loud Springsteen. And there I was, in June Carol Jenkins’s house, wearing a maternity dress from the Salvation Army and my grandmother’s cardigan, the only things that would fit me, rocking in a chair with a baby I’d never intended to have, my hair piled in a bun on top of my head. I looked like a Mennonite.
Those eight months, the one before and the seven after she was born, were a disaster of me fumbling, me breaking dishes, me burning an entire lasagna so that the kitchen filled with smoke, me sneaking cigarettes out the bathroom window, me crying in the dark alone with the baby. I remember Easter—Jesus, Easter at the pastor’s house—Summer laughing for the first time, the perfect square of a backyard coming back to grass and lilacs, camellias along the fence and the azalea bush in the sun like it was burning. And then she was gone.
I went back to the house once after I’d moved out. A few days before Christmas, when I’d been sitting in my mother’s living room, trying to sort out ornaments, trying to put up some semblance of a tree, or any decoration, but just sitting with open boxes around me while the TV blared, and after no kind of supper, nothing that resembled a meal, just some Ritz crackers and some cheese that Chuck had picked up at Rite Aid, and a box of chocolate-covered cherries.
&
nbsp; I left the boxes open, tissue paper scattered.
The house was closed up tight. Locks changed. Eli had gone back to his parents’ home, just like I had gone to mine, both of us back to the opposite worlds we’d come from. I stood out there on the step like a fool, trying my key and trying again, while the lawn sparkled with frost under the streetlight. I felt cast out. Put to the curb. The house was never mine to have, only to borrow, only to shepherd a child through. June Carol always said you just borrow children from God. It’s your job to take care of them for Him.
In the morning, by the lake, I come out of the Scamp, dressed, but sweaty, and I graze my hand over Couper’s shoulders. I kiss his neck. He sits by the water in the camp chair, tapping away on his laptop. The water, rippled and bright.
What’s the thing you remember most about Holly Jasper disappearing? he says. The one thing?
There wasn’t anyone strange in town, I say.
He twists in the chair to face me, the metal legs stressed and bending. For days I’ve been wearing the same underwear, the same jeans, the same top. My hair, curlier and heavier at the same time.
What do you mean? he says.
It was a dead week, I tell him. In the summer, there’s always something going on, a car show, a carnival, bikers. But not that week. There weren’t extra people here. School wasn’t out yet, I say. I mean, maybe a couple of fishermen, or retired people staying at the lake, but nothing big.
You think it was someone here, he says.
Yeah, I say, and shrug. I pick a stray thread off his sleeve. You know. The call’s coming from inside the house. It was one of us.
Do you think she’s still here? he says. Her body, I mean.
Maybe. But they sure as hell never found it.
Did anyone else disappear? he says.
Other girls? No.
I mean, leave town.
Her family, but . . . they had to, I say. They thought for a while, like, unofficially, people thought it was the dad. But it wasn’t.
He starts to smile, the sun warm on his legs, but his face still in the shadow of trees. How do you know? he says.
I shake my head. I got a feeling. It just wasn’t.
He pokes at the brass button on my jeans. How good’s your feeling? he says.
Pretty good. I laugh then. For what that’s worth.
That’s worth a lot, he says. He closes the laptop and stretches, shoulders back, breastbone out.
What’s in it for you? I say.
A contract, he says.
For murder? I say, only half-amused, and he laughs.
For a book, he says.
Oh.
He gets up, taller than I am, even when he’s standing downhill of me. I’m only half as dangerous as you think I am, he says.
I need clean clothes, I tell him. I’m twice as dirty as you think I am.
I like that, he says.
When we pull into Pine Bluff Estates in the Gran Torino, the contents of one room—not mine—are being thrown into a dumpster. There’s a cop car parked to the side, dormant, lights off, with an officer inside, typing away on a laptop that’s balanced on the center console.
Yikes, Couper says.
I scan the lot.
Um, I say, quickly, my car’s not here.
Where did your car go? he says.
I don’t know.
He parks next to the office, where we can see through the glass window that the manager is inside on the phone.
Couper gets out, he nods at the cop, why I don’t know, and leans in the office door. Then the manager sees me sitting in the passenger seat with the window down.
Oh, honey, she says. Yeah, the cops came and got your car. That was a couple days ago, she says. Now, we got this going on. She and Couper both look down the line of doors to the room being emptied. Two guys come out with a mattress and hurl it into the dumpster.
Couper turns his head to her and before he asks, she says, Dead. She waves her hand. Happens, she says.
They come out with a cooler, and a suitcase. All his possessions, whoever he was, whatever he was in trouble for, once you die, they just throw out the mattress, your suitcase of belongings, maybe all you had in the world, and chuck them into a dumpster to drag away.
She comes to the side of the car. I don’t want to get you in trouble, she says, but that car was reported stolen.
I huff out a nervous laugh. It’s my dad’s, I say. If I was going to steal a car, I say, it wouldn’t be a goddamn ’94 Escort.
Couper slides in beside me, and the manager goes inside the office, the black cordless phone in her hand. From the door, she says to me, You didn’t have nothing in your room.
No. I didn’t.
Well, Couper says. Where to?
I’d been planning to pick up my car and drive back home, take a shower, change my clothes, meet him somewhere out, or back at the Scamp, in my best jeans, a black shirt, my hair done and makeup on my face.
So I tell him how to get to the trailer park.
It’s a road of trailer parks, one after another. Some are nicer than others. Some are senior parks, fifty-five plus. There are apartments back there, too, and next to the park my mother lives in, a huge cemetery with tall monuments, spires and angels, crosses. I point him into Cottonwood Park, on the left, and he goes over the speed bumps, down the five-miles-an-hour drive between tiny run-down trailers.
It’s not the best park. We’ve been here since I was ten. Before that, we lived in a lone trailer on a rural route; before that, in a basement apartment; before that, in my grandmother’s back room and back porch. My mom and Ray had their own trailer in another park when I was born, that I’ve only seen pictures of. It was yellow, a single, with a wavy edge that made it look modern, or old-fashioned, depending how old you were.
It looks like shit here. Jimmy the neighbor’s trailer is up on cinder blocks because he needs to do plumbing and wire work below the floorboards. The one next door to his has a plywood window. There’s a skinny dog in the street, just standing. Penny. She’s a mutt and she’s about sixteen years old. She always limps over to let me pet her soft head.
I don’t want to watch Couper’s face. I don’t know where he’s from, but it’s not here. Even his tin-can trailer has some appeal to it, some ironic roughing-it bullshit that you can get away with when you have the money to get away with it. It’s not ironic when it’s your actual fucking life.
There are about twenty-five black trash bags on my mother’s lawn, filled with soft material, bedding, curtains, towels, and some just half full, tipped over, with heavier things inside, books, old cheap brass picture frames. My mother’s Grand Prix is parked on the gravel drive, but not the Escort.
Must be trash day, Couper says, before I even tell him that’s the one.
Stop here, I say.
Here? he says, sort of forced and surprised.
Yes. I open the door before he has the car in park. I don’t totally trust her to clean out her own shit, even when there’s so much of it and I know almost all of it has to go.
She comes out of the sliding glass door, tiny and red-faced, heaving another bag. Here, she says, and thrusts it at me. It’s soft, but heavy. I wonder if she took the burlap cushions off the couch.
Mom, I say.
Put it out, she says, and points. She goes back in and then reappears, sliding a twin mattress on its side. Blue satin flowers, old, flattened on the edges. Mine.
Mom.
She pushes it over the edge of the deck onto the grass, where it lands in a puddle.
She starts to fix her hair, taking it out of the ponytail and redoing it. She smoothes the wispies back from her forehead. And then she notices Couper.
Mom, I say, watching the water seep up the sides of the mattress. What are you doing with my stuff?
Who’s that? she asks.
Couper gets out of the car. Can I help you with some of this? he asks.
No you cannot help her, I say.
Why don’t you
take this box spring, my mother says, and bust it up for me, and then we can bag it. They won’t take it whole, she says. She goes inside and pushes the back of it toward the open glass door, and Couper has no choice but to grab it and pull. It comes out to the deck, just a rickety frame of cheap wood, and he pushes it off onto the mattress below.
Sledgehammer in the shed, my mother says.
Mom!
She comes out the sliding door, hunched over like a kid making a snowman, rolling another trash bag that has shoes—my shoes—spilling out of the open side.
Where am I supposed to sleep? I ask.
Where you been sleeping? she says.
I hear Couper open the metal doors of Chuck’s shed. Who knows what’s even in there. I know he has tools, but Jesus, I half expect Couper to find something embarrassing. A stack of dirty magazines. Or weird. Fucking moonshine. I watch Couper grab an axe. When he takes a swing at the box spring, the dull blade gets stuck and he has to wiggle it out.
My mother goes down the steps to him. You’re kind of delicate for a big guy, she says. Then she points at the grid. You have to work the joints, she says, and takes the axe from him, swinging hard, way above her head so that he ducks, and when she hits, the frame springs apart, loose and broken. Like that, she says.
Yes ma’am.
I watch him break it apart, hitting it with the axe and then pulling with his foot on the frame, breaking off pieces that fit into a stretchy black trash bag, and then another. He gets it into two bags, sharp bits of wood jutting out. He wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist.
I need some clothes, Mom.
You should have thought of that when you disappeared and didn’t answer my calls, she says.
I didn’t answer the first ones. And then my phone died. I left the charger in the motel room. Which means it’s probably in a dumpster now.
The Scamp Page 5