“Dr. Mom to you,” she calls after me.
Gym is still my least favorite period of the day. Now we are practicing the divine art of modern dance. Fantastic. Olive and her clique watch me try to practice my final dance. They sit on the bleachers and laugh behind their hands as I circle my arms wildly to the music. My dance partner, Simone, keeps yelling at me to “tighten it up.” But when I try to tighten it up, I move like a robot, in small jerky bursts. Simone has had it with me. She watches me too, frowning and shaking her head.
After gym class, I go to my locker for my clothes, but they aren’t there. Olive is laughing with her friends, wearing only a white bra and gym shorts. I walk up to her.
“Have you seen my clothes?” I ask.
She glares at me. “Um. You’re wearing them.” Her friends snicker.
“Not my gym clothes. My real clothes.”
“Your real clothes, hmmm. Maybe I have seen them. Oh no, you only wear black. The clothes I saw were gray.”
What does that mean? The clothes she saw were gray. I look in the shower, I look in the sink. There. My silk wrap top and loungy pants are crumpled in the sink, turning lighter and lighter. Someone has poured bleach all over them. I walk back to Olive and whisper menacingly in her ear.
“Listen to me,” I say, my cold voice a surprise, my boldness even a shock, but I continue. “You don’t know what I’m capable of. But I will make you pay in ways you never even imagined were possible. Just wait.” I move my head slightly away so I can read her expression. Her eyes are wide open, her mouth is parted. She is terrified. I have her. “You won’t even know when it’s coming. But it will come, again and again. I never rest.”
When I step away, Olive is trying to compose herself, but she’s scared. I’m a little scared too.
I might be just a little bit like my father, but my mother is still in my bones. She is swimming through my blood.
I’m in a bad mood until chemistry, my solace class, my comfort zone. The minute I walk into the room, the darkness drains from me, the cool of my blood. Chem is hard for me, harder than biology, but it wakes up a part of my brain that I didn’t know was in there, and I love it. I love how everything makes sense, and I like figuring out how all the numbers fit. This week, we have been studying the colors of chemicals, and today is lab day. We’re doing the flame test lab, which means we get to burn things, and that is exciting for Martin and me both. Mrs. Burke passes out the Bunsen burners and wire loops, and Martin and I immediately start fighting about who gets to do the burning.
“You have neater handwriting,” he tries, passing me the comp book.
“You don’t want to burn your orange sock-gloves,” I counter.
“We’ll take turns,” he says, and I nod, taking the book from him.
We switch off burning metals and writing the color of the flame next to the element into our comp book. Sodium is orange, and copper is blue green. Potassium is pink like petals from a cherry tree in spring. The writing in our comp book is so neat and clean. I watch as the electrons move from the ground state to an excited state and give off energy in the form of color.
Maybe I’ll be a chemist when I grow up. An herbal chemist, if there is such a thing. There are a lot of concepts I haven’t totally gotten my head around, but I love how everything fits together so neatly. Positive and negative, metal and nonmetal, protons and neutrons. I love the periodic table, how there’s an order to everything. It’s so beautiful in the way it’s structured. Everything has a number and a place and it all adds up like a map to the universe.
I think of ancient alchemists turning elements to gold. Base metals to noble metals. I would like to do that. I see myself in the future, gathering my herbs and extracting their components. I’ll have a periodic table on my bedroom wall, and I’ll consult it for answers, looking for links between humanity and the cosmos. Looking for the answers of the universe.
In my room, I gather my sweetest-smelling herbs and tinctures. Vanilla beans in a jar. Rose petals and wild strawberry. I am going home, even if only for a weekend. And even though I can’t be as nice as Anna, I can be more the girl I once was. “She is so much like her father,” my mother had said. And I am. My mother is darkness and venom. It scares me when I act like her. Anna is cobwebs and song. She makes me sane. But me, I am like my father.
In Chico, gardens thrive and swans sing serenades to turtles. Egrets, not fear and sadness, have been known to follow me home from school. And I will be going in only a couple of days. The hills will turn from green to gold. I can’t want this too much. If you want something too much, it won’t happen. But I want this. I want this too much.
At school, I try not to imagine that she will still be in bed when I get home, that she will refuse to take me to Chico for the long weekend as promised. Even if she does, I can just call Anna to pick me up. I call her at break to put her on alert.
“She just broke up with someone,” I tell her. “If she’s feeling depressed, she might not be getting out of bed.”
“No problem,” Anna tells me. “I’ll be ready with the bus. Just call me after school if you need me.”
At lunch, I sit with Stacia and Martin beneath the cherry tree. Olive has left me alone all day, and her friends have been ignoring me too. I won’t really do anything to get back at her. Although I could.
“Guess what,” Stacia says, her dark eyes twinkling. “Olive has started a new rumor.”
“Great,” I groan.
“No, I think you’ll like this one. She said Drake’s back at his house, and she’s been trying to nurse him back to health. I guess she thinks her duties are above and beyond.” She snickers. “In any case, he tried to seduce her. But then she said he couldn’t get it up.”
I widen my eyes, nodding. I wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t cast the spell. Would he have tried to hurt Olive too? I shake my head. It doesn’t matter; it’s none of my business anymore.
I propose a toast to us, and we clink drinks, me with my pomegranate juice in a bottle, Stacia with her Diet Coke, and Martin with his Gojilania goji and mangosteen juice (foods with funny names diet).
I have friends and nice clothes and a warm bed at night. I feel a surge of well-being course through me. Every once in a while, that happens. I’ll just be sitting there, minding my own business, when all of a sudden I feel good, like everything is right in the world, and I am alive and it is amazing.
But like I said, I wanted it too bad. When I get home from school, Cheyenne is sitting on a chair at the kitchen table. A red candle burns, illuminating the dark sheen of her hair.
“Hello,” I call, but she doesn’t turn to me. Her hair streams down the side of her face, and I can’t read her expression, but something is wrong.
“Mom?” I go to her in a panic. “What is it? Are you okay?” Her head slips off her hand and bangs the edge of the table. Her eyes are rolled back into her head, and her tongue hangs limply from her mouth. “Mom!”
Her head on the table, she nods weakly. “Wha. Lashy,” she slurs.
“Mom. Stay there.” I grab my phone, dial 911. The woman stays on the line with me until I see the red flashes though the window.
Then there are two men in the house. They move her onto the couch.
“What did she take?” one of them asks me.
“I don’t know. I got home and she was like this.”
He lifts a bottle I hadn’t seen off the floor. The other one puts a tube down her throat. Cheyenne is gagging and coughing and crying. Her eyes are wild. How could she do this? What did she take? I can feel the thick tube in my own throat, choking me, and my own eyes fill with tears. The red flashes light up the walls, blood on blood, my mother crying gagging sobbing on the couch.
The hospital room is quiet and white. There is a gash on Cheyenne’s forehead from where she hit it on the table. She lies back, an IV in her arm. “I’m sorry,” she whispers to me.
“What did you take?”
“A lot of Xanax. A lit
tle vodka. Honey, please don’t cry, I can’t stand it.”
“Were you trying to kill yourself?” I ask.
She wipes at my tears with her long, pale fingers and leans up to kiss me on the head. I feel it then, that current that runs between us, that current that means we belong to each other. Then she pats the hospital bed beside where I’m sitting, and I lie next to her, the tears still coming, and my mother brushes the hair from my face. After I settle down, we lie on our backs and she holds my hand. She doesn’t say anything about the cold of my skin.
I close my eyes and the memory returns. The binding spell I did on my mother. I put the spell in an empty wine bottle and buried it below the crumbling front porch of the old hotel we lived in for a couple of weeks. But later, she held the bottle in her hand. She unwrapped the twine with her long red fingernails. Her red lips moved in anger, and I lay curled in a corner of a couch on the front porch, so scared.
I shoot straight up in the hospital bed, my mind messy with thoughts. If the binding spell had worked, then she wouldn’t have been able to hurt herself with vodka and pills. And if the binding spell hadn’t worked, then she might have been responsible for my father’s death after all.
I shake her. “Did you kill him?” I ask. I sob as I shake her.
“What the fuck?” she says, her eyes fluttering open.
I take a breath and try to figure out what I’m asking. “Did you cause my dad’s cancer with magic?”
“No, of course not.” Her eyes are wide and innocent, and I don’t believe her. She reaches for me. “You know I wouldn’t. You know I promised.” Promised what? I don’t get what she’s saying. “Look, calm down for a minute here, Lacy. Why are you asking me this? Why now?”
“I thought I did a binding spell. So that you couldn’t hurt Dad and Anna.”
“You did.”
“Okay, but I just remembered that you found it. And you removed the bind.”
“Well, yeah, Lacy, you buried it beneath about a centimeter of dirt. It was the easiest thing in the world to find. And when I found it, I shouted at you, and you cried for a few minutes and then you shouted back. You were pretty scary, actually. And I realized how worried you were, how much they mattered to you, and I’m still your mother, whatever you think. Don’t you remember this?”
I shake my head no.
“I promised you on that day that I wouldn’t use magic on your dad or Anna. And I’ve kept my promise. Whether you want to believe it or not, that’s your choice.”
I nod, slowly. Maybe I do remember, a little. And maybe I shouldn’t, but I believe it. “I believe it,” I say, and my necklace again warms my chest.
Memorial Day weekend is spent in the hospital. Anna is not happy with me, or maybe she’s just mad at Cheyenne, but she sounds angry when she talks to me. She thinks Cheyenne is just manipulating me. But she doesn’t understand. I’m trying to do the right thing, and the right thing is to stay with this woman, my mother. I know it’s what Anna would do. And my father. It’s what he would do too.
Cheyenne is my mother. I don’t always like her and I don’t even think I always love her, but she is mine.
Together we lie in her hospital bed, playing cards or watching the TV. The nurses bring me vouchers for the cafeteria and I spend them on pizza, soda, and fries. My mom is brought trays full of Jell-O and lemon freeze and milk, and she eats all her food like a good girl. I offer her my pizza, but she shakes her head. Sometimes, at night, I wake up to find her holding me. I don’t remember her ever touching me this way before. I begin to let myself love her again.
Myrna drove me back home so I could pick up some of our things, and when I came back, I brought with me a tincture made from plantain and apple cider vinegar for the gash on her forehead. Uncomplaining, she lets me apply it with a cotton ball. The tincture will pull out the pain and help her heal.
On TV, a commercial for mattresses comes on. This new mattress, the spokesman declares, will dramatically reduce your time spent tossing and turning.
“I like tossing and turning,” I say. “It keeps my arm from falling asleep.”
“It’s the only way I get any exercise,” my mom says, and we laugh. We laugh with each other. “I’m sorry about your weekend with Anna,” she says.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Anyway, Anna is going to drive down next Saturday if that’s okay. And she’s bringing Mr. Murm. Since you’re not allergic to cats anymore, do you think Mr. Murm can stay?”
My mom smiles at me and touches my wrist, just above the spot where she once burned it. “I don’t see why not,” she says.
Finally, my mom is discharged. We go home and she climbs straight into her bed. I bring a chair from the kitchen and sit beside her. She isn’t going to make me go to school. We play Scrabble and hangman, and I go out for movie rentals. Every morning, I get coffee and croissants, which we eat from white paper bags. We keep candles lit and avoid mirrors. Neither of us has showered in days.
By Friday evening, I decide it is time for us to get out of bed. I ransack the refrigerator and find chard, onions, garlic, and carrots, all of which I bought over a week ago. Fortunately, none of it seems to have gone bad. Fortunately, Anna taught me how to cook — not a lot, but a little. I can make twice-baked potatoes and guacamole and rice cooked in vegetable broth with onions. I can make pasta and pizza crust. And soup. I can make soup.
I sauté the onions and garlic in butter and start a large can of chicken broth to boil in a pot. I want everything to be nice. The next-door neighbors have a garden of wildflowers, yellow ones with green caps like gnomes, and purple ones like little bells. I go outside to pick some, hoping no one sees. I know not to pick flowers from other people’s gardens, but they have so many, and I really want the table to look pretty. I want Cheyenne to like me right now. Anna is coming tomorrow, and I want Cheyenne to be on her best behavior.
When the soup is ready, I pour it steaming into two bowls. I would season it with herbes de Provence if we had any, but all we have is salt and pepper. I can’t use herbs from my garden; they’re all dead.
“Mom,” I call, and in a minute she comes shuffling out of the bedroom without me having to call her a million times. She wears her kimono and shiny blue slippers with gold embroidery. Slippers for a queen.
“Smells good,” she says, going to the cupboard and pulling out a bottle of her expensive white wine with the cherry blossoms on the label. She also pulls out two glasses. “Will you join me in a glass?”
“Sure,” I say, although I don’t know if I’ll be able to stomach it. White wine in a Dixie cup, metal in my mouth. She pours the wine into the glasses.
“Cheers,” Cheyenne says, and we drink. It doesn’t taste like Drake’s wine. It tastes like a fairy wood, oak trees and pine trees, gnomes in their little mushroom houses. Drake’s wine tasted like feet.
The soup is delicious if I do say so myself. It is hot and salty. We haven’t eaten anything hot in days. We’ve been living off croissants and yogurt and CHEETOS. My mom reaches over to refill my glass. I didn’t realize I’d emptied it.
“We should get drunk together,” she says. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
I laugh, surprised. “Are you serious? Okay, why not?” I say. Shrugging away the questions in my mind: Why does she want me to get drunk tonight? So I’ll be hungover tomorrow and not have fun with Anna? I shake my head and try to relax. I’m just glad that she’s out of bed. I’m just glad that she isn’t being mean.
After dinner we sit on the love seat in in the backyard, the open bottle of wine on the porch between us.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I went to San Miguel de Allende?”
“No,” I lie. It’s my favorite story. She’s happy when she tells it. Maybe it was the happiest time of her life.
“I didn’t? It’s where I got those shoes. You know, the brown and red stripy ones with the heels.”
“Oh yeah,” I say, and I settle in against the pillows to listen.
“
Your father and I went there when I was pregnant with you. We stayed in this great little hotel at the top of a hill. You could see the rooftops of people’s houses. Their laundry hanging on the lines. There were so many colors there. I never saw color like that, before or again.
“We went to El Jardín, and I was captivated by the church. La parroquia, it was called, and it cast a glow during the day, but at night it was lit from within and the whole thing was gold. There was a magnificent white crucifix on the top, and the first time I saw it, in the late afternoon, I thought it was a silver angel lit by the sun.”
“Sounds pretty.” I help myself to more wine.
“It was incredible. Anyway, we were there in El Jardín one afternoon. Some mariachis were playing their instruments, and there was a woman selling jewelry. Your father and I looked at what she had, and when my eyes fell on this silver ring, you kicked me from inside. It was the first time I felt you kick. The ring was amethyst, set inside a silver spiral. I loved it. Your father bought it for me; he didn’t even try to bargain down.” This is my favorite part of the story.
“That night in our hotel room, I swallowed the ring. I wanted you to have it. I knew you liked it.”
“I did,” I say. “Thank you.”
“I told your father I lost it, so he bought me those shoes instead. I was so happy then.” She sighs.
“It sounds like it was really nice.” I pat her back.
“I wish I could go back in time.” I nod. I know what she means.
What if we could go back in time? Back to a time when she loved my father and my father loved her. What if we could alter everything, just push the RESET button like you can do on a clock? Would I do it? I might. I think I would.
“If I could go back in time, I’d change what I did to your baby.” My eyes fill with tears, and I pour the last of the woodsy wine into my glass. Cheyenne leans away and studies me.
“What you did …” She doesn’t look mean, or mad. Just surprised.
When My Heart Was Wicked Page 13