Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  She shrugs. "I need space," she says. She and Keith are down there for hours, music playing quietly on her dad's old boom box. I've gone down often enough to make sure and I never have the sense that they are doing anything. No hurry, no dishevelment. Just Renata painting and Keith sitting in a ratty old armchair they found set out for the garbage.

  Matt doesn't go down in the basement. His workbench and tools are in the garage. I go down for something now and then- boxes for Christmas gifts, or glasses stored down there. I shouldn't look at Renata's paintings. They're hers. There is something private about them. But I do.

  "Come downstairs, I say to Matt on the second night Renata is gone.

  He comes down with me and we stand with our arms around each other's waists while he looks at Renata's paintings.

  Renata paints pictures of girls hit by cars. There are always four paintings: the moment when the girl is struck, the girl sliding across the hood or against the windshield, the girl in the air, and the girl crumpled on the ground. Renata has all sorts of photos stuck up on her easel and on the table she uses for her paints. She has pictures of her best friend, Kerry. Keith has Kerry around the waist and yanks her backwards forcefully-all you can see of Keith are his arms. Renata used Matt's digital camera. In her first series of girl hit by car, you can see it is based on Kerry.

  There are also pictures of cars and car hoods; Matt's, mine, Keith's, cars I don't recognize.

  In the first series, the Kerry series, the girl looks awkward, not quite right, except in the painting where she is flying through the air. I think Renata really caught something there.

  In the second series, the girl is a black girl who looks around ten. There's a magazine photo of a black woman falling off a fire escape, and you can see that in the girl in the air. In that series, the best painting is the girl crumpled on the pavement. In the third series, the girl is an enormously fat white girl with red hair. She bobs in the flying in the air painting like a huge pink Macy's Parade balloon. She has on a red jumper and white anklets and Mary Janes. She doesn't look frightened. And when she is lying crumpled on the pavement, her haunch is exposed so her white panties show. Her huge thigh is painted pink and smooth as strawberry yogurt.

  The one Renata is working on right now is an Amish girl series. She works on them all at once, so they are sitting around in stages. On her easel is the Amish girl being hit by the car. The Amish girl is in gray, with a white bonnet sketched over her hair. She is wearing sneakers. The car is Keith's car.

  "Well," Matt says slowly. "She'll have to come back for all this, won't she. She wouldn't leave all this"

  I don't know.

  There is a folder, open, full of pictures of girls cut out from magazines, and just visible, the scalloped corner of an old photograph. I reach for it, and Matt says, "Don't touch that," but I do anyway. It's from one of my photo albums. It's an old black and white picture of a young woman, maybe Renata's age, wearing a forties-style one-piece bathing suit. She's soft and by today's standards, a little heavy in the hips and her bangs make her look something like Betty Page. The bathing suit is a jazzy number with polka dots. She's sexy and solid as a pin-up. It's my mother. I show it to Matt and then take it upstairs with me. He doesn't say anything.

  Brenda, one of the aides where my mother lives, left me a voicemail at work that my mother was out of some things- lipstick (Cool Watermelon by Revlon, a strange, overly vivid shade that my mother prefers) and lotion and menstrual pads because sometimes my mother has a little urinary leakage. It's Wednesday and I'll see her Thursday, but I stop on my way home from work and pick things up at the grocery store and drop them off

  I always want to leave right away, so I always make myself sit down and say something to Mom. I touch her a lot, on the arm, on the shoulder. I kiss her cheek sometimes. We were not a huggy family. We're not as remote as the classic Presbyterian family (my husband says that in moments of great emotion, the men in his family would shake hands) but we don't touch each other much. My mother seems to like to be touched now, though.

  Her phone rings. I can't think who would call. I call her and tell her I'm coming over, although I have no sign that she remembers. I used to see notes written to herself, CLARA COMING. But not anymore. I pick it up, expecting it to be a telemarketer. It's Matt.

  "Renata called," he says. "She's on her way home."

  "Is she all right?" I ask.

  "She didn't say," he says.

  "I'll be right there."

  My mother is watching me, birdlike. "Where's Renata?" she asks.

  Lost, I want to say. "I don't know where she is, Mom. She's run away. She's seventeen and she's run away. But she's on her way home now.

  My mother looks at me and reaches out and covers my hand with hers. Her hand is cool. She searches in my face. I think she is together in this moment and I know what she is going to say. It's what she said to me when Renata was two and I told her that sometimes I was so afraid I would get up in the middle of the night to see if Renata was breathing. She said, "Our children are hostages to the world."

  She pets my hand and then she says, "Take me home."

  Our driveway is a bit of an incline. Keith parks at the bottom, the way he always does, and Matt and I stand at the door, watching. The car sits for a long moment, while Renata and Keith are apparently talking. Then the doors open and Renata gets out and cones up the driveway, head down, leaning forward against the slope. She's wearing plumber's tape around her upper arm. Keith gets out and leans up against the door of his car, arms crossed across his chest.

  I gasp and Matt says, "Oh shit." Keith's lip is split and his face is bruised all down one side, swelling now so that one eye is half closed.

  Renata doesn't look back at him, doesn't say anything to us, just goes in the house.

  Matt goes down driveway and I know what he is asking. Are you all right? he is asking. Do you want me to go with you to the emergency room? But Keith is shaking his head.

  I follow Renata inside. "Have you had anything to eat?" I ask. I hear the door behind me, Matt coming in.

  "We stopped at McDonald's," Renata says. She tried to be vegetarian for a week or two, but she's a carnivore. Even as a baby, Renata would choose steak over ice cream.

  "So where did you go?" Matt asks her.

  "Some guy Keith knows has a friend who has a trailer. He uses it for fishing or something. Out near Sandusky." I can imagine the trailer, low and mean and narrow. The story comes out in little hits, and before much of it has come out, Renata is crying. The guy who owns the trailer is named Don, and he showed up there today. He was high on something, Renata thinks maybe crack.

  "He's missing a hunch of teeth," she says, "and I can't understand him when he talks." She is crying in the way that is almost like hiccoughing. "So I kept smiling and nodding my head like I knew what he was talking about but I was afraid I was nodding my head at the wrong times or something.

  "And then he got mad at Keith, I don't know why. And he got all ugly and he, like, winged this ashtray at Keith and it hit him in the head and they started fighting and then Keith and I got out of the house and he said he was going to get his gun and we were out in the middle of nowhere and I was so scared and we ran to Keith's car. While we were trying to back out his crappy driveway he shot at us and he hit the back of Keith's car. There's a hole in the trunk. We kept backing up really fast, and his driveway is really long. It's just these two ruts, not even gravel or anything."

  We are sitting on the couch and at seventeen, she almost crawls into my lap. I stroke her hair, coarse with black dye.

  We ground her, of course.

  "Here's the deal," I say. "I'll take you to the doctor and get the chip taken out. But you've got to do your part. 'You've got to tell us where you're going and what you're doing."

  She is subdued and listens without agreeing or disagreeing.

  Matt and I lecture, even if we know it is the worst thing to do. How can we not? All our feelings spill out in warnings.
She's got to straighten up. She'll be eighteen in five months, and she's got to make some decisions. If we're going to help her go to art school, she's got to get her grades up. And on, and on.

  Her dad goes to the bathroom and I take the photo of my mother out of my purse. I slide it towards her on the coffee table.

  She frowns at it, and looks up at me, puzzled.

  You can have it," I say. "But please don't paint her being hit by a car. I couldn't stand it."

  She covers her mouth with her hand, thinking. What words are trapped behind that hand?

  Then she nods and says softly, "Okay, Mom."

  At two that morning, I wake up, frightened from some dream. I lie in bed and catalogue my sins; obsessive, insufficiently understanding, self-absorbed. Then I get up and call up DigitalAngelMap.com. First I put in Renata's code, which I know by heart. The yellow triangle is steady on our street. I watch it a long time. Sonia climbs the steps. I can hear her. She's an old dog now and she has arthritis. She comes into the extra bedroom where we keep the computer and lies down and sighs.

  I put in my mother's code. As soon as I start typing it, I am gripped by the deep conviction, the premonition that my mother is out wandering around.

  But the triangle is right where it should he, unmoving. I turn off the computer and then step over the dog and turn out the light, step blindly back over the dog and sit in the chair. The dark and stillness spread around tile, blanketing the house and the street. The cars are silent and still and the girls are all safe in their beds.

  Wicked

  he first thing that burst into flame was a bag of groceries in the back of the Explorer. Taking groceries in the house was a moment she joked about with the cashier at the grocery store. The grocery store nearest her house was a little upscale, a little chichi and when she shopped there instead of the less expensive Kroger's, she knew it was another moral lapse. But she liked to get shopping over with as fast as possible so she mostly shopped at the expensive place.

  The bag boys loaded the groceries in the car for the customers and as Joe was bagging, she said, "Could you come home and put them away for me?"

  Joe, who was still in high school, just laughed.

  But she really hated putting groceries away. Picking them was ripe with possibility. Putting them away was like cleaning up after the party. Joyless. She opened the back of the SUV and saw the pile of bags and felt the creeping edge of despair. She just stood there, looking, and then a curl of smoke drifted up past the box of Life cereal, and suddenly, instead of a bag of cereal and macaroni and cheese, it was a bag of flame.

  It was gorgeous. And her heart warmed to it. She felt nothing but pleasure for a moment and then she thought distantly that she should pull the bag out. But she didn't. Instead she just watched the next hag of groceries-onions, red hell peppers and portabello mushrooms-catch. Upscale groceries, double-bag, and outer plastic sack melted, then blackened. The back of the seat caught, too, heavy black smoke, stinking and acrid with chemicals.

  She backed out of the garage. Would the car explode? But it didn't. It burned flamboyantly, the flames flattening against the ceiling of the garage.

  The next-door neighbor shouted, "I'll call in!"

  She hadn't even noticed that the neighbor had come out.

  Let it burn, she thought.

  She looked at the mailbox down by the street and in a moment, smoke leaked around the opening, and then the top of the post flared, fire almost invisible in the daylight.

  The garage was engulfed and she could see smoke behind the windows in the front of the house. Her husband was at work. Her kids were at school. Wouldn't they be surprised?

  Who was going to clean this up?

  Not me, she thought.

  Laika Comes Back Safe

  here was a special program when I was in fourth grade where this photographer came and taught us. It was called the Appalachian Art Project and it was supposed to expose us to art. We all got these little plastic cameras called Dianas that didn't have a flash or anything, and black-and-white film. The first week we took pictures of our family and then we developed them and picked one for our autobiography. Then the next week we took pictures of each other. Then the third week we took pictures of important things in our lives. The fourth week we took pictures of dreams.

  Not hopes and dreams -we were supposed to take a picture of something that was like something we would dream about. I had a book from the school library about exploration in space. It was old, from the seventies, and it talked about the history of space exploration. It was really more of a boys book. My favorite books were horse books. All I remember from it was the part about Laika the dog. They trained this dog and they sent her up in space and they used her to see if people could survive in space and then because they couldn't bring her back down they left her to die up there.

  That really bothered me because I had a German shepherd named Lacey and I kept thinking about Laika up there all by herself and then just her bones going around and around. I had a bad dream about Lacey being taken to go to space. So when it was time to do the photograph of a dream, I took string and tape and I taped Lacey up with spots of tape on her chest and her head and I took her picture sitting there in the backyard. I had a parachute from one of those plastic soldiers you get that you wrap up in the parachute and throw in the air and hope the parachute opens and I taped that on Lacey, too, and had my mom hold the parachute-you can see her hand and a little of her arm in the picture-and then, while mom kept Lacey from pawing all the tape and the string oft, I took her picture. It's a good picture-she's looking at me and she has her ears up. I titled it Laika Comes Back Safe.

  We put all the pictures on the chalk rail. I remember somebody took a picture of their steps down to their cellar. Nobody seemed to think anything of Laika Comes Back Safe maybe because you could see my mom's hand and the parachute was really too little.

  Tye Petrie stood behind me in the lunch line. "Brittany, is that your dog?" he asked.

  "Yeah," I said.

  "She looks like a neat dog."

  That was more than Tye Petrie had ever said to me in my life. Even though he was my second cousin, we didn't have picnics and family reunions or anything with the Petries. Her name is Lacey," I said, and then I said, "I love her more than anyone else on Earth."

  I thought it sounded like a stupid thing to say, but Tye Petrie just said, "Really?" in this way that made it sound like he thought that was good thing.

  "Do you have a dog?" I asked.

  "No," he said. "I'm not allowed."

  You can come and pet Lacey," I said.

  We had a little white house on cinder block-my dad had built most of it himself I was doing my homework and my dad was getting ready to leave for second swing, the shift he was working at the plant before he got messed up, and my dad looked out the window and said, "What's that briar doing hanging on the fence?"

  My dad didn't mean anything by it, he called everybody a briar, but Tye Petrie had a real light head of hair and real pale eyes in a dark face and he did look a bit like white trash. He was waiting around by our gate. "He's come to see Lacey," I said, and went out.

  By that time Lacey was barking her fool head off. I untied her-Dad said she had to stay tied up even though we had a chain link fence because she crapped all over the front yard-and she went bounding over towards Tye. She stopped when she got close to him, looking back at me with one paw raised like she wasn't sure of something. Then she lowered her head the way she did when she was being introduced to another dog, tail sort of neither up or down and wagging just a little.

  She was acting that way because Tye was a werewolf, although he wasn't really, not yet. I didn't know Tye was a werewolf, because he didn't tell me for years and years. In movies, dogs are afraid of werewolves, but that's not true. They just think they're other dogs and if your dog hates other dogs, then they'll hate a werewolf, too. I'm like an expert on werewolves, after knowing Tye all these years, but it's not something that
will ever do me any good. I thought about calling the X-Files people and seeing if they could use all that stuff for a movie, but I really can't tell, and besides, I wouldn't know how to get the phone number for a television show.

  Tye and Lacey liked each other fine and we took her for a walk down the street. We hung out and he took me to the place where he'd made a fort in the woods. He came over pretty often after that and I think he went roller skating with my mom and me once. We never talked at school, because I was always hanging out with Rachel and Melissa and Lindsey and he was always hanging out with Mike and Justin or somebody.

  When my dad was in the motorcycle accident and messed up his back and his leg and lost his job, we had to go on the county until he got his social security pension settled. We moved into town and I transferred from the Knox County school system to Barbourville City Schools and went to Landry middle school. We had to give up Lacey. The people down the street from our old house took her. I only saw Tye Petrie at church and we never said anything to each other.

  I was in 4-H then, doing sewing stuff, and I ran into Tye at the Knox County Fair. He wasn't in 4-H, he was just at the fair. He wasn't hanging around with anybody and I was in the barn looking at the big draft horses. He walked up beside me like it was the school cafeteria lunch line and looked at the horse.

  "Hi, Tye," I said.

  "I checked on Lacey last week," he said. "She's doing fine."

  When we gave up Lacey I didn't get mad and scream and cry like they do on TV. I didn't say, "You can't have her!" and she didn't run away and find me, but it really hurt me deep inside and I never ever got over it. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, even worse than when my dad got hurt. I couldn't say anything, because I was afraid I was going to cry.

  "I meant to tell you at church, but I never got a chance," he said. "I go check on her about once a week. They take good care of her. They don't tie her up, they let her run around their yard."

  I took a deep breath and it was like a sob. "Thanks," I said. It came out a little shaky.