Squeezing between the trees, I step into the woods and the temperature drops twenty degrees. The scorching sun loses its grip and the air turns dank and muggy. The beauty of the woods takes me by surprise; it’s not just a collection of trees but there are paths leading toward what looks like ancient tree cities; some are still standing, and others have turned into mere skeletons. The springy ground is an array of leaves and chunks of rotted wood, the dark wet earth soothes my feet after the unforgiving asphalt.
I follow deer tracks, and brambles claw themselves to the mesh fabric of my Reeboks. With my palms I lean against a gnarly Texas oak, stretching my calves. The bark is sharp, leaving painful imprints on my hands. The burn in my leg ceases and as I bend over and pull brambles off my shoes, I catch a glimpse of a crescent indentation in the ground, like a burrowed tip of a boot in the soil. Next to it, a speck of red, a shade somewhere between scarlet and crimson. I can’t make sense of it, as if my mind is trying to fit a square block into a round hole.
I step closer and my brain catches up; the colorful speck is a fingernail, a half-moon rimmed with dirt, resting among the tree scraps. A pale hand with nails a shade a teenager would wear, one with a silly name like Cajun Shrimp. The hand is motionless, just lies there, bare and helpless, a peculiar intruder disturbing the methodical layers of the forest’s skin.
I scan the ground. There’s a pale silver bauble—a coin maybe, larger than a dime but smaller than a nickel. The sun hits it just right and throws a sparkle my way. There’s a luster to it, radiant and sparkling, illuminated as if it wants to be observed. I believe the hand and the sunlit glint among the browns and greens of the woods to be a figment of my oxygen-deprived runner’s brain.
I bow down to get a closer look. Eyes peek from within the ground. They are surrounded by a spongy layer of pine needles.
Still the square block doesn’t fit into the round hole. Broken and cloudy, the eyes stare beyond the cathedral high pillars. The lids seem to quiver ever so slightly.
And then the hand moves.
Run.
My body obeys. Ten steps and I lose my footing and stumble, hit the ground, left shoulder first. I roll down a hill and sharp branches nip at my skin. I tumble farther and farther, a steady and painful descent that I’m unable to stop. I come to a halt and I feel a sharp pain hit me right between my eyes. Then my world goes dark.
When I come to, everything is quiet but for the thumping sound of my heart. I swallow water. I’m drowning. My head throbs but I manage to push my body off the ground. I’m in a creek, facedown. The vision of the hand has carved itself into my brain. I must be mistaken, I tell myself.
I catch my breath and return to the very spot. I kneel down and a burning sensation moves up my arm, to my face, then to my neck. There is an anticipation, a nervous kind of energy tingling through me, as if electrical sparks are traveling all the way to my toes. A scent hits my nostrils, an olfactory hint of something . . . unpleasant . . . out of place within the otherwise fresh forest. The scent is sickly sweet, a mere hint one moment, then a good stench. Something is dripping onto my lap—warm moisture spreads onto my bare thighs—and I realize my nose is bleeding profusely. My shaking hands are covered in blood.
A buried body, I think, as if I have finally solved a riddle I’ve been pondering for a while. My mind tumbles, spills into itself. My sense of smell is heightened and the soil and decomposing leaves make the atmosphere thick. I feel a sense of paranoia, I imagine someone watching me, no, I don’t imagine, I know there’s someone watching me.
I scan the trees around me. I know what I am; prey. A small sob works its way up and out of my throat.
There’s no visual clue, just knowledge and intuition, and my eyes find a narrow path with knotted roots. Run, I repeat to myself, and again my body obeys.
I reach the road and wave down a truck filled with men in overalls. There’s a large ladder covered in paint splatters extending beyond the truck bed. I scream and point at the tree line and they rush in that direction.
One man stays behind and says words in Spanish I don’t understand.
—
I feel as if I have traveled through a time machine: I remember the clinic well—Metroplex, a three-story building, aged and tacky, from the industrial carpet to the disassembled pay phones left deserted on linen fabric–covered walls.
I recall the emergency room—every strep throat, every fever that wouldn’t go away, every sprained ankle, every cut that required stitches resulted in arguments with nurses and administration. My mother refused to sign paperwork, wouldn’t give them any information but our names.
There’s this rage inside of me that I feel toward my mother and I wish my memory was a sieve, yet it maintains a detailed account of her transgressions, all fresh, all defined, neat and organized. They sit in waiting and many have come back to me lately, so many memories have returned, yet not a single one of them pleasant. Lately, all it takes is an image, a smell, a faint recall, and the dam of restraint breaks. It sloshes over everything, unforgiving in its clarity.
They say—I’ve done the research—humans are hardwired to retain negative memories as a matter of survival.
Survival; the act of surviving, especially under adverse or unusual circumstances.
EL PASO, TEXAS, 1987
I roll down the car window to allow the night to seep in. I hear trucks idle. I listen to the drone of the engines; observe them maneuver in and out of the parking lot. They hiss and scream; sometimes their engines fall silent. Men emerge and climb from the cabs.
It’s their house on wheels, my mother tells me.
My house is the backseat of my mother’s car. From there I watch the constant movements of trucks and men. I arrange my pillows and blankets just right. I have learned how to tuck myself in. I am to remain underneath, hidden.
It’s just a game, my mother says. So no one knows you are here.
I listen to their radio until it jitters, and then there is nothing left but silence. Underneath the many layers, I hear my mother talk to the truckers.
One man said, I saw a black dog, so I pulled over.
I’m afraid of the black dog. I watch the road sometimes, expect him to stand in the middle, drooling, baring his fangs.
I spread out my crayons over the seat. When I run out of paper, I flip through my drawings until I find one that’s blank on the back.
We wash up in a sink in a nearby building. The floor is cold and my bare feet leave dirty wet trails all over the white tiles. I wiggle and struggle to get away from the cold that makes my skin turn into tiny bumps.
Is the black dog coming for me? I ask my mother.
She just laughs.
The dog’s not real—it’s when you drive too long and you see things. It’s time to pull over and sleep. That’s all.
I know the feeling of seeing things. I will keep an eye out for the black dog anyway. To make sure.
Mom leaves and when she returns, she smells of food. She hands me a donut, and I eat in the car. I get powdered sugar all over everything but Mom doesn’t seem to mind.
Those days don’t feel real. It’s almost as if I travel while I sleep. When I wake up, I’m in a different place but still in the car.
I love the car. All my toys are in the car.
Two
DAHLIA
THE ER waiting room is quiet but for the hypnotic tick of an old plastic clock hanging on the wall. A whiff of latex and disinfectant hangs in the air.
Bobby’s uniform is tidy, his blue button-down shirt and navy-colored slacks pressed immaculately. His hair is short, his face freshly shaven. A lifetime ago Bobby and I went to high school together, but he stuck around and I left Aurora days after graduation. We haven’t spoken since I’ve been back in town.
“I can’t believe this,” I say and struggle to line up the events. My clothes are wet; so is my hair
.
Bobby smiles at me. “You’ve been back in town for what . . . a few months, and I see you’re still the same old troublemaker.”
For a split second I’m a teenager again, remembering how we’d roam through town, wandering around in abandoned buildings, acquiring cuts and bruises and sprained ankles along the way. “Seems that way, doesn’t it?” I finally say.
“I waved at you the other day, at the gas station. I was going to follow you and pull you over.”
I feel some sort of way about his words. That’s how we met a long time ago; his father pulled my mother over by the side of the road. Bobby sat in the backseat of his father’s cruiser, I was in the backseat of my mother’s car, and we stared at each other.
I ignored Bobby at the gas station because of the way I’d left fifteen years ago. That and the fact that my life is nothing to be proud of. I have been dreading having to make small talk with him, catch up, swap stories about our lives.
“How long has it been?” Bobby asks. “Just about fifteen years?” he says as if he’s kept track of time.
I do the math. I arrived in Aurora just shy of thirteen. I did one year in middle school, then went to high school. In high school, I saved every dollar I made; I bagged groceries, worked at the car wash, even put away my allowance. There wasn’t any money for college, and I didn’t have any motivation or big dreams short of getting out of town—but Bobby was going through something then. His mother had cancer, had been well for years, but then it returned. There seemed to be something else; he was preoccupied with things I knew nothing about, things he was reluctant to share. I left Aurora at eighteen. Fifteen years exactly.
The last time we spoke was the night I left.
“If you think about it, why not go to Colorado, or California? If we’re going to leave, might as well go far,” I had said but he had remained quiet. We had talked about leaving Aurora for years, leaving Texas altogether; we had imagined it many times.
“You want to hear what I think?” he finally asked.
I sensed sarcasm. He started talking about having a different perspective and maybe I should be thankful for what I have instead of griping about what I don’t. That night, he made his way through a six-pack in no time, and by the time he was on the last beer, he didn’t make a whole lot of sense. He went on and on about choices some people have that others don’t. Had we not talked about leaving Aurora since tenth grade, had we not imagined what life could be like somewhere else?—but suddenly there was no more I vent and you listen. He was judgmental and mean and not what I needed that night. We parted ways then; he was drunk and I was angry.
At home, I saw my mother hadn’t lifted a finger to fill out the paperwork I needed to apply for financial aid. I threw my clothes and a few books in a duffel bag, waited for the sun to come up. When I heard my mother rummage around in the kitchen, I went downstairs.
“You still haven’t filled out the forms.” It came out sharply, just as I intended. All my life there had been missing paperwork and incomplete forms. “Are we still doing this? We still don’t have the right paperwork?” I asked. There were the missing papers when I was a kid—what I now know to be shot records and residency documentation—and school was the mother of all wounds. She would never let me leave, wanted to attach an eternal tether to me, to make sure I’d never be more than she was.
We argued. I told her I’d leave. She said she’d pay for a community college close by. I told her I wanted to go out of state. We argued some more. Eventually she turned silent and ignored me.
I left that night. I drove down the highway, leaving Aurora behind me. I had about five hundred dollars, a fifteen-year-old car, and my high school diploma—a pretty meek start for a life on my own. There were regrets about that night: I had fought with my mother, and I had never said good-bye to Bobby.
I felt panic rise up. The streets felt alien to me, yet I drove on until I reached Amarillo. The city was depressing, with nothing but dust and yellow grass, far away from everywhere and close to nowhere. I found work the very next day and a place to stay. Help Wanted signs at motels were plenty along the two major highways running through town, and my mother had taught me well: the right motel and the right owner, and you can offer free work for a week in exchange for a room. One week’s worth of work for the room each month, cash for the next three weeks of work. I knew that many employers didn’t mind turning a blind eye to the fact that I insisted on getting paid under the table.
I got a second job at a nearby motel, and after a year of saving every penny, I felt confident I was in a good place. One day, on my way to my second job, a tapping and slapping sound under the hood made me pull over. The car, by then sixteen years old, was no longer fixable. The next day I went to apply for a car loan, for a used older model Subaru—though it was still better than what I had—but I needed my social security number.
“I’m sorry we can’t process the application,” the car salesman said. “Do you have your card on you?”
“I think I lost it,” I lied.
He scrambled through the papers. “You might want to go to the social security administration office downtown.”
“How about I pay you cash for the car?” I hated to use every penny I had saved up, but I needed transportation. I haggled some, paid for the car. I never went to the local social security office. It was just like it had always been, the old and familiar hurdle that was paperwork.
I worked more jobs to save more money and eventually moved out of the motel. I knew better than to try to rent an apartment, but I waited for a sublet to come available—there’d be no credit checks, no paperwork, and no contracts to fill out. I lived in a three-bedroom apartment with two other women: a flight attendant and a pharmacy student from Ecuador.
I thought about starting my own residential cleaning business, but I knew the business license would never happen. Again, there’d be paperwork. There were better jobs I qualified for over the years—cruise ships taking off from Galveston—but I needed a passport. I kept my head down, never forming lasting friendships or getting seriously involved with anyone. Fifteen years passed, and I saw myself going nowhere but down a lonely, dead-end road of minimum wage jobs and double shifts.
I thought about returning to Aurora, but those moments passed. I thought about my childhood, and those thoughts lingered. My early years remained sketchy at best; I couldn’t name my favorite childhood food, stuffed animal, board game, friend, place, or person. Glimpses emerged, yet none of them could be verified; there was no attic stuffed with trunks and boxes holding dolls and toys and old bicycles. When my mother and I did move, we started completely from scratch; no phone calls to left-behind friends, no letters, no Christmas cards. Everything was final, never to be revisited.
I imagined myself twenty years from now and I panicked. I needed a social security number, a birth certificate, and proper documentation so I could emerge from the shadows of my bleak existence.
With those thoughts, I got on the same highway that had led me to Amarillo and I went back to Aurora. The trunk was filled with hardly more than I had left with fifteen years before. On the highway, I folded the visor down, and in the mirror I saw my reddened face. I was going to appear back in my mother’s life the same way I had left; one minute there, then gone, then back again.
I had questions. The kind of questions that, once raised, demanded answers.
—
Sitting in the ER, I want to apologize to Bobby for ignoring him all these months.
“You okay?” His words pull me out of my lulled state.
I attempt to speak, but my voice fades into unintelligible croaks.
I hear a gurgling sound from the water dispenser and he holds my hand steady as he places a cup of cold water in it.
“Drink this.” He raises his hand and brushes my wet hair out of my face.
Water spills over my hands. I remember t
he creek. There’s that odor, the one I smelled in the woods. Sweet and pungent—roadkill is what comes to mind, a recollection of hiking and coming across a deer cadaver, weeks old, dissolving in the heat. All blood leaves my face and I grip the paper cup so tight that I nearly crush it.
“Maybe you should spend the night in the hospital? You look horrible. You don’t seem well at all.”
“I’m fine. Really, I am. How’s your dad?” I ask to change the subject. I wish I looked more put together, hair done, makeup, a shower.
“You know, he’s old.” Bobby pauses for a moment, and a shadow falls over his face. “He’s not the man he used to be.”
A nurse behind the counter turns up the volume of the TV mounted to the wall. Bobby and I both look up, glad to be distracted.
There’s mention of a breaking news about the girl from the woods coming up and immediately a vision of the tree line appears out of nowhere and my mind pops like an overheated lightbulb. The hand of a dead woman with red fingernails. There’s no sense in fighting the image of her fingers prodding through soil layers, a hand stealing a glimpse of the underworld.
“You’re shaking.” Bobby waves his hand in front of me as if to fan me some air. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”
“Is she alive?” I haven’t dared ask but I must know.
“Yes, barely. She’s in a coma.”
I’m back in the woods, bent over her body. Someone dug a hole and shoveled dirt on top of her. Buried her alive. How long ago? A day? Hours? Minutes, even? The possibility that someone watched me discover her—stood behind a nearby tree, his boots covered in soil, his heart beating in his chest, sweat on his brow, watching me—is mind-boggling. I manage to wipe the thought away like a determined hand removing fog from a bathroom mirror.
The Good Daughter Page 2