“How are her social interactions?”
“Nonexistent.” She has no friends. No interactions with the world at large. A few men came and went, all for places to stay, jobs, never love. There is just me, no one else. The moment I grant myself this directness, the moment I accept that I’m somehow the key to her motivations, I’m accepting his invitation to revisit the past.
“What kind of a mother was she?”
“My childhood is nothing I dwell on,” I say, and that’s not a lie. If it wasn’t for the walls I erected over the years beginning to crumble, if it wasn’t for wanting to have my questions answered, I wouldn’t revisit any of this. My past has been more or less a torrent of disconnected thoughts, but nevertheless, maybe it’s about time to put everything in order and for someone to hear my stories. I need to make sure I don’t make this about me—my Jane, my missing people—but like sap lazily making its way down the bark of a tree, I falter. “I’m . . . I’m . . . sorry,” I stutter, “I’ve been going through a lot lately and I’m trying to think about this chronologically.” If I don’t, it gets mangled in my head and I’ll repeat myself. I don’t get the luxury of order often anymore, not since I found Jane, not just externally, but also internally, being organized, having things compartmentalized, and tidy.
Words pop into my head. Razzle-dazzle. Flimflam. Double-dealing. Shell game. Those are words from the book I used to have, but I don’t want to get dramatic, carried away. To tell her story is in a way telling mine and I can only refer to her behavior through how I perceived it as a child. It’s hard getting to her innermost core. She’s a vault.
“First of all, I didn’t know other kids didn’t live like I did. I thought my world was nothing but a mirror of everybody else’s life. So I didn’t ask questions for a long time.” Once I figured out that my life was anything but normal, I learned to deceive. Don’t volunteer our names, or where we lived before. My name is no one’s business; neither is yours. Nothing we do is anybody’s business, remember that. I scoured my book, found words for what she asked me to do. Strategy. Slyness. Cunning. “In order to understand my mother,” I say and look past him, scanning the wall, “you must understand that I have to talk about myself. I’m not a doctor, I have no insight into her that way, all I can tell you is what I’ve observed over the years.
“Chronologically speaking, my first memories are of wind and dirt. Just that, dirt and wind. Reddish dirt. I want to say we were homeless but that’s not a memory in itself, just the dirt. The kind that kicks up under your feet as you run, leaving a cloud trailing behind you. And whirlwinds, dust devils, sand augers, whatever people call them. I guess it depends where you’re from.” Whirlwind; a column of air moving rapidly around in a cylindrical or funnel shape. The kind of whirlwind the Navajo refer to as chiindii: ghosts or spirits of dead people. If it spins clockwise, it is said to be a good spirit; if it spins counterclockwise, it is said to be a bad one. I don’t remember who told me this or where I read it.
“I remember old ladies watching me in houses without other children, not a single toy, not as much as a swing in the backyard. I was about four, maybe five. All I had was a coloring book and crayons.” I pause. I’m not used to not censoring myself. It’s time for the truth. “Promotional crayons from chain restaurants they give to children to color in placemat menus while waiting to be served.
“I remember my mother arguing with a woman, and a yellow paper being passed back and forth, which I now believe was my shot record. I didn’t know it then but I think she was some sort of school official. If you ask my mother, she’ll be elusive, so I can’t be sure what that was all about. She said she homeschooled me, but she was never home.”
Dr. Wagner scribbles on a sheet of paper and occasionally nods.
“We moved a lot. I know we lived in California for quite a while. I have memories of New Mexico and I know I was able to read by then, so I must have been about eight or nine. My mother brought books home, some from libraries. Others I got to keep, they were used, I could tell by the broken spines and ripped pages that they weren’t from a store. I had this encyclopedia I carried everywhere. It was heavy, one of those A-through-Z editions.” The mention of the book brings a smile to my face.
“She worked at a restaurant. I remember her bringing home food in take-out boxes. And I remember a gas station. We lived above a gas station for a long time. My mother worked the night shift there. By then the supply of crayons and coloring books had dried up. I had collected all my drawings and I remember making those scratch art pictures, you know, you cover the entire picture with black crayon and then you use an empty ballpoint pen or something sharp enough to scratch away the black, and the rainbow colors underneath come through. I never knew how the picture would turn out until I started scratching and revealed the colors.”
He chuckles. Barely, but quietly he chuckles. Not in a funny way—I didn’t tell any funny stories—but in a nostalgic kind of way. We all have those stories, they don’t mean anything until we’re older and we look at them in the present, evaluate them with a grown mind.
“So she changed jobs frequently. How about her relationships? Friends? Boyfriends?”
Men. Her men. I’m trying to line them up chronologically, but it’s like attempting to merge a narrative without an apparent structure or plot. They get jumbled easily. I open my mouth to say something but then I think otherwise. I don’t want to go back there. Having lived through it was atonement enough, no one should have to revisit this again. One drank, one made me uncomfortable just by looking at me. Suddenly I don’t blame my mother for not wanting to go through therapy twice a week for however long. I can’t stand to be here and it’s been all of ten minutes. And it’s not even about me.
“I really would like to just take my mother home. I have to be at work in a bit,” I lie. “I’ll be happy to bring her in for therapy if she’s up for it.”
He pinches his lips into a thin line. “I understand,” he says and gets up and extends his hand. “I think it is very important for your mother to see somebody. Anything you can do to get her to agree would make a big difference.”
“I’ll try,” I say and together we walk down a corridor to a nondescript door. We enter the room and my mother sits by a window.
“Are you ready to go, Mrs. Waller?” Dr. Wagner’s voice is too loud, a volume reserved for the deaf and the mentally disturbed.
Suddenly I become very protective of her and before he can say, “Your daughter is here to pick you up,” I’m already by her side.
My mother sits in a faux leather chair the color of a robin’s egg. Memphis Waller is no longer a Pollock painting, full of vibrancy and complex colors. She is a mere watercolor image, watered down so much she almost vanishes.
“What’s going on with her?” I ask and my chin starts to quiver.
“Please don’t be alarmed. She’s just getting used to the meds. She’ll perk up in a day or two. If not, we’ll reduce the dosage. I wish there was an easier way but we have to wait until the meds reach a therapeutic level. I’m so sorry.”
I watch Dr. Wagner put his hand on her shoulder. He bends down and she looks up at him. “Your daughter is here. You’re going home today.” He keeps it short and to the point as if she’s unable to comprehend longer sentences.
I grab the already packed bag sitting on the bed, and a nurse with a wheelchair appears.
“I’ll bring her down in the wheelchair. If you can just pull the car around?”
Later, in the car, I try to make small talk. How was the food, are you happy to go home, do we have to go by a pharmacy, that sort of thing. She’s short with me, nothing new there, bad, sure, no, her usual economic brevity. When we get to the house, she makes straight for her room. “I’m tired,” she says as she walks past me. “What about . . .” She doesn’t finish the sentence, looks around.
“I cleaned the house. I did the laundry.” I’m
afraid. Afraid that she’ll ask about the crickets—Please don’t start with the crickets again, I want to beg.
“My purse,” she says as she stands in the doorway, her feet firmly planted on the threshold, as if she’s afraid to step into her room. “Where’s my purse?”
I panic, but just for a second. “Don’t worry, just get some rest. I’ll get it for you.”
Her face goes soft; it’s no longer rigid. She nods and takes a step forward, into the room. She pulls the door shut and the house goes quiet. I hear the mattress springs and then there’s silence.
—
Decades ago, FM 2410 was a county road connecting a rural area to the town of Aurora. It still does just that, in a way, but the part it used to connect to isn’t there any longer. There’s hardly anything out there—an occasional warped trailer on a couple of acres of patchy grass, boarded-up houses with sagging porches, overturned Little Tikes toys, and empty doghouses in abandoned unfenced yards—and the farther I drive east, the fewer signs of habitation I find. The distance from the last traffic light on Aurora’s main street to where, according to Bobby, my mother was picked up, is less than two miles to marker 78.
When I pull over at the marker, I stop on a bed of gravel and get out of the car. There’s a lonely bench under a tree—maybe a remnant of an old bus route, but I can’t be sure—and it’s not one of those cast-iron benches with wooden slats as a seat, but a crude construction of gray and weathered wood nailed together a long time ago.
I scan the road and the surrounding area for a fleck of goldish brown leather amidst the greens and grays of grass and buckled concrete road.
A fragrance presents itself—I can’t put my finger on it but some sort of shrub smells syrupy and oddly familiar—and I don’t see anything remotely resembling her purse. There’s still a lot of daylight left; it’s barely late afternoon. The light is the kind of warm you only find at the end of a day, because afternoon light is that way, yellow and welcoming, just the opposite of morning blue light. It comes at you, building in strength because it had all day to get better, more vibrant, and it contains everything that’s been building up for hours, like moisture and dust and atmosphere, so it’s always warmer than the morning light and it’s always just a little bit more golden.
I am captivated by the scenery around me, especially the old wooden bench, odd and warped, its placement as much as its sheer existence, and I can’t imagine an old bus route leading through here.
I walk past the bench and there’s a remnant of a path left leading through trees and bushes and shrubs, half overgrown, but still, it’s a path. I follow it. It suddenly turns sharply to the right, as if it was meant to deceive, to take followers on a twisted journey, like a maze. I continue on, keep my eyes on the ground as not to stumble or twist my ankle, but then I look up and see a farmhouse.
I can see it clearly through the trees, and the overgrown trail leading toward it turns into a path and then an assertive dirt road, where shrubs become scarcer and none of the ground cover has dared to reach across the road. With each step I take, I feel the farm is the end of a journey I didn’t know I was on. From a fair distance I behold the structure, consider it as if I were a photographer looking for the perfect shot. Farther to the right sits a dilapidated barn.
The farmhouse itself is a square two-story building with a porch. Time has taken its toll: the exterior has the worn color of unfinished wood, weathered by harsh elements and baked by decades of hot summer sun, cracked, warped, and twisted by the shrinking grain of the wood. It is an old relic at best, with a shingled roof and a sagging porch. I approach the house, the dirt beneath my feet solid, and I no longer worry about stumbling over roots. I reach the front steps and as my feet make contact with the porch, I freeze.
Unexpectedly there is movement. Not an animal scurrying by or a fleeting shadow even, but more a visible trembling of the space around me, as if the wind grants me a glimpse of itself mingling with its surroundings. Like a conduit, the farmhouse allows for the breeze not only to be heard, but seen; the way it rattles the screen door, the quivering of the worn shingles, brittle leaves caught in the nooks of the window.
I approach the window to the right, by the front door. I cup my hands and shield my eyes, the sinking sun behind me distorting the image inside: a kitchen sink, the faint outline of a table, chairs upturned. The lack of birds chirping makes it eerie and the top part of the window still has remnants of a curtain of indeterminable color. A pitcher sits on the ledge, cracked and old as if it could dissolve into dust at any moment. There’s something in the other corner of the window sill, something that strikes me as familiar, yet I’m not sure what in my brain calls up its memory—and at first glance it is a container with dust and debris gathered at its bottom. Given the disrepair and state of the entire property, yes, that is the most likely guess—a glass that has collected dust and other debris.
I lean into the window and I focus on the content, really focus on it. My mind claws at the image—I have a strange sense of not being able to turn around and walk away, and so I panic. I force my body to step back, then forward again to peer through the window once more, like a child hoping the monster is gone. But it’s still there.
I’ve seen a jar just like it before. Underneath my mother’s sink. Filled to the brim with crickets.
Her nighttime excursion to this farm. Her lost purse. Nothing makes sense to me anymore. But it totals something. It’s not nothing, that I know.
Before I can continue the thread in my mind, my body gets tingly and I walk backward until my back hits the railing. The tingling in my body turns into visual shapes, snowflakes, but stronger, impenetrable and dense and thick, making it hard for me to breathe. It looks like snow slowly descending from above, but then it turns into a blizzard. Thousands of little white ghosts fly around me and at the same time my skin turns icy and the ghosts find their way down my neck and underneath my clothes. My blood cools, I’m disoriented in a ghost blizzard, and the world around me is being erased.
I wait it out, that’s what I do—wait for it to pass—and I step off the porch and make my way back to the car. I start the engine and take off. I almost drive right past a golden square by the side of the road, a few feet off the mile marker. I don’t understand how I could have missed it earlier. I pull over, open the door, and grab the purse without even getting out of the car. It is dusty and there’s a visible tire mark cutting across it.
I turn around. There is nothing but a line of trees, nothing else letting on that there is a farmhouse behind them, yet its presence is undeniable now that I have laid eyes on it. My heart beats faster than it should. The sun is about to go down, that’s what makes this place scary, nothing else.
Does wind just arrive—isn’t there usually a gradual buildup? There hardly was a breeze earlier, but there is one now. Things move and shake and tremble.
That’s all this is, I tell myself. The wind.
Twelve
QUINN
QUINN sat by the window, staring. Cars driving up the long windy dirt road to the house created a cloud of superficial dust, shrouding the visitors in a cloak of lifeless powder. Not even the tires were capable of leaving an impression in the parched ground. The cracks reached deep into the barren soil, which had been baked hard by the sun. The flower bed behind the house hadn’t been soaked by the rain in weeks and the soil had turned from brown into an ashen colorless shade unable to deflect light. Withered grasses emerged from the thirsting soil like burlap strings. The roses struggled to grow, for this environment was no more hospitable than a bed of river rocks.
Quinn barely managed to get out of bed and she hadn’t been in town at all. She kept catching herself jerking out of some sort of tranced state and inspecting her nails. They had grown back then, no longer ripped, broken and bleeding from clawing at the mud to escape. Regardless how often and how harshly she scrubbed her body, she longed to immerse hersel
f into the stream in the woods and wash off the memory of that day. She wondered if the stream had turned into a lazy creek when it had stopped raining weeks ago, and if that creek would soon turn into a mere trickle, moving listlessly over the boulders and stones it usually disregarded in its swift passage when it was bursting with the rain from up north. Even if she could go back, there was no sense wading into it; no amount of rocks in her pockets could drag her to the bottom of something that no longer existed. She envisioned her feet not reaching the ground, kicking into the vastness of the water, and every day she imagined drowning, for it was the only thing that mimicked what her body felt, the panic of her heart hammering against her ribs, and she knew she would welcome the oxygen deprivation and how it would erase all other thoughts.
When it became too hot on the porch, she’d move back to her room, lay on her bed, still longing for the feeling of her legs struggling to get her to the bottom of the stream. She wanted to sink to its lowest point, yet she knew she could step across its entire width by now and still have dry feet. She imagined the fragile plants on the banks of the river, lifeless and weak, vanishing as they turned into dust between her fingers. Like Benito. For he had all but disappeared.
There was talk in town; Quinn wasn’t sure about the specifics, but there was talk. Of a Mexican boy and a white girl and a rape, but no one was sure if it was true. Quinn wasn’t even sure who started the talk—for all she knew it was Sigrid wanting to get rid of Benito. No one knew who or when or where, it was just a random story of what happens to some girls. Benito’s uncle came by for handiwork now and then but when Quinn asked about Benito, the uncle just shook his head, panic in his eyes. Quinn stared out of the window every day, sat on the porch, waiting for Benito to appear, take her in his arms. He never showed. By the time summer passed and fall showers trenched the soil, her head had cleared and all she could think about was getting away. High school was over with and the thought of going to college out of state appealed to her. But Sigrid had other plans.
The Good Daughter Page 10