The Good Daughter

by Alexandra Burt

  After everyone has left, I find Tallulah hiding underneath my bed. She looks defeated, the way she is facing the wall, her tail tucked underneath her body. I grab some bacon from the fridge and sit on the floor, speaking gently to her.

  I recall her behavior in the backyard earlier, and how her head doesn’t always turn when I approach her as if she’s waiting for acoustic clues. I realize my mother might be right. Maybe her cloudy eye means she is partially blind and her good eye is on the brink of darkness. This blind dog from the pound, cowering underneath my bed, drooling and shaking, may see shadows at best.

  I wonder what shadows my mother sees. How it feels to live in her body. Maybe it’s like having a nightmare and realizing you’re awake and it just doesn’t stop. I know one thing for sure: for years I’ve watched her eccentricity get worse, appearant even in random phone calls now and then, but these three months I’ve lived with her are no longer up for interpretation. I can only imagine what’s the next step in her madness.

  I pull a pillow on the floor and I just lie there, bacon beside me. My ears are ringing, my hands shaking.

  All windows and doors are open. A pungent scent of smoke fills the air and from the backyard I hear the snapping of ashen bedsheets in the wind.

  —

  There’s so much going on around me—having to pack up the house, finding rental properties that accept dogs, my mother’s empty glare as they led her to the ambulance that would take her to the hospital. Out of all the things I could possibly obsess over, I focus on the jars of crickets. I can’t let go of the black flattened bodies, the way their long antennae tangle and create a labyrinth of legs and spurs. I know I should be searching for employment opportunities online, but instead I check the Bertram County website for property information. I need the exact address of the property. There’s no information given out over the phone, all inquiries have to be made in writing, so that afternoon I visit the courthouse.

  The County Tax Assessor’s Office is located in an annex building of the Aurora courthouse, a dank room with artificial plants and stained industrial carpet. In the background, I hear the faint melody of country music, interrupted by occasional static. At the window, I exchange polite tidbits about the weather, the fact that it’s Friday, and Mrs. Winnipeg’s leopard blouse. She is about sixty and tempted to take reduced social security payments in two years. I tell her I’m a photographer and that I’m working on a project photographing abandoned properties in the area and I’m here to check on the status of a property on FM 2410. “I’m not sure if you can help me, I don’t know the exact address. And the property is vacant; actually, it looks like it’s been abandoned for a while.”

  “All the information about deeds and properties is a matter of public record,” she says and I’m engrossed by her red lipstick bleeding violently into the lines and wrinkles around her mouth. Her silver hair is fine and wispy and I can see her shiny scalp.

  Mrs. Winnipeg puts on a pair of cat-eye glasses and grabs a form from the shelf next to her. “Tell me the approximate location of the property.”

  “It’s on FM 2410, a couple of miles or so from the outskirts of Aurora, by mile marker 78. It’s set back from the road by a quarter of a mile or so. There’s a dirt road and an overgrown path, and a farmhouse on the property. And a barn. No close neighbors to my knowledge, not that I could see, at least. It’s pretty deserted out there.”

  “And you need to know who the owner is?”

  “I don’t want to trespass,” I lie. “I’d like to get permission to photograph the property.” I watch her write FM 2410, the F and M so elaborate that the letters are almost impossible to decipher.

  “Ranch or farm property?”

  “There’s a difference?” I ask. Livestock versus produce, I assume, but can’t be sure.

  “A ranch includes structures used for the practice of ranching, raising and grazing livestock such as cattle or sheep. A farm produces a harvest and results in a product used to sustain those who farm or in a commodity to sell. Sometimes a ranch engages in a limited amount of farming, raising crops for feeding the animals, such as hay and feed grains,” she says, rattling off the well-rehearsed facts of farming. Mrs. Winnipeg is resolute and on a roll and I don’t dare interject.

  “Well,” I say, “I don’t remember seeing any cattle guards or troths, but I didn’t see the entire property. There was some rusty farm equipment, so I assume it’s a farm.”

  She checks off a box, moves her glasses up to the bridge of her nose. “Have a seat,” she says and slides the glass door shut in my face.

  I sit and wait on one of the shiny wooden chairs in a row of ten opposite the customer window. She returns after what seems like fifteen minutes, maybe longer. Her hands are empty.

  “The property is not abandoned and we should be able to figure out who the owner is. The bad news is that the Official Public Records index does not include entries prior to 1976. I had to contact the Bertram County Archives. They will fax over a copy. It’ll just take a minute.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Five dollars. Cash or credit card?”

  “Cash,” I say and push a five-dollar bill over the counter.

  “Anything else?” she asks as she hands me a receipt.

  “Yes, unrelated. Completely unrelated.” I take a deep breath in. “Is there such a thing as collecting dead crickets in jars? Is it something people do around here? Like a regional custom, something like that?”

  She stares at me for a moment. “Crickets in a jar? You mean like trapping fireflies?”

  “No, more like for collection. Or storage. I’m not sure.”

  Her red fingernails scratch her shiny scalp. “It’s not anything that people do around here, and I’d know.” She pauses for a second. “But my late husband collected and preserved insects. He pinned them in, you know, in a curio box. House was full of them.” Her voice trails off and her eyes become glossy for a moment as she’s remembering bugs and beetles pinned behind glass. Then her eyes turn back to steel. “There’s a certain protocol you have to follow. You put them in a jar, then add alcohol or some sort of chemical, I don’t quite remember. Then they go in another jar so they don’t fall apart when you pin them. That’s about the gist of it. Other than that, no, I don’t know why someone would collect bugs in a jar.”

  The fax machine rings and hums, and a tray spits out two pieces of paper. She inspects them and then slides them toward me. “So here’s the deal. This here is the last known owner but”—she pauses, wets her finger, then flips to the second copy—“it was decreed to someone else after. It might just be a glitch in record keeping and, you know, things happen. We don’t have the current address or name of the new owner on file. So I can’t help you with permission for your photographs. If you want, I can request for some research to be done. It might take a while.”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  “The owner is alive and up to date on property taxes but I can’t tell you the name or their address. I don’t have access to that information. I wouldn’t worry about a permission. But don’t quote me on that.”

  Later, in the car, I scan the fuzzy copies. Most of the words are typed, some are filled in by hand. Deed Record. I skim the typed portion, pick up on words like grantor, State of Texas, lot 5, block 17, 48 acres, AURORA, Bertram County, Texas. Date: October 12, 1949. There’s a box in the corner with the word MICROFILM and a number that’s hard to decipher. It reads as follows:

  WARRANTY DEED

  Mable and Rupert Creel, Creel Hollow Farm

  TO

  Nolan Creel

  The second copy looks identical but the MICROFILM box has a decipherable number and completely different information. The date below the signatures reads April 4, 1982.

  WARRANTY DEED

  Nolan Creel

  TO

  Quinn Creel

  I sit in th
e car and I read the deed over and over as if I’m going to find something of value if I just look long and hard enough. I come up empty. There’s no obvious connection and maybe it was all a coincidence, maybe my mother just walked out of town and ended up there for no reason at all, and I’m not sure what I even expected. I feel silly. What sounded like a Sherlock Holmes kind of move, a connecting of the dots—my mother’s night excursion down 2410, losing her purse, the Mason jars with dead crickets—is now full of flaws.

  There’s so much going on in my head, but it’s not like this is some sort of buried memory, nothing like that. Maybe I’m attempting to connect dots that are bound to end up in a jumbled mess: no meaning to be extracted here. My mother has always been random in her actions and maybe all this is random too.

  I fall asleep with those thoughts and when I wake up, Tallulah is curled up next to me in my bed. Her body exudes warmth and her paws gently twitch. She relaxes and her nose rests so close to my arm that her breath produces moisture on my skin. I dare not move as to not interrupt her sleep. She hasn’t eaten since the fire, must have come out from underneath the bed some time during the night.

  The sun isn’t up yet and I have to finish packing but I give Tallulah this moment of peace. As she lays there, I have time to examine her. I don’t know anything about her past, but her thick calloused elbows make me believe that she’s spent years on concrete floors. She’s probably never seen any of her litter beyond eight weeks. Her pads are cracked as if she’s walked across state lines. I wonder if an owner gave her up because she was blind or too used up or had too many litters. And I wonder what I’d feel for my mother if she had a heart condition or broke her hip. I would care for her, I know that with certainty, but this odd behavior, this madness is something completely different. What if I can’t help? I stroke Tallulah between the eyes and she wakes and begins to walk in tight seemingly random circles and then stops, does a quick cursory spin before she curls up next to me again.

  Tallulah, deep inside, is a wild dog with an ingrained instinct to pat down tall grass and underbrush to make a comfortable bed for herself. There’s a reason for everything. There’s never nothing behind something. Maybe there’s a reason why my mother set fire to that bucket. Or rather—what was she burning in that bucket?

  I get up slowly and enter my mother’s room. It smells dank and smoky and I can see through a hole in the floor straight into the living room downstairs. The bucket sits in the corner of the room, filled with a mixture of water, soot, and paper pulp.

  Several of the boxes were completely engulfed in flames and there is nothing left but a distorted pile of charred remains. I flip over one of the boxes that is still intact. Most of the papers are soaked and stick to one another. I gently peel them away from each other, so they don’t fall apart.

  There’s the lease to the house, a life insurance letter—I can make out red lettering and the State Farm Insurance logo, but it seems older, the font and graphics seem vintage in an outdated kind of way—it’s not a policy, part of the address is intact, but all I can decipher is the word Aurora, and an incomplete zip code and a partial name. No___. ___ll. Change in Bene___. This could mean benefits or beneficiary, but then there’s not a single complete line. There are also photographs. I flip through them, and as they separate, murky drops of water mixed with soot run off, as if they are hemorrhaging some vile, black blood containing a long-kept and dark secret.

  There’s a picture of me; I’m about thirteen, I can tell by the length of my hair. It is the nineties, summertime I assume, judging by the shorts and the tank top. I was skinny and lanky, didn’t wear a bra yet, but one of those sports bras was flattening my barely developing chest. I flip the photograph and see numbers on the back. 199 , I can’t make out the last number. It could be a zero, or an eight, maybe a nine. Then a name. Pet.

  I know, know, that Dahlia isn’t the name my mother has called me all my life. I have memories of her calling me Pet, and now there’s a photograph with the name on the back. She went from Mom to Memphis Waller. I went from Pet to Dahlia.

  Dahlia came about in Aurora. Somewhere between West Texas, en route to Vegas, then California, and back to Texas, something changed. We no longer ran; we settled down in Aurora. I went to school for the first time in my life. I ate lunch with other children, made friends. The woman who had dragged me over multiple state lines, from motels to furnished rooms, from living in cars to ramshackle trailers, settled down. Suddenly my mother felt safe enough to stay in one place. And she was Memphis from then on out. Not that I was aware of any other name—she was Mom, Mother, not a name—there were no IDs, no documents. And if there had been, would I have understood? Would it have meant anything at all?

  A wet piece of paper flops around in my hand and I support it with my palm. The paper is without tension, its fibers no longer maintaining its original shape. The bottom portion of the document is partially burnt. There is, if one were to look for it, something resembling a seal.

  I remember the paperwork from the tax assessor’s office, the microfiche number, the seal. This one looks identical, yet it’s difficult to make out the faint letters. Something catches my eye. Creel Hollow Farm. I tilt it toward the light, then stand by the window to get the best possible view of it.

  WARRANTY DEED

  Quinn Creel, Hollow Creel Farm

  TO

  Memphis Waller

  Like a flash of lightning is followed by a rumble of thunder, parts of my body go numb. Something inside of me shifts, as if my bones move but my body doesn’t, almost like I’m stepping out of myself. I feel a tug around my neck as if someone is jerking on an invisible leash. Nausea washes over me and my vision turns blurry.

  Nothing makes sense but I know one thing for sure: my mother’s world, the part that is unknown to me, the part she keeps secret, expands with every passing day.

  I connect the dots: an older couple puts a property into their son’s name, and that son is Nolan Creel. At some point, Nolan Creel puts the same property in the name of a Quinn Creel. That make sense, that’s how farms are handed down through generations, gifted while the previous generation is still alive as to avoid taxes, especially when there are large estates involved. But then it gets curious; at some point my mother was given the property. From a Quinn Creel it goes to Memphis Waller. My mother never claims the farm. Allows it to sit there, somehow manages to pay property taxes. But she sneaks off at night to visit the farm in the dark. To see what? If it’s still there? If the key still fits?

  How do I ask her the questions I need answers to? She very seldom allows herself to get caught up in a conversation, is always on point, careful not to divulge too much. Not to give it away, whatever it may be.

  How do I make her understand how important this is to me? She lives in her head and emotions are alien to her, she barely understands her own feelings let alone anyone else’s. It isn’t that she doesn’t care—I keep telling myself she loves me, that I’m sure of it—it’s just that she wasn’t born with the faculties to understand how to relate to people. Maybe someone more skilled is better prepared to open the vault that is my mother.

  —

  Charlene, blond and thick and cheerful, her acrylic tips clacking on the keyboard, collects my money and as I sit and wait in Dr. Wagner’s office, I roll a can of Diet Coke from the vending machine in the lobby over my eyebrows.

  “Dahlia, what brings you in?” Dr. Wagner enters and, like the first time I met him, his hands are covered in glistening gel that smells overwhelmingly minty.

  “I don’t think that’s my name,” I say and my voice surprises me. Cold. Without emotion.

  “What was that?”

  “My mother started a fire, almost burned down the house. First she doubled up on her meds and before I knew it, the house was on fire. I found a deed . . .” I stumble over my words. I take in a big gulp of air but that makes it even worse. “Do you remember t
hat I looked for her purse?” I pause and breathe but still the words get jumbled up in my mind. I’m not sure if it’s my faulty brain or my mouth relaying words out of order. It takes all the concentration I have to sound coherent.

  “Slow down, Dahlia. I don’t follow. What happened?”

  I start from the beginning. Purse. 2410. Farm. Crickets. Fire. Deed. When I’m done, he just stares at me.

  “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he says and leans back in his chair. “The farm where your mother lost her purse, according to this deed, belongs to a”—Dr. Wagner flips the pages—“Quinn Creel. And after your mother set fire to the house and ended up in the hospital for smoke inhalation, you find among the things she attempted to burn a document that says that a Quinn Creel deeded a farm to your mother. And Memphis Waller, your mother, is the rightful owner of that farm. Something she never told you. But she also rents a house where you both live.”

  “Yes. But there’s more.” I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enjoying this. Some part of me is reveling in this mess of names and deeds and court documents.

  “There’s more?” he asks and stares at my hands pulling a photograph out of my purse.

  “Here,” I say, “that’s me, I was about thirteen or so. Flip it over.”

  “Pet. 1-9-9 something. I don’t understand?”

  “My mother called me Pet for as long as I can remember. Some people thought my name was actually Pat, like Pat short for Patricia. And for all I know that’s true. Then suddenly she tells me my name is Dahlia and hers is Memphis. Last name Waller. Out of the blue. When we came back to Texas after living in California and all those other places. She changed her name and probably mine too, and I don’t know my real name. And Pet is not a name.”

  “Are you aware that you’re slurring your speech?”

  “I sound just fine to me.”

  “Why are you rolling that can over your forehead?”

  “I’ve been having headaches. But I’m okay,” I say. “I have weird moments, smells and memories, and sometimes I pass out.” I smile to make it sound plausible, insignificant, even.