Her eyebrows rise and she looks past me. “Uh, no. I don’t think that will be a problem.” She winces a little and then holds her belly for a second. Then she blows out a long breath that smells of corn chips and her face relaxes once more. “She’s kicking my bladder again.”
“Ah,” I say. “So it’s a girl, then?”
She nods, a smile on her face that’s a bit dreamy. “Yeah, I’m safe and so is she. Any day now.”
When she sees me glance down at her hand where a gold wedding band is pinching at her swollen finger, she waves her hand to dismiss it and says, “He was an asshole. I was going to divorce him anyway.” She shrugs.
We stand there for a moment in silence, until she shifts on her feet and leans against the doorjamb. This isn’t the kind of girl my mother would approve of, I’m sure. I’ve paid close attention to her friends over the last couple of years and I know she wouldn’t have socialized with a girl like this one. There is something about her that strikes me as crude, and crude is something my mother never is.
“Well?” the girl prompts.
I glance at her, then decide. “I’m going to check on some stuff, get some clothes like you said. Then I’ll be back.”
She looks back at the room again and nods. “Take some of that trash with you when you go, will you? You can come get clean linens when you come back.”
With that, she salutes me with a finger to her brow, then turns and waddles away.
EIGHT – MIDDAY, DAY SIXTY
It takes a long time to get gas for my car, the line snaking almost two blocks by the time I join it. The air is so hot it’s almost unbreathable. Like everyone else, I stand outside my car and fan the thick air, listening to the others near me as they share with each other all that they have lost.
Afterward, I drive the streets littered with debris and shining with broken glass, trying not to look too closely at things. Big clouds of flies lift and then settle as my car passes the bundles not yet collected from the sidewalks. They lay there like so much trash. Factories will need to start making a lot of bedsheets to replace all those that have been put to use as shrouds.
I park a few blocks from my mother’s house and then watch. The neighborhood is quiet, but there are women about. Some are clearing their yards or the streets. One is wielding a garden hose on a patch of street with a look of grim determination on her face while the gutter runs with red-tinged water.
The woman with the garden hose gives me a look when I get out of the car and begin to walk away. There is recognition in her eyes, but no alarm. She’s seen me park here plenty of times. I’m tense, wondering if she knows who I am, but I do my best to look casual, just another young woman returning home. Eventually, she gives me a solemn nod and I return it.
Yellow plastic tape flutters in the wind from the trees at the edge of my mother’s yard, so I try to prepare myself for what I might see. I can smell the charred substance of the house before I see it. I stand on the sidewalk in front of the small, neat house and look at what remains.
The once-white clapboard is now gray going to black, the paint bubbled where it still remains. The porch has collapsed over the roof of a car that’s been driven into the front of the house, but the car isn’t burned so I know that happened after the fire. The house’s roof is open, a black and yawning invitation for the elements to reach in and destroy anything that might have survived.
I had thought to find her clothes, her shoes, her purses. I had intended to take her hairpins, her brush, the soap from her shower. I won’t be able to now. The soot-blackened siding above each of the blown-out windows makes it clear that the interior is gone.
Something inside me twists. I’m not sure what it is, perhaps panic, but I pull out my phone and open the gallery of photos inside. I flip through the pictures and the queasy feeling inside abates. They’re all there. The photos I snapped of the pictures on her walls, the inside of her dresser drawers, her vanity, the inside of her kitchen cabinets. I’ve even got some of the contents of her fridge taken at different times over the years. I liked to compare them, see what her diet was like, see the foods I should try to enjoy.
There is the selfie I snapped while lying on her bed. Her pillows had smelled of hair spray and face cream, the neatly folded nightgown under her pillow a long one, made of cotton grown thin from many washings. All that is gone, except that I still have it in my phone. I grip the metal case and hold it to my chest.
I still have this and no one else will ever have any of it.
An older woman steps out onto the porch of the house next door. Her arms are crossed tightly across her chest and her face is set and hard. She looks at me for a moment, then calls out, “What are you doing here? There’s nothing to see anymore.”
“I’m just looking,” I say.
The woman nods, as if she’s seen others doing the same. She lifts one finger from the tight grip she’s got on her upper arms and points toward the house. She says, “I didn’t burn it, but that’s my car.”
I nod and look back at the car again, as if admiring her aim. When I turn back to her, I get a look at her backyard, the two driveways that lay side by side between the houses, offering me a clear view. There is a grave back there, but there are three crosses on it. The wood the crosses are made of looks odd to me from this distance, finished in some dark stain and curved where one wouldn’t expect a cross to curve. I realize they were made from the wood of an elegant chair, perhaps from the dining room.
“I hope someone comes to bulldoze it soon. Take every bit of it away. I’ll salt the earth when they do,” the woman says. This time she looks at me more closely, her eyes narrowing. Perhaps she sees the resemblance.
I nod again, pulling my sunglasses from my purse. Then I reconsider and put them back. These are my mother’s sunglasses. I borrowed them from her car and the woman might recognize them. Not likely, but it could happen.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say instead, nodding toward the yard behind her house.
The woman only puts her head down and I walk away, back to my car.
NINE – AFTERNOON, DAY NINETY
My grandmother’s house is quiet and feels empty from the street. I wonder if my aunt is still there or if she’s returned to her own home now that her mother is dead. My grandmother’s car still sits in the driveway, its blue handicap tag hanging from the rearview mirror as if waiting for her to go to the market. One of the tires has gone flat and it’s covered in a thick layer of this summer’s dust.
I should feel sad. I know this. I try to force that feeling, but all I can come up with is the nagging question of what will happen to me now. This is my home and has been since I was born. My father lived here off and on during the brief times when he wasn’t being housed in a cell somewhere, but for my entire life, my grandmother and I have lived in these tiny rooms, under this compact roof.
There’s no sense in sitting outside in the heat. There’s no one here to bother me. I’m sure of that now, so I unlock the door and step inside. The power is on and the room is very cool. It feels so good that I lean against the front door and let the sweat dry for a few minutes, my eyes closed.
There’s no bad smell, so my aunt must have found a way to bury my grandmother without me, or else hauled her to the street to be picked up like all the rest. There are no bodies in this neighborhood, so those trash trucks must have already come this way.
When I open my eyes I see nothing out of place. It is the same as it’s always been. The hard green sofa with its thick plastic cover, the heavy sofa table with a coffee service on it meant only for show, the knickknacks covering every shelf or flat surface that I must never touch.
I reach out a finger and push a ceramic cat off the table by the door, smiling a little as it crashes to the floor and breaks. I push away from the door and sweep my forearm across the surface, sending the animal kingdom to the hardwood floor to shatter. A lion manages to survive the fall, so I step on it and listen to it crunch under the sole of my s
hoe.
Inside my grandmother’s small room everything is neat and tidy, the bed made tightly, just as she liked it. On the faded floral quilt there is an envelope, placed with exacting precision on the center of the bed.
It’s from my aunt. She writes that she is sorry, that my father didn’t come home, but that I shouldn’t worry about that given the situation. She tells me that my grandmother was taken away by kind people—a rebuke if there is one to be found in her otherwise polite letter. She ends by telling me that she cleaned out the refrigerator and that, if I am in need, I can call her for help anytime.
I toss the letter down onto the bed, then wrinkle the covers just because there’s no one to tell me I can’t. Suddenly, I’m so tired I don’t think I can stay on my feet for one more second. I fall onto the bed and reach my arms out to each edge. The pillows send up the scent of lilacs when my head pushes the air out of them and I turn to press one to my face, breathing in the fading scent of the only person who ever really took care of me.
I still don’t feel grief, but I do feel something. I’m not sure what it is. I’ll miss her breakfasts and her readiness to pay for my schooling. That’s something.
Our last conversation rises in my mind while I lie there. Our last real conversation, anyway. Once the cancer metastasized into her brain, we had no real talks. But that last time we spoke, she patted her bed, inviting me to sit. She’d asked me how I was doing, inquired about school, and finally, asked if I was okay with what she’d shared with me those few years before. She really wanted to know if I was okay with knowing about my mom.
She’d looked at me in a way I didn’t truly understand, but I smiled at her because that always seemed to work. It did, and she patted my hand again, clearly relieved. That encouraged me, so I told her about meeting my mother, about my efforts to find the right way to her heart, about my visits into her home while she was at work. I told her of my struggles in passing the secret tests I knew my mother was putting in front of me to prove my worth.
My grandmother’s face had fallen while I spoke, making her look even paler and sicker than she already did.
“Are you mad at me?” I’d asked her.
She’d only shook her head a little and turned my hand over in hers, her fingers tracing the lines of my palm. Then she’d folded my fingers over and let me go. She stroked my cheek and said, “You can’t help it. You are your father’s daughter.”
Then she said she was tired and rolled to her side, facing the window in her room and moving her feet under the blankets so that I had to get up from her bed. I know she was sad, but she was wrong to be so. She didn’t understand what I did. My mother needed me to prove myself, and I was doing it. I would be perfect for her. I just wasn’t there yet.
I also remember that I heard her say something as I left her room that day. Facing away from me as she was, I could have misheard her, but I thought I heard her say, “Dear God, please forgive me for what I’ve done.”
I can only guess that she wanted to be forgiven for waiting so long to tell me about my mother.
My sigh is loud in the empty room. Grandma is gone and there’s no use in thinking about her. I can’t smell the lilacs anymore, so I get up from the bed. A shower makes me feel almost like a new person, and I leave the wet towels where I drop them. Packing isn’t hard to do, because I don’t want anything I can’t use right now. The mementos aren’t important anymore. Nothing stirs even the slightest interest.
Once my car is loaded, I watch from a safe distance as the house burns, far enough away that no neighbor will see me watching. I’ve always enjoyed fire. My father does…or did…as well. But this, well, this is the best fire I’ve ever seen. It burns quickly and no sirens sound out for a long while. By the time the fire truck shows up, there’s nothing to save.
I’ve no intention of going back to the hotel. I felt strangely possessive of it while I was there, but now it seems a seedy place to plant myself. There must be many orphans like me now and far fewer college students requiring rooms. I wonder if the dorms are open yet, or perhaps still empty of anyone who would object to my moving in.
TEN – DAY NINETY-ONE
While I wait for hours in the college’s housing office, the sounds of so much useless work and the way the light falls from the overhead lights reminds me of the day I failed my mother’s most difficult test.
It was just last year, and I’d been disheartened at how little progress we’d made at becoming the mother and daughter we were meant to be. That day, I had hoped that the time had finally come. At a lawyer’s office, we sat opposite each other, a broad table between us and two lawyers bracketing her in their dark, funeral-director suits.
One slid a thick sheaf of papers toward me and asked, “Are you sure you don’t want a lawyer present?”
My mother was looking beyond me, somewhere in the direction of the door, but I knew she was waiting for my answer, waiting so that she might judge me by my actions. “No. I don’t need one.”
The older lawyer had coughed a little into his cupped hand, given the other lawyer a look, and then said, “Ms. Kennedy doesn’t want this to go through the court systems, but if we can’t come to some sort of agreement, our next step will be an order of protection.”
He paused there, examining me for some reaction, but I wasn’t sure what was correct, so I simply settled for giving him a tiny nod—one I hoped mirrored those my mother gave, chin up and my head tilted just so. He’d narrowed his eyes at me, so I think I must have done it well.
He pointed to the papers in front of me and said, “The top one is an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement. It’s basically an agreement that you will never reveal the circumstances of…of your birth.” My mother’s eyes blinked hard at his words, but her gaze never wavered. “The next is a settlement offer. You’ll get the funds if you sign the other two agreements, one of which is your assurance that you will move and not live, visit, or otherwise come within fifty miles of this city. The second is an agreement that you will in no way attempt any further contact with Ms. Kennedy, her possessions, or property by any means existing or which may come into existence in the future.”
At the end of his little speech, he pushed a pen across the surface toward me. I picked it up, but rather than sign, I looked at the papers, thinking hard.
What does she really want of me? This must be a test, but what kind of test? I remember how hard I thought about it and how I tried to find the twisty path that she’d laid out for me.
“All you have to do is sign and the money is yours once you leave the area,” the younger lawyer said.
Instead of signing, I pushed the pen and papers back toward the lawyer. My mother, who had been so still during this meeting, clenched her hands into fists on the table, crumpling the papers in front of her. That’s when I knew I had done the right thing. She was crumpling her copies, letting me know that she didn’t want me to sign. She might have looked upset, but I know that was just for the others in the room. I knew what she meant by that secret signal.
“I don’t think I will,” I said, smiling at my mother.
The younger lawyer got up then, grabbed me by my arm, and yanked me up from the table. The other lawyer stood, looking alarmed, and said, “Tom! Stop that!”
Tom didn’t stop though. He pulled me to the door, through it, and then past the lobby, where he pushed me out the front door of the building. All the while, he yelled at me, telling me to stop staring at her, to stop following her. Right before he pulled the door closed between us, he screamed in my face, “Are you trying to kill her? Leave her alone!”
Whoever this Tom was, I knew then that he was jealous, that he wanted my mother for himself. I raced around the little building to the windows in that conference room and crouched beneath the glass. I heard my mother’s voice, crying and screaming in a way that disappointed me.
“How much more of my life must I lose? How much? I can’t take any more! I want to die! I’ll go mad!” she screamed. Then her voice
grew weaker, muffled.
The older lawyer’s voice was softer, so I stood and pressed my ear to the glass. The blinds in the windows hid me from view, but I could hear better. He said, “I agree, it’s terrible, but you have other options. There are strong stalker laws in place. You can go to the courts—”
“No!” she screamed. “What? So everyone can point at me and see only the little girl left for dead who had her rapist’s baby in fifth grade? I’ve made a life—such as it is—and I’m not going to lose everything I’ve managed to scrape out of this mess because I gave birth to a sociopath no different from the animal that spawned her. I should have cut her out of me!”
That last made me lift my ear from the window, confused. Why would she say that? I’d done what I could to win her love. I’d passed most of her other secret tests, bought clothes like her, dyed my hair.
I must have failed somehow. Perhaps she’d wanted more reaction from me, a declaration of love that was clear and loud. I thought about that day in the lawyer’s office for weeks afterward, watching her carefully for clues as to what I had failed to do, leaving my car only to wash in gas station restrooms or grab food to bring back. I even slept beneath her bedroom window on a few of those nights, sure that would be the night she would want to explain her actions.
A sudden increase in the noise level in the housing office wakes me from my reverie. The lawyer’s office disappears into the past where it belongs. I look around to see women gathering around the big screen on the wall where the news is being played. Some of the women are crying, others are shouting angry words, others are merely moaning in grief.
I’m the only one still in my chair, so I walk toward the screen to see what’s got everyone so riled. I must have missed it, because there is only a news anchor on the screen now, her face very grim, but a hungry look in her eyes. I push forward a little into the press of women and listen.
The Doomsday Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 3