I'm Just Happy to Be Here

by Janelle Hanchett

  Joan Lila was told she couldn’t go to college because she was a girl, and my grandfather preferred she not work, but she did anyway, and perhaps she had some ideas and hopes for herself that simply were not viable on account of her gender. So when she came to my house a week before she was slaughtered, and then again two days before she was slaughtered, I felt a rush of joy that I had a grandmother again—to be near, to be with, to maybe wrap presents with. I thought, Oh, we can do so many things together. I’m going to take her everywhere. Because there was a part of her that had come alive, maybe the part of her that had wanted to go to college at eighteen, and even though she loved my grandfather with a fantastical-type unicorn love, there was a brightness in her step as she told us of her plans.

  Oh, her plans. She was going to buy a little place closer to the city, closer to where we lived, and she was going to visit each grandchild to get to know each great-grandchild “really well.” On the last day she visited, she wore makeup that matched her blouse and a vibrant red scarf around her neck as we perused the books at Costco—her tiny, wrinkled fingers stretching over the embossed covers—with more places to visit now, at eighty-six, than perhaps in the entirety of her life.

  Instead she was eliminated at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 9, 2016, by a grandchild she loved with the fullness of her heart, a grandchild who had ceased taking medications for a psychiatric condition nobody told us he had.

  • • •

  Within a few hours of arriving at my mother’s house, after a friend had picked up Arlo, and Mac and my brother had come to help hold my mother’s trembling body, I realized she was living the fear that had been pulsing through me since I was a little girl. Somebody had hurt her mother. Somebody had taken her mother. Somebody had caused indescribable suffering to the woman who held her as a newborn, whose existence was a blanket around shivering shoulders. And my mother, my mother got the phone call I was always waiting for, for years, rocking on a couch as a child, wide awake in college, imagining an intruder. Here it is, Janelle. This is what it looks like. This is the horror you built in your imagination.

  “Maybe she is not actually dead. We haven’t heard from anybody who saw her body. Maybe she’s just sick at the hospital,” my mother said, getting up and packing a suitcase. “I have to be with her.”

  Mac rose silently, called the police in the city where the crime occurred, and spoke softly with the detective. We watched him taking notes while my mother ran around the house packing, and I searched for the power to say, “Mom, she’s dead.”

  When Mac hung up the phone, my mother cried, “Where is she?”

  Mac looked at her with the same kind brown eyes I knew from that first night sixteen years before, the eyes that caught me in the flurry of my life and held me near him, with him, if only to discover how deep the kindness goes. He nearly whispered, “She’s at the coroner’s” and grabbed her as she collapsed again against him, her legs too weak to support the truth.

  That night, as I slept next to my mother like she had always done for me, as I pulled the blankets up under her chin and tucked her hair behind her ear, I wondered if all the agony and all the terror of my life—of the surety that my mother would die one night in some horrific way, and I would be left motherless and powerless—had been leading only to this very moment.

  Maybe I knew. Maybe I knew somewhere in my bones that a mother would die, and that her daughter would mourn, and though it would be my blood, it would not be my body.

  Maybe I knew it would be so close I could touch it, but it wouldn’t quite be mine.

  I rolled toward her and closed my eyes, thinking, This is it. Here it is.

  I felt a silk-spun terror pulled from my body, thirty-seven years of web around my bones, lifted and carried off, as I opened my eyes again to watch her sleep—my motherless mother, my grandmothers gone, and an entire night before us.

  17

  If I Knew the Way

  January 20, 2017

  Did my aunt see him first, and gasp, causing my grandmother to turn? Just in time to see his face before the knife sunk into her neck? And if she was looking forward, no warning at all, was she speaking when the knife went in? What was she saying? Was she looking at her phone? Or doing absolutely nothing? Maybe they were talking about her flight the next day to visit her granddaughter, who was cleaning her house and preparing her guest bed at the very moment a thirty-five-year-old man we all grew up with but suddenly stood a complete stranger buried metal into her tiny neck, wrapped in her mother’s pearls.

  Is this how we go? Is this all there is? Is this what we’re doing here? Do we live our whole lives in work and service to families only to be slaughtered? And in a kitchen, no less? The kitchen we warmed with our own love? To be slaughtered like a fucking barn animal by the very humans we devoted our lives to?

  If I could, I would kill him. If I could, I would rip his fucking throat out. But I cannot. Because I am not a murderer. So I remain. We remain. In the blood of our mother.

  We remain in the blood of our mother.

  We remain in the blood of our mother.

  • • •

  I wrote the words “we remain in the blood of our mother” fifteen times on the page of my journal while sitting alone on a beach in Santa Cruz, and each time I wrote them, the letters were bigger and more jagged and I pressed harder and harder, just as I had my whole life, hoping the torture in me would absorb like ink.

  I couldn’t save her—nobody could—and nobody could save my other grandmother. That day on the beach I felt it, their absence, and how I simply remain in their blood—my grandmothers, and my mother, who seems different now, who seemed to have a light in her eyes extinguished that day, a wild light that carried her to Yosemite and back home, to me. I understand, though I fear she won’t return. I fear she will remain in the blood of her mother, and not a damn one of us will be able to save her.

  So I drove to the ocean as my mother had done with us. I looked to the rage of the water as it sang its roar against the rocks of my heart, and waited to be filled again.

  I pulled out a fountain pen and the leather traveler’s journal my brother had given me for Christmas, and found myself writing that I wanted to kill somebody. But really, I wanted relief. I felt I was drowning in the blood of my mother and her mother and my father’s mother, all the mothers in my life and beyond, whose blood pulsed through me like fire but never like annihilation, until then.

  I saw myself in them. I saw myself in their eyes or turn of the head or laughter, and it had always felt like connection, like life. One Christmas after Grandma Bonny died, my aunt walked up to me after I had been writing about motherhood for years, and handed me a thick plastic-bound book. On the cover it said, “Between Us Girls, by Bonny Jean Hanchett.”

  “Your grandmother wrote a column to mothers for many years. I collected them for you. Did you know that?”

  I looked at my aunt. “No, I had no idea,” I said.

  As I thumbed through the pages, a chill ran up my body, an electric channel that opened to words and a woman who wrote them seventy years before. I understood then why I kept showing up at her house. I was to become her: in words, in rage, in broken, slightly pathetic mothering.

  It was better than a ghost. She was with me. No, she was me.

  I am her.

  We remain in the blood of our mother.

  Sitting on the sand with my journal on my knees, I looked up and saw in the breakwater the shadows of my children as they played on that very beach a few months before, before my grandfather watched goldfish swim into the abyss and my grandmother bled on the linoleum, before I knew such things were even possible. The older children chased waves and explored tide pools while my mother, Mac, and I corralled the younger ones, held their tiny resistant hands, tending to the little minds who don’t yet know white water can turn without warning into massive sleeper waves.

  “Never turn your back to the ocean!” the older children told the younger ones, but they hadn
’t seen enough to listen yet.

  • • •

  We have always visited Santa Cruz a few times a year, but for four years in a row, Rocket wanted to go there for his birthday celebration. We often stayed in a motel in Aptos, a little town a few miles down the coast from Santa Cruz. We’d wake up on Saturday morning and walk a few blocks to the beach, then turn right and head down to the pier with the metal boat at the end, on the other side of a wood fence. It’s a famous metal boat. Everybody knows about it, though nobody seems to know why it’s there.

  On our second trip to Aptos, we were walking to the beach when a white house with gray trim caught my attention. As we moved closer, I realized I had seen it before, many years earlier. I looked harder as the memory formed in my mind, and I realized I had actually been in that house before.

  I had driven there with a boy named Evan when I was sixteen years old. The entire night rushed into my mind: sitting in his Jeep along winding roads, pulling up to the house on the corner, parking across the street, getting beer from a supermarket that sold to underage kids. The joint he smoked while I politely declined.

  “No thanks, weed’s not my thing,” I said. He was older than me and excessively popular, and I was trying to act confident, but I was afraid.

  Evan and I drank a lot of alcohol that night, took some ecstasy (which was bunk) and some cocaine, but I remembered that night in particular because it was when I smoked heroin for the first time. He and his friends had to teach me how, though I felt no resistance. I sat on a couch with people I had just met, and somebody brought out the tinfoil, lit it underneath, and showed me how to inhale the smoke through a straw.

  After that, Evan and I decided to go for a walk, so we went down to the beach, turned right, and walked down to the pier. It was the middle of the night and there was nobody around. I wanted to see the metal boat at the end, but the fence was locked. I tried climbing it but couldn’t get a footing on the front of the boards, so I kicked off my shoes and scaled the railing of the pier while Evan yelled at me to stop.

  I did it anyway, and he joined me, probably afraid of compromising his masculinity. We were high up, and beneath us was the crashing, freezing ocean. It was two or three a.m. and black below us. The fence extended from the sides of the pier for a few feet, but if I could get around to the other side I could get on the boat. So I tiptoed along the tiny wooden lip beneath the fence, clinging to the top of the boards, all the way to the end, but then I had to swing my body around the last pillar, and that seemed particularly dangerous. Evan was with me until then. He said, “You’re fucking crazy” and went back onto the pier. I looked at him and smiled, held on tight, and swung my body out over the ocean and around to the other side, not knowing if there was a footing.

  I made it. I looked down at the rolling water, and it only looked lovely and soft. By the time I got to the metal boat, whatever drugs I had in my body were wearing off and I got that familiar anxiety and urge for more that made me forget everything I was doing and focus on what mattered. More. So I didn’t even sit and enjoy the boat. I just yelled at Evan on the other side of the fence and told him I was there, then climbed the boards on the back of the fence and hopped down. I put on my shoes and walked back, hoping this guy wouldn’t try to have sex with me and wondering how much more blow was available.

  • • •

  The second time I recognized the Aptos house and recalled the metal boat escapade, I was thirty-five and pushing a three-month-old baby with Mac and our three other children. I felt fat and frumpy with my gray roots showing, and was hit with a blast of shame and sadness because back then I had been young and beautiful and hopeful about what life would become. Life was really going to be something, and when Evan was gone, I thought someday I would find another man who loved me even more, and I would have reached that potential everybody had been talking about since I was a kid in the “Gifted and Talented” program.

  This whole cocaine booze sex cigarette jumping-over-fence thing is merely a phase. It’s a silly one-time, maybe few-year, young-person phase, and the metal boat is just around the corner, I tell you. The thing I’m risking it all for is just right there.

  I believed it.

  As Mac and I walked with our children, we had Styrofoam cups of motel coffee in our hands. It was nowhere near strong or plentiful enough. Georgia was throwing a tantrum because she wanted to push the stroller and we wouldn’t let her. Ava was complaining about the flies. I told her it was from the seaweed. Rocket wondered about the driftwood scattered across the sand. Mac told him there must have been storms recently.

  I watched the joggers in awe, as usual. Look at them out here running at nine a.m. on a Saturday. The fog was perfection. People were already arriving to set up birthday parties in the barbeque areas. I saw them and I saw us and I saw the ocean. And in flashes, when I had a second or two in silence, I saw me—sixteen years old, spinning over oceans and piers and men like straws over heroin.

  I wasn’t going to fall. I could not. I was holding on and too young to die.

  I walked along this road at sixteen, high. I walked it again at thirty-five. I walked it at thirty-one, too, but somehow failed to notice.

  • • •

  Perhaps it took a few years for my mind to accept the memory of that white and gray house. Perhaps the brain blocks us from what’s too strong, too soon. After eight years of sobriety, I’ve grown better at it, better at encountering places that bump me into history, into living for a moment a tiny irreconcilable truth.

  At first, I couldn’t look at the places at all. I couldn’t look the first time I drove by the motel where Mac and I stayed because there were “people” in our house. When I think about that time in the motel, the pier and metal boat seem less appealing, and even though I’m older and more tired now, I am freer, because I don’t need to throw myself over a cold dark ocean to get to where I’m going.

  At first, I couldn’t look at the craft store in my town either, because I once drove Ava to preschool after taking drugs, and I couldn’t make it back in time because those lines wear off quickly, so I stopped behind that craft store and did another line, right there in the car off the back of a binder. Many years after that, I bought material there for the Harry Potter costume my mother was sewing for Ava. Now, I buy felt and poster board there for school projects, and clay for Ava to shape into little animals for gifts at Christmastime, and mini hay bales to decorate our porch in the fall.

  The liquor store down the road was my liquor store, where they knew me by name, and I was sure nobody from my family would see me. I could hide there. I could buy my bottles in peace. Once, Mac saw me driving out of that liquor store parking lot and followed me in his car. He was irate and wanted to know who I was with. I couldn’t stop because I was drunk and thought he would kill me, though that was my imagination. Mac is a gentle man, but it was a dangerous time for both of us. I was absent and loose, insane and drunk, and he was sober but miserable and insane, and losing his wife.

  I wanted to be as good as him but I didn’t know how. I wanted to be his wife but could not. I felt sorry for myself and ordered another whiskey. But after that run-in, I was very particular about where I went. I found a new liquor store. Now I buy milk at that liquor store when I don’t have time to make it to the market.

  • • •

  I don’t shake my head anymore to get rid of the memories. I take a deep breath, look at each line of the picture in my mind, and get as close as I possibly can to the image and the pain it causes. I say “thank you” sometimes, in moments when I’m sitting at some horribly boring back-to-school night or student pick-up line, or working at my child’s preschool, or doing some other motherly thing. Because on the surface, I fit in now.

  But I have a secret that’s not really a secret, and I hang out with many alcoholic mothers, trying to make those years worth living. When they tell me the horrendous and disgusting things they’ve done, I flinch and think, What kind of fucking dirtbag…, but then I r
emember my own damn story, and that I, in fact, was that dirtbag. So I nod, and tell what I did, and how I recovered, because I want them to see that the water they need to wash themselves clean flows always and immediately to the lowest possible places. And I know that God, to me, is that kind of love.

  I always thought I had to get holy before some Power would help me, if there was one. Now I see that it is when we are our most vile that help comes pouring in, meeting us where we are at the bottom, where all the humans refuse to go anymore, because it’s dark and reeks of the dying. Maybe they’ve forgotten that from their sunlit vistas, that some of us are broken enough to believe we need rebuilding, and that lifting us is worth their time. Or maybe they never knew.

  I know, though, and I’m here with them still, though I’m walking around a life that isn’t my life or wasn’t my life once, and the two seem wholly incompatible, impossible even, and yet this is the same body that inhaled and spun around the pillar over the ocean, and now I’m making semi-forced small talk with you in your yoga pants and Honda Pilot because we’re both mothers picking up our kids and it’s hard and thankless and perfect. The only indicator of those years are my ill-timed swear words and the slash marks on my arm, which you probably can’t see now anyway, as the years have faded them into almost nothing. (You can see them if you really look.)

  You can’t even get to the metal boat anymore. It sank down farther into the ocean and now it’s completely removed from the fence. Even if you jump the fence you can’t get to the boat. Now it’s only a place for the seagulls to shit and the tourists to wonder what it was like to sit on its hull or walk along its sides. It looks creepy and broken and rusty now, half submerged in murky blue.

  I knew it when it still seemed like a boat. I knew it during its better days. It never saw me during mine.