by Ruth Lehrer
“Make sure you label it correctly,” said Duck-Duck.
The cops glanced at Molly, who glared at Duck-Duck. Then they looked at the shepherd’s pie.
“That sure looks tasty,” said Greg. “Just like my late wife used to make.”
I wondered why he would be thinking about his wife just now. Maybe she didn’t have a face when she died either. Or maybe he didn’t like talking about dead bodies any more than I did.
“We’ll send the sample off and let you know what they find, but the rest of the details do match exactly,” said Officer Greg. “We’re really sorry,” he said one last time.
It was weird, but I didn’t feel sorry. I didn’t feel sad or happy either.
Molly thanked them for all their hard work, and they said they wished they could have done more, ma’am, and then they went out to their cop car and drove away without turning on the blue lights. We sat down to dinner and didn’t talk about bodies anymore. For dessert, Molly brought out the chocolate-cherry ice cream she hadn’t let us eat the night before, and she even let me have seconds. Duck-Duck gave me sprinkles to put on top. Before I went to bed, Molly hugged and kissed me, the way she hugged and kissed Duck-Duck every night. I wasn’t sure if I liked the hugging and kissing or not.
“We’ll make sure you stay with us,” she said.
Then Duck-Duck and I went to sleep in Duck-Duck’s pink room with the two frilly beds.
Grandpa used to say that paying a kid to do housework was double theft. Parents already had to support them for years and years, and then they were expected to pay a kid extra to mow the lawn? In his mind, Mom was still paying off the ride he gave her up the Taconic Parkway from New York City.
“Go milk a dead cow,” he said whenever Keely asked for money.
I never asked for money.
We were supposed to get $225 for Grandpa when he died, but Social Security said that, because he died in February and Keely went ahead and deposited his March check, we actually owed them money. So we basically had to pay money for him to be dead. I thought it was worth it, but Keely whined and complained until Social Security finally gave up and said they wouldn’t make us pay back the March check, but we still didn’t get the $225 either.
When the Social Service ladies came to Birge Hill after Grandpa died, they thought we would be upset if parts of him went to scientists for research before the rest of him went to the cemetery. I wasn’t upset. I said it was fine, that maybe the scientists could figure out why he was so mean.
On Cherry Road, Duck-Duck got an allowance every week, not exactly for anything she did, although she was supposed to wash the dishes and keep the recycling bins neat and correct, but apparently she got money just for being a daughter. When I started living on Cherry Road, Molly started giving me money too. I wanted to ask if it was because she didn’t want me stealing money from her purse, something she might have thought, although she never said it.
Every time Molly gave me money, I stashed it away. Since I didn’t have the rock box anymore, I put it in the toe of my old blue sock and pushed the sock into the springs of the pop-up bed. I didn’t need to buy more Yodels since Molly gave us lunch every day, plus dinner and breakfast. But if Molly decided she didn’t want me to stay with them anymore, I’d need to be able to take care of myself. I wondered if I would get $225 for Keely or if I’d need to show them a body.
“Would you like to have a funeral?” asked Molly the morning after Officer Greg and Officer Sam’s visit. “They seemed pretty sure it was her. When they get the DNA tests back, we could have a memorial service.” We had just finished eating pancakes and bacon. Duck-Duck was in her bedroom under orders to clean her room.
I wasn’t sure what they did at funerals. I had seen the funeral home with long black cars and people in suits waiting patiently for everyone to drive the right way. No one at Birge Hill owned a suit.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Or you could take a walk in a place that was special to her,” said Molly, “and think about the things you’ll miss about her.”
I knew for sure that normal kids would say they missed their mothers. Normal kids would cry and sniffle and want a funeral with big cars.
“It’s okay,” I said. “She didn’t have anyplace special.”
Then I remembered the river. The river, taking away Keely, taking her face. The face without Keely. My stomach crunched up like a soda can getting stomped.
“It’s not your fault,” said Molly, as if she could hear me crunching. “There wasn’t anything you could have done. Even though she was so young, she lived a hard life.”
“Yeah,” I said, “because she lived most of it with Grandpa.”
Molly stopped clearing the table and sat down opposite me. I had licked the maple syrup off my plate until it looked clean. Except if you touched it, it was still sticky.
“Sometimes when someone dies,” she said, “you don’t have to have a funeral with lots of people around. You can just think of what was good about the person and how you want to remember them.” She wiped the crumbs in front of her, but she didn’t sweep them into her other hand. “When my mother died, I was mad because she had said a lot of mean things to me, but I remembered how she always called people when they were sick and asked if they needed anything. Somehow that little thing stuck in my mind. I decided I would do that too — just my way of remembering her. You could try something like that if you want to.”
“And you became a nurse,” I said. My stomach was un-crunching.
“So I did,” said Molly, and she smiled at me.
It was lucky she didn’t ask what I was going to remember about Keely, because all I could think of just then were things I didn’t want: she was a drunk, a pushover, a wimp. Molly wouldn’t comprehend there could be a mother who wouldn’t stand up for her kid.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and then we washed the dishes, and I put the maple syrup in the refrigerator door next to the organic mayonnaise. I was sure Keely had never had organic mayonnaise within ten miles of her mouth, let alone in her refrigerator.
That night I dreamed the river spoke. It didn’t speak in words or thoughts. It spoke in white air and black waves. Screaming and dark, it inhaled, and Keely fell in, sucked down into the river’s throat. I screamed at her to fight, to swim, but my words came out as thin squeaks of wind. I ran along the riverbank, looking and hoping, and suddenly there she was, rising out of the river’s rusty gullet. I grabbed her by the wrist, but just as I made contact, Grandpa suddenly pushed me from behind and I fell in too. Keely sank down between the red rocks, and I was sucked in after her as Grandpa laughed.
In the morning I asked Molly, “What does it mean if you dream about somebody?”
“Somebody?” she said.
Somehow she knew I meant Keely. It bothered me how she knew so much. It almost felt like she was digging around in my brain.
“Yeah,” I said. “Somebody.”
Molly was hurrying because she had to be at work and we had to be at school, but she stopped for a second. Then I felt bad because I was being snotty and she was being helpful.
“Sometimes,” said Molly, “dreams about someone who’s died can be our way of visiting them one last time.” She raised her eyebrows in a little question.
I shrugged.
“Or,” she added, “sometimes it can just be us trying to process the feelings we had about them when they were alive.”
I shouldn’t have asked. Dreams were just dreams. Some were bad, and some were nicer. Kind of like the weather.
That afternoon, instead of walking home with Duck-Duck, I went to the river. I didn’t go all the way to Birge Hill, but I walked to where the river ran after it twisted down through town. I watched the white water churning and spinning. The sky was drizzling a cold gray rain.
I threw a pebble into the water and watched it disappear, and then I threw another. I threw a whole fistful of pebbles, and still I didn’t feel right.
> Maybe if I had been nice to Keely when she got fired from Walmart, we could have started over. Maybe we could have gone to the supermarket and bought bread and milk, and she would have felt better and she would have gone out to look for another job.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I whispered. “I’m sorry I didn’t catch you.”
I listened for an answer, but all I could hear was water — rushing water — and wind.
The next weekend, when Molly and I picked up Duck-Duck from soccer practice, I spotted Darsa. She was tall and had bigger breasts than some high-school girls. She ran like an antelope on the range: an antelope with magazine-model legs and a cool haircut. She loped; she jumped; she back-switched in midair. I could see why Duck-Duck was impressed.
“Isn’t she great?” said Duck-Duck after practice.
“Umm,” I said. I could feel Molly looking at me. Or maybe she was just thinking at me really loud.
I didn’t want to ask in front of Molly if we were going to hang out in the cemetery. When we got back home it seemed we were, because Duck-Duck took the apples Molly gave her and put them in her pack. Then she did the secret-password knock.
I actually didn’t know it was a secret-password knock until she told me.
“Swear on your oath blood you won’t tell anyone,” she said.
“Tell anyone what?”
“The secret-password knock, stupid,” said Duck-Duck.
“I swear,” I said. “What do you need a secret-password knock for?”
“If you are kidnapped by the enemy, silly. Or swallowed by zombies.”
“Of course,” I said, even though there was no way a secret-password knock would help in the belly of a zombie, and we went out. I wondered if Duck-Duck talked to the girls on the soccer team about secret-password knocks, and if she did, what they thought of it. They probably wouldn’t be so buddy-buddy with her if she told them.
When we got to the cemetery lookout spot, we set up camp. We lay under the bushes, which used to be green and then red but now were brown. We crunched our apples, watching down the hill for other gangs’ spies. You could tell other gangs, Duck-Duck said, by their different-color lunch boxes. I didn’t have a lunch box. Not yet, anyways. It was still on my list. Molly had been putting my lunch in Duck-Duck’s box.
We also counted Priuses because Duck-Duck said she wanted her mother to buy one. She said that in a Prius, you could get a little TV screen of behind you that would aid your ability to stay alert to espionage. Very important if you operated outside the law.
Then I saw the green pickup.
“Shit,” I whispered, and shoved Duck-Duck down to the ground.
“Is it gang spies?” Duck-Duck asked, her mouth in the wood chips.
“Shhh,” I hissed, suddenly sweating, my hands digging into the dirt. Again in my mind I was at the river, watching Keely fall in, watching her grab for my hand but then, like she changed her mind, let go. She didn’t scream, like people should do when they fall. She didn’t struggle, like people should do when they don’t want to die. She just smiled a little, like she had planned this all along and was laughing at me.
But here was the green truck, the pickup that had disappeared before she did. I thought she had sold it for junk or that it had disintegrated into mean little green particles, like metal crumbs of Grandpa. The passenger door was rusted half off, and the windows weren’t windows anymore, just duct-taped plastic. No one but Keely would still be driving that truck. I heard a scary, panting breath, and I realized it was mine.
“It’s my mother,” I whispered.
The pickup stopped by the side of the road, and the door opened. Half of me wanted to throw myself down the hill toward her. The other half was ready to run into an open grave if she spotted me, but the cemetery bushes bent low around us, and she never looked up. Duck-Duck sat up a little. I couldn’t get my hands to stop shaking.
“She doesn’t look dead,” Duck-Duck whispered.
And she didn’t. She was wearing new tight jeans and black sunglasses. She got out, went around to the passenger side, opened the door, and poured the contents of her purse out onto the ripped seat. She seemed to be looking for something. We watched her sort small objects until she picked one up and applied it to her lips. Keely had never used makeup. She tried using the side mirror, and, not satisfied, climbed back into the truck to use the rearview mirror, blotting the corners of her mouth and wiping her teeth.
“Why’s she wiping her teeth?” hissed Duck-Duck.
“Maybe when you come back from being dead, there’s green stuff in your mouth.” There was something bizarre about putting on lipstick when your car was a junk pickup.
“I don’t think she’s dead,” said Duck-Duck, a little louder.
“Well, duh,” I said, and then I was sorry. I jabbed Duck-Duck in the ribs so she would know I didn’t mean it nasty. “Dead people don’t need red lips.”
After the lipstick, Keely pulled out a plastic cup with a lid, and a black-and-yellow cardboard canister. She scooped stuff from the canister into the cup and went around to the back of the truck, where she had a gallon of water. She poured the water into the cup, screwed on the lid, and shook up the contents. She closed her eyes and took a big gulp.
“What’s she doing?” Duck-Duck tried to get a better view. I pushed her down again. “What’s in the cup?”
“I have no idea.”
After my mother drank most of whatever was in the cup, she did the lipstick thing and the mirror thing again. She smoked a cigarette, and again, more lipstick. Then she pushed everything back into the purse and shut the passenger door. For a second, she glanced up in our direction, and I froze, but her eyes didn’t focus on me or even on the bushes. She got into the pickup and drove away, the cracked muffler beating our ears until the truck disappeared over the hill. Then the street was quiet and empty.
“What the hell am I going to do now?” I said.
We ran home as quickly as we could. Maybe we were running because Keely could show up and take me back to Birge Hill at any moment. Maybe we were running because it wasn’t every day you saw a dead person walking around. It was hard not to run fast when you were thinking about zombies.
“I have something to tell you,” Molly said when we burst in through the door.
“We have something to tell you,” Duck-Duck said, and just went ahead and told Molly about the green truck and about Keely coming back from the dead.
“Maybe she’s a zombie. But I don’t know if zombies use lipstick, unless it’s to pretend they aren’t zombies,” said Duck-Duck.
“No zombie,” said Molly. “The cops got the DNA report back. That body they found isn’t a match. Also, the cops traced Keely’s SNAP card. It was used several times since Keely’s disappearance.”
“Were there video cameras where the card was used? It could have been someone else,” said Duck-Duck. “You could get proof.”
Molly laughed. “Didn’t the two of you just get proof? She’s alive. A positive ID, as you would say.”
There were a limited number of places you could hide a green truck in the town of Salt Run, and two days after Keely came back from the dead, Officer Greg called Molly to tell her he had spotted the truck on a dirt road on the north side of town. Keely had been sitting on the tailgate, drinking a shake, when he came up to her. I wondered why Keely hadn’t gone back to Birge Hill. I could think of a few reasons why she wouldn’t want to, but wasn’t it better than living in a truck?
“We’re talking to her at the station,” Officer Greg said. “Social Services is coming down too.”
“Are they going to charge her with abandonment?” asked Duck-Duck after Molly hung up.
“I don’t know. Why don’t we pick the movie we want to watch tonight?” said Molly.
“They should put her in jail for forgetting she had a kid. What about the courts? Are they going to make her prove she’s really the mother?”
Molly gave Duck-Duck one of those sideways blue-lightning loo
ks. “I’m sure she didn’t forget she had a kid, Chrissy. But we don’t know anything yet.”
“Are they going to track her movements in the last five months to see if she was running drugs?”
“Enough,” said Molly. “We’ll see what the police say when they call again. Why don’t you stop worrying about it right now and pick a movie.”
Now that Keely was back, I thought I would see her walking in Molly’s front door at any time, but several days went by, and no Keely. It made me nervous, not knowing if she had decided to be dead again or not. Finally, I asked Molly to call.
“Maybe they put her in the slammer for wasting state and city funds to locate a not-missing person,” said Duck-Duck.
I knew Duck-Duck was just being logical, but sometimes I wished she would keep her logic to herself.
Molly called Mrs. Jones and held the phone away from her ear a bit so I could hear too.
“We met up with her and set an intake appointment for the next day, but she never showed. I had given her some forms to fill out, and she never returned them. I had the officers leave a note on her car telling her that her SNAP card could be renewed if she came to see me, but she hasn’t come. She doesn’t have a cell phone, and she’s living in a truck. We’re too understaffed to have to keep tracking her down.” The lady sounded frustrated.
I knew asking Keely to fill out a form was useless. If I forced her, I could sometimes get her to sign on a dotted line, but fill out an entire form? I’d never seen her even try.
“Tell them if she shows up again, to have her fill out the forms in the office,” I said. “Otherwise it will never happen.”
Molly raised an eyebrow and relayed my advice.
After a few more days, Mrs. Jones called us to report that Keely had finally showed up at their office, and they had begun a comprehensive assessment related to visitation, custody, and financial responsibility. I knew this meant me. The first thing Keely was supposed to do was go to group therapy once a week at the Family Center and visit the Social Service ladies once every two weeks in their office. Then we were supposed to start family therapy, just the two of us.