by Ruth Lehrer
“She’s allowed an initial supervised visit,” said Molly. “Do you want to see her?”
I was surprised by the question. I had assumed that whatever the cops and the ladies decided was what I had to do.
“I guess,” I said. “Maybe she’ll tell me where she’s been.”
“I’d like to know too,” said Duck-Duck.
“Fishkill can ask,” said Molly, “not you.” And she called the lady back.
The next Saturday morning, Molly dropped me off at the Family Center.
“Call if you need me,” she said.
I had to give her credit. If it had been me, I would have wanted to listen in.
A new Social Service lady led me to a seat in a room connected to her office and then she got Keely, who came in and sat down too. Keely put her bag on the floor. She had on the same tight jeans as when Duck-Duck and I saw her from the cemetery, and her lipstick was very red. Her eyes weren’t blurry, the way they got when she’d been drinking; they were steady and almost pretty. It was like a famous person’s grave had been dug up and the person had been alive the whole time, drinking beer and watching soap operas down there in the hole of dirt.
“You look good,” said my mother. “How’s school?”
That’s what strangers asked. What grade are you in now? What subject do you like best?
Keely pulled a small plastic bag from her jacket pocket. She measured two tablespoons of off-white powder from it into her plastic drink cup, which she held between her knees, poured in water from a canteen, put the lid on, and shook the cup with both hands.
“It’s a protein shake,” she said. “Want a taste? These have changed my life.”
Molly thought it was important to break bread with people, so I took a sip. It tasted like tomato soup, but maybe that was just my imagination.
“It has all the essential vitamins and minerals you need to live a serene life.” She took another gulp. She clicked her teeth together and swished the shake.
“Where’d you go?” I said.
For the first time, Mom looked a little glazed, the way she did after a six-pack and a bag of Doritos. Maybe protein shakes didn’t change her as much as she thought. Maybe a serene life was beyond the reach of a powdered drink.
“I took a ride to Reno,” she said, like you would say, I went to the diner.
“But I saw you fall in the river,” I said, “and you never came up.” I wished Duck-Duck were there. She would know the right questions to ask. Her hands wouldn’t be sweaty for no reason.
Keely didn’t answer right away. “I thought if I stayed down long enough, I would move on,” she finally said. “But then my head came up, and I was still breathing.” She swallowed more shake. “I thought, ‘Hey, that didn’t work, but I can still move on, just in a different direction.’ So I walked out to the road, and there was my ride, the Reno Man himself.” She clicked her teeth.
All the time I lived with her, Mom never kept her mouth still. She clicked in the day, she ground in the night. She chewed gum, and she spit tobacco. It probably got really noisy in there, inside her head. It sure was noisy out here.
“Did he have a name — the Reno Man?”
“No. Well, he did, but he didn’t really take me to Reno like he said he would.”
I wasn’t surprised.
“Where did he take you?” The conversation was like one of those word problems. Lots of words, lots of problems, not a lot of story.
“We ended up in Lorain, Ohio. I should have gone on to Nevada.” Keely swallowed more shake.
“What did you do in Lorain, Ohio?” I said.
Keely smiled. It was a weird smile, like the smile of someone who was just learning how to smile and had gotten it a little wrong. “I found Auga-L,” she said, “and the Four Freedoms.”
I wished again for Duck-Duck. Surely she would be able to get my mother to answer questions in English. My social studies teacher told us that the United Nations had interpreters who spoke every language in the world, and they all sat there with headphones, making sure everyone understood everyone else. I could have used one of those right then.
“What’s the L stand for?” I asked.
“Auga-L,” said Keely, “makes my shakes, but they also make my life. You just apply the mission statement to your personal choices and you start to see changes. Immediately.”
“Huh?” This made even less sense. Also, she hadn’t answered the L question.
“Every time you have a problem, you think of the Four Freedoms: Cleaner, Concentrated, Secure, and Free — C.C.S.F. — and an answer will come to you.”
“Let’s go back to the part about the river,” I said.
“So,” said Molly when she came to pick me up, “did you catch up with your mother?”
“No,” I said. “I think I’m more behind than when I thought she was dead.”
“Being dead is definitely simpler,” Molly agreed.
I told Molly how Keely had tried to sell me a carton of shake mix.
“She says she learned the Four Freedoms and how to be a balanced person.” I gave Molly a look so she would know that was a fairy story if ever there was one.
“Why do you think she’s not balanced?” Molly didn’t ask like she disbelieved me, just like she was curious to know.
“You didn’t live with her all those years. No way she’s better.”
“You don’t think people can change? She’s still so young.”
“All she eats is protein shakes,” I said. After surviving the tomato soup year, why would Keely do that to herself? “She won’t even eat apples. She says their energy is too acidic. Duck-Duck would call that bad logic.”
Molly laughed. “She would.” Molly seemed used to me saying Duck-Duck, even though she still called her Chrissy. “Give your mother a little time. She’s only just back from wherever she went.”
“If I could only figure out where that was,” I said.
The next Monday, Duck-Duck stayed after school without me. “I have extra soccer practice with Darsa,” she said. “We’re almost good enough to transfer to a Division One team. Then, when we go to college, everyone will be offering us great recruitment deals.”
It was funny. Before Duck-Duck, I wasn’t lonely. Maybe I might not have had someone to do homework with, but I didn’t have a big jagged shell in my chest like a broken egg either. It was really stupid, but I felt like crying all afternoon, and Fishkill wasn’t supposed to ever cry. Maybe I was getting sick.
Duck-Duck stayed after school the next day too.
“You sure practice a lot,” I said when she got home.
“Discipline is really important,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand, since you don’t do sports.”
How do you fight back against that?
In the backyard, I tried to kick the ball the way Duck-Duck did, but all it did was roll off into the corner and get stuck in the leaves. Even if I practiced all day, I would never catch up to Darsa.
Duck-Duck was staying after school several times a week. I pretended I didn’t notice. I did notice Darsa’s best friend, second-wolf-in-command, Brittany, was now not-in-command. That left the best-friend spot open.
“Maybe you should be careful,” I had said to Duck-Duck one day when she came home late. “Darsa isn’t necessarily as great as she seems.”
“What do you mean?” she had said. “You think I should be like you and never talk to anyone?”
My stomach got all tight, and after that I shut up.
At the next meeting with Social Services, there were two new ladies. They said Mrs. Jones had left and that she’d taken a new job. The new Social Service ladies sat me down in their office and asked me hundreds of questions about Birge Hill.
“Maybe they think it was part of a drug ring,” said Duck-Duck. It was the first thing she’d said that wasn’t about Darsa since she’d come home late again from soccer.
They hadn’t asked about drugs; they kept grilling me about Keely and Grandpa.
They asked about food and doctors and shots. They asked about school and money and electric bills. I wasn’t sure why they were asking me. Now that they had Keely, they could ask her. One lady kept asking me questions, but she really wanted to ask other questions, not the questions she was actually asking. I could tell because she had a piece of paper in front of her, and she kept her finger as a placeholder. She moved her eyes down the paper but never moved that finger. It was like the one thing on her list she never got around to.
“Did you have your own bedroom?” she asked.
I would have laughed, but that would have upset her more. Obviously, this lady had never visited Birge Hill. I slept on a cot in the corner of the living room. Keely had a closet for a room, the size of Molly’s pantry. Grandpa had the bedroom. After he died, it still felt like any moment Grandpa would stamp in with his stick. Mom must have felt the same way, because she never moved her bed out of the closet. We started leaving empty soda bottles and Red Bull cans in Grandpa’s room, stacking them high before we redeemed them.
“I wish the ladies would stop being so nosy. Sometimes I just want to forget stuff, but it’s hard if someone keeps bugging you,” I said to Duck-Duck. We were sitting in the living room, doing homework.
After Grandpa died, the Social Service ladies used to write lists and post them on the refrigerator. One list for me, one list for Mom. My list would say things like Go to school every day and Clean your room. Mom’s list would say Make lunch for Carmel, Write shopping list, Go to therapy. The next week, the ladies would come back, and my list would be all checked off, and Mom would say, “Oh, I forgot.” They kept prying into what she did and what Grandpa had done and she just clammed up.
After a while, if Mom kept cereal and bread in the house and didn’t drink more beer than milk, the ladies let it be. Maybe they didn’t really want to know what Grandpa had done and why he did it either.
“Hello?” Duck-Duck was saying. “Did you hear what I said?” She was waving her hand in front of my face.
“Yeah,” I said. “I just forgot where I was for a second.”
“Maybe,” said Duck-Duck, “Keely can’t read. Maybe that’s why she won’t fill out any of those forms.”
“Huh?” My brain kind of froze and then went into go-back mode, like on Duck-Duck’s TV when you missed what someone said and you pressed go-back and then they said it again. I saw Mom not checking off lists, not signing school papers, not reading the principal’s letters, getting fired from Walmart for not following the rules. Written rules, lists of rules.
It all made sense if she couldn’t read.
“Shit,” I said, not caring that I was swearing in Molly’s house. “I never thought of that. How could I have missed it?”
“I guess she faked it. It would be really hard to not read,” said Duck-Duck. “It would almost be like not having a memory. Or only having part of one. Mom says she’s lost without her list. If you couldn’t read, you’d have to spend your whole day faking it, even to your daughter.”
There were soup cans and road signs and newspapers and letters. There were e-mails and electric bills and candy-bar wrappers.
“You’re right,” I said, although I couldn’t really imagine it. Reading was like eating to me. Who needs to learn to eat? “Maybe that’s why she drinks those shakes.”
“Why?” said Duck-Duck.
“So she doesn’t have to go shopping or read labels or even remember a list. She just makes another shake. Just add water.”
“If I couldn’t read, I’d have a better memory, since I’d have to use it all the time,” said Duck-Duck.
“Not if you lived with Grandpa,” I said. “He gave you a lot to forget. Keely got more practice at forgetting than remembering. No wonder she never finished high school. It wasn’t just that she got pregnant. She couldn’t read.” I tapped the eraser end of my pencil on the table. It made a smacking sound. “Why did I never figure that out?”
Duck-Duck looked at me. “Maybe,” she said, “you didn’t think it was possible to be a grown-up and not be able to read.”
That night, I dreamed of words, all the words I’d ever read, floating down the river. Whenever I tried to grab a good one — Banana, Turquoise, Alabama — it slipped out of my hands and got swept away in the swirling current.
It was beginning to get really cold outside. Not just fall cold, but winter cold. At Birge Hill, Grandpa used to wait until the thermometer hit freezing to turn on the heat. If the pipes froze, he would have to pay money. Before that, we could just suck it up.
“Put on a coat,” he would say. “You think I have millions to pour into heat?”
At Cherry Road, they didn’t even talk about heating the house. The heat just went on automatically when it was cold outside. We would come in from the yard and it would be bright and warm in the kitchen, and it would smell like apple cider or hot chocolate, or maybe just peanut-butter toast.
In books, winter was fun. Kids went sledding and ice-skating and had races with dogs. Sometimes there were bad accidents and girls ended up falling on the ice, but everyone was sorry and tried to make it up to them. Duck-Duck and Molly seemed to think winter was fun too. Even though it hadn’t snowed yet, they pulled the sled out from the garage and tried on ice skates to make sure they still fit.
We were looking through the box of skates to see if any would fit me when Duck-Duck said, “You look all pissy. Don’t you like skating? It’s not like we’re forcing you or anything.”
“I’m not pissy,” I said. I’d never gone skating, but I was sure I would like it. I tried to think of why I might look pissy. “I keep worrying about my mother.” When I said it, I realized I had been worried ever since she came back to life.
“Worried that she’ll leave again?” asked Duck-Duck. She tossed a pair of skates out of the box into the too-small pile.
“Crap, no. Worried she’s going to flip out. Worried she’s going to stalk me. Worried she’s going to run naked through town. I don’t know.” I guessed maybe I was feeling a little pissy. “Worried.”
“Maybe we should spy on her,” said Duck-Duck, “like when cops stake out a suspect. Who knows what happened after she fell in the river? We don’t even really know where she went.”
Spying together sounded nice. Like it was totally normal. Like Darsa and soccer didn’t exist. Like Duck-Duck didn’t hang out with Darsa more and more at school and somehow not even see me when she passed me in the halls. I wanted spying together to be normal again. Maybe we could even find something out about my mother.
“We have to take quiet provisions with us,” said Duck-Duck. “Nothing that will alert the suspect to the fact that she is being watched. No apples. No potato chips. No sunflower seeds.” She tied up her blond ponytail tight and stuck it in her jacket collar, like spies do.
We caught up with Keely in the Main Street Convenience Store. We slipped into the potato chip aisle and then circled around back when she was in the beer aisle. When she came up to the register, I was sure she would have a six-pack, but she only bought a box of tissues, a pack of gum, and a can of motor oil.
“I guess the truck is leaking oil again,” I whispered.
Next Keely walked out to the pickup, which was parked in the lot. We slipped out too, peering around the store corner as she stacked and restacked the packages in the truck bed. She stacked everything along the cab wall. Then she laid a tarp over the boxes and tucked it in underneath.
“If she drives off, we’ll lose her,” hissed Duck-Duck.
But she didn’t drive off. Through the whole afternoon, Keely didn’t drive at all. She’d walk off and then come back to the truck and fuss with the boxes. She went to the Social Security office and to the Family Center, where group therapy was supposed to happen, but she just walked around it and never went in.
“Is she spying on someone too?” whispered Duck-Duck.
“Naw,” I said, “she’s just avoiding group. Now she can say she intended to go, but, for so
me reason she will make up on the spot, she never got there. That’s what she did when they wanted her to go to counseling after Grandpa died.”
After group would have been over, Keely finally went inside. The Family Center was a funny building. It used to be the Salt Run bowling alley, but then they put up a bunch of walls and made offices for Social Service ladies and a big room for supervised visitation. The building’s windows were old and rickety.
Outside it was cold. I had on an old winter jacket of Duck-Duck’s. It was pink with fake fur on the collar. It wasn’t my favorite color, but the fur felt nice on my chin. In the Family Center, though, the heat must have been on high, because everyone with an office window had it open as far as it would go.
We watched Keely walk in the front door. Through the glass doors, I saw her go past the receptionist and down the right hallway, which meant she was going to the Social Service lady.
Duck-Duck and I crawled along the right side of the building until I thought we were far enough down, and then we peeked into the windows until we found the right one.
“The cameras can’t see us,” whispered Duck-Duck. “See how they’re aimed for the sidewalk?”
I looked up, and sure enough, at each corner of the building, there were cameras straining for pictures of the sidewalk, the parking lot, the front door. The Family Center ladies were a suspicious bunch. We plastered ourselves against the wall and gave quick peeks through the window at the lady sitting at her desk with her back to us.
Keely must have been banging on the Social Service lady’s door, because the lady slammed the phone down, threw up her hands, and stood up.
“Maybe she has a gun,” murmured Duck-Duck.
Keely didn’t have a gun, but she came in, plunked herself down in a chair, and started complaining. Through the open window, we heard every word she said.
“Lady, I have rights” was the first thing Keely said. “You’ve got a lot of nerve telling me I can’t see my daughter.”