by Ruth Lehrer
I should have worried when she said this — after all, it was totally bad logic — but it sounded like a TV-mother question: “Do something for me,” TV-Mom would say. “Don’t ever think you’re not good enough,” or “Remember, you’re the best kid in the world, okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Have you had plenty of shakes today?” Keely asked. The pickup’s speed increased. “I just need a little pee in a cup. Just an inch or so. They don’t need a full cup.”
She looked like she was asking me to buy her a can of Red Bull on my way home from school.
“You want me to fake a pee test for you?” I said. “You did drugs. I knew it.”
“Not drugs, silly. I wouldn’t do that. I just may have been in the same room where people were smoking a little pot. You wouldn’t want me to fail the test for something bogus like that, would you? Then I would never get full custody. You don’t want to live with that nasty blond girl for the rest of your life, do you?”
“It’s like lying,” I said, but I didn’t say no.
“Mothers and daughters look out for each other,” she said. “It’s no big deal. I’d do the same for you.”
We pulled up in front of the health clinic, and she opened her purse. Inside was a little cup wrapped in plastic. “All ready for a deposit,” she said, trying to make a joke but not getting it quite right.
We walked up the stairs and took a quick left at the restrooms.
“Here you go.” She put the cup in my hand and pushed me toward the bathroom. “Don’t spill any.”
The bathroom was a single. I stood with my fingers laced around the cup for a minute, thinking about peeing and lying. I had to admit that Keely had improved a lot since the Birge Hill days. She had actually shown up for every visitation appointment and seemed to really want to see me. She had never cared whether or not I had friends before. Maybe if I did this for her now, she would want to do things for me too. Maybe we could have a little apartment not too far away from school. Maybe she could get a job at Walmart or maybe even T.J. Maxx. She could buy me new clothes and we could make spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.
I unwrapped the cup and sat down on the toilet.
It was a lot harder to get pee into a cup than you would think. When I was done, I had to wash my hands with soap and also wash the outside of the cup because it was all wet with piss. A little soap sloshed into the cup, but I figured that would make it even cleaner and they would be even nicer to Keely.
“That’s my good girl,” said Keely, and she hid the cup under her sleeve and went into the pee office to give them the deposit.
School was getting worse and worse. Every day, I felt like I was walking the halls with a rock in my stomach. Every time I saw Duck-Duck, I walked the other way, but the rock kept getting bigger. I told Molly I needed a separate bag for lunch so that she wouldn’t put mine in Duck-Duck’s blue lunch box.
“Our schedules are different,” I said. “It’s hard to coordinate.”
Molly looked like she wanted to say something, but then she didn’t. The next day, Molly put my lunch in its own brown paper bag. If I told her the real reason, she would make me move away. After all, it was Duck-Duck’s house first, and Duck-Duck was Molly’s daughter. I started wondering if Birge Hill could be fixed up, and if the heat would still work if I bought oil.
Then one day when I got home, Molly was waiting for me.
“Fishy,” she said, “when I was at work, I got a phone call from Candy Phillips.”
This was a bad sign, since Molly almost never took messages from any of the Social Service ladies. She was always insisting that they speak directly to me or to the both of us.
“What?” I sat down on the couch. I crossed my arms and stuck my fists under my armpits.
Molly came over to the couch and sat down next to me. She looked sad, but didn’t look like she was going to throw me out.
“Candy said Keely’s visitation rights have been suspended until further notice. Something about one of the conditions not being met. She didn’t tell me anything else.” Molly patted my leg. “I’m sorry, honey.”
I wasn’t exactly sorry and I wasn’t exactly surprised, but my stomach started to burn, and I started trying to figure out which condition Keely had screwed up.
“Did she stop going to therapy?”
“Candy didn’t say. Maybe if you asked, she would tell you.”
“Whatever,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Molly gave me a blue-squinty look.
“It’s true,” I said. “If she doesn’t care enough to do what she’s supposed to, why should I care?” I almost said, “Why should I give a rat’s ass?” but that was what Grandpa would have said. Molly never even said give a shit, let alone talked about rats and horses and pigs and their asses.
“Okay,” said Molly. “But next time we see Candy, we can still ask. Just for curiosity’s sake.” She looked so sad that I was certain that if I were Duck-Duck, she would have hugged and kissed me right then. I moved to the far side of the couch.
“Whatever,” I said again.
“If you want to talk about it now, I have time,” said Molly. “Or if you’d rather talk later, just let me know.”
“Nope,” I said. “I’m good.”
Instead of talking or thinking about it, I had dinner. Instead of talking or thinking about it, I thought about gingerbread.
Molly’s gingerbread was more like cake than cookies. It had a bite that didn’t hit your tongue until after you swallowed. I counted the number of bites and the number of chews. It kept me from thinking about visitation rights and suspensions and giving a shit.
After school the next day, I took the long way to Molly’s. I walked through the cemetery, up and down the rows of dead people. I decided I would call Candy and ask if we could just act like I was sixteen already. If the Department paid up the electricity and started me off with a tank of oil and a little propane, I could move back to Birge Hill and fend for myself. Now that I knew how to cook, I could make better food than we used to have. If I could get a SNAP card of my own, I would be okay. Maybe Candy would drive me back and forth from the grocery store once a week so I wouldn’t have to walk.
I made my way to the street on the other side of the cemetery. I decided I would go home and tell Molly that she had been very nice to take me in but I needed to be on my own now. I was wondering about the paperwork I would need to become independent when I realized that I was being followed.
It wasn’t hard to figure out. The green pickup spit black smoke whenever she hit the gas, and it made an unmistakable cough-gag when she gunned it. At the end of the block, Keely caught up with me and stopped. She leaned over and pushed open the passenger door.
“Get in,” she said. “Hurry up.”
I got in.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought your visits were suspended. What happened?”
“You fucked it up — that’s what happened,” said Keely, banging her hand on the steering wheel. “They said the sample was contaminated, so they made me do a second test right there, with a lady watching me pull down my pants.”
“And you failed.”
“Damn right I failed, kiddo. I told you I might have been where people were smoking a little pot. Why couldn’t you get one thing right?” She looked like she was going to spit, just like Grandpa.
Suddenly I was really mad. “Hey, maybe I spilled a little soap,” I said, “but it was your pee that had drugs in it, not mine.”
Keely started like she was going to yell or hit me. Then she stopped and half smiled. “You’re right,” she said, and took a deep breath. “Think of the Four Freedoms: Cleaner, Concentrated, Secure, and Free. An answer will come to you.”
She reached behind the seat to grab her purse. She pulled out a plastic bag of shake mix and a cup.
“I already have a shake. Let me make one for you,” she said, and she measured out white powder and water into t
he cup.
“Here you go.” She handed me the cup. “You need a pick-me-up.”
I took it and drank some as Keely started the car. Suddenly the day seemed longer and more tiring than any day yet, and I fell asleep as Keely drove off.
When I woke up it was dark, which confused me. I’d just been at school, and it had been light out. My eyes were throbbing like I had a cold or had been hit.
As my eyes started to adjust to the dark, I realized I was in a one-room shack lying on a lumpy pad on the floor. I saw Keely on another thin mattress nearby. I sat up to see better, and she suddenly spoke.
“Don’t even try. The door is locked, and I’ve got the key. You’re going to live with your mother now, like daughters are supposed to.”
“Where the hell are we?” If I had been out for a long time, who knows where she had taken me.
“Every time you have a question, think of the Four Freedoms: Cleaner, Concentrated, Secure, and Free, and an answer will come to you,” said Keely.
My head felt heavy and my throat was incredibly dry. “What was in that shake? What did you do to me?” I said to her.
Keely didn’t answer. She just stretched and rolled over on her mattress.
“We can’t live here. What about school?” I said. “You can’t keep me here all day and night. I have an oral report due tomorrow.”
“You’re smart enough already. You don’t need more school.”
Lying there in the dark, I tried to think of an answer to that, but then I fell back to sleep.
When I woke up again it was day, and my mouth was so dry it hurt. I was still in the shack. In the daylight, it looked even worse. There was electricity but no sink and no toilet. Cartons of shake mix and bottled water were stacked up, lining the entire wall. Keely was obviously planning on being here for a while. I could hear a river nearby. Keely was standing by the window, screwing on the top to her shake-up cup.
“I know I wasn’t a good mother,” she said, not even looking at me. “I was too messed up. But things are different now. I’m going to make it up to you.” She sounded a little shaky, but she banged the cup against her palm and took a swig.
“By taking me prisoner?” I said. “That is just plain stupid.”
“A mother knows what is right,” she said. “And it’s right that my daughter be with me now.” She glanced up at me, but then looked back at her cup.
It made me wonder what made someone a mother. Popping out a baby? If you popped one out and then got on a bus to California the minute after, were you still a mother? What if you popped out a baby and then lived with the baby, but all the time you were wishing you hadn’t had it and wished the baby wasn’t living with you? I thought of Molly, who had wanted a baby so much that she borrowed sperm from a bank and then homeschooled too.
“So, what I think doesn’t count?” I asked, scanning the walls and windows of the shack. I wondered if there was a way to pry open the little windows. “How are you going to provide a ‘good home’ now?”
“They were going to take away my daughter,” Keely said. “They might have never let me see you again if I didn’t pass all their stupid tests. I couldn’t take the risk.”
“So, running away is less risky?” Nothing I said seemed to sink in. “Good luck with that.”
“I used to think it was all about luck — good and bad, but mostly bad,” said Keely. “But now I know it is within my power to change my own life. I don’t have to just be a passive participant.”
“Change away,” I said. “Just don’t go changing my life.”
“Simple, Simple, Simple,” she answered, and handed me my very own shake-up cup.
For the first week or two, I tried every way I could think of to escape.
Whenever Keely went outside, I tried pulling out the window nails, but I only got splinters in my fingers. We didn’t have metal forks or spoons, but whenever Keely left for even ten minutes, I tried digging a hole in the wood wall with a screw I pulled from the electric heater. After a week, I had made only a tiny pile of shavings. At that rate, I’d be there till spring.
When I ran out of ideas, I would ask myself, If Duck-Duck was still Duck-Duck and not a wolf-girl, what would Duck-Duck do now? But I never got further than standing on a chair looking out the tiny window at the white rushing river. There was still very little snow; the trees were black and naked. In the mornings, the ground was white with frost. If Keely had fallen in the river now, she would have become ice. We were probably miles from the nearest house.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked again, despite knowing that Keely would never answer me.
“Home,” said Keely.
“And where exactly is ‘home’? Arizona? Timbuktu?” I knew I sounded snotty, but surely she would at least tell me what state we were in.
“Simple, Simple, Simple,” she said.
“By ‘simple,’ are you saying we’re still in New York?”
Keely didn’t answer. On the frosty windows, I finger-wrote backward S.O.S. messages, figuring that even if Keely saw them, she wouldn’t know what they meant.
“Molly and Duck-Duck are going to miss me, you know,” I said. “They’ll send the police out looking for me.”
“No, they won’t,” said Keely. “You never belonged there. They didn’t really want you. They were just being charitable. You don’t want to live on charity.”
“The Social Service ladies will send the cops to look for me,” I said. “They’ll put me on TV. They’ll put me on milk cartons.” I tried to sound certain. Duck-Duck would have.
Keely was counting her cigarettes. “That’s why I told everyone I was going to take you to my apartment in Arizona,” she said. “All those ladies, as you call them, will be looking for you far, far away from here.” She gave a weird smile. “You think I’m dumb — I know.”
The shack had an electric heater but no running water. We went outside in the cold to piss and poop, and we washed with wet wipes and cold water brought in from the river after we broke through the ice. Pooping was painful, your bare ass out in the cold. At first I hoped someone would walk by while I was squatting there with my naked butt in the wind, but no one ever did. Keely was always standing ready to grab me when I was done. If I tried to run, where would I go? We were out in the woods, and I didn’t even know what state we were in. I didn’t want to think of the warm lion tub at Molly’s house.
Every day, I tried to think how lawyer logic would solve this problem, but as the days passed and I was still a prisoner, thinking grew harder and harder. It was as if Duck-Duck and her warm lion tub were in the real world, and I had gotten stuck in a cold imitation world. Or maybe it was the opposite.
This cold fake world had no other people in it besides me and Keely. In the mornings, I saw animal tracks — squirrels, foxes, even bears — in the frost but never any human tracks. I wondered if we were in Alaska or Maine. Somewhere lonely with a lot of predators.
After several weeks of cold woods, I almost started to believe that Keely was right and that Molly hadn’t noticed I was gone. Or maybe she had noticed but didn’t care enough to tell anyone. Then I thought of the chicken in the oven, and I knew Molly would notice and would care. Duck-Duck might be too busy with Darsa, but Molly would care.
Keely didn’t read newspapers, but she had stuffed them in the window cracks for insulation and used them to cover holes in the floor of the pickup. I excavated weeks’ old Country Journal pages; they were all too old to mention a search for a kidnapped thirteen-year-old girl.
My backpack and books had never made it to the shack, so the only other reading materials apart from the old newspapers were the black-and-yellow Auga-L shake containers. Every morning at breakfast and again at lunch and dinner, I read the Auga-L ingredients, the nutritional requirements, and the claims to serenity. I missed Harry Potter and Nancy Drew like they were my long-lost brother and sister.
The shack’s little windows were rigged to slide open only six inches. They were high up off
the ground too, so even if I did break one and managed to fit through it without slicing myself to pieces, I would still have to jump ten feet down. The door had a wooden bolt on the outside, which Keely conscientiously slid into place every time she left. I kept thinking she would forget about the bolt, just once, but she never did. The door locked on the inside with a key, which Keely never put down, even to pee. There was no phone, no computer, no TV. All I could see outside were trees and river.
We would wake in the late morning and have a shake. Then Keely would leave — for a walk? to go to the stream? to the pickup?— always bolting the door behind her.
For lunch we would have another shake, and then Keely would nap.
In the afternoons, Keely would let me out for half an hour, tying a rope to my leg and watching me the whole time. At one point she decided mothers and daughters should play games, so we played tic-tac-toe and Go Fish.
“Games give us a chance to bond,” she said in a voice I knew was not hers but the therapist’s.
For dinner, yet another shake. Sometimes Keely would go out again for a smoke, and then, at night, she would lock the door with the key, which she put in the pocket of the sweatpants she wore as pajamas, and we would go to sleep for the night.
It was boring, but it was also almost relaxing in a way. No homework. No shopping for food. No math class. I knew Duck-Duck would think I had gone soft by not trying to get away anymore, by relaxing into the repetitive life of a prisoner.
I started to think the shakes were slowly erasing my memories of real food.
“Cleaner, Concentrated, Secure, and Free,” Keely would say.
I decided she was convinced that if we both drank enough shakes, we would become a normal mother and daughter.
I tried asking her questions from time to time.
“How long are you going to keep me here? Till I’m eighteen? Are you out of your mind or something?”
“No, I’m not. You’re my daughter, and I am doing what’s best for you. They can’t take you away from me,” said Keely, click-clacking her teeth and starting to head for the door.