by Ruth Lehrer
“Give me a break,” I said. “You’re only doing this because you couldn’t hack having a job and going to therapy.”
“Carmel, you just got to face facts. I’m your mother,” said Keely.
“My name isn’t Carmel anymore, Mom, it’s Fishkill.”
“I named you Carmel. Carmel Fishkill.”
“And I named myself Fishkill. Fishkill Carmel.”
“Cleaner, Concentrated, Secure, and Free,” she said, and banged the door shut.
Having conversations with Keely was a bit like talking to a cat. Sometimes she seemed to understand English. Sometimes she didn’t.
Gradually, Keely started talking more. At first it was in little spurts. Then the chats got longer. None of the conversations ever felt finished, though.
“I was going to kill him, you know,” Keely said one morning, mixing up my first shake of the day.
“Kill who?”
“Pop. I was going to kill him if it got bad enough.”
I thought about this. Wasn’t the hitting stick bad enough? Wasn’t the rationed toilet paper bad enough?
“It was already pretty bad,” I said.
“I was going to give it until you were fourteen. If he hadn’t kicked off by then, I was going to kill him.”
Fourteen would have been a long time to wait. “Why fourteen?”
“He didn’t come into my bedroom until I was fourteen,” she said, and then she went outside to pee.
She stayed outside for a long time.
Keely was still outside when I had a memory. It was a weird memory, as if I were seeing it through a rusty screen. I wasn’t sure if it was really a memory at all.
In the memory, I was really little. I walked smack into the corner of the kitchen table and hit my head. There was blood, and it hurt and I cried. I must have been really, really young, because I hadn’t yet learned you shouldn’t cry, you shouldn’t make noise. From far above me, Grandpa’s foot came down on my hand and almost crushed my fingers flat. Suddenly Keely was there. She pushed him hard and he stumbled back, off my hand, into the refrigerator door.
And then Grandpa hit her, and hit her again, forgetting about me. My hand throbbed, my head bled, but I stopped crying. I never cried again.
Maybe Keely had tried to protect me after all, and I never noticed. Maybe I noticed but then forgot. Maybe I remembered but it wasn’t a real memory. It made my head hurt just thinking about it.
When Keely finally came back in, she changed the subject.
“When I was young, I wanted to go to the Mildred Elley School and become a cosmetologist,” she said. She poured some shake mix into a cup. “That’s someone who knows how to cut hair for fashion models and do their nails and stuff.”
“I know what a cosmetologist is,” I said. “Why don’t you do it now?”
Keely shook her shake for much longer than it really needed. “It’s too late. I lost my chance,” she said, and she took a swallow of vanilla shake.
“It’s not too late,” I said. “Molly says you’re still young. You could re-carnate. That’s what I did.” I told her a little, just a little, of becoming Fishkill. I didn’t tell her the whole story, the way I told Duck-Duck and Molly, but just a little so she would know I knew what I was talking about. “Like, do you really want the name Keely? Or Jamison? That was Grandpa’s name, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep it.”
Keely looked at me as if I had appeared out of a green bottle, like a genie. “But that’s my name.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have a name with a story to it?” I asked.
“What good is a story?” said Keely. “Keely’s my name.”
“If you want it to be,” I said. “And if you wanted to, you could go to hairdressing school.”
“Cosmetology school,” she said.
“Whatever.”
I thought about hairdressing. Keely never had her hair or nails done until after she fell in the river and ran away with the Reno Man.
“Did you start wearing lipstick because you wanted to go to cosmetology school?” I asked, but Keely was already leaving, sliding the big bolt over the door so I couldn’t escape.
I thought of Molly. I was sure she had never had a father like Grandpa. She had a real job, a real car, a real life. If Keely had ever had one person who wanted her the way Molly wanted Duck-Duck, would we be here in this shack right now? It made me sad, thinking of Keely wanting things to be different and never succeeding. Even though I was still mad that she had kidnapped me, I had to give it to her that at least she was actually trying to make her life different.
When Keely came back, I said it fast so she couldn’t run away before I said it.
“Thanks for wanting to kill him.”
She glanced at me. For a second, she looked almost like, if she were Molly, she would have hugged me. “Sure,” she said, “no problem,” and then she went back outside again, even though she had just come in.
The next morning, when I looked out the frosty windows, there was only white, like a coloring-book dream with no color. It had snowed a heavy foot overnight. If I’d been at Duck-Duck’s, Molly would’ve made us hot chocolate and we would’ve gone sledding. That is, we would’ve gone sledding if Duck-Duck were talking to me. Maybe the hot chocolate would have had little marshmallows on top.
Instead of taking me sledding, Keely shoveled a small path to the stream. I left the shack only once that morning, to pee. Inside, I lay under the blankets, staring at the ceiling while Keely shook up shakes. I wished again for a Harry Potter book. Keely never read Nancy Drew or Harry Potter or Harriet the Spy. She wouldn’t have read Charlotte’s Web or Little Women or The Secret Garden. I wondered if I could convince Keely to visit the local library if I promised to read Harry to her. I could start with the first book, and we could read our way through the winter.
A sudden thought shook me.
“If you couldn’t read, how did you read the Fishkill/Carmel sign?” I asked.
Keely shrugged. “When you were coming, I kept asking Pop, ‘Where are we?’ I thought if we were close enough to a hospital, he might take me.”
“What did he say?”
“He said we were in ‘Carmel or Fishkill, or some crap place like that.’ ” She shook the cup slowly while she stared into space. “Carmel is such a pretty girl’s name, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, but my mind was spinning. All my life I had imagined how I was born: my mother lying on the backseat, pushing and screaming. Then, just as I popped out, my mother raising her head high enough to look out the window, seeing the green sign, glowing with reflective white letters like a cosmic message, and then falling back on the seat, exhausted but satisfied. It never occurred to me that the story I told myself wasn’t actually how it happened.
Maybe there were other things I made up too. Maybe I should find out.
“Who was my father?” I asked.
“Shakes are ready,” said Keely. “Drink up.”
“Who was my damn father?” I asked again, but Keely just drank from her cup and cut her fingernails.
That night it rained a cold winter rain, and all the snow disappeared, as if it had never been.
I began to dream about peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Every morning I would dream I was biting into a PB&J on whole wheat, but every morning I woke just before the peanut butter touched my tongue. Sometimes I dreamed of a glass of milk. In the dream, the glass always slid farther away when I reached for it, and I could never get even a swallow.
If I was stuck with Keely, maybe I could at least convince her we didn’t have to live in the shack. Maybe we could live in one of those double-wide trailers with two bedrooms and a pretty backyard.
“If we had a real kitchen,” I said to Keely, “I could make you spaghetti and meatballs.”
For a second it looked like she wanted to hug me. If she were Molly, she would have.
“Simple, Simple, Simple,” she said instead.
I decided I was
n’t going to get discouraged. Maybe she just needed a little time to get used to the idea. I wanted to say, “We could have a real home like they do in Little Women,” but Keely had never read Little Women, and we would never be close like that anyway.
I wondered why Keely had never learned to read. She had gone to school; I knew that. What exactly was wrong with her?
“Did you have bad reading teachers?” I asked.
“I guess not,” she said. “It just never made any sense to me.”
How could reading not make any sense? “Do you know the alphabet?” Maybe those S.O.S. signs were a mistake.
“Sure,” she said. “What do you think I am, a baby?”
“Then why can’t you read words?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just can’t. Too many letters or something.”
This made even less sense.
“Didn’t they teach you?” I said. “And you can’t write?”
“I can draw fine,” she said.
I had never seen her draw, same as I had never seen her even try to write. If forced to, she would sign her name with a big scrawl that looked like a K with a Y if you held it sideways and squinted.
“Why don’t you draw me something?”
“No pencils,” she said and left the shack, carefully pulling the bolt across behind her. She didn’t come back for hours.
It grew dark. Wet snow began to fall again.
The days started to run into one another. Sometimes it felt like we had always lived in the shack. I had more questions than I could count. Sometimes Keely would actually answer, but I had to catch her by surprise. What I really wanted to know was, why hadn’t she tried a little harder?
“Why didn’t you just follow the Social Service rules?” I asked. “You already had some visitation. You could have worked up to reunification.”
Keely shook her head. “How can one person remember all those rules?” she said. “One lady would tell me I had to go to therapy or I’d lose visitation. The other would say if I didn’t go to the parent meeting, I’d lose visitation. But the meetings were at the same time. I was screwed no matter what. And if I didn’t follow all their rules just right, you would have ended up with that fag lady and her daughter for good. If you stayed there, you would have ended up perverted.”
“Fag lady?” I said. At first I couldn’t even figure out who she was talking about.
“Your little friend’s mother, Molly Farina. Why isn’t she married? Where’d she get that kid? She’s just not normal — you can tell from her hair.”
I sat down on the edge of the mattress in amazement. If Keely had told me she had learned to make French wedding cakes, I couldn’t have been more stunned. Not married? Where’s the kid from? Not normal? I almost laughed.
“Don’t you know those are the same things everyone asks about you?” I said.
“There’s nothing wrong with my hair,” she said, “and I’m not a fag.” Then she vanished out the door into the woods.
When she came back, I said, “You know, those are exactly the kinds of things Grandpa would say. Don’t you know that if you talk like him, you’re going to be like him?”
Keely acted as if she didn’t hear me and started making yet another shake.
That night I had a dream that the moon had turned into a woman with spiky hair.
“Is there really cheese up there?” I asked her. “Or is it cake? Can I come up and see for myself?”
The moon lady just smiled, and then a cloud passed in front of her face and she disappeared. I kept watching for her, but all I saw were gray hailstorms moving in from the west.
We entered a dark season of shack winter, when each breath had a frozen, pained edge and it felt like winter would last forever. It was probably almost March, although I had lost count of the days. I was always cold. We had to leave the bottled water right next to the electric heater to keep it from freezing.
“We’re going to move on soon,” said Keely.
She didn’t look like she was moving on anywhere. She sat on the floor, leaning against the cabin wall with a vanilla shake in her hand. It almost looked like a beer, the way she nursed it. I could see her breath.
“Oh?” I said. “Sounds fun. Where to?” It would be bad if we moved on. It would make it less likely that anyone who cared would find me. The farther we moved from home, the fewer people would know us. Even if I ran away to the police, in another state they wouldn’t believe a kid’s story over a grown-up’s.
“We’re going to California,” she said. “Where the movie stars are.”
“I thought you wanted to go to Arizona.”
“They’re pretty close. We’ll visit Arizona on the ride out. They will have stopped looking for us by now.”
I couldn’t believe she thought her truck would make it all the way to California. Maybe she had another plan.
“Plane tickets are expensive,” I said. I watched her smack the bottom of her shake cup, trying to dislodge some leftover drop.
“Don’t be silly,” Keely said, but she didn’t add “We’re driving” or even “We’re taking the train.”
“Are we going to walk?” The truck was almost dead. Wherever she had it stashed.
“Simple, Simple, Simple,” she said, and then she went out for a smoke.
When I got free, I was going to take every dictionary I saw and tear out the page with the word simple on it. Meanwhile, I just hoped we wouldn’t simply disappear before some lost hunter simply stumbled on the shack and simply wondered why there were so many simple cigarette butts on the simple ground.
When she came back, Keely repeated, “We’re going to California.”
“How about you go to California and I stay here?” I said.
“We’re a team,” said Keely. “A mother-daughter team.”
The only time we had been a team was the time Grandpa had shot a garbage raccoon. Instead of throwing it into the woods, he left it in the driveway for days. When it was gushy and full of flies and worms and had birds pecking its eyes, he told Keely and me to clean it up.
“You think we have a maid or something?” he said, and then he stood there until we got shovels and moved it out of the driveway. The body was hard to pick up all at one time because the shovel was too small. We didn’t want to pick it up with our hands, so we had to cut it up, dripping rot, and cart it away piece by piece. We had to work together to get rid of the raccoon before one of us puked on the driveway and got in worse trouble.
“Got a weak stomach?” he said to Keely, who wobbled as a piece of intestine fell off the shovel. “Should we cook it for dinner?”
“We’re not a team,” I said to Keely now. “We never were. We were a chain gang.”
Since Grandpa was gone, there was nothing at all chaining us together anymore. Not even a rotting raccoon.
“C.C.F.S.,” Keely said, and she drank another shake.
Early one cold morning Keely went out and didn’t come back until almost noon.
“Where were you?” I asked.
Keely didn’t answer. She mixed herself a shake and paced. It made me nervous. Maybe she had decided we’d leave for California that day. I sat down on the mattress and tried to pretend I wasn’t anxious. Sitting there, low to the floor, I spotted a small scrap of paper that I was sure hadn’t been there before. It was right near the door, like it had been slid underneath. I didn’t run to look but got up and wandered around the room as if I were just stretching my legs. I worked my way to the front door and bumped Keely’s coat, which fell off its hook. Leaning down to pick up the coat, I scooped the paper into my palm and went back to the mattress. I pulled the covers over me and read the note —“Free the M&Ms!”— written in red, blotchy letters that had to be blood.
Duck-Duck! How had she figured out where I was? Where was she? Yesterday, when Keely took me out for a walk around the shack, I hadn’t seen anything vaguely ganglike. Just the idea that someone was looking for me made me yearn even more for the outside world
without vanilla shakes.
I waited until Keely went out again. I heard her pull the heavy wooden bolt across the door, and I waited until I thought she would be out of sight. Then I started looking out every window, trying to see if I could spot signs of anyone outside. I stood on a chair and breathed on the windows to finger-write backward S.O.S. signs. If helicopters were searching, though, my S.O.S. signs wouldn’t do any good. I would need a sign on the roof.
But no helicopters buzzed overhead. No police cruisers came speeding up to the shack either. A few minutes later, I did hear a tap-tap-tap on the back wall, and I saw a red mitten flying up past the back window. I raced over, stood on a chair, and jerked the window up the six inches it would go.
“Hello?” I cried. “Who’s there?”
“Shhh,” whispered Duck-Duck. “She might have the cabin tapped.”
Peering out the window, I could see the top of Duck-Duck’s head and the tip of her nose. It was a beautiful nose.
“Oh, my God, I’m so glad to see you,” I said. “Did you get help? Is someone going to get me out of here?”
“Shhh, she could be recording us. I’ll open the front door,” whispered Duck-Duck, “but we have to make a plan.”
The idea of Keely rigging the shack with a recorder was laughable. I heard Duck-Duck struggling with the front bolt and then the door opened. The cold had made her cheeks as red as her mittens, and her blue-and-white coat stood out against the gray wooden walls. It was as if the weeks of shack life had been a black-and-white movie, and then suddenly, a full-color Duck-Duck appeared.
“A plan? Run like hell. Keely can’t be far away. Let’s get out of here.”
“No, no. We have to think ahead.” She paused for a second. “I’ve got it — Keely’s got to think you’re dead.”
“Huh?” I said. “Why do I have to be dead? Won’t Keely just go to the police?” I looked out the open door. Sometimes Keely left for a couple hours. Sometimes it was only fifteen minutes.
“Think about it. Keely won’t go to the police. She kidnapped a minor, even though it was her own daughter. And she’s not going to tell the cops her daughter is dead. She’d be the primary suspect in a snap.” Duck-Duck snapped her fingers to show how quick. “She’ll leave town to escape arrest, and we’ll be free and clear.”