by Ruth Lehrer
Duck-Duck was going to be in the famous people cemetery, where the lady poet was, but in the new part. I was glad the lady poet would look after her when we weren’t there. I tried to see them having juice and Yodels together instead of seeing Duck-Duck as cold, bloody ash all alone under the ground.
Molly still hadn’t stopped crying. It was like the Cherry Road sound track.
Duck-Duck’s funeral proceeded at the far end of a long paper-towel tube. Far away at the other end of the tube, people wailed and cried. At my end, miles away, I could hear only faint murmuring. Molly, Patricia, and I sat up front, Patricia between us holding both of our hands.
People kept standing up and talking about Duck-Duck and crying, one after another. They called her Chrissy, of course. It seemed all wrong, like they were talking about some other girl who had died.
Ellen talked about going to baseball games with Duck-Duck when she was little and betting on the teams. Duck-Duck won. Ellen lost.
Some lady with dyed-red hair and feathers in her belt talked about how we would all meet one another again in the end and how Duck-Duck was in a better place. Molly looked like she was going to puke. I felt like that too. Where would be a better place than with Molly and me?
The school principal got up and said nice things. He didn’t really know Duck-Duck, so it didn’t mean anything. You could tell he meant to be nice, though.
Molly had forgotten how to talk, like someone had pressed her mute button. In Molly’s place, Patricia stood up and talked about Duck-Duck being born on the hottest day of the year.
“She was like a comet,” she said, and a couple of tears ran down her cheek. “She was only here for a short time, but when she was here . . .” Patricia couldn’t say anything else. She had on red high-heeled shoes, and when she came back to her seat, I could see that her black stockings had red threads running up and down the back. She sat down and wiped her eyes. She wiped carefully so her makeup wouldn’t smear.
No one asked me to say anything, but I couldn’t have talked even if I’d wanted to. Everything was glued shut. My stomach felt like a black stone.
Then they played music, and everyone got up and hugged and kissed. I hid behind Patricia, out of sight, as much as I could. I tried counting the times people said, “If you need anything, just call,” and then ran away as fast as they could.
We hadn’t had a service for Keely, but there at Duck-Duck’s funeral, I could tell everyone knew about her. We all filed into another room with food, and I knew they were all looking at me because I was the daughter of the woman who killed Duck-Duck; my mother was the reason we were all there, crying and eating yellow cake.
I didn’t eat any yellow cake. Eating cake without Duck-Duck seemed wrong. Molly didn’t eat any cake either.
Molly and Patricia were huddled at the window side of the room. People kept coming up to them, to talk, to hug, to cry.
For a while, I hid in the bathroom, and then I sat down on a chair in the far corner, like it was an island in a lake of mud. Stuck on the chair, I didn’t have to figure out where to stand or who to look at.
But I couldn’t prevent people from walking over to me.
“Hi.”
I looked up.
It was Worm, in a suit with too-short sleeves. He had shiny black shoes on his huge feet.
“My father said we had to come.” He shrugged toward the huge man who was walking up to Molly.
My stomach still felt like a stone. My throat was welded shut.
We stared at each other for a minute, and then he said, “I’m sorry I pushed her.”
I’d never been to a funeral, but it was weird how death did this to people. Made them talk about things that had happened a long time ago. Making the long-ago story different from it was when it happened.
“Why’d you do it, then?” I asked. I remembered Duck-Duck’s eyes full of tears and her dirty yellow dress. “Why?”
“I dunno,” Worm said, kicking his big foot a little on the carpet. “She was real pretty.”
He pushed her because she was pretty? That was bad logic.
Worm still didn’t go away. “You want a soda?” he asked me. The table was covered with slices of yellow cake on little plates. Patricia had also bought tea, coffee, and soda for the kids. If Molly had been right in the head, she would have nixed the soda.
I shook my head. If I tried to swallow anything right then, I might have started crying.
“You look really nice,” he said. He kept talking, even though I hadn’t said a word. “My pop knew your grandpa when he worked in the prison. He said your grandpa was a real piece of work.”
It startled me that Worm had said something so real and mean when everyone was working so hard to say only nice things. I looked up. It was the first time I noticed his eyes were brown with a spot of yellow right in the middle, like an egg or a star.
“Sorry about your mom,” he said. “Sorry about Chrissy.”
“Duck-Duck,” I said.
“What?”
“Her name was Duck-Duck,” I said, and the stone in my stomach hit the top of my throat and tears squeezed out my eyes. “Duck-Duck,” I said. I put my head down on my knees, down on the velvet pants Patricia had picked out, and pretended they couldn’t see me, all those people eating cake, while I cried snot on my legs.
Worm just stood there, a big black rectangle between me and the cake people. Then he got a napkin and pushed it under my face, into my hands. When I sat up because I was going to choke, he handed me another napkin and waited for me to blow my nose.
“My mom died, too,” he said.
I hadn’t thought of him ever having a mother. I had just imagined him and his father living in a house with lots of big shoes and maybe a pit bull.
“Sorry,” I said.
Worm poured Coke into a glass of ice and brought it back to me. “If you drink it really cold, it makes the tears go back in your head,” he said.
It didn’t really, but it was nice that he thought it did.
Then Worm’s father came over. He said something I couldn’t hear through the black stone and the snot tears, but he nodded and patted my shoulder, so I guess it didn’t matter.
“See you at school,” said Worm.
I nodded quick and wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “Yeah,” I said.
I had forgotten it was still only May.
Even when I went back to school, days kept moving on ketchup time. Sometimes I would look up, sure it was the next day, and no, it was only ten minutes later than it had been. Then, wham! the time would jump, like I hadn’t been paying attention to dinner and now it was done and all the dishes were washed. I wanted to skip this part, the part where every time my heart moved, it banged up against my ribs and my stomach and made me want to cry, or throw up, or bite someone hard.
At school, kids looked at me like I was broken, like we looked at Carlotta Bennigan when her little brother died of cancer, like she had an extra arm sticking out of her head or a sign posted across her chest that said, You Don’t Want to Be Me.
The school counselor asked me how I was doing.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Patricia took Molly to the doctor, who gave her pills to help her sleep.
“It’s just temporary,” Patricia said to me, “because if she doesn’t sleep now, she’s going to get worse, not better.”
I thought about what worse would look like. Maybe Molly would start acting like Keely, forgetting to go shopping, forgetting to come home, forgetting she was a mother. Maybe she would become like Grandpa, cursing everyone and only buying tomato soup. She wasn’t doing any of those things yet; she was just crying all the time and not going to work. When I woke up at night, she would be walking around, just mumbling to herself. She would answer me if I talked, but she never came out and asked me if I wanted to watch a movie or if I would make more cookies. Maybe she was starting to wish I didn’t live there. Maybe she was okay about me being there while Duck-Duck was there too,
but now that I was the only one left, she wished I would go somewhere else. I sort of understood because I wanted to be somewhere else too.
Patricia did her California work by computer. She could see the California people on the screen and they would talk about numbers and orders and patents. She dressed up for these computer calls, like she was really going into the office, but she only dressed up the part the computer people could see. She would have on a fancy jacket and earrings and makeup, but down below she would have on exercise tights and no shoes.
“They don’t have to know everything,” Patricia said. “They think they do, but they don’t.”
I thought it was kind of smart of her, but it made me look at people on TV differently. If you couldn’t see the newspeople’s feet, were they wearing shoes? Did they have underwear on? It was the kind of thing I wanted to tell Duck-Duck. It was the kind of thing I would have told Molly, but before, not now. Now she didn’t think anything was funny. She definitely didn’t think I was funny. She would kind of pat me and try to smile and go into another room. I wondered if she would ever think I was funny again.
Then I heard her say what she was really thinking.
The Social Service lady caught me outside the house. I had been just standing on the doorstep staring at the sky.
“Fishkill,” she said, walking up to the door. “How are you feeling? How’s school?”
“Fine,” I said. “No problem.”
Then I let her into the house and hid. I don’t know why, really. Maybe if I hadn’t hidden and made her talk to me instead of Molly, Molly wouldn’t have gotten worse. This was a new Social Service lady, because the old lady had quit, and she was talking about options and long-term placements or maybe just adopting, and then she hauled out all this paper and started pointing to different pages and shuffling them and pointing to other pages.
Molly was very quiet and didn’t answer many questions. Even from behind the couch, I could tell she didn’t want to consider adopting or long-term anything, but she didn’t say so, and then Patricia came back from the drugstore.
“Thanks so much for coming,” said Patricia. “We’re going to give it all serious consideration.” And she actually pushed the papers back into the Social Service lady’s bag and opened the front door. “See you next month,” she said.
I was still hiding, but I heard every word. Patricia sat down on the couch next to Molly. Molly leaned her head into her and started crying again.
“I’m sick of this shit,” said Molly.
Molly never cursed, so I knew it must be really bad. Molly could always fill out paperwork, so I realized she must really not want me to be long-term.
That was when I knew I would have to move on. I would have to take care of myself. Some kids were born to have real mothers, and others weren’t. I wasn’t.
I could kind of understand. Once you had a perfect daughter, why would you want to have a pretend daughter who was only so-so? Probably you could only have one special child, one comet, and everyone after that was useless.
It wouldn’t be right for me to stay anyway. If I thought about it logically, it was really all my fault. If Molly hadn’t let me move in, Keely wouldn’t have known Molly existed, and she certainly wouldn’t have been following us, or whatever she was doing. If Molly hadn’t let me live with them, her car wouldn’t have been hit by Keely’s green truck. Keely wouldn’t be dead, and Duck-Duck wouldn’t be dead. It was my fault that Duck-Duck was dead. No wonder Molly didn’t want to be my long-term anything.
If I stayed, I might even make Molly worse. I had killed her perfect daughter. Who knew what else I might do?
I could call the Social Service ladies and tell them it was time to move on.
“Are you sure?” they would ask.
“Yup,” I would answer.
Or maybe I would take the chance Keely never took. I could go west, like the pioneers. Or I could go to New York City and start a new life.
I didn’t tell Molly or the Social Service ladies when I started getting ready.
Now that I knew what I had to do, it made things a little easier. I made a list, but I wrote it in code so if anyone found it, they wouldn’t understand anything. Instead of food, I wrote Yodels. Instead of clothes, I wrote Aunt Patricia. Instead of money, I wrote socks. Then I wrote Finish unfinished business. I couldn’t think of a code for that.
I tried to decide what to take with me. The cops had brought me Keely’s purse. I opened it, and all I felt was a big black hole inside me. If only I had tried harder, if only I had been nicer to her, maybe she would have tried too. I pulled out Keely’s lipstick and drew a red line on the back of my hand. If I stared at it just right, it looked like a big red vein that now pumped outside my body for everyone to see.
It took me a while to decide if I could take some of Duck-Duck’s things. Should I take what I needed, or was that stealing? I needed to talk to someone smart like Duck-Duck to figure out if stealing was okay in this situation or not, but Duck-Duck wasn’t here anymore. I started having a conversation with her in my head:
“I know you wouldn’t mind,” I said, “but what about Molly? I would sort of be stealing from her.”
“Is it for the greater good?” asked the Duck-Duck in my head. “If it is, you can take it by eminent domain.”
“Isn’t that just an excuse?”
“The law isn’t just an excuse,” she said. “It’s the foundation on which our whole society rests. What do you need?”
“Rain boots?”
I didn’t have any rain boots. The tan-and-black pair in the bedroom closet must have been big on Duck-Duck, because they fit me fine. They weren’t shiny or striped, like some of her flashy shoes, but that was good, because I didn’t want to stand out. I wanted to blend in with all the other people in the big city where I was going. I guessed I was going to New York City, but I wasn’t sure yet.
I found Duck-Duck’s change purse, but I decided taking money was too much like stealing and left it in her top drawer. I pulled my allowance sock out from the bed springs and counted fifty dollars and forty-five cents. I knew I wouldn’t have a lot left after I bought a bus ticket, so I decided to take forty-five dollars from Duck-Duck as a loan. I would pay Molly back when I had a job and an apartment in the city.
I bought twenty Yodels to take with me, but I bought them slowly, from different stores, so no one would get suspicious. I packed them away in my backpack with my new clothes, which were all folded up small, and some of Duck-Duck’s socks. In the front pocket, I put the Yodel-from-scratch recipe Duck-Duck had printed from the Internet. Maybe someday I would be able to make it. I put it with Keely’s lipstick and the tiger card Molly gave me after I took those tests. Then I stuffed in Keely’s redacted file with Mary Esther’s name on it.
I decided I would wear the white sneakers with red Velcro. I kept ripping the Velcro on and off, back and forth. It sounded like I felt inside.
I didn’t know what to do with Keely’s ashes. It wasn’t like I could bring them with me, even though Keely probably would have wanted to go to the city too. I pushed the box into the way-back of Duck-Duck’s closet and put the red boots in front. I didn’t want Keely with me in the city anyways. She would just have been a pain in the neck. I would have had to explain everything to her.
Finish unfinished business was still on the list.
I decided I would go to Birge Hill one more time before I left. That was definitely unfinished business. The house wasn’t mine anymore. The town was going to sell it because Grandpa and Keely hadn’t paid taxes in so long. I didn’t think I was sorry about this.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said to Molly, even though I didn’t know if she could hear people or not. “Don’t worry about me.”
She didn’t answer.
“I’ll be back for supper.”
Molly finally made a noise. It was between a grunt and a mumble. It would have made me sad if I hadn’t been focused on my plan.
At least she
wasn’t crying. The day before, Molly had wept all day, in little bursts, in loud rainstorms, like she would never be a dry, quiet person again. Molly was soft, I realized; she had no stone inside to put a lid on all that water.
The walk to Birge Hill seemed much longer than it had when I lived there. The hill was steeper too. When I got to the fence, I saw that sections had caved in under the wet January snow. The town used to plow big, dirty snow piles and push them up against the fence. Sometimes they would plow snow across the driveway on purpose, and Grandpa would call up the highway guy and tell him his pisser wasn’t bigger than a Tootsie Roll. That would make the highway guy mad, and he would plow us in even worse the next time.
Now the town had towed away the dead trailer, and they’d gotten rid of the rusty refrigerator, but they hadn’t touched the dead trucks in the back yet. I stood by the fence while I talked myself into walking up to the door and stepping inside. I didn’t need to stay long, I told myself. I just had to see if there was anything I should take with me before the town sold it off. Something I had forgotten. Something I had overlooked.
The house seemed to have shrunk. From the outside you could see the walls were leaning in, like there was a giant pushing on them. The roof tiles had separated from the house, exposing hollow black spaces, and when I opened the door, it smelled of mice and mold and dead people. If someone died in a house, was it possible to ever get rid of the deadness?
I started digging around and found a box hidden under Keely’s bed. It looked like Keely had made a hole in the floorboards and covered it over with dirty clothes. I wiped up the dust and mouse poop before I pulled off the top. It was just papers. I was disappointed. It would have been nice to find money or a magic map. Then I realized there were drawings on the papers. Keely’s drawings. Drawings of us. Drawings of the river.
I spread the pictures out on the bed. There were only ten, but finally I had proof. Keely could draw. She was good.
The first picture I pulled from the pile was of Grandpa. It was black and white, like Keely only had a pencil and drew with the side, not with the point. She made Grandpa look like a real person, not just a monster. He looked like an old man with a lot on his mind. I wondered if Keely really thought he looked like that or if she was imagining what he would look like if he weren’t a monster. I guessed I would never know.