Being Fishkill
Page 24
“You didn’t kill her,” she said. “A car accident killed her. It wasn’t anything you did.”
“But,” I whispered, “my mother was driving that car. And my mother wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for me. If I’d been nicer to her in the store, none of this would have happened.”
Molly put her fingers in my hair. She scratched my head and then gave a huge sigh that made us both shake.
“Sometimes,” said Molly, “I think, if only I hadn’t stopped for milk before we picked Chrissy up, everything would be different. I could have changed everything by not getting milk but I did.”
“That’s not logical,” I said. “What does stopping for milk have to do with it?”
“See?” said Molly.
I did but I didn’t.
“I won’t blame myself if you won’t blame yourself,” she said. She slid her hand down to my neck and looked like she was going to cry again.
So then, because I knew she was used to all those hugs and kisses, I hugged her.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try.”
“I’ll tell you a secret,” said Molly. She kept playing with my hair but she didn’t tug. “I was jealous of your mother.”
I was stunned. “Jealous? Of Keely? But she was such a screwup.” My insides clenched when I said that, but it was true.
“Yeah,” said Molly, “but she was your mother, and she had a real claim on you. I was just a stranger. They could have taken you away from me in an instant if Keely had cleaned up her act. You could have moved to California, and I would never have seen you again.” She buried her nose in my hair. “I wanted her to fail, and I felt guilty for wanting that.”
I felt like my world was turning flip-flops. “Jealous?” I said again. “You? But you were always so normal and nice. Waving and telling me to say hi to my mother.”
“I know,” said Molly. “But inside I was totally scared that this would be it, and she would have fulfilled all her conditions, and she would take you away from me.”
I started crying. I didn’t even try to cover it up. I just held Molly’s hand and let salt water run down all over my face. I never knew crying could happen because of a good thing.
After I had almost stopped crying, I whispered in her ear, “I’m sorry I ran away.”
“I know,” said Molly. “I wanted to run away too. Sometimes I still do. But I promise I won’t.”
And then we didn’t talk anymore, because it felt like Duck-Duck might walk into the backyard at any moment, and because we both knew she wouldn’t.
When Molly went inside to make dinner, I fell asleep outside on the hard, warm wood of the picnic bench. The sun shone down on me, and inside those tall hedges, I felt kind of safe. Like I didn’t have to go out if I didn’t want to, and no one would come in.
I dreamed I was walking in the famous people cemetery. Duck-Duck was sitting under the quince tree, eating a Yodel. I knew she was dead, but I wasn’t sure if she knew. It seemed rude to bring it up. She might be embarrassed that she didn’t know. Could a person be embarrassed when she was dead?
She didn’t look dead. She looked alive and ordinary with her golden hair and blue eyes. She had on her red boots, although I knew they were still in the bottom of the closet, and they were even a little dirty from the cemetery grass and moss.
“If you think about it logically,” she said, “elevators should go sideways as well as up and down.” She unrolled her Yodel and ate the white cream first.
“Why?” I asked. I kept looking at how blue her eyes were and at the unraveled Yodel in her pink fingers.
“So you could get where you were really going. You’re going to do that, right?” she said.
In my dream, I didn’t want to answer too quickly, because I knew if I answered she would go away too soon. So I leaned over to catch a piece of Yodel that had fallen into her lap.
“I love you,” I said, but she was already gone.
It took us almost the whole summer to feel ready to do it. Finally, on August twenty-fifth — on Duck-Duck’s birthday — we took a ride. I brought the cardboard box of Keely’s ashes. Molly brought flowers. The bouquet had little pink and yellow flowers and white plumes that looked like sea spray. It was the hottest day of the year so far.
First we drove to the Birge Hill river. It was low now, since the summer had been hot and dry, but it still ran white and mad across the rocks.
I climbed up on a big rock and opened the cardboard box. It felt heavier than you would think a body burned to nothing would feel. The Cremated Remains of Keely Jamison and the name of the funeral home were printed on top. Inside the box was a plastic bag with the ashes. They weren’t light and gray like fireplace ashes. They were darker and lumpy. I didn’t look too closely.
“Do you want to say something?” Molly asked. “Or just say good-bye?”
I thought of Keely’s first attempt to pass on. I thought of her drawings of me and Grandpa and of the Birge Hill river. I thought of her red lipstick. The black hole inside me squeezed and twisted. I tried to remember her face. If I forgot her, who was left to remember her? There was no one.
I opened the plastic bag and poured a few ashes into the fast white water. I watched as pieces of Keely raced away. The black hole squeezed again. I opened my backpack and took out another bag. It was the last bit of vanilla-shake powder.
“Cleaner, Concentrated, Secure, and Free,” I said, and I emptied both bags into the river. “An answer will come to you.”
We watched the dark ash and vanilla shake swirl downstream. In less than a minute, they had vanished completely. I tried to tell myself Keely had gotten her wish. When she got out to sea, maybe Keely would find Mary Esther, her mother. Maybe when I went to sea, I would find both of them waiting for me and it wouldn’t be like it was but like it should have been.
As we walked back to the car, I found myself automatically looking for the green pickup. Any minute now, Keely would drive up, the truck coughing smoke. It was all a mistake, she would say, she had just been visiting Reno, and she would hand me a vanilla shake.
We got in the car, and Molly started the engine.
“She’s not completely gone,” said Molly. “People are still with us if we think about them and remember them.” She didn’t look like she completely believed that herself. If she wanted Keely completely gone, I wouldn’t have blamed her.
“No,” I said, “I know she’s not completely gone, but she was never completely here either. She was like that.”
Then we went to the cemetery. It was cooler on that side of town because of the big old trees. We walked up and down the rows, looking at old stones and the graves of famous people. I showed Molly where the lady poet lived, and the stone wall where Duck-Duck had appeared when I met her here that first time. The grass around the quince tree was shimmering green, and the trees hung over us like a summer canopy.
Then we made our way to Duck-Duck’s stone. In my head it always appeared rough and worn like the lady poet’s. In the real world, it was new and shiny, like a marble statue or a kitchen counter.
The writing on the stone said:
“Patty told them to write that,” said Molly. “I don’t think I had a word left in me.” Her face was wet.
The words were fine. It was the name, Christine, that I wished were different. But I didn’t say anything; Molly was her mother and she had named her that.
Molly laid the pink and yellow flowers in front of the stone. In silence she traced Duck-Duck’s name with her finger.
“What do you want to do now?” she finally said.
I reached into my backpack and pulled out a Yodel. I split it into three parts: one for Duck-Duck, one for Molly, and one for me. I laid Duck-Duck’s piece in front of her stone, next to the flowers. I handed another piece to Molly. Her hand was warm.
“Duck-Duck gave the lady poet a juice box too. I should have brought one,” I said. “Next time.”
Molly and I ate our Yodel. I thought of the lady
poet and Duck-Duck, sitting on the big rock, swinging their legs, talking about poems and logic, eating their Yodels. The sunlight filtered through the leaves.
After a little while, Molly and I walked back down the path, past the stone wall, past the old trees. The sun watched us from behind. When we got back to the road, the day was still hot, and up in the sky a V of wild ducks was flying home.
Molly watched the ducks fly past the trees, over the dead people’s graves, and then she looked at me with those blue blue sky eyes.
“I never called her Duck-Duck,” said Molly. “Maybe I should have.”
“Yeah,” I said, watching the wild V soar. “You still could.”
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2017 by Ruth Lehrer
Cover photograph copyright © 2017 by Getty/Simon Willms (truck)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2017
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number pending
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