A Blue So Dark

by Holly Schindler

  "Listen, after we dissect it, I want it," she tells me in her awful drawl.

  "What for?" I ask, my mouth all twisted up as horror breaks through me.

  Angela rolls her eyes at me like she's sure my mother once dropped me on my head on a regular basis. "I'm gonna take all its skin off and put its skeleton back together."

  "Jesus," I hiss, trying desperately not to shriek.

  "Well, it's not like I'll be doin' it for pleasure," Angela says, the daisy petals of her hair flopping around her face. "I mean, it's the extra credit assignment. Every semester, it's the same."

  "To take a poor mutilated cat home and glue it back together?" I screech.

  I just stare at her, mouth open. I can't quite believe it. Take some living thing ... (Okay, so the frogs and crawdads were alive at one point, too-but the cat seems different to me. I can't help it. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy, I get that; it's a beautiful theory. But a cat's different. It just is.) Take some living creature and hack it up, all in the name of science. Pull its guts out to find out how they feel in your hands. Find out why they died. Find out what was good and what was off.

  "Aura." Wickman's voice is tinged with the kind of annoyance that makes my stomach fist. My brain spins as I try to pick an expression that will convince Wickman that I am really, truly in love with my wonderful lab partner, that I do not think she is the worst thing ever to put on a pair of blue cowboy boots, and that he should, in fact, give us both ten million extra credit points for getting along so well.

  But when I look up, I realize it's not about Angela at all. Wickman's waving a green hall pass. "Your lucky day, Ms. Ambrose."

  Confused, I slide out of my desk and grab the pass, which isn't just some Please send Aura down to the main office but a get-out-of-jail-free card. Family Emergency, the flowery, antique-looking script of one of the attendance secretaries proclaims.

  I race through the empty hallways and burst out the front door, where the Tempo is idling.

  I can smell it as soon as I open the passenger's side door-the fear. And I can hear Mom breathing-hard panting, like she's been jogging for an hour. "Get in the car," she says, through gritted teeth.

  I climb in, my heart on panic. "What's wrong?" I ask. "Why aren't you working up a lesson for your afternoon class? What's the emergency?"

  "You have to get out of there," she informs me, like she knows a masked gunman is on his way to Crestview.

  "Where-school?" I stammer, even as Mom's putting the building in her rearview.

  "You have to get away," she says. "Get home. But not on this street. I can fix it. But we have to go back. Scenic Avenue. Scenic. View. Back. I'll show you. I'll fix it."

  I can see the wet spots on the steering wheel. Sweat from her hands as she turns off one of the main thoroughfares and winds through a quiet neighborhood with comfortable houses on huge tree-loaded lots.

  When I look through the windshield, a red, plain-Jane, two-door pickup is at the opposite end of the street, heading toward us. Mom's breathing even harder, and sweat is breaking out across her face like a bad case of acne.

  "Get away. Get away. Get away," she insists, waving her hand wildly at the driver of the pickup. "Get over!"

  "It's okay, Mom," I say.

  "He's in our lane!" she screams.

  "He's not-" I say. "He's not even touching the line, Mom."

  "He is! Oh, God!" she screams, blaring the horn. "And here we are getting smaller!" she shrieks.

  "Smaller?"

  "I'm shrinking!" she squeals.

  It just doesn't make any sense. She's still Grace Ambrose, five feet nine inches tall-legs like a supermodel, Dad used to say. Long, lean legs.

  "Look how small I'm getting," she shouts as the truck rolls closer.

  I look down the street, at the shiny chrome grill heading straight for us, and I realize, as the hot chills light my spine on fire, that Mom's got it all backwards. She's not getting smaller, the truck's getting bigger because he's getting closer.

  I want to tell her Mom, its just like drawing class. Don't you remember that word you put up there on the board last weekend? "Perspective" remember that? Close up is big, far away is small, right? He's closer now, Mom, that's all, that's all.

  "Get away!" she cries out, and veers for absolutely no reason.

  My terrorized scream fills the car, along with the squealing of brakes and the crunching of a mailbox into about a billion toothpicks. The Tempo finally slides to a stop in a ditch.

  Behind us, the pickup squeals, too, then turns around.

  "You all right?" the driver shouts, jumping from the cab. He's the kind of guy you see in ads for politicians who swear they're down-home folks. He's wearing work boots and a ball cap with a mesh back. Has a white circle on the back pocket of his Wranglers where his daily can of Skoal goes. And from the look on his face, I'd say we scared him so bad, he just about swallowed his mouthful of chew.

  "How dare you drive like a maniac!" Mom screams as she kicks open the Tempo's driver's side door. "How dare you come racing at me in my lane. My lane! How dare you shrink us!"

  By this time, a woman's banging through her front screen door to get a look at her mailbox. Her mouth is open, her face all shiny with cold cream, and she's wiping her hands off on a dish towel.

  "I'm sorry," I tell the owner of the pickup. "I shouldn't have let her drive." I say it with my shoulders squared, with what I hope is something that just might resemble authority.

  "She ain't drunk, is she?" the guy asks. "This early in the morning?"

  "No, no," I say. "You can smell her breath if you want."

  "What's the matter with her?" he asks. He nods once at Mom. She's standing over the mailbox, screaming at the woman with the dish towel, "How dare you plant this thing in the middle of the road! Don't you know that's against the law?"

  "She's having a reaction to some medication," I lie. "It wasn't this bad when we left the house-it's hitting her hard now."

  "She need to get to a doctor?" the man asks.

  "Sure, right. I-I really do appreciate your concern. I'm taking her right now, actually," I lie again. "Like I said, I should have been driving." Even though I've never been much of a praying kind of girl, I find myself saying a quick, silent Please, God that my words are all coming out strong and clear. I'm terrified-but I can act, right? Just like the troupe that fills the stone stage behind the art museum during Shakespeare in the Park on a sweet July night? If I play this thing right, I can convince the guy I'm actually Mom's older sister.

  I guess my prayer works, because the guy nods at me like he believes I know what I'm doing. (And even if he doesn't, really, I'm taking Mom away, and he must think that, in itself, is a good thing.)

  "Let me give you some money for another mailbox," I tell the woman, offering her the cash that was supposed to buy my lunch for the next two weeks.

  The woman shakes her head and flicks her towel at me, like I'm being ridiculous, like we're old friends and she could never take money from me.

  "Is there any way you could pull us out of this ditch?" I ask the guy with the pickup.

  He doesn't say anything, just hooks the Tempo to his trailer hitch. Rev of the engine, spin of the tires, and like that, he's hauled the car out of the muddy slope.

  They just stand there, the guy from the truck and the woman with the dishrag, just stand there staring as I put Mom in the passenger's seat and hurry around to the driver's side.

  "Goddamn crazy men drivers," she spits, still fuming. "Men will try to own your roads, Aura. Always remember that. They will try to buy your mind. Your thoughts are roads with gravel."

  And I'm barely listening, because I'm concentrating on making it seem like I'm an expert driver. I click my seat belt and reach for the gear shift, pretending I've been driving for years and years. Like this is normal, no big deal, I do it all the time.

  The car lurches, even though I'm trying to press so lightly on the gas-and when I look in the rearview, there they are, the
truck driver and the housewife, staring at me with their mouths scrunched up and their eyes so round, you'd think they were a couple of kids watching a horror movie.

  I want to tell them, I feel exactly the same way.

  We wiggle down the road while I'm trying to get the knack of the steering wheel. My heart starts throwing a child's fit in my chest as a stop sign asks me to move my foot to the brake. I have no idea how hard to press the pedal or how to judge where the Tempo will finally come to rest-three blocks from the intersection? In the middle of the cross traffic? Now I'm the one leaving sweaty handprints all over the steering wheel.

  I manage a halfway decent stop, and have barely begun to silently congratulate myself when Mom grabs my hand. I turn to face her, my terror exploding, because she's got this look in her eyes like she's been tied to the freaking railroad tracks.

  "Don't tell your father, Aura. All right? Please, please, please, don't tell him. Promise, okay? Because I know your promises are like locks with no key. You're my girl, right? You'll help me. Okay? All right? Don't tell him, right? Promise, right, right, promise?"

  "Yes, okay, yes," I finally shout. "I promise." I don't know what else to do.

  Insight: 4 person's awareness of their illness and symptoms. When a person who has insight is told she is behaving like a stark raving lunatic, it is often enough to embarrass her into submission.

  y heart is thrashing against my chest as I haul Mom ,up the front walk.

  "Sneaky, sneaky," a man's voice lisps at me, the "S" sounds hissing like a pile of snakes.

  When I turn, Joey Pilkington is standing on his mother's front step, shaking his finger at me. He's gotten fat these past few months. Really fat-the kind of fat where you can safely figure the guy's actually graduated to oozing bacon grease from his pores. The sight of him makes me go as tight inside as a tennis racket-and not just because the extra pounds look so bad, either.

  "You steer clear of Joey," Dad warned me on a daffodil-infused spring day, when I was still wearing a little black ponytail and Joey had made his first appearance back home. "I grew up with Joey," Dad told me then. "I'm not saying he's a bad guy, but-look-steer clear, okay?"

  When I was little, Joey would show up at his mom's place once, twice a year. Now the living arrangement seems permanent, even though he swears it's only until he finally turns over that new leaf.

  Joey just needs time to get back on his feet, Mrs. Pilkington's always saying, like it's the chorus of her freaking life. But then again, Mrs. Pilkington is no stranger to the bottom of a bottle herself. And I guess the sobriety coins A.A. gives her when she actually makes it a month or two without drinking tend to make her a little more understanding.

  Yeah, Joey Pilkington, all meth mouth and needy eyes, A.A. and N.A.'s biggest repeat failure, always just out of rehab, poor-pitiful-Me, living out of his mother's basement. Turn over a new leaf, my ass, I think when I look at him. That new leaf has been wrong-side-up so freaking long, it's grown dust.

  "You should be in school, bad girl," Joey lisps around the black remnants of broken-out front teeth. "Sneaky, sneaky," he taunts me again, like we're a couple of eightyear-olds on the playground.

  I just push Mom up the steps, into the front hall. I don't know what else to do, so I steer her into the kitchen, sit her beneath the ceiling filled with wooden mermaids.

  I'd rattle her shoulders to get her attention, except the way she slumps in the chair, it'd break my heart to touch her. Her whole body's so limp, she doesn't seem like she has any bones at all. She seems more like a jean jacket that's been left behind, draped over a chair.

  I want to grab this jacket-no, this empty shell-and go running outside, screaming, "Wait! You forgot this!" And I want my real mom, the artist who teaches drawing classes and smells like the sun-to turn on her heel. "Goodness," she'd say. "How silly of me to forget this old thing." And she'd step into that empty shell I'm holding like it's a bodysuit. She'd zip up the front and smile at me. "That's better," she'd say. And life would go on as normal.

  Sure. Normal. Whatever that is.

  "Mom?"

  She frowns. "Have you counted all those crystals yet?"

  According to Mom, crystals are important, powerful objects. They have meaning and comfort and healing power-like the custard (a recipe three generations old) that Janny's mom always serves her every time she comes down with the flu. When I got strep throat, or food poisoning, or even mono from playing retarded make-out games with that douche bag Adam Riley in the ninth grade, Mom gave me crystals to hold. But somehow, already, I know she's not talking about those kinds of crystals. Not the sharp, jagged quartz pieces that Mom swears she can feel vibrate.

  "What crystals, Mom?"

  "Crystals of sugar," she says, shocked that I'm suddenly so stupid. She reaches across the table, picks the lid up off the old ceramic bowl, and points at the white mound inside. "Haven't you counted them yet?"

  "Every single little crystal?" I ask, fighting the hot chills.

  "You won't know how much to buy if you don't count them, the crystals," she snaps.

  I'm looking right at her, but Mom seems so far away. It's like she's still on that vacation to Florida. But the thing is, she doesn't ever have to come back. She can just step off the eastern Florida coast and dip her toes into a corner of the Bermuda Triangle, never to be heard from again.

  Staring at her, I miss her so much, I ache. If I could, I'd write her a postcard: Dear Mom, having a rotten time without you. Wish you were here.

  "Sure, I counted," I tell her, smearing a fake grin across my cheeks, a la kid in a Welch's grape juice ad. "Seven thousand fourteen."

  Mom looks at me, a little shocked. But she finally nods her head, once, like she thinks she's really taught me a lesson.

  "You know what you are?" I ask her. "Exhausted. Teaching three afternoons a week at the museum, and all weekend long plus keeping up with your own artwork ... I think you should call in those-" I stop myself from saying sick days. "Vacation. You must have a few days coming to you, right?"

  Mom offers a limp nod.

  Actually, it's wrong to leave the museum in the lurch, scrambling to get someone to fill in. But even if they got mad enough to do something really horrible-like maybe dock her pay-we'd at least still have Dad's child support to lean on.

  "What can work more magic than some time off? Vacation ... by Saturday, you'll feel as bright as a rhinestone. Actually, I'll call the museum," I offer. "One less thing for you to deal with. Nobody can recognize the difference between your voice and mine, anyway.

  "Why don't you just go lie down?" I suggest. "When you get up, I'll have lunch waiting for you." It's not like I'm going to get back to school today, anyway.

  She pulls her empty shell of a body up, and leaves the kitchen. But instead of taking a nap, Mom slams the door of her room and launches this Janis Joplin rocket-that's what it sounds like, anyway. "Me and Bobby McGee" streaks through the house, whistling until it hits the kitchen, where it explodes. I feel like I ought to duck and cover somewhere, because, I swear, Janis sings like a regular guided missile streaking across the sky.

  As the chorus of the song flowers, I feel like I'm at a concert for the dead and Janis is right there in front of me, wearing a feather headdress and big round pink sunglasses, a bottle of Southern Comfort tucked under her arm.

  I can see those words Mom wrote on the board last weekend: PERSPECTIVE, PEPPER, PET. And my hand is suddenly reaching for the phone, and I'm halfway through my dad's number-the one that rings in the insurance office across town-before I stop, wondering what the hell I think the guy's going to do, since he's so far away now.

  And he is far, you know-has been ever since my last soccer game. The last time I'd ever been part of a team that had won anything, victoriously pulling ourselves away from a tie. Not that Dad had been there to see it. He was working, still painting houses-unhappily, though, by that point. He'd already sold all his philosophy books at our last garage sale, calling them pie in the sky
. He'd bought a briefcase, and had started writing a resume. He'd bought a sport jacket, of all things.

  But Mom was in the stands. I raced to her, like my teammates were racing to their own mothers, even though we were in middle school by then. Even though we were finding we didn't need Kleenex to fill our bras so much anymore; even though we were definitely getting the hang of eye shadow and curling irons; even though we'd all had at least one crush, and a select few of us even had someone to call boyfriend. We weren't our mamas' little girls anymore. But my team was so big-bright-yellow-sunflower happy, no one even thought about shrugging her mother's hug away.

  And I was no different, me, twelve years old, racing up the bleachers. "Mom," I said, my heart so joyful it bounced, just like a soccer ball off a knee. "Let's go." I pointed out all the other mothers and daughters who were stepping off the field. Cars were starting, cranking to life, one after another. Minivans and SUVs were leaving. Off for pizza, off for ice cream, off to celebrate the good news-we won, we won. God, the pattern of the words-we won, we wonit sounded like feet that skipped, you know? Like the very sound that bliss itself would make.

  "I can't, Aura," Mom whispered. "I'll drown. I'll drown in that shiny water." And she pointed at the rows of bleachers below her.

  Waves of nausea began to swell in my gut, causing my legs to wobble. Please, Mom, does it have to be today? Do we really have to go through this now, when everything is so good and so pure and we won-don't you know we won? Did you see any of it? Did you believe it? Or did you just think you imagined it all?

  "Come on, Mom," I tried again. "Come on, let's go."

  "No," Mom insisted. "No. Not ever. I'll drown in that shiny water."

  When I turned, to show her she could leave, that it wasn't water at all, but bleachers that would hold her, Mom grabbed hold of my wrist. "Don't, Aura, please. Don't go out there. There are alligators in that shiny water!"

  "Okay, Mom," I whispered, goose bumps making a polka-dot pattern all over my sweaty skin. I sat next to her and pulled our cell phone out of her purse. "I'll call Dad," I told her.

  "Yes," she whispered. "He'll help. Tell him to rent a boat."