by Tawni Waters
The moon gleams yellow. A night bird sings. Mary keeps listening. “I’m so alone. I’ve never been so alone. Before you died, I thought I understood loneliness when people were mean to me. But I would run to you, and there you’d be, waiting with your shitty banana cookies—sorry, Mom, I only choked them down to make you happy. You’d hold me and tell me everything was okay, and I knew there was no way I’d ever be lost. You told me I was your home every day, but, Momma, I don’t think I ever told you that you were mine. And now, I’m homeless. And people are as mean as they ever were. I’m as big a freak as I ever was. Only these days, I have no place to run. There are no shitty banana cookies waiting for me anywhere.”
Drops of water plop on my hands, which are folded in my lap, clutching each other for dear life. I don’t know if they are tears or raindrops, and I don’t care. I stare at the Virgin Mary, and maybe it’s my imagination, but I feel warmth wrap around me, soft and good. Perfect love. What I felt when Mom gave me those shitty banana cookies. “You aren’t the worst person in the world,” it says. “Sure, you suck, but have you ever heard of Hitler?” I laugh because whether it’s my imagination or Mom, this is exactly the kind of thing she would have said to make me smile and forget for just a minute how vicious life can be.
“I can’t believe you didn’t want me,” I say.
The warmth makes me feel wanted, and I somehow understand that eighteen years ago, my mom was me, a willful girl driving across the country with a belly full of maybe-baby, trying to figure out what the hell to do. I can’t be mad at her because I know how scary it is to be me. “I get it, Mom,” I say. “Even if you didn’t know I was your home when you first knew I was inside you, you were always, always a home for me. I’ll love you forever.”
As I say this, a shaft of moonlight falls over the Virgin Mary’s features, and for one second, I believe, truly believe, that there is life after death, that there is magic in the world, that there is a god, and she looks like the thing you love most. I believe my mom can hear me. I believe she is saying, “I love you too.” I believe I am not alone.
I pull Mom’s necklace from my pocket and clasp it around my neck.
Thirteen
That night, I pitch the tent at a campground. It may not be the safest for a woman to sleep alone outside, but I can’t bear the thought of being trapped in another crappy motel room. I try to be smart. I set up close to other campers. To my left, a family with several tents and a passel of kids sits at a picnic table playing cards. To my right, an elderly couple prepares for dinner outside their motor home. They have a graying black poodle named Davy Crockett. I know Davy’s name because as I’m unzipping the flap to crawl in my tent, he bounds over and humps my leg.
“Davy Crockett!” the woman calls. She stops setting plastic plates on a picnic table long enough to reprimand the offending canine. “Stop molesting that sweet child. Come back here!” Davy runs to her but returns to his object of affection (my ankle) the second she turns her back.
“Davy!” yells the man, who is sitting at the table reading a book by the light of a lantern. “Get your willy away from that poor girl!”
Normally, Davy would piss me off, but I’m so desperate for a friend, I smile and say, “It’s okay!” Crouching, I push him gently away and croon, “Hey, Davy Crockett. How’s life?”
When I stand up, Davy returns to his amorous activities.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart!” The woman stomps over and sweeps the dog into her arms. “Davy, you know better!” She’s wearing a men’s flannel shirt, probably belonging to her husband. Her short hair is dyed purplish-red. You can tell she used to be pretty. Maybe she still is, and I’m too young to see it. It occurs to me that her husband probably thinks so.
“It’s all right,” I say. “I get it. I used to have a dog.” I had several when Mom was alive, actually. I don’t mention that none of them ever carried on an illicit affair with my leg.
“You by yourself?” She looks me up and down, appraising me.
“Yeah,” I say.
My answer clearly does not please her. “Have you eaten?”
I can tell she’s about to go “protective grandma” on my ass. I consider lying and saying I have eaten, but hunger and loneliness override my antisocial tendencies. “No, I haven’t,” I say.
“Well, you’re having dinner with us,” the woman declares. “I’m Jean, by the way.” She shifts Davy to one hand and extends the other. I shake it. Her grip is surprisingly strong.
“And I’m Lawrence,” the man calls. “That dirty little asshole is Davy Crockett, if you haven’t figured that out already.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind me eating with you?” I ask. It’s a silly question, as I’m already following Jean to the picnic table.
“Of course not,” she says over her shoulder. “You’ll be a welcome change of pace. I get sick of listening to this old bastard drone on and on about airplanes.”
“I was in the air force,” Lawrence says, beaming as if she paid him a compliment.
We sit at the table, which is spread with a bucket of fried chicken, a container of potato salad, and a basket of biscuits that are probably half butter. Mom would kick my ass if she saw me eating this. Lawrence kisses Jean on the cheek. For a second, I imagine Dean and me like them—old, insulting each other, herding horny poodles at a campground. It warms my heart.
“So what’s your name?” Lawrence asks me.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Harley,” I say.
“That’s an interesting name.” Jean plops several drumsticks onto her plate and passes the bucket to me.
I take a breast and wipe my fingers on my jeans. “It’s a nickname,” I say, pointing to my Harley as if it’s explanation enough. “My real name is Juliet.”
“I knew a Juliet once,” Lawrence says. “Second most gorgeous girl I ever saw.”
“Who was the first?” Jean asks.
“Julia Roberts.” Lawrence winks. Jean slaps his arm.
We pass around the rest of the food, and then dig in. I hate to say it, but I’m enjoying my foray into unhealthy eating more than I ever dreamed possible. Fried chicken dripping with grease is about a billion times better than baked tofu skewers, for the record.
“So, Juliet,” Lawrence says. “What’s a pretty girl like you doing out here all alone?”
I consider lying so I won’t have to hear someone else say how sorry they are about Mom dying. But with his no-nonsense white buzz cut and still impressive physique, Lawrence looks like the kind of guy who could spot bullshit a mile away. “I’m taking my mom’s ashes back home.”
Jean’s eyes go soft, but she doesn’t say she’s sorry. “Where’s home?”
“New York.”
We’re quiet for a minute. I watch the moon disappear behind a swath of clouds and emerge again.
“My mom’s death nearly did me in,” says Jean softly. “She died when I was about your age.”
“Yeah?” I say.
“Yeah,” says Jean. “Lung cancer. She was really healthy too. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t drink. None of us saw it coming.”
“I’m sorry.” It feels good to be the one handing out condolences for once.
“You know, it’s been almost forty years, and not a day goes by that I don’t miss her.” Jean sets another chicken breast on my plate even though I’m not halfway through the first one. “Eat up. There’s plenty.”
“Thanks,” I say, wondering if I have to. I’m not sure I can even finish one.
“How long has it been?” asks Jean.
“Coming up on seven months,” I say.
“You must be walking around half dead.” Jean places her soft hand over mine for a second then goes back to her dinner.
“Pretty much,” I say.
“I know when my mom died, it hurt to think of living my whole life without her,” Jean tells
me. “She was going to miss all of the important moments. My wedding. My kids being born. I was afraid that by the time I died and saw her again, I’d be someone she wouldn’t even recognize.”
I nod. I’ve worried about those things too, even the part about her not knowing me when she saw me again, because for all my grandstanding about not believing in an afterlife, I hope there is one.
“But you know what is strange? Every single time something important happened to me, my mom showed me she was nearby. She loved hummingbirds, and on my wedding day, this hummingbird buzzed my head as I said, ‘I do.’ When my son was born, a hummingbird showed up on the windowsill at the hospital. Do you know how rare that is, for a hummingbird to sit still like that?”
“No,” I say.
“Oh, they never sit still,” Lawrence pipes in. “Little bastards are always going, going, going.”
Jean smiles. “Lawrence has feeders for his hummers all around our house. Loves them.”
“They’re beautiful,” I agree, deciding not to inform them that the word hummer may mean something very different to the younger generation than it does to them.
“They are indeed,” says Jean. “The point is, my mom never really left me. You’ll find this out as you move through life. She’ll let you know she’s around in the oddest ways.”
I look down at my chicken. “She already has, I think.”
“Of course she has.” Jean touches my hand again. “You know, I’m way closer to death now than when my mom left me, and I can tell you that underneath all these wrinkles, I’m still her little girl. Life won’t change you as much as you think, at least not the important parts. When you see her again, you’ll still be her baby.”
“How do you know I’ll see her again?” I ask. I expect her to give me some religious diatribe, but she doesn’t. Instead, she says, “Close your eyes.”
I feel weird, but I do it. A cool breeze brushes my cheeks.
“I have always believed that the truth lives inside you,” she says. “I have always followed my heart.”
“That’s what Mom did too,” I say.
“Does your heart say your mom is gone forever?” she asks.
I open my mouth to give her the answer she wants to hear, but I stop. I’m not going to lie to make her feel better. I’m not going to say Mom is still here if she’s not. I wait, listening to the wind rustle through the treetops. Behind my closed eyelids, I see Mom’s face, smiling. A wave of love washes over me. With it, grief comes too. These things seem to go hand in hand. You pay for love with pain. I’m still not sure it’s worth it.
I keep listening. I hear familiar music in the distance. For a second, I can’t place it. I focus. It’s the band Mom loved, Roger’s band. The song about Jean-Luc Picard. No one but Mom listens to her little indie band from nowhere. And yet, there they are, blaring from the speakers of some motor home a few hundred yards away.
I gasp. The image of Mom remains in my mind’s eye, as alive as she was when she was with me. For a second, I’m 100 percent sure Mom is here.
I don’t know what happened to her. I don’t understand life and death. How could I? I’m a tiny speck of a human on a minuscule dot of a planet in a universe bigger than my ability to comprehend. How could my pea-brain possibly grasp the meaning of existence? Still, when I listen to my heart, it knows a soul as beautiful as hers couldn’t just up and vanish.
“She’s not gone,” I whisper.
“No,” Jean says. “And she never will be.”
• • •
Later, after hours listening to Jean and Lawrence recall their lives’ adventures, I return to my tent. They were so kind, I almost forgot to hurt for a while, but as soon as I lie down, the pain comes back, twisting my insides.
After tossing fitfully for an hour, I sleep and dream of Mom and me racing down the freeway on the Harley. She steers. I’m behind her, but somehow, the throttle is mine. I squeeze, harder, harder, harder, watch as the speedometer climbs, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty. Soon, it’s spinning around and around, like a clock hand going way too fast. Somewhere in the distance, the band Mom loved sings about Jean-Luc Picard, and around us, the scenery races past in a blur.
“Harley, slow down!” Mom screams, but I can’t.
Our bike lifts off, driving through the sky at warp speed. Stars fly by. Moons. Planets. Galaxies. Mom starts to float away. I clutch at her, but can’t hold her. “Don’t leave me, Momma!” I cry. She turns to me, waves goodbye, and drifts off into the black nothing of space.
I look down. The motorcycle has become a mangled mass, all twisted steel and smoke. Clinging to the wreckage, I watch Earth fade to a faint blue dot in the distance.
I know I will never go home again.
Fourteen
I wake up to my phone dinging. I ignore it the first time, but the second time, I roll over. Groaning, I pick it up. It’s Dean texting. Harley, call me. I have a right to know if this is my baby.
I shove the phone under my pillow and try to go back to sleep, but I can’t. I know I’m being a royal bitch. It’s not like I don’t feel bad about it. Taking up being a bitch is kinda like taking up smoking. Once you start, it’s hard to stop. And it’s addictive. Like guilt. You can mainline guilt the way junkies mainline heroin. When it comes right down to it, guilt is my drug of choice. My guilt is the engine that keeps my bitch machine running. I know I should put it down, get clean, and start acting like a sane person again, but it’s kinda hard when you’re a murderer.
“Honey, you awake in there?” Jean’s gentle voice pulls me out of my reverie, if reverie is the word you use to describe a particularly intense bout of self-loathing. The sun filters through the mosquito netting at the top of the tent, turning the soft ground into a web of light and shadow.
“Yeah,” I say, sitting up and glancing down to make sure my nipples aren’t showing through my white T-shirt, should Jean decide to unzip the tent flap and pop her head in. She probably won’t, but you never know.
My nipples are showing, and she does.
“Well, aren’t we perky?” she says, staring straight at my boobs.
I have no idea how to respond to that.
“I brought you some OJ.” She laughs as if she told the best joke, thrusting a Styrofoam cup through the flap. I fumble toward her, trying to cover my chest.
“Oh, sweetheart, don’t sweat it. I’ve seen a breast or two in my day. Believe it or not, mine used to be quite impressive.”
I am utterly unsure how to proceed, as we skipped the “protocol for tit conversations with old, purple-haired ladies” section in my manners class. Before I can stop myself, I look at her chest. She too is braless. Far be it from me to impose fashion imperatives on anyone, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s a look she might want to forgo in the future.
She winks. “You could at least pretend not to be horrified.”
“What?” I mutter. “I’m not. I mean, I think you look—I wasn’t even looking.”
“Are those my boobs, or two raccoons wrestling?” she asks gleefully.
My god. Have I been planted in some very unfortunate scene from old people porn?
“They didn’t look like this until after the kids,” she says. “You want babies?”
I shrug. “I think so. Someday.” I do not tell her that she has almost convinced me to return to Planned Parenthood, ASAP.
“Behold your future.”
• • •
An hour later, I’m eating cereal at a picnic table with Lawrence and Jean. Jean has put on a bra, thank god. The cereal is some granola shit Mom would have loved. Lawrence is crunching it loudly, and as much as I like him, it makes me want to punch him in the face. There is nothing in the world worse than listening to someone you love chew, except for listening to someone you barely know chew. Chewing is an intimate act. I should not have to think about the insid
e of anyone else’s mouth unless I decide to stick my tongue in it. But dear Lawrence is an aggressive, untidy chewer. He clearly did not have a mother who ordered him to eat with his mouth closed.
“So where you headed next?” he asks.
I barely hear the question through his spoonful of cereal.
I shrug. “Not sure yet. Wherever the wind takes me.”
“I like the way you think.” Jean extends her plastic spoon in my direction, a queen granting her blessing. “Spread your wings. Enjoy your youth. God knows, it will be gone before you know it.”
Who are these depressing old fucks, and what happened to the benevolent angels from last night? I eat what’s left of my cereal as quickly as I can without reproducing Lawrence’s abominable litany of slurps and chomps. Then I stand, wiping my hands on my jeans.
“Well, thanks for this. It was so awesome meeting both of you. I’d better get going.”
“So soon?” Lawrence asks, mercifully setting his spoon down. “We were just getting used to you.”
“I’m sorry,” I say awkwardly.
“Lawrence,” Jean chides, standing. “Don’t guilt-trip her. Save that for our own children. They’re ours to torture. She isn’t.”
I laugh.
Jean puts an arm around me and winks meaningfully, as if we have a secret. “She needs to go sow her wild oats.”
Holy shit. If I do not get a move on pronto, Jean will surely start sharing the details of her sexual history. “Why, when I was your age, I blew a handsome young man in a subway bathroom,” I imagine her saying.
“Okay,” I say quickly. “Thanks again.” I hug them both. Jean smells like pine, not real pine, but bottled pine.
“You smell nice,” I tell her.
“Oh, that’s air freshener,” she says breezily. “I douse myself with it in the mornings. Quicker than a shower. Cheaper than perfume. You can buy it any convenience store.”
I can’t help but laugh. “Are you kidding?”