I still wasn’t sure any of them were his but it didn’t seem like the time to establish paternity. That’s best left up to the Maury show.
“Did you ever think relationships would be so complicated? It was all so easy when you could smile at a guy at Friendly’s and get an extra scoop of ice cream for free.”
“Sing it sister.” she raised her water glass to me.
“Now it’s a good day if the grocery bagger doesn’t call me ma’m.”
“God, I hate that.”
She shifted in her seat.
“I’m Jim’s old lady. I’m my kids’ mom and the littles’ grandma. That’s who I am. To leave him would make me a ghost.”
“You could totally leave him, you could leave this place. Come with me and we’ll figure it out on the road.”
I looked around for added drama and may or may not have done a Vanna White hand motion. She shook me off.
“A man isn’t everything, Cricket. You can do it on your own.” I channeled my inner Helen Reddy and would’ve erupted into a drunken rendition of “I am woman” if she hadn’t clobbered me with the truth.
“Out of all of us in the senior suite, you’re the only one not married or with someone, so forgive me for saying this but you really don’t have any idea. No one said a man is everything but...”
She looked at me as if I could somehow complete her thought.
“You need someone. Everyone does. It’s not just for companionship. It’s for balance...and I’d say you need some.”
She smiled and then bit her cuticle. A sound came out of my mouth but not quite a word. I stared at my friend. The simplicity of what she said smashed my left temple like that moment when Demi Moore throws a very drunk Rob Lowe out of her really cool jeep and he falls to the ground. I feel like I’m drunk on the ground looking up at Cricket and she’s about to give me a valuable, yet unwanted lesson.
“I don’t want to be lonely like you. I love my kids. I couldn’t imagine leaving them for an indefinite amount of time to drive cross-country with a baggie of ashes. I’m not saying this to be hurtful. I’m trying to help you see what I see.”
“I didn’t leave my kids.” I clarified. But I had.
“Maybe you don’t think that you did because you’re on some quest but all I know is that if your kids want to see their mom, they don’t know when that will happen.”
She looked at her phone.
“You make it sound like I abandoned them. I would never do that! I know how that feels better than you ever could.”
I am now ugly crying for the entire bar to see.
“I know you do and I’m sorry. But then why would you go and do the exact same thing to them?”
“I AM NOT MY MOTHER! You of all people should know that.” I yelled at her for the benefit of the entire bar as if the louder my message the more true it was.
A fat guy in plaid playing pool chuckled with his friends and said “I know you ain’t honey ‘cause I knew your mama.” His friends doubled over as if they had all been punched by a funny clown.
I thought about charging those guys and taking them all down but then a very sad part of me realized the one...anyone...could’ve very well known my mama.
“I know you’re not honey and maybe that’s why I feel the need to tell you this...M is gone and it breaks my heart but your kids are still here. Which one of them needs you more?”
We sat in silence, the wind sucked out of my sails. Fat tears filled my mouth with a familiar saltiness. Cricket couldn’t look at me. There wasn’t much more to say so she asked the only thing left:
“Where are you going next? Home?” she asked.
“Is that what you would do?”
She shrugged. “You already know the answer to that.”
“I started something. I’m not a quitter.” I patted my pockets searching for tissue. Finding none, I moved my drink and used the soggy cocktail napkin to wipe my equally wet nose. The napkin crumbled in my hand and Cricket touched her own nose to show me I had remnants of napkin on mine. I waited for her to say something. She held her phone and stared at the black screen.
“Cricket?”
She pressed her lips together. Her gaze still locked on the phone.
“What happened here? What did I do?” I tried to piece together the night. There was nothing in my recollection that I said that should’ve caused her face to look like that. The Cricket sitting next to me was not the same person I came in with. What had I said? What had a done? The patterns of the lights and the smokey haze of the bar played with my brain. It was like waking from a bad dream filled with dread even though you couldn’t clearly remember why you were upset.
I scanned her face. Was it anger? Disappointment? Had I told her what I really thought of Jimmy?
“Sara, I know you well enough to know when you’re not right. I realize you just lost M but there’s something...something broken. I know what you do when you start feeling that way.” Cricket reached for my hand again. This time I let her hold it.
“What?”
“Come on. You know you as well as I do.”
But I wasn’t sure I did. She looked up at the discolored ceiling.
“It’s like you’re forcing me to be mean to you.”
“I’m not.” I needed to know what it was I did.
“You wreck yourself and everyone around you.” She squeezed my hand.
“How?” I asked as if I needed a fortune teller.
She shrugged.
“In this case, in this town, I would say the longer you stay, the more there’s a chance you’ll end up with Jim and I’m not sure I want that, even if I can’t stand him.”
I should’ve told her that I wouldn’t dare. I wasn’t that awful of a person but like I said earlier, Cricket knows me.
“Plus, he likes needy. I should know.”
I was deep into my sixth whiskyretto sour by then and Freebird was blasting through the near empty place. I can’t say for sure that she actually said those exact words in that way but since that was what I think I heard, I refused to come into her house that night. I slept in my car or at least that’s where I woke up. I vaguely remembered telling her she didn’t want someone like me in her house. I don’t remember her fighting that idea. She just made me promise I wouldn’t drive off but she also didn’t take my keys because I found them digging into my side at daybreak. I fumbled with the keys dropping them once and having to open the car door in order to reach them even though they were by my feet. Contortion wasn’t my strong suit anymore and M didn’t have any opposable thumbs.
I pulled out of Cricket’s driveway and got on the road without even the decency to say thank you or acknowledge our time together. Just like my mother.
The country roads leading to the interstate wound back and forth over themselves. I doubted that I would ever get there. The Twilight Zone was caving in on me. What was it about me that made people just give up on me? No brilliant, dramatic interventions. No energy spent on my behalf. It was like Cricket saw me heading for a cliff careening out of control and she simply politely points to the inevitable end of the road. Just letting me drive off the road of bad decisions, turning and walking slowly from the fiery wreck that I brought on myself.
every now and then i can never take the place of your man
Sometimes failure seems like a dream. Like I’ll wake up next to my husband and have kids who adore me and crawl in bed with us and we’ll laugh and wait for the music and words from the breakfast sandwich commercial to come up over our perfect lives .
But instead I feel trapped inside a bad Lifetime movie hoping it will have a Hallmark Channel ending. But the heroines in those shows deserve the good guy. They’ve been done wrong.
I, on the other hand, am the wrongdoer. I am the light that attracts the moths. It doesn’t aim at destroying them but it does anyway. Then again, I’m not at all like the light because I am ultimately the one who fails, alone and cold in the night, not enchanting and brilliant.
M was the only one who stayed…almost.
Luke’s whiny voicemail and four subsequent calls that were sent to the exact same place, put me in a mood. M was my bestie. Not a moment goes by that I don’t see something that reminds me of her or feel something that I want to run by her. It is hard to share my grief with someone who loved her for thirty hot seconds.
I remember awkward eighteen-year-old M. I remember cocky 25-year-old M. I remember the call she made when she plucked out her first gray hair. Luke feels like an interloper in these memories. But when I get over the selfishness of how I feel about her, my relationship was no stronger than his.
She left us both.
To him, that’s a connection. To me, it’s a failure. I should’ve been able to keep her here.
I still needed her. Didn’t she know that? Didn’t I make that painfully obvious on the phone the day she killed herself?
Most people who knew her still don’t believe the suicide story. People with everything going for them don’t end it all staring down a train. Others think it was all a tragic accident. But I know differently. I knew her longer than I didn’t. We were friends over half our lives and there wasn’t a thought we didn’t share…well, there was one.
When I called the second time I wanted to continue our earlier conversation. She told me she had an insane schedule.
“Come on, M. Can’t you tell when you have a needy friend?”
She laughed that urgent laugh of hers like she was trying to get all the happiness into an abbreviated moment.
“I know Sara, but it’s crazy everything I have to do before Luke gets home today. You know how it goes.”
“You seem happy.” I stated believing it for the first time in a long time.
“Do I?”
But suddenly she didn’t. For one second she was somewhere else, or so I’ve told myself hundreds of times while laying in bed waiting for sleep.
“I am. Luke is a wonderful person. He takes great care of me and is sooo supportive. Couldn’t ask for more.”
She drew in a breath.
“You’ll meet someone like that Sara, I promise.”
I wasn’t in the mood to argue and when she said that I felt silly bringing up Walsey again. She clearly said I would meet someone, not that I had met someone. She obviously didn’t think he was the one. But he would be the first person I called after I learned of her death. I figured he knew a lot about the subject, having spent his life in the military.
“Are you still coming to see me and the kids next week?” I asked her.
“I have a ticket, don’t I?”
Looking back, I realize that wasn’t really an answer. And it’s not like I knew for sure if she had one. Luke didn’t know when I asked him later. He said she had talked about visiting but he couldn’t remember when. Maybe she never intended to come out.
I nodded half listening to what I felt at the time was an answer but all I could think about was Henry telling me that Mike had been looking at rings. And I needed her to tell me if I should email Walsey back or not. He had admitted he was still adjusting to civilian life, not to mention a world away, or at least most of the country’s width.
I knew she didn’t have time to discuss these pressing issues. I could tell because she wasn’t asking her usual probing questions. I wanted to tell her how devastated I was that Mike had moved on so quickly but I couldn’t get the words out on my own. I needed her to ask. And I wanted to talk about Walsey. She knew him better than anyone. I wanted her to open that door so I could hear his name and “try” it on.
But she didn’t.
“Did you ever think being a grown up would be so hard?” I asked.
She laughed again and I wished I hadn’t asked it. She’d known me long enough to know what I was up to like those people who post partial posts on Facebook in the hopes someone will ask them what they meant.
“It’s not hard. There are bad things that happen. Remember how lost I was after Jeff? And look at me now. Totally in love with Lucas.”
“Lost? You went out to a corn field with a plastic bag and bourbon.”
“I would never do that now.”
“Better not. If you did, I would hate you forever.” I blurted.
“Seriously?”
“What do you mean seriously? Damn straight I’d be mad. What the hell?” How could my bestie think I would be okay with her “opting out.”
“Well, I would never do that...again.”
“I will hate you in this life and into the next. I promise you.”
“Oh, Sara. So dramatical. Besides you know me well enough to recognize the signs if I got there again.”
Out of all the things she ever said to me, this was by far the cruelest, although I didn’t know at the time. She told me I would recognize if she was suicidal because I knew her. Two hours later she would drive onto those tracks with no intention of talking to me again. Was this her cry for help? Was I supposed to keep her on the phone? Was joking about it a way of saying it was on her mind? I’ll never know but what I do know is that I failed.
I saw nothing. I felt nothing. No warning bells or gut feelings. After we got off the phone, she’d go to the store, bring her items in the house, leave them on the counter, grab Luke’s keys from the barn, round up the dog, put the convertible top down by hand, start up the old car, drive through their corn field out onto the tracks, and wait.
Was she crying when she did this? Did she keep looking at her phone waiting for me to call and stop her? Did she expect a text to tell her I knew what she was doing and she better get the hell off of the tracks? Why did she think I could rescue her?
But at this point I knew none of this. It was just a silly conversation between friends so I continued it with a silly promise.
“Promise me, M. Don’t ever even think about something like that again without telling me.”
“Why would I?” she said from thousands of miles away.
“I don’t know but I’m warning you. We won’t be friends.”
“Ha. You are a card.”
M loved to say “you are a card, you must be dealt with” but this time I cut her off.
“Promise.” I waited until she did.
At the time, I was happy with her promise. It had allowed me to get back to my depression about Mike ring shopping and rereading the thrilling and yet frightening one-line email from Walsey “Been thinking about you.”
I could spend the afternoon wondering if I was ready for something else and not thinking about why my friend would bring up love and suicide in the same breath.
At the time her promise had soothed me. Looking back, it meant nothing.
“Sara, I promise you. I will never go into a corn field with a bottle of alcohol and a plastic bag again.”
But the one fact that would keep me up for days after her death was that she didn’t promise not to end it all. She had merely (silently) stated her way out wouldn’t be a plastic bag. And I missed it entirely.
I just can’t get enough, Hold On
Point Pleasant, West Virginia is a quiet little town that looks like it got left behind in the early 1960s. Its storefronts resemble a movie set, like real businesses don’t operate behind them. You can easily understand why people who lived there thought they were all under surveillance by the men in black. Yes, just like the movie. Part of J. Edgar Hoover’s cronies or Will Smith’s. Not sure which.
Speaking of movies there was this one with Richard Geer, the Mothman Prophecies. It’s where I first heard of Mothman. He’s a pretty creepy fellow. Mothman, not Geer...although…
This creature looks like a space alien mated with a butterfly and its appearance coincides with mass tragedy. When he shows up, you really should consider relocat
ing with great urgency. But no one ever does. The moth guy just comes to town, tries to warn locals, and everyone ignores him. He visited Moscow before an apartment bombing in 1999. Point Pleasant before that. Who knows where else.
In December of 1967, traffic was stopped on a bridge that spanned the river between Ohio and West Virginia. Maybe the timing on the light right before it was off. Maybe people were all getting off of work at the same time and making a run for some delicious home cooking. Whatever the cause, there was a mass backup on the bridge. And backups mean lots of weight. And lots of weight means bad things when it comes to old bridges with faulty pieces in cold weather.
Turns out M and I had just missed the Mothman Festival. We missed our chance to see grown ups dressed like winged creatures and men in black. Darn the luck.
✽✽✽
#278 M will never be warned by the Mothman of impending tragedy or visit Point’s fun museum.
#279 She’ll never get to see that the 12-foot metallic statue of Mothman that sports a cigarette most days. M would’ve been happy to know Mothman too enjoys the occasional cigarette.
✽✽✽
As I walked around the closed downtown trying to imagine what the festival would’ve been like, I realized Mothman was a failure just like me. Here he came to tell the good people of Point and Gallipolis that their bridge was unsafe and yet, everyone just ran away from him. Some thought he was an alien. Others thought he was some sort of government experiment run amok. Others say he’s a species yet to be named that roams the area to this day.
I think he was just trying to do his job and no one would listen.
Turns out the legend of Mothman is a lot more exciting than the actual reason behind the bridge collapse, a faulty eyebar. It was #330 in the design, hidden behind another eyebar that looked strangely like a rounded wrench head.
The bridge stood for nearly 40 years before a crack about ⅛ of an inch thick caused the failure of the entire eye bar.
West of You Page 10