At the motel, Isabelle sat on one bed and Caroline sat on the other. Caroline turned on a sitcom. Isabelle continued to text and started to cry.
“What’s wrong?” Caroline asked her.
“Nothing,” she said. She cried harder.
“Is it something with Quentin?”
“No!” Isabelle screamed at her. “You’re always so mean to him!”
“I think he’s damaging to you,” Caroline said.
“You’re a bitch,” Isabelle said.
Caroline said, “I want to help you.”
“You can’t help me.”
“But I want to.”
Isabelle cried and went into the restroom. Through the door she told Caroline about things she saw when she was with Quentin. She said sometimes she saw the skin melt off his face until there was nothing but blood and bone. She said sometimes an army of spiders would march out of his mouth and cover this mass of blood and bone and try to crawl onto Isabelle.
“Oh, my God,” Caroline said. “Please dump him.”
“It’s not his fault,” Isabelle said.
Caroline put her hand on her knee. She wanted to stoke Isabelle’s head, but she couldn’t.
Isabelle came out of the restroom and got her sketchbook and a black pen out of her bag. Isabelle was a good artist, Caroline thought. Isabelle drew a picture of a boy’s face stripped of skin and covered with spiders.
“Whose fault is it?” Caroline asked her.
Isabelle only glared at her, then went back to sketching her pictures.
Catherine remembered their conversations when Isabelle was little. She remembered that Isabelle had cried and repeatedly begged not to go back to John’s parents’ house, to have a different babysitter. She remembered when Isabelle tried to cut her grandfather’s hands off with a knife. Catherine knew that she tried to cut his hands off for a reason. She remembered how she never told John, how she never said or did anything.
Caroline couldn’t tell if the counseling and medication really helped Isabelle. It depended on the day. Caroline made a mental note that it would be better to teach men not to abuse others in the first place rather than trying to heal all the women after the fact. She thought making a mental note was not enough, but she didn’t know what else to do. Sometimes Isabelle screamed at Catherine, and other times she was nice and let Catherine braid her hair while they watched Mulan or Peter Pan together. “I love you, Mom,” she’d say. “Sorry I’m a pain.”
“You’re not a pain,” Catherine would say. Isabelle would only look at her. There were things they did not discuss. There were things they lied to each other about. Catherine supposed this was normal when dealing with teenagers.
After a few months Isabelle broke up with Quentin, or he broke up with her. Either way, he was gone, and Caroline was glad. Isabelle didn’t get another boyfriend. She started cooking for Caroline a couple times a week, and she also spent a lot of time in her bedroom drawing and listening to music that sounded like growling monsters.
John’s parents died in a car crash. His father had been driving. They were coming back from the mall and it had started to rain hard. Somehow, he lost control. This didn’t fit with Caroline’s picture of him. She thought he never lost control. There was going to be a funeral, a military funeral where men wave flags and shoot guns to honor the veteran. John told Caroline he wouldn’t be going. It was too far and expensive and his father was already dead anyway, plus he couldn’t get away from Kelly. Things were bad with her mother, who was still alive and needed support. Caroline thought she should go to the funeral, to show respect, and that Isabelle should go too.
“I don’t want to go,” Isabelle said.
“But they were your grandparents,” Caroline said. Caroline remembered going to her own grandparents’ funerals, and how she hadn’t wanted to go either. But it was just what people did. Funerals gave closure.
“I don’t care about them,” Isabelle said.
“They loved you. Your grandmother loved you.”
“No, they didn’t,” she said. “And I didn’t love them, not him or her. Just because you share blood with someone doesn’t mean you have to love them.”
“Isabelle!”
“Blood means nothing to me. It’s stupid to tell people who they have to love.” She went away to her bedroom.
Caroline wondered what would happen to Kyle. She thought he would die without his parents to care for him. He had no job, and she didn’t know whether he’d be allowed to stay in that house or not. She wondered what would happen to all the dogs.
“You may be older now, but I’m still your mother,” Caroline said, gently pushing Isabelle into the car to go to the funeral. She didn’t know if she was doing the right thing; she never knew if she was doing the right thing. Parenting was impossible, especially alone. Isabelle looked out the window away from her mother. She put her headphones in to listen to the monster music.
When they were driving along the lake, almost at the cemetery, Isabelle took her headphones out. “When I take baths, I think about dying,” she said. “I put my head under the water and hold my breath. I want to fall asleep in there and never wake up.”
“Isabelle!” Caroline said.
“It’s true,” she says. “I want to die. I want to walk right into that lake and never come back out.”
“You’ve been watching too many movies,” Caroline said.
“Fuck you,” said Isabelle. She looked out the window.
They drove up to the place where the funeral was going to happen. The army men already stood in a straight line with their neat hair, holding their guns upright like toy dolls. They were so still they looked dead. Isabelle rolled down her window to look at them better. “I hate the army,” she said to her mother. “I hate wars. Killing people is wrong.”
“Oh, sweetie,” said Caroline. She remembered the graffiti on the wall from the Christmas party years ago: “I am a teenager. My life is the size of a walnut. I do not care about Afghanistan.” This wasn’t true about Isabelle.
To the row of army men Isabelle yelled, “I hate you!” The men stood still as figurines. Caroline remembered gardening when Isabelle was a baby. She remembered finding plastic army men under the ground, where some former little boy resident had buried them. “You should be ashamed!” Isabelle called to the army men. “I hate you!”
The men didn’t look up. Isabelle was sobbing. Caroline saw Kyle standing under a tree, speaking to some people she’d never seen before. He was laughing. He didn’t see her. Caroline continued to drive. She drove away from the funeral party. She drove all the way around the cemetery and back to the exit. She drove away. She drove herself and Isabelle all the way home and when they got back she stroked Isabelle’s head and Isabelle let her.
The HIlls
Lena and her grandmother are taking a walk through the yellow hills when the grandmother drops to her knees, rustles her hair in the grass, and begins rolling up the hill. Lena has seen children rolling down hills, but never someone rolling up, especially not an old person.
“Grandmother, you’re doing it backwards,” Lena says. She chases after her. When she catches up, she puts her foot on the grandmother’s back to hold her still. “I said you’re like a backwards child.”
The grandmother looks as if she doesn’t remember what a child is. She often forgets things now, or remembers things incorrectly. She sometimes thinks she is a mermaid, or the widow of a handsome, famous baseball player.
“You remember children,” Lena says. “Those very small people.”
“How small, exactly?”
“Well,” Lena says, looking around for an object the size of a child, but finding nothing but hills, “some are as small as a loaf of bread, even.”
“And just as soft!”
“Maybe,” Lena says. “Some are bigger. Some are more like a toy trunk.”
Lena’s grandmother picks a dandelion and runs her fingers up and down the stem, getting them green and filthy, Lena is sure.
“I’m a child,” Lena says. Lena is eleven, so she is almost not a child, really, and she is a very mature and intelligent child. But she decides not to complicate the issue by explaining all of this to her grandmother.
“Ha!” says the grandmother, now chewing the stem. “I’ve never seen you roll down a hill in my life. That would be far too much fun for you.”
Lena remembers when she was six, and her grandmother took her for walks, not the other way around. It’s true, Lena never rolled down the hills. She didn’t want to get grass stains. Lena wondered if the grass stains would be yellow, since the grass here always seemed to be.
“Grandmother, you really shouldn’t chew on that dandelion.”
“This isn’t a dandelion. It’s a puff globe.”
“There’s no such thing as a puff globe,” Lena says. “That’s called a dandelion.”
“A dandelion, my foot! If this is a dandelion, what are those yellow ones?”
Lena ruffles her forehead. “Daffodils,” she says.
“And I’m a child and you’re a potato plant! Rubbish!” says Grandmother.
Lena helps her grandmother up, taking her hand so they may continue their walk. The doctors say it’s important for the grandmother to get exercise, so taking her for walks is one of Lena’s chores now. Lena moved here with her mother last week, just for the summer, probably, to help take care of her. Lena still has to do her normal chores—taking out the trash, feeding the fish, cleaning the windows—but she has to take the grandmother for walks too. While completing only her normal chores, Lena earned seventy-five cents per week allowance. Lena’s mother refused to give her a raise for taking on this additional chore, on the grounds that the grandmother was Lena’s grandmother. Lena found this unfair and noted that when an employee works extra hours, he or she is paid overtime, and so Lena should at least get a quarter for the extra time she would spend taking the grandmother for walks. Her mother told her she was a pain in the neck and stalked off.
Lena decides this walk has gone on long enough and that it’s time to steer her grandmother in the direction of the house. Everything looks the same around here because it’s the countryside. There are no other houses or landmarks in sight, just dried grassy hills, so Lena carries with her a compass she received for her eleventh birthday.
She reaches in her pocket for the compass, but finds nothing.
“Oh no,” Lena says, hands patting down her clothes, “I must have dropped my compass.”
“We don’t need it,” her grandmother says. “You think I don’t know my way back? I’ve lived here my whole life!”
“I need to find it whether or not we need it to get back!” Lena says. “It was a birthday gift from my mother. I love it. I need to find it. And besides, you don’t know your way back.”
“The way back is up,” her grandmother says.
“Up is not a direction,” Lena says. “There’s North, South, East, and West.”
“Not at all! There’s also circles, zigzags, down, and certainly up.”
Lena sighs. She knows her grandmother won’t see reason about this, so she just begins to rustle around in the grass in search of her compass.
“Are you looking for gold?”
“No, I’m looking for my compass.”
“But there’s tons of gold out here! I know your mother won’t pay you an extra quarter for taking me on walks—”
“She told you that?” Lena asks, looking up. She feels a pang just below her sternum.
“But I’ve got tons of gold at the house! I’ll give you a piece when we get back.”
“If we ever get back,” Lena says. “Everything looks the same here. It’s all just dry hills.”
Lena’s grandmother gets the look again, like she doesn’t remember what hills are.
“Oh, Grandmother, you remember hills,” Lena says. “They’re all around us right now.”
The grandmother points to a fly.
“No, not those. Hills are large half-circles coming out of the Earth. Maybe the size of a shed. Or some are bigger, like several tractors put together.”
Grandmother curls up on the ground like a cat. “I’m a hill,” she says.
“No, Grandmother, you’re a woman.”
Grandmother points to herself and says “hill” so quietly Lena can barely hear it. Her eyes stare at nothing.
Lena continues to sift through the grass without moving too far away from Grandmother, who remains still as a barn owl. Lena swats a fly away from her face. She takes a few steps left, pushes the grass around, takes a few more steps left, swats away another fly. She digs and pushes and swats and steps left, needing to find the compass, needing for this walk to be over.
After several minutes Lena looks up and sees what must be hundreds of flies buzzing all around her. She swats one off her knee, then another off her T-shirt, then another off her other knee. As one takes off, another lands, and still another buzzes right up to her ear, so that she can feel the vibrations, as if they were inside her own head. She flails her arms in front of her as she walks forward in search of Grandmother. Could it really be that while searching for one thing, she had lost another?
“Grandmother!” Lena calls. “Grandmother!” But a fly buzzes into her mouth, and Lena bends over and spits onto the grass, wanting water, wanting chewing gum. She spits out the fly and calls to her grandmother again, but she doesn’t answer. Lena begins running straight ahead, her arms knocking the stream of flies sideways and sometimes in zigzags. Then she remembers she took a lot of steps to the left, so she turns to the right and begins running that way, even though she is lost. But soon she hears a voice: “The way back is up!”
Lena turns around to see her grandmother, holding Lena’s compass, which gleams in the sunlight.
“My compass!” Lena says. “You found it.”
“The way back is up,” her grandmother repeats, and begins once again rolling up the hill, the bones in her back and shoulders rattling.
“Grandmother, stop!” Lena says. “You’ll get hurt! Your bones will crack like egg shells!” But another fly buzzes into Lena’s mouth, and she again bends over, coughing and spitting onto the ground. Lena imagines her grandmother’s insides as a network of bobby pins clipped together, threatening to snap apart should she bend a joint too quickly. Flies continue to buzz around Lena, and she swats them, and she can’t get the taste out of her mouth, but she manages to say in a voice the grandmother surely cannot hear, “Grandmother, give me back my compass.”
sleepwalking
Sleepwalking becomes more dangerous if you live near a body of water. After midnight, when we’d all gone to bed in Marysville, Washington, a small town north of Seattle, our four-year old daughter Maggie would sneak out in her sleep, wander across the wet grass to the pond. I’d find her wading through the water, the hem of her nightgown floating up with the waves, her hands reaching out towards I don’t know what. It happened often and we feared it every night.
Of course we locked the doors, but sleepwalkers can fiddle with locks. We put up a fence, but Maggie learned to climb it. She was athletic because of the ballet lessons. Rachel called the doctor and asked what we should do. “Nothing helps,” she said. “Not the art therapy, not the meditation exercises. And she gets enough sleep, so it’s not that. What are we supposed to do?” She’d pace back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, running her fingers over every surface of furniture and frowning at the dust, letting out small puffs of air in between talking.
“Sleepwalking is often caused by stress or anxiety. You might try avoiding any type of stimuli before bed,” the doctor said. “No television, no rowdy games. Try not to read her any stressful bedtime stories, either.”
“Last nig
ht I read her Caps for Sale,” Rachel said. “It’s about a man who sells caps. But he falls asleep against a tree, and when he wakes up, monkeys have stolen all his caps. He gets them back, though. Is that too stimulating?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Did she sleepwalk?”
“Yes. She sleepwalks all the time.”
“Then perhaps it’s too stimulating.”
Rachel had a problem with anxiety. She said this had to do with how much pressure she had been under as a teenager, when she was a highly ranked gymnast in a wealthy, WASP-y suburb of Boston. Her parents had hoped she’d attend a good college, then marry and/or become a senator.
I met Rachel in a bar a few months after she graduated from Tufts, a good college, where she’d studied Literature. She’d moved to Seattle where she’d gotten a job at a small publishing house. The job was actually an internship and it didn’t pay a living wage, but it was good experience, so her parents supplemented her income. I was the same age as Rachel, but had not gone to college. I was waitressing, like I had been doing since graduating high school. I was at the bar with a male friend I was casually sleeping with. We both stared as Rachel spun alone in the middle of the floor. Actually, everyone stared. She was blonde and tanning-booth tan, and wore pearls and a khaki dress. I had short dark hair and mostly shopped at second-hand stores.
To my surprise, she approached me. “Do you know the actress Selma Blair? You look just like her. She is so beautiful.” She touched my hair and flashed a big smile. I smiled back, no teeth though. I didn’t like my teeth; they were a bit crooked.
I didn’t know the actress. “Thanks, I think,” I said.
“You’re kind of like a character she plays in one movie. At first, she’s quiet and rough around the edges, but then she turns out to be so nice and strong. I bet you’re nice and strong too.”
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