The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (4 page)

My mother, after years of living in the tepee and then in the loft of the big community barn, had made a home that was truly hers. It was to be her house to grow old in, tucked about three hundred feet behind the big barn, bordered on the back side by the sloping woods that led back down the hill, away from New Hope, right into the farmland once owned by the Griswolds.

L
OOKING BACK
on my last visit to New Hope, I found there were signs of my mother’s sickness even then. There had been little clues all along, but nothing that set off any alarms, rang any bells that would toll loud and clear with the weight of the words
dementia, Alzheimer’s.
She had seemed a bit more absentminded, more scattered. She repeated herself, forgot things I’d told her. She seemed preoccupied, a little on edge. I figured the strain of building the house was taking its toll. She was a seventy-year-old woman, after all.

During that visit two years ago, I learned that she’d wrecked her car and had decided not to get another one. When I asked what had happened, she said she was out for a drive and fell asleep behind the wheel. The car went off the road and into a drainage ditch. Luckily, she escaped with only minor bruising. It happened near Lancaster, New Hampshire.

“But what were you doing in Lancaster in the middle of the night?” I had asked. And she shrugged off the question. Later, Raven told me she’d been getting lost from time to time, finding herself farther and farther from home. Usually, she’d run out of gas and call Gabriel or Raven to come rescue her. She kept the New Hope numbers pinned to the Pontiac’s visor. My mother had known those numbers by heart for years. Her needing to pin them to her visor should have set off alarms, but it didn’t. Her body was strong and healthy enough to build a house. But her mind was going, and she must have felt it slipping away, memory by memory, beginning, perhaps, with something as simple as those phone numbers.

As I followed Raven through the front door into the living room, I saw that the inside of the house looked the way I remembered: the same overstuffed plum-colored couch, wooden rocking chair, and braided rug. To the left of the door was a bench to sit on while taking your shoes off and there was a row of coat pegs along the wall. Hung on it were a yellow rain slicker, a down parka, and a blaze-orange vest for walking in the woods during hunting season. No doubt about it—I was back in Vermont.

Walking forward and turning left into the kitchen, I saw the white enamel wood-burning cookstove and the round wooden table that had been with my mother since the tepee days. The door to my mother’s bedroom at the far end of the house was closed. Beside it, the door to her painting studio was ajar, and I caught a glimpse of the colorful canvases and the cot and dresser pushed against the far wall. The house smelled of wood smoke, oil paints, and the lavender lotion my mother used. Familiar smells that I couldn’t help but find comfort in.

What was different about the house were the notes tacked up everywhere—signs on white paper written in bright markers. On the inside of the front door: K
ATE, YOUR DAUGHTER, WILL BE HERE THIS AFTERNOON
. And below it, someone had taped up a snapshot of me taken during my last visit. In the picture, I’m staring straight ahead, eyes heavy and sullen—a regular
Wanted: Dead or Alive
mugshot. I could picture the description now:
crime of abandonment, reward offered.

There were several signs in red marker taped to the stove: STOP! DO NOT LIGHT! There were signs on all the cupboards saying what was in each one:
DISHES
,
GLASSES, CEREAL
. The phone on the wall had a list of names and numbers next to it. There was also a sign saying, D
O
NOT
DIAL
911
UNLESS IT IS AN
EMERGENCY! (I learned later from Raven that my mother had been calling 911 several times a day, asking whose house she was in, wanting to know if there was more yogurt anywhere.)

Magpie had been just a kitten when I last visited, a gift from Raven and Opal. Now she came trotting out of my mother’s studio and wound herself around my mother’s legs, doing little figure eights, loop de loops, a sleek little black-and-white thing. My mother picked up the cat, cooed at her and carried her over to the Servel gas fridge.

“What’s for lunch?”

“You had your lunch, Jean,” Raven told her.

“What’d I have?”

“Grilled cheese.”

“What’s for supper?”

“You just had supper. Gabriel brought you stew.”

“I’m hungry,” my mother said, her voice whiny as a child’s. She unceremoniously dumped Magpie back onto the pine floor. “What’s for lunch?”

Raven ignored her. She opened the StarKist and plopped it into Magpie’s bowl on the kitchen counter. The cat danced around her feet now, saying “Murl?” again and again in a plaintive voice. My mother leaned in quickly and stuck her face into the cat’s bowl. She gulped at the tuna, getting a good bite before Raven yanked it away.

“I’ll fix you a sandwich, Jean. Now go sit down.” There was an edge to Raven’s voice I hadn’t expected—a touch of hostility. She gripped the edge of the counter and blew out a long breath.

My mother turned toward me. “They’re starving me,” she said. I just stared. Flakes of tuna were stuck to her face.

“I know you,” she said, smiling.

My stomach ached. I fought back the urge to run from the cabin, legs pinwheeling like a cartoon character’s, jump in the rental car, and hop the next plane back to Seattle. I hadn’t been close to my mother in years, but I knew her to be a bright, resourceful, dignified woman. This person who had replaced her was a complete stranger. My mother, it seemed, had vanished completely without my even noticing she was taking her leave. Ah, I realized, she’d pulled the same trick on me that I’d pulled on her. Touché.

L
ATER
, after making my mother a sandwich, Raven and I put her to bed, then settled down on the living room couch. I longed for a stiff drink but knew there was nothing in the house. My mother had always frowned on alcohol—
“Katydid, I will never understand why on earth you would want to dull your senses, the wits God gave you, with that stuff.”

Raven pulled a pack of matches from her pocketbook and lit the oil lamps in the living room. Just as it had been in the tepee, light came from candles and oil lamps, heat from the woodstove, and whatever water she needed was hauled from the well by the big barn in gallon jugs and buckets. When she needed to bathe, there was a tub in the big barn, too. It was a self-reliant lifestyle chosen by my mother when she
had
been self-reliant. It was a life I remembered all too well even after all those years. And I was sure it was the reason for my love of gadgets—my house in Seattle was full of them: blender, food processor, microwave, coffee grinder, espresso machine, electric can opener, Crock-Pot, electric toothbrush, and bright halogen track lighting angled carefully so that every corner blazed.

Raven dug around in the leather shoulder bag again like a magician searching for her next trick and handed me a large metal ring of keys. She showed me how they kept my mother in her bedroom at night with a brass padlock.

“Jesus,” I said, “What is she, one of America’s Most Wanted?”

Raven said if we didn’t do this, my confused mother would wander and get lost. Nighttime was worse. My mother was more clear during the day. Raven promised I’d see a change in the morning.

Another key went to the lockbox on top of the fridge that contained the array of medications that Dr. Crawford had prescribed over the past several months: lorazepam, haloperidol, Ambien, and a tube of burn ointment. Raven explained that they didn’t like to use the pills, they just seemed to dope her up. I tried not to roll my eyes—what did she think the drugs were for? Inner peace? She said that before now, they medicated her only during really bad spells, but since the fire they’d had to increase the dosages. Most days, they had managed to get by giving her only the tinctures Gabriel made. There was a memory tincture with ginkgo that she got in tea twice a day. And at night, a sleeping tonic with valerian root. My mouth went bitter at the thought of it and I made a silent promise not to subject my mother to such botanical torture.

“For now, we’ll stick with the heavy med regime Dr. Crawford prescribed. I’d rather see her doped up than hurt again,” Raven said and I nodded in agreement, making a mental note that we needed a consult with a gerontologist as soon as possible. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the town doctor, but my mother was on some heavy-duty medication, and I questioned how well it was being monitored.

There was a key to a padlocked kitchen drawer that contained knives, scissors, a nail file, nail clippers, and matches.

“Never, ever, ever give her matches,” Raven instructed, as if the bandages on my mother’s hands weren’t enough warning.

“Right,” I said, picturing again my rabid, foaming mother shooting fire from her fingertips. I shook the nightmarish image from my head.

Raven went on to explain the routine: getting my mother up, cleaned, and dressed; emptying her chamber pot; changing the bandages; serving her breakfast; going for a walk; making her lunch; having her take a nap; and making sure she gets each of her pills. I must have looked a little overwhelmed.

“I know it’s a lot. And I know it must be a bad shock for you to see her like this. But I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re here. How glad Gabriel is, too. We just couldn’t do it anymore. Not like this. Not with winter coming now. She can’t be alone. Not here.” She looked around the cabin, gesturing helplessly at the woodstove, the oil lamps hung from the ceiling, well out of reach. “See what you think once you’ve been here a few days. God, I’m so glad you came.” Then she hugged me—this woman whom I felt I barely knew, who had been only in second grade when I left home for good—put her arms around me and held tight. I was her life raft. I was the one who was going to come in and make everything okay, even if meant packing my mother off to a nursing home. I let all my breath out as she squeezed.
Great,
I thought,
a life raft without air.

The first thing I did when Raven left was undo the padlock on my mother’s door. I was not going to be her jailer—at least not yet. I jingled the large ring of keys, feeling like a deputy in an old Western:
You’re free to roam the open range, partner. Just get out of town before sunset.

I peeked in and saw that my mother was sound asleep on her brass bed. The wind-up clock ticked loudly on the nightstand beside her. Its hands glowed. Only eight o’clock. It was just five back in Seattle. Jamie would be getting home from work soon. Tina or Ann or whoever his latest was might be there now, in his place waiting, dinner in the oven, white wine chilling. I wondered how he kept track of his girl of the month, sometimes girl of the week. He must have to mark his calendar, keep notes. With bitter amusement, I remembered his index card habit. He kept stacks of them in the office, the glove compartment of the car, next to the bed. He had them stuffed in the pockets of shirts and jackets and was always writing little notes to himself on them. Notes that he would promptly shove in some other pocket or between the pages of a magazine, his reminder to pick up stamps or check out a book he’d heard about on the radio, lost forever. Perhaps he now used the cards to keep a girl file:
Sasha—redhead w/ appendectomy scar. Likes martinis, dislikes dogs.
I chuckled to myself as I imagined the card one day tumbling from the pocket of his blazer when some other girl dropped off the dry cleaning.

I carried the lamp into the room that had been my mother’s painting studio, where there was a cot set up in the corner, piled high with blankets, wheeling my black suitcase, Magpie at my heels. The cat watched with her head cocked as I unpacked socks, underwear, and T-shirts and put them in the battered wooden dresser, no doubt a remnant from a long-gone New Hope resident. I came across my Swiss Army knife in my toiletry bag, among the tea tree oil shampoo and avocado body scrub—I had stuck it in there at the last minute when I realized I wouldn’t be allowed to carry it on the plane. About the only things I ever used it for were opening wine and slicing cheese at impromptu picnics, but I am a woman who likes to be prepared. I considered locking it up in the sharps drawer in the kitchen, but finally tossed it into my purse.

Suddenly, I was exhausted. Not by the unpacking but by the whole afternoon. By being home. More than anything else, it was the guilt I felt seeing how much my mother had changed, slowly slipped away, while I held on to my careful little life back in Seattle—my life of electric appliances and halogen spotlights—oblivious, thinking she couldn’t be that bad, thinking the phone calls from Raven were exaggerated.

I set the oil lamp on the bedside table and lay down on the cot to rest for a few minutes. Magpie joined me, purring like a lawn-mower. My mind was racing and my body thought it was barely suppertime, much less bedtime—I could easily foresee the sleepless night before me, soon to be followed by a blurry-eyed day. What I needed was a drink, preferably something hot, with spiced rum. Then I remembered the locked box of drugs in the kitchen and made my way to it, keys jingling. Now, I am not a person to indulge in the casual use of pharmaceuticals, but one little Ambien never hurt anybody. To be on the safe side, I took two.

While I waited for the drugs to take effect, I studied the shadows of my mother’s paintings as they glowed in the lamplight. They were still lifes mostly, the one on the easel half finished: a bowl of fruit in somber shades of gray. It was an underpainting, a scene stripped of its color, only a shadow of what it promised to become.

R
ON
M
ACKENZIE WAS OUR BUS DRIVER
back in the fifth grade. He was a bulldog of a man with a thick neck and beady, watchful eyes. He always wore a black knit cap and worked his jaw as he drove as if he were chewing on his own tongue. Looking at him, you would have thought he had always been driving school buses, but the truth was that once he’d worked for NASA. He’d tell the new kids on his route this, letting them think he must have been an astronaut or something, and only when they pressed him did he admit that he had driven trucks and forklifts, not lunar landers. He had moved rocket parts around. Ron Mackenzie had gotten to touch metal that blasted off into space. He moved from Cape Canaveral back home to Vermont because his wife’s mother got sick, and that’s when he started driving buses and working down at the town garage.

On good days, Ron called us his chickadees. When he was angry, when one of the kids had disappointed him in some way, we were monkeys, and you could tell from his tone that monkeys were, in Ron’s mind, a pretty low-life thing to be.

“I’ve had just about enough from you monkeys today!” he’d say through clenched teeth when the noise on the bus got too loud or when kids switched seats while we were moving.

Del and I caught Ron’s bus each morning at the bottom of the hill by her mailbox. Three of her brothers rode the earlier bus that took them to the Brook School, where grades six through twelve went. Nicky, the crow assassin, was fourteen. Her twin brothers, Stevie and Joe, were seventeen, seniors in high school. Mort was nineteen. He had never graduated and was still living at home, helping out with the farm. Her other brothers, Roger, Myron, and Earl, all had places of their own in or near New Canaan. Earl, the oldest, was married with two kids not much younger than Del.

Stevie and Joe kept to themselves and showed no interest in Del. When they weren’t doing chores, they were working on a GTO that they planned to race at Thunder Road. They had girlfriends—pimply, overweight girls who loved to ride in that red GTO, fixing their hair and blowing cigarette smoke through their noses while greasy wrenches and car parts rattled at their feet. They’d drive through town too fast, gunning the engine and squealing the tires at each intersection. Sometimes I would see the four of them riding or back in Del’s yard—the ugly girls sprawled out and smoking on the brown lawn while Stevie and Joe banged around under the hood.

D
EL RODE TO SCHOOL
in the morning on Ron’s bus, but took the afternoon kindergarten bus home right after lunch along with the three other kids in the Special Ed room. I guess the school figured half a day was about all these kids could handle.

The other three Special Ed kids were boys. Tony LaPearl had Down syndrome. Artie Paris was twelve like Del—they’d both stayed back twice. He was a big hulking kid already growing a scraggly mustache. Mike Shane was twelve also, and the tallest, skinniest boy in our school. He could not speak. No one really knew why, but there were lots of rumors. The most believable was that he’d had some kind of illness as a baby that badly scarred his vocal cords. Mike went around with a pad of paper tied with a string around his neck, communicating by notes.

The morning after our first meeting in the field, while we stood waiting for the bus, I noticed that Del wore the same soiled cowgirl shirt. She had on a clean pair of tan corduroy bellbottoms that hung loose and were cinched above her narrow hips with a thick brown leather belt. The pants looked like hand-me-downs from one of her brothers. Pinned to her shirt was a silver metal sheriff’s star.

Neither of us spoke. I waited and watched, leaving it up to her to make the rules. We scuffed the dirt with our shoes and stared down at the patterns we made. I thought of the crow, the letter
M
on Del’s chest, covered, now, not only by the shirt, but by the silver star. Just before the bus arrived, I looked up and caught Del smiling at me and knew I had not imagined our meeting. I also knew, as I caught a glimpse of that broken edge of tooth, that I would return to the crow after school to see what might happen next.

When Ron stopped the bus, I got on before Del, just like always, and took the first empty seat in front. I half thought she might take the seat beside me and guiltily prayed she wouldn’t. I said thank you to God when she passed me and went to the back to take a seat alone.

“I smell rotten potatoes,” whispered one boy to another when she passed.

“Potato Girl, Potato Girl, smells so rotten it makes your nose curl,” sang the other boy.

Ron Mackenzie, strict as he was about behavior on the bus, never once stopped the kids from teasing Del. He just gripped the wheel tighter, working his jaw extra hard, like he was embarrassed or something.

“Hey Del, how do spell
potatoes
?” asked the first boy, looking out at the misspelled sign in her yard.

“Retards can’t spell. Retards just smell,” said the other.

Del just stared out the window, grinning widely, like the joke was really on them.

I
SAW
D
EL ONLY TWICE
that day at school, at the same two times I saw her every day: morning recess and lunch. During morning recess I was on the monkey bars when I saw Del go to the maple tree at the edge of the playground. She was alone, as usual. She said something to herself, something out loud that must have been funny, because then she laughed. I watched with curiosity as she picked a twig off one of the lower branches and pretended to smoke it like a cigarette. Artie, the big Special Ed kid, approached her with two of his fifth grade friends.

“What ya got there, Del?” asked Artie. “Wacky tobbaccy?”

Del just kept smoking, pretending not to hear. She tilted her head back and stared up into the branches with their freshly unfurled leaves. I climbed to the top of the monkey bars to get a better view. Two other girls played below me—Samantha Lancaster and Ellie Bushey. They whispered and giggled to each other when I smiled down at them. They were best friends who wore their hair in identical braids, and each had a matching pink windbreaker. They were popular girls, surrounded by a glow of normalcy and self-confidence, the first two to be picked for teams, shoe boxes overflowing with cards on Valentine’s Day. I went back to watching Del, doing my best to ignore Ellie and Samantha.

Over by the trees, Artie was still talking to Del, swaying a little as he spoke, as if he needed extra momentum to get the words out.

“Cat got your tongue, girl? You a mute like Mike now? Mute Mike and the Potato Girl. What a couple. I seen him passin’ you notes in the classroom. Little love notes prob’ly. Maybe you two should get married. Have little dirty mute babies. Raise ’em on raw potatoes. Ain’t that what you cut your teeth on, Del?”

Del said nothing, just sucked hard on her stick and blew invisible smoke rings, still staring up at the highest branches. When she leaned back like that, her sheriff’s badge caught the sun and gleamed like a real star might. I remembered what Lazy Elk had told me about talismans and thought that maybe that silver star was Del’s.

“Where is that Mute Mike, anyway?” Artie wondered out loud. He made a visor out of his hand and scanned the playground like a general surveying the battlefield. He spotted Mike.

“Get him over here, Tommy,” Artie ordered, and off lumbered Tommy Ducette, the fattest kid in fifth grade, to drag poor Mike over. By the time Tommy forced Mike back to the maple tree, a circle of curious kids had formed, including the two girls who’d been under the monkey bars. I climbed down and walked over to get a closer look. Samantha whispered something to Ellie, who then turned to look at me and blushed a little.

“There’s that mute!” Artie grinned. “There’s your sweetheart now, Del.” And there stood Mike Shane, toothpick thin but taller than the other boys by a head. His wrists and ankles stuck out beyond his cuffs. The spiral pad hung around his neck on red yarn. Mike kept his head down, studying the worn rubber toes of his Keds.

I had watched Mike Shane before. He was, like Del, like myself, a kid who stuck to himself for the most part. I’d seen him playing checkers at recess with Tony LaPearl, the boy with Down syndrome, and from what I saw, Mike let Tony win each time. I had also noticed, as Artie had, that he passed notes to Del from time to time and, occasionally, she would lean close and whisper something in his ear that made him smile and look away, embarrassed.

“Now you two are gonna be married,” Artie announced. “Stand together now.” Tommy gave Mike a shove so that the quivering string bean of a boy stood nearly touching Del, who continued to play-smoke like some glamour girl movie star.

“Do you, Del the Potato Girl, take Mute Mike to be your husband, for better or worse, in sickness and health, till death do you part?”

Del blew smoke in his face.

“That was a yes. Sure, sure you do. Now do you, Mute Mike, take this here smokin’ Potato Girl to be your smelly old wife? A nod will do, Shane. You don’t need to write it in your freakin’ book.”

Mike Shane nodded, still staring at the ground, jittery as a cornered hare.

“I hereby pronounce you man and wife. Now kiss your bride,” Artie ordered.

Mike looked up at this, his brown eyes wide and truly terrified. Del just smiled. Mike tried to bolt, but Artie and Tommy stopped him and pulled him over to Del. He made howling sounds like an animal trying to speak. Spit ran down his chin. The two bigger boys pushed him up against Del, who just stood her ground. She dropped the twig she was smoking and ground it out with her foot, then leaned forward and kissed Mike Shane on the lips. It was a long, soap opera kind of kiss, and when Del pulled away, Mike’s face was no longer pale but a vivid, burning red. The kids gathered around squealed, laughed, said
gross
.

“Ew! Potato Girl germs,” Ellie said.

“Worse than cooties,” Samantha added.

“Poor Mute Mike,” one boy said.

“They deserve each other,” sang back another.

Then the party was broken up by Miss Johnstone, who demanded to know what was going on.

“Playing cowboys,” said Del. “I’m sheriff,” she added, smiling, pointing to her shimmering badge.

W
HY’D YOU LET THEM
do that today?” I asked later, when I met Del back by the dead crow.

“What?”

“The way they teased you and Mike. Why’d you kiss him? You didn’t have to.”

“What was I gonna do?” she snorted.

“Go get Miss Johnstone. Holler out. Anything.”

“Yeah, right,” she said.

“You could have tried.”

“It wasn’t so bad.”

“What was it like?”

“What?”

“Kissing Mike Shane.”

“Like kissing any boy, I guess.”

“Have you kissed lots of boys?”

She shrugged casually and pulled back the sleeves of her shirt. Her left forearm was covered in purple bruises that I was sure hadn’t been there the day before.

“Enough.”

With that, Del tore off toward the pasture where her pony was penned, pointing her fingers like the barrels of guns, shooting everything in her path.

“I’m Wyatt Earp!” she hollered. “Gonna get me a bad guy. Come on, Deputy. Catch me if you can!”

So I chased Del through the garden, past the horse fence, both of us shooting from pointed fingers, her yelling,
Catch me if you can,
the whole way. I chased her past the pigpen, keeping my distance from the fence, not slowing to try to get a look at their teeth. We ran to the root cellar, which Del announced was a bank being robbed. We drew our guns and threw the wooden door open, hoping to catch the robbers in the act.

“Shoot ’em dead!” Sheriff Del cried.

“Shoot who dead?” asked the raspy voice behind us.

We turned and saw Del’s brother Nicky. He had a real rifle in his hands, a BB gun, probably the one he used to kill the unfortunate bird hanging in the field.

Suddenly Del wasn’t Wyatt Earp anymore.

“Take us shooting, Nicky,” she whined, grabbing the fabric of his white T-shirt and twisting it into a ball as she pleaded.

“No way, Del.” The boy spoke to his sister, but studied me with his sly fox smile. He was long and tan. His arms hung low, looking impossibly dark as they poked out from the sleeves of his white T-shirt. He wore stained blue jeans and the same huge, worn work-boots as the day before. His face looked as if it were chiseled from some dark, exotic wood.

“Take us, or I’ll tell Daddy about you know what,” threatened Del, still tugging at the shirt.

“Bullshit. I’ll tell Daddy you’ve got a friend who comes over.”

“Take us, or I’ll tell him, Nicky. I swear.”

“No way.” Nicky jerked his shirt out of Del’s grip and took off running toward the back field.

“The bank robber’s getting away!” shouted Del. “Stop him! I think it’s Billy the Kid!”

We took off after Nicky, chasing him through the garden, the field of peas, and into the woods, up the path that I took home. It looked like he was going to lead us straight to New Hope, but he jogged down an overgrown path I’d never noticed off to the left. The path went on a ways, the vegetation thick and jungle-like, before it opened into a clearing. In the center of this grassy area stood a tiny, leaning cabin, like something from a fairy tale. A witch’s house, a gathering place for trolls.

Nicky was stooped over, his hands on his knees, gasping for breath, the gun in the weeds by his feet.

“Surrender, Billy!” sang Del as she tore into the clearing, pointing her loaded fingers at her brother. Her hair was plastered to her forehead and her words sounded wheezy.

He put his huge hands in the air and smiled. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat and clung to his narrow chest.

“What is this place?” I asked once I caught my breath.

“Used to be a deer camp,” Nicky said. “Daddy let it fall to shit. Our grandpa built it.”

It was a small building, about twelve by fifteen feet, more like a toy house than an actual place where men once slept. The cabin was leaning precariously to the left, looking like it might come crashing down at any minute. It was sided with rough slabs of wood, bits of bark still clinging to them. The wood-shingled roof looked spongy and was green and black with moss.