The Scamp (6 page)

When her neck was uncovered, her throat had a red hole that moved with her breathing. If she went out, she wore a scarf. She had to cover the hole with a handkerchief to cough, or to smoke, which she kept doing. What the hell difference is it now? she'd whisper at me. When
the opening wasn't covered, smoke trailed out of her neck, curling at her collarbone.

Nudie died before she did. She had to live through that.

She had the abortions after she got the cancer.

And still, he kept fucking her, even while she had cancer, while she lay in bed, sick from treatment. Her skin was sweaty all the time. Her once curvy body had shrunk down to a rack of bones, loose and empty. Her bed was her solace. Ivory satin sheets, an ivory peignoir I picked out for her at Macy's. I told her she looked like a movie star. She kept a glass of vodka neat on the bedside table. A row of painkillers. And a bucket to throw up in. And he kept coming in to fuck her.

Even while he was fucking me.

When she died, I was the one who found her. If nothing else was, that was how it should have been. I hate—and I mean I hate hard—to think of what would have happened if he had found her instead.

It was late. Past eight in the morning, and I needed a ride to school. The bus had come and gone, doing its slow creep at the edge of the driveway, waiting to see if I would come rushing out. Sometimes I'd open the door and run down the steps, and the bus driver, she'd wait. She'd also let us smoke at the very back of the bus with the windows down, if we were quiet about it.

You need women like that in the world. Women who are looking out for you. Women who turn a blind eye when necessary.

My mother wasn't what anyone would call well, but she'd been steady. She'd get up in the morning with me, sit at the glass kitchen table. We'd smoke together, have coffee. She'd begun to look breakable, frail under her peignoir. Her wrists seemed snappable, her fingernails, dried out. Sometimes she leaned her elbow on the glass and held her sweaty head. Her hair hadn't fallen out, but it was brittle, and its dark brown color had lost its red depths.

She'd whisper to me without her electronic voice box.

Good Christ, I hurt, she'd say. Sometimes she'd hold her arm, or her hips, like they were springing apart with pain. Mostly, she drank her coffee black in a shallow teacup, one that had come from her mother's house and had pink-and-black pagodas on the side, leafed with bits of gold. She smoked, and held the handkerchief to the hole in her throat.

But that morning, we both overslept.

My dad wasn't home. Even if he had been, he wouldn't have gotten me up for school. Though he'd woken me plenty of times. It was usually in the night, after I'd fallen asleep, when I was too drowsy in my limbs, my throat too dry with sleep to fight him very hard. When I rigged a makeshift lock for my door, he was so angry he took the whole door down, right off its hinges.

You put that door back, my mother whispered. A girl needs her privacy.

He roared at her that I was deceitful. That I was stealing from him, undermining him, sneaking boys in through the window.

She just pointed. Put it back, Doe.

The house was quiet. The living room, glitzed up like a nightclub, something my mother loved, a red-and-black carpet, red velvet furniture. Lamps that hung from gold chains. The kitchen had a black leather bar, a lit beer sign on the wall. Rows of bottles and shakers and my grandmother's ice bucket from the fifties, with a heavy weighted bottom and black and white polka dots on the sides.

He wasn't there. Not in the basement, or the garage. And the car was gone.

The back bedroom, where she spent more and more of her time, was different from the rest of the house. Instead of dark, it was all champagne and gold. She liked flowers, and I tried to keep fresh ones for her. Whatever I could get. Soon, the lilacs would be in bloom, and I could bring that smell inside to cover up the usual smell of stale smoke, spilled whiskey.

My father hated flowers. He said the room looked like a funeral waiting to happen.

The baby, Aubrey, had died in there. Tucked in satin. Burning with fever.

There was my mother, tucked into satin sheets. Sweating out Vicodin and vodka.

He wasn't wrong.

I couldn't miss another day of school. I'd been out so many times—up all night sick, morning sick, hungover sick, taking care of my mother sick, taking my mother to appointments sick—that they were about to fail me for the year on absences alone.

I missed that day anyway.

She lay facedown on her pillow, a dark, sticky stain next to her mouth. I moved her shoulder to rouse her, and then rolled her onto her back. All her life she'd been voluptuous, round shouldered and big breasted, with hips and fleshy arms. But in my hand, she felt bony. Underneath the nightgown, her chest was flat and sunken; her rib cage was puffy, like it was filled with water, and the skin showed through, purple, filled with blood.

It wasn't what I'd expected. I'd imagined sitting by her bed in a chilled hospital room, holding her hand, listening to her breath, to the beep of machines and the drip of IVs, the overhead calls to doctors in code. The soft pad of nurses in clogs in and out, checking charts, adjusting meds. Everything a cool blue light, like the inside of an aquarium.

My mother died alone. In her own bed.

Later, the doctor told us it was her heart, not the cancer, and not her lungs.

It happens, he said. Sometimes, it's just too much strain on the body.

She'd refused further treatment after her voice box was removed. What else? she'd whispered to me. What else can they do to me? What else can they take away?

I'd leaned over to light her cigarette for her. We sat that way, all morning. Quiet, smoking. The clink of her coffee cup on the glass tabletop.

When someone dies at home, you call 911, and they take them to the hospital, even when they know that the person is dead. Even when that person is your mother. They kept me on the line, and I was okay, I was numb, sitting there in her room on a padded oval-backed chair, watching her stillness.

911, what's your emergency?

My mother is dead.

When my father found me in the hospital waiting room, surrounded by other people waiting to be seen for emergencies and births, the bustle of deliveries, flowers, carts with lunches on them, orderlies and nurses and doctors walking together, he told me I was the woman of the house now.

I was holding a pen that a nurse had given to me, a click pen that said
ENFAMIL FORMULA
on the side. I kept opening and closing it, an undone word-search magazine on my lap. The nurse had given me that too, to keep my mind occupied, she said. She was an oncology nurse. Short and round. I wondered how many motherless girls she'd ushered through the last days.

And then Doe plunked down beside me on a vinyl chair that was connected to all the other chairs in a row.

Well, you're the woman of the house now, he said. It was eleven thirty in the morning and he smelled of whiskey, of sweat, and sex.

I jammed the pen into the back of his hand, deep enough to stick. I wished it had gone all the way through.

Because we were in public, he barely uttered a sound. He grimaced, and looked murder at me, and I could hear the stuttered click of his teeth clenching.

I walked out. I walked all the way down Route 8, without a jacket, to Rayelle's, where I didn't want her; I didn't know what I wanted. Something was different in me the instant I turned over my mother's body. The instant I realized I was alone, without her.

Why? I asked my aunt Carleen. Why would that happen? I hadn't seen it coming. Couldn't have known that was how it would be.

The heart has funny ways, Carleen said.

I knew it. Rabbits can stop their hearts out of fear, if in danger, or cornered. It saves them from the grisly death that was coming; like flicking a switch, they just turn themselves off and die on the spot. I thought about my mother lying in bed, about my father coming in anyway, smelling like booze and someone else's pussy, even though he said he hated the room, the light, the flowers, the pretty gold leaf in the wallpaper, the satin sheets. I'd hear it, the movement of their bed, the running water. Her dry, voiceless cough. He'd move to the couch after, and I'd hear him snoring.

What had decided for her? Her brain, or her heart? Which one threw up the white flag and gave up? Imploding. Cornered. Saved from something more grisly.

I wished I had been there. I should have been in that room with her. I should have held her hand, stroked her head, given her water, rubbed her feet, anything,
anything but left her alone in that room, trussed up like a dead body, where he came and went as he pleased. I hadn't heard her last breath. I hadn't seen her heart break. She'd been alone. Used up and broken. All of her shitty forty-four years, dead babies and miscarriages, Nudie with a goddamn bomb to his face, her unstoppable hound of a husband. All of it, too much strain for the body.

No one should have to die that way.

five

RAYELLE

Summer was born in the dead of winter. The house, a little clean-to-the-baseboards ranch that Eli's parents owned and rented to us, was so cold in January that I would undress Summer in front of the heat duct. I laid out her changing pad there, even the little blue plastic baby tub, with the dry forced air blowing on her, her skin crisscrossed white and pink, her lower lip shivering.

I felt like I made the house dirty, just being in it. The white walls, the sealed wood floors. The new windows. Like my dirty bare feet left tracks everywhere.

We moved in when I was eight and a half months. I hadn't told Eli until I was already six months. Not because I wanted to trap him. I didn't even want the baby. I'd just never been regular, and didn't know until I was pretty far along. It was nothing for me to miss a period.
Sometimes, they'd come every ten or twelve weeks. So when I saw him again, when he came into the bowling alley where I was still tending bar, not quite showing, but hiding underneath a billowing shirt, he took one look at me and said, I sure am glad you're here, because, he meant, I was fun, because he knew what it meant: a ride in the car, windows down, legs up, parked by the pines along the lake.

I'm glad you're here too, I said, and handed him a Coors Light. I'm pregnant.

Well, shit, he said. I remember him rubbing the back of his neck, not looking me in the eye for a long time after that. I said I hadn't known how to reach him. But his daddy was the pastor at South Lake Baptist. If I'd been crazier, or desperate, I might have rolled up in front of the brick building, and the Sunday morning congregation, looking for Eli, my belly big. His mother might have fainted. Elijah got the bartender pregnant.

June Carol did pitch a fit. I was the worst thing that had happened to them. At the very least, she wanted us married. But really, she didn't want me at all, a trailer park Reed, a bowling alley bartender, living in her house with her only son, raising a bastard child.

Just let us get settled, Mama, Eli said to her. It might have been the first time he'd stood up to her. I know you think it's that official paper that makes it real, he said, but right now, we need to take care of this baby.

That is not what makes it real, Elijah, and you know it. It's the sanctity of marriage.

I never saw her without mascara and lipstick both. Her outfits were meticulously matched. Her nails, tasteful and immaculate. She gardened. She cooked every meal to include each food group. She had perfect handwriting and always wrote thank-you notes.

I had never even felt very feminine. I thought about my own mother, in her jeans and ponytail, with her cigarettes and gin. The way she drove her Grand Prix like a motherfucker on the highway, speeding and listening to loud Springsteen. And there I was, in June Carol Jenkins's house, wearing a maternity dress from the Salvation Army and my grandmother's cardigan, the only things that would fit me, rocking in a chair with a baby I'd never intended to have, my hair piled in a bun on top of my head. I looked like a Mennonite.

Those eight months, the one before and the seven after she was born, were a disaster of me fumbling, me breaking dishes, me burning an entire lasagna so that the kitchen filled with smoke, me sneaking cigarettes out the bathroom window, me crying in the dark alone with the baby. I remember Easter—Jesus, Easter at the pastor's house—Summer laughing for the first time, the perfect square of a backyard coming back to grass and lilacs, camellias along the fence and the azalea bush in the sun like it was burning. And then she was gone.

I went back to the house once after I'd moved out. A few days before Christmas, when I'd been sitting in my mother's living room, trying to sort out ornaments, trying to put up some semblance of a tree, or any
decoration, but just sitting with open boxes around me while the TV blared, and after no kind of supper, nothing that resembled a meal, just some Ritz crackers and some cheese that Chuck had picked up at Rite Aid, and a box of chocolate-covered cherries.

I left the boxes open, tissue paper scattered.

The house was closed up tight. Locks changed. Eli had gone back to his parents' home, just like I had gone to mine, both of us back to the opposite worlds we'd come from. I stood out there on the step like a fool, trying my key and trying again, while the lawn sparkled with frost under the streetlight. I felt cast out. Put to the curb. The house was never mine to have, only to borrow, only to shepherd a child through. June Carol always said you just borrow children from God. It's your job to take care of them for Him.

In the morning, by the lake, I come out of the Scamp, dressed, but sweaty, and I graze my hand over Couper's shoulders. I kiss his neck. He sits by the water in the camp chair, tapping away on his laptop. The water, rippled and bright.

What's the thing you remember most about Holly Jasper disappearing? he says. The one thing?

There wasn't anyone strange in town, I say.