Traplines (6 page)

Ginger barked.

I waited until I saw Mama peeking out the kitchen. I felt a bit safer, but not much. I ran. Maybe it was stupid, but I wanted to be inside. I wanted to be with Mama. I remember looking both ways before crossing the street, the way I’d been taught. I ran across the street with my thermos clunking against the apple that I hadn’t eaten and hadn’t been able to trade. Running, reaching our lawn, and thinking, I’m safe, like playing tag and getting to a safety zone where you can’t be touched. I remember the sound of wood breaking and I turned.

Ginger bounded toward me and I couldn’t move, I just couldn’t move. She stopped two feet away and snarled and I couldn’t make any muscle in my body move. Ginger’s teeth were very white and her lips were pulled back way up over her gums.

I found my voice and I screamed.

The dog leapt and I banged my lunch box against the side of her head and her jaws snapped shut on my wrist. There was no pain, but I screamed again when I saw the blood. I dropped the lunch box and Ginger let go because Mama was running toward us. Mama was coming and she was shrieking.

It was as unreal then as it is now. Mama and Ginger running toward each other. They ran in slow motion, like lovers bounding across a sunlit field. Mama’s arm pulled back before they met and years later I would be in art class and see a picture of a peasant woman in a field with a curved knife, a scythe, cutting wheat. Her pose, the lines of her body would be so like Mama’s that I would leave the class, run down the hallway to the bathroom, and heave until I vomited.

Mama slid the knife across Ginger’s scalp, lopping off the skin above her eyebrows. Ginger yelped. Mama brought her knife up and down. Ginger squealed, snapped her jaws at Mama, and crawled backward. Up and down. Mama’s rapt face. Up and down. The blood making patterns on her dress like the ink blots on a Rorschach test.

The moose’s short neck makes her unsuited for grazing; consequently, she is a browser. Her preference runs to willow, fir, aspen, and birch, as well as the aquatic plants found at the bottoms of lakes. The moose is quite able to defend herself;
even grizzly bears and wolf packs think twice before attempting to kill the largest member of the deer family. Much of the moose’s time is spent in the water. She is an excellent swimmer, easily covering fifteen or twenty miles. She is a powerful traveler on land, too, trotting uphill or jumping fallen branches for hour after hour.

During the rutting season, her mate, the bull moose, is one of the most dangerous animals, frenzied enough to inflict death or dismemberment on those who stand between him and her and incapable of distinguishing between friend and enemy.

A man and a woman came into our backyard. The woman knelt beside me as I lay back in my lawn chair feeling the drizzle on my face. She touched my hand and said, “Your mother’s been asking for you.”

Her hair and skin were tinged blue by the diffused light through her umbrella. She showed me a card. I didn’t bother reading it, knew just by looking at her perfectly groomed face that she was someone’s hound dog.

“Janet’s in the house,” I said, deciding to play dense. It never worked.

Her hand squeezed my arm. “Your real mother.”

I wondered what she did when she wasn’t trying to convince people to visit serial killers in jail. Sometimes they were writers or tabloid reporters, grad students, the merely morbid, or even a couple of psychics. I wondered why they always came in pairs, and what her partner was thinking as he stood behind her, silent. Only the sleaziest ones came after me like this, not asking Paul or Janet’s permission, waiting for a time when I was alone.

Mama kept sending these people to talk to me, to persuade me to come visit her. I suspected that what she really wanted was a good look at my face so she’d know whom to come after if she ever got out.

“She misses you.”

I turned my face up to the sky. “Tell her I miss Aunt Genna.”

“You don’t really want me to tell her that, do you?”

I closed my eyes. “You’re taping this, aren’t you?”

“Lisa,” the woman held onto my arm when I tried to sit up. “Lisa, listen—it would only take a day, just one day out of your life. She only wants to see you—”

I jerked my arm away and ran for the house just as Janet came out.

“Who are they?”

The man and the woman were already leaving. They could try all they liked. I wasn’t ready to see Mama and maybe never would be. But I didn’t want any questions either. “Just Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

I saw the woman waiting outside school the next day but pretended not to notice her. Eventually she went away.

I was fourteen when I first tried to commit suicide. I remember it clearly because it was New Year’s Eve. Paul and Janet were at a costume ball and thought I was with a friend. Paul was a pirate and Janet was a princess.

They drove me to my friend’s house. Paul put his eye patch on his chin so it wouldn’t bother him while he drove. I sat in the back, at peace with myself. In my mind I was seeing
my foster parents at my funeral, standing grief-stricken at the open casket, gazing down at my calm face.

When they let me off, I walked back home. I brought all Janet’s Midol and all Paul’s stomach pills upstairs to my bedroom, where I had already stashed two bottles of aspirin. I went back down to get three bottles of ginger ale and a large plastic tumbler.

Then I wrote a poem for Paul and Janet. It was three pages long. At the time it seemed epic and moving, but now I squirm when I think about it. I’m glad I didn’t die. What a horrible piece of writing to be remembered by. It was something out of a soap opera: “My Darling Parents, I must leave / I know you will, but you must not grieve” sort of thing. I guess it wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t made everything rhyme.

I emptied the aspirin into a cereal bowl. Deciding to get it all over with at once, I stuffed a handful into my mouth. God, the taste. Dusty, bitter aspirin crunched in my mouth like hard-shelled bugs. My gag reflex took over, and I lost about twenty aspirin on my quilt. I chugalugged three cups of ginger ale to get the taste out of my mouth, then went more slowly and swallowed the pills one by one.

After the twenty-sixth aspirin, I stopped counting and concentrated on not throwing up. I didn’t have enough money to get more, and I didn’t want to waste anything. When I got to the bottom of the cereal bowl, I’d had enough. I’d also run out of ginger ale. Bile was leaking into my mouth. Much later, I discovered that overdosing on aspirin is one of the worst ways to go. Aspirin is toxic, but the amount needed to kill a grown
adult is so high that the stomach usually bursts before toxicity kicks in.

My last moments on earth. I didn’t know what to do with them. Nothing seemed appropriate. I lay on my bed and read
People
magazine. Farrah was seeing Ryan O’Neal. Some model was suing Elvis’s estate for palimony. Disco was dying. A Virginia woman was selling Belgian-chocolate-covered caramel apples at twelve dollars apiece to stars who said they had never tasted anything so wonderful.

At midnight I heard the fireworks but was too tired to get out of bed. I drifted into sleep, my ears ringing so loud I could barely hear the party at our neighbor’s house next door.

Some time during the night, I crawled to the bathroom at the end of the hall and vomited thin strings of yellow bile into the toilet.

All the next week I wished I had died. My stomach could hold nothing down. Janet thought it was a stomach flu and got me a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol and some Pepto-Bismol. To this day, I can’t stand the taste of ginger ale.

By some strange quirk of fate, Mama came for me not long after the SPCA took Picnic away. People had complained about Picnic’s affectionate behavior, and when Officer Wilkenson got involved, it was the end.

Aunt Genna was weeping quietly upstairs in her bedroom when the doorbell rang. She was always telling me not to let strangers in, so when I saw the woman waiting on the steps, I just stared at her.

“Auntie’s busy,” I said.

The woman’s face was smooth and pale. “Lisa,” she said. “Don’t you remember me, baby?”

I backed away, shaking my head.

“Come here, baby, let me look at you,” she said, crouching down. “You’ve gotten so big. You remember how I used to sing to you? ‘A-hunting we will go’? Remember?”

Her brown eyes were familiar. Her dark blond hair was highlighted by streaks that shone in the sunlight.

“Aunt Genna doesn’t like me talking to strangers,” I said.

Her face set in a grim expression and I knew who she was. She stood. “Where is your aunt?”

“Upstairs,” I said.

“Let me go talk to her. You wait right here, baby. When I come back, maybe we’ll go shopping. We can get some cotton candy. It used to be your favorite, didn’t it? Would you like that?”

I nodded.

“Stay right here,” the woman said as she walked by me, her blue summer dress swishing. “Right here, baby.”

Her high heels clicked neatly as she went upstairs. I sat in the hallway, on Picnic’s high-backed chair. It still smelled of him, salty, like seaweed.

Something thunked upstairs. I heard a dragging sound. Then the shower started. After endless minutes, the door to the bathroom creaked open. Mama’s high heels clicked across the floor again.

“I’m back!” Mama said cheerfully, bouncing down the stairs. “Your aunt says we can go shopping if you want. She’s taking a bath.” Mama leaned down and whispered, “She wants to be alone.”

She had my backpack over one shoulder. I jumped down from the chair. Mama held out her hand. I hesitated.

“Coming?” she said.

“I have to be back tonight,” I said. “I’m going to Jimmy’s birthday party.”

“Well then,” she said. “Let’s go buy him a present.”

She led me to her car. It was bright blue and she let me sit up front. I couldn’t see over the dashboard because she made me wear a seat belt. Aunt Genna’s house shrank as we drove away. I remember wondering if we were going to get another dog now that Picnic was gone. I remember looking down at Mama’s shoes and seeing little red flecks sprayed across the tips like a splatter paint I’d done in kindergarten. I remember Mama giving me a bad-tasting orange juice, and then I remember nothing.

“Yuck,” I said. “I’m not touching it.”

“No problem,” Amanda said. “I’ll do it.”

Amanda was everyone’s favorite lab partner because she’d do absolutely anything, no matter how gross. We looked down at the body of a dead fetal pig that Amanda had chosen from the vat of formaldehyde. We were supposed to find its heart.

“Oh, God,” I said, as Amanda made the first cut.

For a moment, I was by the lake and Mama was smearing blood on my cheeks.

“Now you’re a real woman,” she said. Goose bumps crawled up my back.

“I don’t know how you can do that,” I said to Amanda.

“Well, you put the knife flat against the skin. Then you press. Then you cut. It’s very simple. Want to try?”

I shook my head and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Chickenshit,” Amanda said.

“Better than being a ghoul,” I said.

“Just my luck to get stuck with a wimp,” she muttered loud enough for me to hear as she poked around the pig’s jellied innards, looking for a small purple lump.

I sat on my lab stool feeling stupid while Amanda hunched over the pig. Not all the chopping and dismemberment in the world could make her queasy. Mama would have liked her. She straightened up then and shoved the scalpel in my face, expecting me to take it from her.

At that moment, I saw the scars on her wrists. When she noticed me staring, she pulled her sleeve down to cover them.

“I slipped,” she said defensively. “And cut myself.”

We faced each other, oblivious to the murmur of the class around us.

“Don’t you say anything,” she said.

Instead of answering, I unbuttoned the cuff of my blouse and rolled it up my arm. I turned my hand over so the palm was up.

The second time I tried to commit suicide was when I was fifteen, a year after my attempt with the aspirin. This time I had done my homework. I knew exactly what I was going to do.

I bought a straight-edged razor.

Janet and Paul were off to the theater. I waved them good-bye cheerfully as they raced through the rain to the car.

I closed the front door and listened to the house. Then I marched upstairs and put on my bikini. I ran a bath, putting in Sea Foam bubble bath and mango bath oil. I stepped into the tub, then lay back slowly, letting the water envelop me as I watched the bathroom fill with steam.

The razor was cold in my hands, cold as a doctor’s stethoscope. I held it underwater to warm it up. Flexed my arms a few times. Inhaled several deep breaths. Shut the water off. It dripped. There was no way I could die with the tap dripping, so I fiddled with that for a few minutes.

Got out of the tub. Took a painkiller. Got back in the tub. Placed the razor in the crook of my elbow. Hands shaking. Pushed it down. It sank into my skin, the tip disappearing. I felt nothing at first. I pulled the razor toward my wrist, but halfway down my forearm the cut began to burn. I yanked the razor away.

Blood welled in the cut. Little beads of blood. I hadn’t gone very deep, just enough for the skin to gape open slightly. Not enough to reach a vein or an artery.

I was shaking so hard the bubbles in the tub were rippling. The wound felt like a huge paper cut. I clutched it, dropping the razor in the tub.

“I can do it,” I said, groping for the razor.

I put it back in the same place and pushed deeper. A thin stream of blood slithered across my arm and dripped into the tub. It burned, it burned.

Paul and Janet came home and found me in front of the TV watching Jimmy Stewart in
It’s a Wonderful Life
. It always makes me cry. So there I was, bawling as Paul and Janet came
through the door. They sat on either side of the armchair and they hugged me.

“What is it, honey?” Paul kissed my forehead.

“No, really, I’m okay. It’s nothing.” I said.

“You sure? You don’t look okay,” Janet said.

I rested my head on her knees, making her dress wet. Paul and Janet said they wanted to know everything about me, but there were things that made them cringe. What would they do if I said, “I’m afraid Mama will find me and kill me”?