In the Forest of Light and Dark (5 page)

    I don't think he believed me though, and judging from the dog-faced look he wore I don’t think he appreciated me blaming him for not having found out what it was my parents were bickering about.
     As we continued our drive over to Owen’s I started feeling somewhat bad for having been so short with Tucker—he was only trying to help after all. So, I had thought about apologizing to him, but at the time I was also really happy that he’d finally stopped asking me questions and I didn’t want to jeopardize opening up that can of worms again. So, I just kept my mouth shut and enjoyed the rest of the ride in peace and quiet.
     Later that night when we had all gotten together again, I was happy to discover that Marzie had managed to keep my secret from everyone else that I might be moving to New York. Her keeping to her word allowed me the ability to enjoy myself for the rest of the evening and it granted me the ability to think a little more deeply about my future without being everyone’s center of attention.
 

*****
 

The next morning after breakfast, just as I was putting away the dishes after having washed them in the basin, my mama caught me a little off guard when she said, “Cera, honey, if you have a minute before you head out, your step daddy and I would like to talk to you.”
    
“Okay,” I responded to her somewhat tentatively before asking, “Is this about the letter? You know the one you got from those two lawyers in New York.”
    
“Yes, it is, honey.” she said, taking my hand in hers before gently guiding me over to the kitchen table. “Now that your step daddy and I have had time to talk things over, we’ve decided that in light of the bank foreclosing on the house and all the other debts we have, not-to-mention your step daddy having been having a hard time finding work.”
    
As if he’s tried,
I thought but would never say that in front of either of them.
     “We’ve decided that we’re going to go ahead and try to make a fresh start in New York.”
    
Woo-fucking-who!
I thought.
Goodbye crummy old Saraland. Goodbye crummy old house. Goodbye crummy old burn-outs and drunks. Goodbye poisoned Gulf, and Goodbye perverted old scumbags like Ray Boone. Keep your dirty, fucking hands off my Ass!
     “So what do you think, honey?” my mama asked, trying to gauge my reaction. “It only has to be for a year, and then if we don’t like it there we can sell the place and come back home.”
    I just stared at her emotionless at first not wanting her to see the giddiness that was bursting inside of me because I knew that she really didn’t want to leave Saraland. She then went on confirming that obvious suspicion when she said, “I really don't like the idea of leaving Saraland… But there’s not much,
if anything,
we can do right now. Trust me, Cera. I'm the last person in the world who wants to move back up to New York, but we’re pretty much out of options for the time being.”
    
“I know, Mama.” I said, trying to sound indifferent to the idea of moving, but still wanting to show her my support. “Whatever's best for the family? I guess. I'll just have to finish my senior year at another school, and make new friends, but it will be okay. I’m sure.” I poured that last part on a little thick, but the way I figured it was… Since we were about to come into all that money I might as well score a few extra sympathy points. I mean… Screw the Trans Am, with that much cash, they can afford to buy me one of those cool, little Wranglers with a rag top, and flood lights. The way I see things moving forward is… There’s no reason this little cowgirl shouldn’t be riding in style from here on out.
 

*****
 

The following two weeks since having received the letter seemed to fly by as we began packing up for the move. During which time I had turned seventeen and my parents had given me a Samsung Galaxy cellular phone as a birthday present. It had just come out on the market a month before and having it instantly made me the envy of all my friends. It was the first time in my life that I had ever owned something that was really nice which also wasn’t second hand. (We’d always been a family that had
New-to-you
items, which was our little way of saying
used.)
     I’d figured that my parents must have used what little money they’d had left to buy it for me since we hadn’t received any of the money from my mama’s inheritance yet, or any money from those sons-of-bitches at BP yet either for that matter. Or, maybe my parents used what little money they had saved up to pay the bank for the mortgage that was behind? But since the house was now in foreclosure and we were leaving Saraland anyways, they’d just figured,
Screw’em! Let’s get Cera a new phone. It’s the least we can do for making her miss out on her senior year with all her friends.
    
Our remaining days in Saraland had gone by in a flash and on the Saturday before we had left for Mt. Harrison my Step Daddy Cade had decided that we should have a yard sale to try to rid ourselves of some of the unwanted crap that we didn’t want to take with us on the move. We had planned on only taking with us a small closed-in trailer hitched up to the back of the Truckster to transport most of our personal belongings, so all of our old, run-down furniture and appliances had to go.
     The day of the sale, all of Saraland’s cockroaches came from out-of-the-woodwork to rummage through our things like they were going to find a Van Gogh hiding somewhere in the piles of trash. In the end, though, most of them had left happy with a piece or two of my Step Daddy Cade’s collection of NASCAR commemorative plates or a couple of his old copies of
Swank
. And by the end of the day, and the sale, we had made more than fourteen hundred dollars, though nine hundred of that came from the sale of the Trans Am.
    
Nine hundred bucks!
I couldn’t fucking believe it. What a steal some jack-off got! I was pissed off to no ends. But my step daddy had said that without it running with new tags he had no real choice but to take whatever he could get for it. But all I knew was that when my parents finally did get that inheritance money I better be getting something a hell of a lot better than that Trans Am.

Moving Day
 

I have to admit that when moving day had finally come I’d reckoned that I would’ve been anxious to leave Saraland. But looking back on it, I was really the opposite with my emotions. I had spent the night before with Tucker sleeping out under the stars in the back of his pickup and it had reminded me of everything that I would be giving up and would miss most about Saraland. (I had told my parents that I would be spending the night at Lettie’s house so that way I could spend my last night with him. I don’t think they had really believed me though, but they let me go anyway.)
     Tucker and I had spent the first part of the night drinking wine coolers while cuddling under a blanket as he gushed on about how much he was going to miss me. It was a little sappy, but it rather made me feel special. And for a little while there I thought the wus was going to start crying, but
thank God
he didn’t.
     Later on in the evening he told me about how he had already begun making plans in his mind to drive all the way up to New York to see me just as soon as he could get the chance to use his vacation time that he had accumulated at his Uncle Fisher’s garage. He kept rambling on about it for most of the night until it had annoyed me to the point where I had decided to give him a goodbye blow job just so I could get him to shut-up and go to sleep. At least after that, and a couple of good swishes of wine cooler to get the taste out my mouth, I actually enjoyed the last night of us being together.
     The next morning my parents and I began the twenty-four hour trip it would take to drive up to Mount Harrison. We had stayed on the road, literally the entire time, except for stopping to eat and when we had spent an overnight in a fleabag motel called
the Trailblazer Motor Inn
located somewhere in Dead Rat, Kentucky. The place’s bed sheets had come pre-stained, and the bathrooms were a certified hepatitis C factory, bio-safety level 4.
     But that wasn’t even the worst part of the trip. The worst part was the half-dozen or so stops my Step Daddy Cade forced us to make to a Waffle Castle to eat. “They don’t have these in New York, so we had better get’em in now.” He would say each time he’d pull into one. “This might be the last time you’ll ever be able to eat here.”
     And, how lucky would we have been if that were true?
     Now, I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who’ve never had the pleasure of eating at a Waffle Castle, so let me just tell you a little sum-um about them. Waffle Castle is an open 24 hour a day, completely filthy, lowbrow greasy spoon that is the first choice of dining for every drunk, slob, dirt-bag, clinically obese, ignorant, chain-smoking redneck, and all-in-all general assholes in the Southern U.S. It’s the Mecca of
What-the-fuck!
     So,
of course,
like all good white trash from Alabama does, we had breakfast, lunch, and dinner at a Waffle Castle the first day of our trip. Then after our over-night in Kentucky, we had it again for breakfast and then again for lunch. We would’ve even had it again for dinner that evening, but we ended up eating at a Burger King due to my mama’s refusal to eat at a Waffle Castle again. That, and the fact that she had also threatened to divorce my step daddy if he even so-much-as tried to pull into another one.
     Thankfully though, the one that we had stopped at for lunch just outside of Pennsylvania was the last one I saw as my step daddy’s threats of them running dry had actually come true by the time we hit Quaker country.
     It was just past 7 p.m. when we’d finally arrived in Mt. Harrison, and I have to say that I couldn’t have been happier to have arrived there. I wasn’t just excited about seeing the new house that we’d be living in (By that point my mama had told me a little about the house she’d grown up in and of the village of Mt. Harrison. From what I had taken from it was that the place was
enormous
, the house that is. Well, at the very least it was a hell-of-a-lot bigger than the two-bedroom ranch we’d been forced to live in back in Alabama. She had also mentioned to me that it sat atop of six acres of our own land. That the property happened to flank more than thirty square miles of state forest which was part of Letchworth State Park.) but I could have screamed if I had to spend even one more minute folded up in that back seat. My ass had grown thoroughly numb more than seventy miles back, and I had to pee. Besides that, by the end of the trip, my Step Daddy Cade had started smelling like a stale, rank fart wrapped in a rotten skunk anus because he had decided to skip a shower at the prestigious Trailblazer Motor Inn.
     As we rolled into the village my mama—who had also started to seem a bit wound up to have arrived—started pointing out a few of the old places that she used to hangout at when she was a kid.
     As she babbled on, I looked out my car window as we passed by what looked like a couple of small supermarkets. I also noticed a post office, a quaint little diner, and I even saw some mom-and-pop specialty stores that looked like they would sell souvenirs and other oddities. There was a coin laundry mat and a hardware store. And at the center the village was a square that had a gazebo at its core. I had imagined that was probably where the community would gatherer for holiday events or possibly even a farmer’s market during the summer.
     “Look, Cera!” my mama excitedly exclaimed while cocking her head around and swiveling it almost a hundred eighty degrees to look back at me. “That building there is the high school. That’s where you’ll be going to school next month.”
     The two-story, brown-brick building had Mount Harrison High School engraved into its cement archway just above the main doorway. As we drove past, I could see that the place had tennis courts, a runner’s track that encircled a football field to the east and beyond that laid a large wooden playground which I had assumed was for an elementary school that might have been the small, adjacent building not much further down the road. That building was also canvassed in the same color and style of brown-brick that adorned the high school.
     “Look… They got a football field. So, they must have a team here.” Step Daddy Cade then said to us as he rubbernecked his head out the car window like a moron. “Why don’tcha try out for cheerleadin’ this year?”
    
Cheerleading? Is he fucking kidding me?
I thought, but never answered him.
     (Now, I don’t have anything against cheerleaders, bless their hearts. But, there’s no-way I was ever going to be dumb enough or whore enough to ever be a cheerleader.)
   
 
It was just a few blocks after we’d passed the high school when my mama had told my step daddy to make a right, and as he made the turn I saw a street sign at the corner that read Collings Avenue. I had recognized it from the letter that Mama had received from my grandmother’s estate lawyers as being the street in which my Grandmother Lyanna’s house was located. We were finally there.
     My first thought was that the street appeared picturesque. All the houses looked well-maintained and the place seemed to have a lot of very large, old-growth trees in all the yards. Their enormous branches and canvases of leaves working together to swallow up the scenery behind them like they were trying to keep what lay beyond a secret. I recognized a few of the trees as oaks, others as maples. There was also a myriad of pines scattered throughout the entire area which Mama had said that most of the larger ones were well over two hundred-years-old.
     As we passed by one particular house on the street, I noticed a couple of small boys playing in their front yard with a basketball-sized red-rubber ball that bounces. As the boys saw our station wagon approach they stopped playing and took to staring at us as we passed. The smaller of the two  sticking out his tongue at me when he noticed me watching him. So, I playfully stuck mine right back at him to see the kind of rise I would get out of him, but all he did was stare back at me with a sour puss.
     Further down the road my mama pointed to the right and said to my step daddy, “In there… There!” as the road began to bank into a wide-left curve.
     At the time I couldn’t even tell that there was even a driveway there. Not with all the over-grown shrubs and trees that lined the edges of the roadway like a colonnade. But it was there, tucked away among the foliage.
     As the Pontiac ascended up the curving driveway, I looked out my window but couldn’t see my grandmother’s house just yet on account of the driveway snaking through a series of ‘S’ curves as it banked around a dozen or so impressively large maples.
     But then, there it was slowly coming into view. It was bigger than I had imagined it in my mind. Its grey-brick façade, making it look almost impenetrable and it had a row of evenly spaced dormer windows on the upper floor that peered out like gun turrets. Two massive maples stood in the front yard like giant sentinels standing guard over a castle. There was a large bowed-out window on the first floor that I’d figured was a living room, and a two-car garage that stood on the opposite end. The yard—at least the part that was mowed—stretched out and around the west side of the house disappearing into the rear of the property. There was easily enough room to build horseshoe pits and to set up a volleyball net, and maybe even have a fire pit if we wanted.
     “Behind the house, past the yard and just down a small escarpment is the Genesee River. And, just beyond that lay the state forest I’d mentioned.” My mama said to me as the Pontiac slowly braked to a squeaky stop.
     “Sounds pretty cool, I’ll have to check it out.” I told her giving her a perfunctory answer as I exited the vehicle, but I wasn’t really listening to her. At the time I was too eager to get out of the car and check things out for myself rather than stay and listen to what she or anybody else had to say.
     “Yeah, but wait for me though, okay, honey?” My mama, then said while looking back at me over the roof of the car. “Those woods are really big and dangerous. You can get yourself turned around in them pretty fast. As I was growing up we’d hear stories all the time on the news about a how kid or some hiker would get lost in these woods—search and rescue having to eventually find the body. And, it was a guarantee that every summer somebody would die after having fallen into the gorge in the state park.”
     “Puh-
lease,”
I said, dismissing her warnings. “I’ve been playing and hanging out in the snake-infested woods and swamps of the Gulf my whole life. You think I’m about to get lost in the woods of New York—Get real.”
     “I’m just saying…” Mama then defensively shot back at me, only this time sounding a-little-bit overprotective. “These woods around here have their own personality—they can play tricks on you. There’s a lot of history in this forest is all, and most of it is negative. So, I want you sticking around with me for a while until you get your bearings, okay?”
     “Yeah, yeah,” I said, dismissing her again, to which this time my candor caused my step daddy to interject snapping at me with, “Would you just do what your mama asks?
Je-zus
.” and then he mumbled something under his breath along the lines of,
“Sheesh, the mouth on that girl.”
     We then entered the house through the front door—my mama having had the keys mailed to her a couple of weeks earlier—and upon entering I peered up in marvel at the entryway’s vaulted ceiling. I then ducked quickly into the first room to my left, disappearing like a kid on an exploring adventure. It happened that it was the room with the big, bowed-out window that I’d seen from the driveway, and I was correct in that it was a family room of some sort or maybe even a drawing-room because I didn’t see a television anywhere. Standing forlornly tucked away in a corner was a grandfather clock and at the center of the room were two sofas each that faced each other. Having only been separated by a glass coffee table with a wood frame that nestled itself in between them.
     Everything in the room looked expensive to me—as if it were all antiques. (But honestly, what did I know? Up to that point in my life any piece of furniture that didn’t have its cushions turned over to hide the cat piss stains on it, I would’ve considered a Rembrandt.)
     The room also had pictures hanging all over the walls and resting on the furniture. I took to looking at them while my parents were busy off exploring other parts of the house.
     Most of the photos were of people I didn’t recognize, but the one constant in many of them was a woman who I had assumed must have been my Grandmother Lyanna. Though, she didn’t quite look like the woman in the small photograph my mama had kept in her bedroom back in Saraland.
     At times when I had thought of my grandmother in my mind’s eye, I couldn’t help but pictured her as a short, frail, old woman with snow-white hair, tired eyes, and wrinkly sagging skin to go along with a hunched back. But I knew that had been never true. The woman in these pictures wasn’t like that at all.
     I could also say that most of the photographs weren’t really all that old either; both from the style of film they’d been printed on and by the style of clothing in which the people in them were wearing.
     My grandmother—if that’s who the woman in the photos indeed was—had still been a quite youthful looking woman, beautiful even. She had long, raven-black hair, and a well-defined chin. Her eyes were hauntingly bright green like emeralds shimmering on a black canvas, and they gazed out as if filled with knowledge or a wisdom that went deeper than what her age would’ve had you believe. Around her neck she wore a silver pendant that had been unfortunately just too small in any of the photos for me to see clearly. But, her smile was what I liked the most about her, it was what I would’ve had to have called mischievous. Like that of someone who kept a secret that they weren’t about to share with anyone anytime soon. It reminded me a little of the Mona Lisa.