Pieces of My Mother (20 page)

A boyfriend appears suddenly, unexpectedly. He asks for my phone number at a party, and a week later, I've fallen into his world. His name is Hannon, and he attends the rival school across town. I was taken by his smile and his forwardness in asking for my phone number within minutes of meeting. I was also looking for some kind of change. Now, I'm not feeling so sure.

We're driving off county-maintained roads in Hannon's 442 Oldsmobile with white racing stripes on the hood. I ask him if he's ever been on these back roads.

“Yeah, once with my old girlfriend,” he says.

He turns off the headlights, laughs, and says he can drive this road by Braille. I'm grateful for the full moon that's watching over us.

I'm not afraid of Hannon, but I'm uneasy that we're going to get stuck out here and I'll be home late again. He's brought me home late every time he's taken me out in his 442.

We park at the end of the dark road.

“Why are we stopping?” I ask.

“So we can be alone,” he says, smiling.

“I can't be late again,” I say. “My dad is going to kill me.”

“Screw your dad. You're with me.”

I can tell he's had too many beers by the edginess in his voice. He reaches under his seat, pulls out another can of Budweiser, and hands it to me.

“I'm okay.”

“Are you kidding? Don't be a lightweight. Let's get wasted.”

I don't want to get wasted. I want to talk about something other than getting drunk.

I flip on the interior light. I show him my hands. I make a fist to show him how the blue veins on the top of my left hand form a peace sign. I trace the outline of the symbol with my finger so he can follow.

“Cool,” he says.

He starts kissing me in a way I don't want to be kissed. Sloppy and drunk. I pull away.

“You have to look at my hands.”

“Why?”

“Please just look,” I say.

I uncurl my fists as if I am revealing a secret. I lay my hands open for him to see—and for the first time he sees my flat palms covered with a map of intricate lines. Lifelines and heart lines going in every direction. Lines that normally don't appear on palms. More lines than on his mother's hands.

“Do you think there are too many lines?” I ask. I want him to look closely. I want him to admire them like rare etchings.

But he grabs my wrists. “I don't really care about your hands.”

He pushes himself on top of me. Clumsy, with his pants on, he grinds against my hips. I lie still underneath him on the leather seat, closing my fists and wishing I hadn't made such a big deal about my hands. There is nothing special about them. I reach for the beer underneath the seat even though I don't want it. I'm out of things to offer. I'll get wasted and disappear into his world because I have nothing to lose anymore. I tilt my head back so I can see the sky above, the Little Dipper, and a million stars.

The sharp gravel pushes into the arches of my bare feet. I hold my brown shoes and my purse against my chest to stop my heart from beating so hard. Getting safely across the gravel driveway that leads to our yellow house without being heard is close to torture at two o'clock in the morning. I've watched how our calico cat does it. Every step is low to the ground, measured and silent. Her eyes don't even blink as she threads her body through the grass. She's an expert but I have to stand for minutes at a time between each small movement here in the dark. Every step is a land mine of noisy, shifting gravel. It doesn't help that I'm drunk.

I am getting away with too much lately. I am as clever as my brothers now at creeping through the back windows late at night and telling lies, both the white kind and the black kind. I'm not one of the BPs (the beautiful people) at school because I don't hang out with those girls who have perfectly flipped hair and painted-on French jeans. And I don't hang around with the Ben Boys. They're so into their thin white T-shirts, steel-toed boots, and black Ben Davis pants. And I'm not a stoner like Jamie and his friends who practically own the back lot behind the gym, the creek, and the field at lunchtime. I may be uncategorized—a thin wisp of a girl looking for a role to play.

I take another step toward the yellow house and cross my fingers, hope to die that my dad is either not home or already asleep. I won't know until I get past the blackberry bushes, where I'll be able to see if his van is parked under the laurel tree. If it's not there, then it's a quick forty-second dash across the rest of the driveway, up the hillside, and in through the back door before he rolls in from the Bit-a-Honey downtown. If the van is parked under the laurel tree, then it's another twenty-minute cat creep across the gravel and in through the window.

I wait for a few minutes in the stretch of driveway between the overgrown blackberry thicket and the hedge of pink tea roses. This is where time always stops. Once I round this curve, everything changes and I am no longer protected by the branches of ripe fruit and the scent of a hundred flowers. Within this small stretch of space, between the blackberries and the tea roses, I wait as long as I can.

I'm supposed to be the good girl, the fair princess in the house of males. But I'm not. When I asked my dad what he would do if he found out that I started smoking cigarettes (which I don't), he didn't pause. He didn't hesitate. “I'd disown you,” he said.

I asked him why it was okay for everyone else, including Jamie and Eden, to smoke but not me.

“Because you're different. You're smarter than that,” he said.

That's what pisses me off the most. What makes him think I'm so different? Why shouldn't I be as messed up as the rest of us? I'm jumping off the pier with my brothers. We're holding hands, sinking down into the soft sand underwater. Lola asks,
Melissa, you want to get high after school? Okay, sure.
My boyfriend asks,
Melissa, you want do some lines of cocaine at the drive-in? All right.
I keep my thoughts and answers simple because I don't want to think or feel too much.

There is something good about being numb. The dentist slowly pushes in that long needle of Novocain for a reason. My boyfriend hands me a small mirror lined with clean, white lines of powder for that same reason. He also tells me I'm a lightweight and a cheap date because I don't require much. My skinny frame has its limit. I cheat on a test if I need to because I'm not naturally smart like Lola. I've learned how to slip almost microscopic cheat sheets into the taped cuffs of my jeans.

I say yes to every party and make sure I slam a beer quickly so that I can feel the buzz as soon as possible. At first I just drank keg beer, but now Jell-O shots and cocaine are lined up in the back rooms of these parties and I get invited in. I'm not the one who rolls up the dollar bill; I'm just the one who uses it. It's always free. I rub the leftover flakes into my gums. Numbness feels great.

I try not to think about my actions and take an uneven step around the corner. Fully lit, our big yellow farmhouse stares down at me in disapproval. The van is not under the laurel tree, but someone's car is here. A green Chevy Nova parked sideways beneath the oak tree that belongs to one of Jamie's Ben Boy friends. They usually hang out downstairs drinking and smoking pot if my dad isn't home.

I quicken my pace toward the window to my bedroom, now knowing that the headlights from my dad's van could come around the corner any second, knowing that whoever is here could suddenly walk out the front door. I need to slip into my room without being detected. These days, more than ever, I need the shelter of my room, where the world feels contained and in order.

I
can
still
be
the
good
girl
, I think. If only everything outside of the yellow house wasn't moving so fast.

I lift up the window to my room. The old panes hesitate from too many layers of paint. The window halfway open, I slide my stomach over the sill and land with a quiet thump inside my room with a sigh of relief. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I'm looking for the label that says “Drink Me.” I'm looking for the key to that tiny door. I want to be small again.

It's past midnight. I check in with Kim, who is still awake, to see if he needs help with anything. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses rests on the bridge of his nose, and a second pair is perched on top of his head. He lifts his eyes from the pages of his paperback and shakes his head, the picture of strength. “No, everything is okay for now.”

I'm glad my mom has this stoic man by her side.

“Good night, Mom,” I say from the doorway.

I walk upstairs and call my husband and explain that she's still hanging in there.

“You can stay longer if you need to,” he says to me.

“I can't. I don't know what the right thing to do is anymore.”

“What's going on?”

“I miss you guys.”

“We miss you too.”

When I hang up, I feel irritable. As tough as these last days with my mom are, I know that I have to switch roles as soon as I return home. I will lose the solitude I have had here. Instead, I will be consumed by housework and tending to what the kids need—the cleaning, scheduling, getting them to and from school, buying their school supplies, making their meals, organizing their visits with friends, paying the bills, and playing the part of the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, the toilet cleaner, the laundry maker.

The house is sure to be a complete mess when I return. It's a domestic battle that I lose every day. As much as I want to tell the kids and Anthony to clean up their crap, it's easier for me just to do it myself. The filthy kitchen counters and the whole goddamn kitchen itself are enough to drive a parent mad.

I imagine that most mothers—even if just for a fleeting moment when the kids are screaming and your spouse is being a jerk and the bills are late again and you're just desperate for a moment of peace—at some point long to just drop everything and pick up a new life, a calm life, a free life to pursue their passions and ideas without any responsibilities to tie them down.

Right now though, it's late, and I need to decide whether to stay or leave Olympia. I don't want to be angry with my mom but I am. I resent that she has pulled me away from my family during Christmas. I've been completely detached from my kids since I've arrived. And I know it's not her fault or intention, but the anger in me is rising.

I should be screaming at myself for being a coward. I selfishly wanted to be next to her when she closed her eyes and stopped breathing. I childishly wanted to hold her hand, thinking it would make up for all the years she wasn't there to hold mine. But I know now that I'm not going to be here for that moment. Even so, I want nothing more now than for her to die while I'm still here. Not in two days, not in twelve. Here and now.

I'm seventeen, sitting in the slippery backseat of a beat-up orange Camaro with my boyfriend and a couple guys I hardly know. Hannon is trying to impress them with his altered California ID. I can't tell if I'm feeling carsick or just tired of this endless game of getting high. When I was nine, I'd sometimes watch the pink-eyed mice in the window at Scooter's Pet Shop frantically spinning on their wheels and wonder if they understood they weren't going anywhere at all. That's how I'm feeling now.

I didn't particularly want to go on this overnight trip, but Hannon said that we might have a chance to water-ski on the lake and that's something I'd love to do. From the minute we left Novato, the driving has been nothing less than reckless. We're speeding close to sixty around tight one-lane roads, the guys cheering when the tires screech. I anchor my elbow into the armrest and close my eyes each time the car flies around the sharp turns.

“Don't worry. I know where the cops stake out this road,” says the guy behind the wheel.

He pumps the brakes, rocking us back and forth as we pull into a gas station halfway up the mountain. One more stop to score another twelve-pack and stock up on Red Vines candy.

Hannon shoves his fake ID into his wallet and jumps out of the car with giddiness in his step. His friend Marty follows, with a baseball cap pulled down to his eyebrows.

“I'm going to head across the street,” I say. But they don't hear me.

A sign that says “Antiques” in hand-painted gold letters is calling my name.

“What are you doing?” Hannon yells to me.

“I just want to take a look. Real quick. I promise.” The wind pushes my gauze skirt up as I cross the road.

When I open the door to the shop, the scent of furniture polish and musty paper invites me in. French wax, lemon oil, and Wright's Silver Cream—the familiar smells from my father's first antique store in Santa Rosa. The woman behind the counter nods at me and smiles politely.

There are oak tables with feet carved like lion's paws, brass lamps, stacks of leather-bound books, and colorful glassware lighting up the windowsill and throwing prisms of color across the floor. I suddenly want to be lost here in the quiet space. Pink and yellow Depression glass, cranberry and cobalt vases. I miss the days when I would spend hours exploring my dad's shop, discovering the hidden drawers inside of antique desks and imagining the things I could stow away in them.

I set my hand against the glass of a lighted showcase filled with a collection of paperweights. The colorful millefiori catches my attention—a compact arrangement of delicate pink and sapphire-blue flowers surrounded by vibrant green stalks and leaves.

“Millefiori. Italian for a million flowers,” my dad taught me a long time ago. I love the idea of a million flowers all contained inside the glass.

Hannon raps his fist against the outside of the shop window.

I don't want to get back in the car and drive to Clear Lake.

“We're going. Come on!” he yells.

Goddamn it. I wish we weren't so far from home.

I wedge myself into the backseat. Before I can even buckle my seat belt, the orange Camaro squeals out of the gas station. The driver, Jay, looks back at me from his rearview mirror. His eyes are deep green and sandy, like the kelp that my brothers and I used to pull from the water at Agate Beach. He asks me if I like antiques.

“I do,” I say.

“Yeah, me too,” he says. “I love that old stuff with a history.”

Wow, this guy might be more interesting than I imagined. Before our conversation even starts, Hannon, hardly discreet, reaches behind me and snaps open my bra.

“You don't need that thing on,” he says. “Marty, here, will agree.”

I cast him an angry look and he laughs at me. His laughter pulls at the back of my neck with the tension of a taut slingshot. I fall silent again and turn my attention to everything outside the car—the blur of redwoods and pines, the late-afternoon sun blinking and finally setting behind us.

It's dark by the time we pull into a narrow dirt driveway. The cabin in Clear Lake is not what I expected. There are bare bulbs hanging from yellow electrical cords, a few pieces of furniture, and several thin mattresses tossed on the floor. Jay explains that it's kind of a party pad until his parents get the flooring and plasterboard in.

“This is fucking awesome!” Hannon calls out. His voice echoes through the empty rooms of the house. “This is like the ultimate place to get hammered, dude.”

Hannon and Marty are slaphappy, checking out the place.

“We've even got a brew freezer,” says Hannon, high-fiving Marty and Jay. He's an idiot when it comes to drinking.

Hannon tosses a can of beer at me from across the room. I let it fall on the flimsy mattress at my feet. I want to be a thousand miles from here, and I don't know how to say it.

In the bathroom, I apply a line of black eyeliner and paint my lips with tinted lip gloss. I catch my distorted reflection in the cabinet mirror propped up against the shower stall. My mom told me that it's “unfortunate” I inherited my father's nose, but that I could always get it “bobbed” when I turn eighteen. If she hadn't said that, I might feel okay about my nose. It's my entire body that I hate lately.

I want to change. I want something to wake me up. I don't want to be with this guy. But I am the one who packed a toothbrush, a change of clothes, and a new stick of black eyeliner, and then stepped into the orange Camaro. I am the one who lied to my dad and told him I was spending the night at a girlfriend's house.

Hannon bangs on the door. “I need to take a piss,” he says.

I'm not friendly to him. It's freezing in this shitty cabin.

“Why aren't you out here getting hammered?” he says. “Come on, drink up.”

“I don't really feel like it.”

“Whoa, what's up with you?”

I walk past him outside to the porch and he follows. A layer of thick fog has surrounded the cabin since we arrived. The tall pines overhead rustle in the dark like the spirits of old men.

I am precise with my words. “I'm getting tired of this whole getting-wasted thing. Is that what you really like? Is that all you want to do?”

“Fuck yeah. That's what we came here for.”

“Well, I'm not sure that's what I want anymore.”

“Well, what do you want then?”

This is always where I chicken out. The question that silences me.

“I don't know. Maybe I just want to go home.”

He laughs. “Well you're shit out of luck on that.” His cockiness warns me that the alcohol has already settled in.

“Home?” he says. “I mean
what
the
fuck
is at home for you? Your dad is most likely out drinking at the bars. Hammered. Your mom doesn't even live in the same state. She's so smart that she knows every word in the dictionary. But remind me again, what is she doing now? Is she still sticking labels on tuna cans? And your brothers? They're going off the fuckin' deep end.”

“It wasn't tuna, Hannon. She's a cocktail waitress now.”

“Damn,” he continues. “You ever heard that saying that the apple never falls far from the tree? You think you're something special?”

He knows how to snap my ribs without even hitting them. I look up at the sky for visible stars that might save me from believing his words. I can smell his breath, predict what's coming next. He moves in close to me. “I've got to train you better.”

I've heard this speech so many times. How he “trained” his parents to respect him and now he's got to train me. I hate that I don't fight back. But I am the peacekeeper, the nice girl, the skinny toothpick holding up the whole house where my dad and brothers and I live.

Jay swings the door open. “You guys coming in or what?”

Hannon looks at me. “Suit yourself, but I'm going to get drunk and have fun—fun with a capital
F
.”

I sit down on the makeshift mattress-couch and watch the three of them laughing, drinking, and passing a joint back and forth. The dinner is cheese puffs, Red Vines, and a tub of pepperoni sticks. I tell Hannon that I will have a beer after all, and he brings me an open can from the freezer. I sip on it just to keep the peace while the guys launch into a rowdy game of quarters. Maybe if there were another girl here, things wouldn't be as bad. Jay says his girlfriend ditched out at the last minute. Then again, I'm used to being the only girl. I live in a house of boys.

Hannon gets up, plants a sloppy kiss on my mouth, and runs his hand along my waist.

“How are you feeling? Did you like that beer?” he asks. He takes the can out of my hand and tilts it back and forth.

“There are still a couple more sips in here.” He's smirking. “I put something special in it for you—a little upper to keep you happy.” He squeezes my thigh tightly.

I want to jump up and hit him. But then I think he must be lying.

“Please tell me you wouldn't do that.”

“Just a little something.” He winks. “It won't hurt you.”

My body starts shaking. And then my stomach curls into a knot. I want to vomit. I should punch him in the mouth.

“You fucking bastard!”

The room is silent. All three of them stare at me. I stand up and walk toward the door, trying to contain myself. When I reach for the doorknob, I can see myself in two places at once. I'm sitting with the guys back on the striped mattress. But I'm also standing in front of the door. It's like I got up too quickly and walked out of my body. I stand still for a second or two, wondering how to reconnect myself, how to snap my parts back together. And then I walk out of the cabin with no idea where I'm going. I don't care if I get lost this time.

I hear Hannon's voice trailing, “Don't worry. She's fine. She just needs to mellow out.”

My high heels clack against the pavement on the main road. Who the fuck does he think he is, tricking me, putting something into my drink to alter my state? He's held onto me by belittling me constantly—threatening that if I ever tried to break up with him, he would simply “erase me” from his mind. He said it would take him exactly two weeks, and then it would be as if I never existed.

The problem is, I'm weak. I'm desperate for someone to like me, approve of me, stay with me. I wanted a boyfriend so badly that I took the first offer that came along. Doesn't matter that it also happened to be the crappiest offer. He likes to remind me that I could never do any better than him.

The sound of my heels clicking in the stillness of the night starts to unnerve me. I pick up my shoe and rub my finger along the bottom where the metal point has pushed through the white leather. I put the shoe back on and move toward the dirt path alongside the road. Headlights creep up from behind me like a stage spotlight. I won't turn around because I'm not going to talk to him or his fucked-up friends. The headlights grow wider and fill the landscape with light. I refuse to turn my head, refuse to be mocked. The noisy engine edges up almost parallel to me.

“You lost, sweetheart?”

It's a man's voice. A voice I have never heard.

I turn my head and am startled by the paleness of the man's face staring at me. A man with thick lips and a deep, receding hairline—skin that looks as though it has never seen sunlight. He looks almost familiar.

“Can I offer you a ride?”

I don't stop walking or change my pace.

His car is a long, maroon sedan of some sort. A Buick or a Plymouth. What does it matter really? I smell the gasoline fumes as he idles alongside me. A Pontiac, maybe? I am acutely aware of how I must appear, walking alone down the road on a chilly night. I've got on a pair of scuffed-up white pumps, a thin gauze skirt, and a tiny sweater with no bra.

“No, that's all right,” I say.

“You look like you're lost, Little Sheba,” he says.

Did he
really
just call me that? So maybe he's a creep, but what if this is a chance to actually catch a ride out of here? When my mom used to pick up hitchhikers, it would scare the hell out of me. She said she'd look carefully at their eyes and use her best judgment before letting them in the car. I don't recall her ever turning someone down. What else did she consider in those moments before making her decision?

I take another glance. And then I realize what's familiar about him. He looks like the Joker from the
Batman
episodes my brothers used to watch after school. A chill runs up my spine. I'm not getting in the car with the Joker.

“I'm just walking home,” I say.

If I keep my feet moving and keep talking to him, I can to get to the next lot where there's a cabin.

“Do you live around here?” I ask.

“Sort of,” he says.

My breath is erratic and visible. I'm wondering what exactly was in that pill anyway. Is it just the mystery pill that's got my heart pounding?

Keep
walking. Keep talking to the Joker.

A yellow light ahead, a single halo on a wrap-around porch.

“Get in,” he says.

“I live right here. I'll see you. Later.”

And I'm sprinting like a deer across the grass and toward the light. His car stays idling on the side of road. I can feel him watching my back, waiting to see if I walk in that front door. I can't knock and have nobody answer, so I step onto the porch and then run toward the back of the cabin. Crouched beneath a darkened window, I grab onto my arms to stop them from shaking.

Half a minute and I creep off the porch to the woods behind the house. I keep moving, my heels pushing into the soft dirt, my hand touching the branches of trees as I walk. I travel backward in the direction that I came from, staying away from the main road because I never want to see that creep again. I imagine him tricking me just like Hannon tricked me, this Joker showing up on the trail in front of me, grabbing me, pushing me down into the earth, my hand grabbing at the dark soil, my scream silenced by the stars.