Something Wicked (19 page)

“How’s Butt doing?” he asks as I climb out of his bed to get home before my mom wakes up.

“I’ve named him Ralph. But don’t worry, I’m going to give him back this week. He’s miserable living with me. He basically lives under my bed.”

“Well, I got something for Ralph.” He reaches for his jeans on the floor, and into the pocket. I prepare myself for some stupid-ass joke, but instead he pulls out this half-chewed little rubber mouse with wire whiskers. I smile. “It’s not new,” he says. “It’s from my sister’s cat.”

I reach over and take it. This is the grey part of people I was talking about, this fuzzy space where you just can’t easily dismiss people anymore.

“Look at your smile,” he teases, all proud of himself.

I hold my hand up in front of my face to hide it. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of thinking he’s a good person. I reach down and punch his firm stomach. “Shut up,” I say. Then I take off my clothes and get back into bed.

Forty-One

My
mom finds me in the laundry room in the basement of the building on Tuesday night. I’m sitting on the dryer, doing my math homework. I’ve been hiding down here as much as possible, whenever I have to be at home and she’s around. We aren’t getting along. She’s like a yo-yo. Sometimes she’s all needy, and then other times (when she’s mad at me) she punishes me by shutting her door and ignoring me and making me feel like she can’t stand the sight of me.

“There you are,” she says, with that sappy look on her face, all droopy-eyed, sad, and pensive.

I’m trapped.

She sits down on the white plastic chair, pulls one of the laundry baskets toward her, and starts sorting our socks and underwear. She looks like hell—straggly hair, no makeup, purplish bags under her eyes.

“Is it Ricky’s?” I ask, doing the math and figuring her stress must be that it’s probably not Scott’s.

She sighs. “I don’t know.”

“Giovanni’s?”

She laughs. “No. Impossible.”

“Why?”

“We used protection.”

“Ichhh.” I make a face. Somehow, the thought of my mom having anything to do with a condom is disgusting. “They’re not a hundred percent, you know.”

She glares at me in response. “Since when did you become a sex education teacher?”

“Why don’t you have an abortion?” I offer.

“Never.” She rejects the idea quickly and lowers her hand to her belly. “Out of the question.”

I’m unsure what to say to her next. She sits there all mopey, like she wants me to make things better or say the right thing—but what? “You’ll be okay”? “You’ll make a great mom”? I look to the door, wishing someone would come to rescue me. Someone older and wiser and optimistic.

I try to think of what my mom would say to me if I told her I was pregnant. I wish I were. I wish I had sliced open my skin and pulled out that birth control capsule five months ago. I wish I had Michael’s baby in me right now. Is that what my mom was doing—trying to hold on to someone?

“We’ll get through it, Mom,” I say to her, but then instantly regret my words. I should have said
You
, not
We
.
You
will get through it. Because if she thinks I’m taking care of some baby, she’s got another thing coming. I have my own problems. I start to feel really angry. Like,
Screw you for dumping this crap on me. You’re an adult. You should know the answers.

She takes my supportive comment as an invitation to complain. She says she wakes up every morning feeling like she just wants to crawl back into bed. She says she can’t even walk past the fridge without gagging. And she’s so tired, she can barely stay awake after noon. Part of me worries that she’s drinking even though she promised she would stop and even
though I checked all the cupboards and her drawers and there

was no sign of anything.

She sighs again. “Oh … I just don’t know what to do.”

I get up to walk out ’cause I’m so angry and I don’t want to have a fight. As I pass her, I say, “I’ll get extra hours at the clinic.”

“It’s okay, Hon. It’s my problem. I’ll figure something out.”

I shake my head and roll my eyes. Whatever. I know these complaints mean she’s going to stop working soon. “Well, I’ll get some more hours anyway,” I say, and walk out.

I have no faith in her working it out. And I won’t go to a shelter again. And I won’t take care of her like I did after Bradley died and my mom vacated her body for about a year, and returned all patched up from therapy. This time I’m old enough to do something about it. This time I’m not going down with her.

Forty-Two

Up,
up, up.

Syphilis keeps straining against his rock. Doomed to the eternal attempt with no reward.

Up, up, up out of bed I get.

It’s strange, but the worse my mother’s life gets, the more inspired I become about my own. It’s one thing to mess up my own life, but I’ll be damned if I let my mother screw me up because of her mistakes. “You decide to be happy,” Uncle Freestyle tells me.“It’s a decision.” I’m not entirely sure I agree, but for some bizarre reason I get the notion that maybe all the recent events of my life can be seen as necessary things that are forcing me off a certain road and onto another that (unknowingly) is leading to success. Maybe my mom’s pregnancy is just the thing I need to kick me in the butt and get me to move into action.

Sometimes I wonder where these bursts of optimism come from, the ones that get me out of bed the first time my alarm
goes off even though experience has told me that there’s no point, I’ll end up in the same place I started from. But like Ms. Dally says, we make our bed each day knowing that we’ll only mess it up again that night. Sometimes the only point to anything is the attempt, because the alternative, never trying, can only lead to inevitable doom.

I start to make plans to move out, get a second job, maybe even have my own apartment. At school, I tell Ms. Dally that I want to make a resumé so I can find work to fill the gaps in between my veterinary clinic shifts. When I say this, it’s like I just told her she won a thousand dollars, because she gets all excited and starts putting piles of papers and folders and booklets on my desk, and for a second I regret having said anything because it looks like too much work. But then she guides me toward the computer and we start writing my resumé right away using a special program, and it looks so professional to see my name in bold at the top of the page. After, we write lists of places where I’ll drop it off: McDonald’s, Coffee Time, Walmart.

I feel so good about everything, for the first time I tell her about wanting to be a veterinarian.

“Fantastic, Melissa. You’re certainly off to a good start with your job.And you’re great at math,” she says in such a teacherish tone that I quickly look over my shoulder to make sure no one is listening. I feel silly that I’m feeling all proud about her dumb comment, like I’m some goody-goody teacher’s pet.

All week I work on a career studies project on veterinarians. I spend a lot of time researching on the internet, and I even interview Dr. Keystone at the clinic. My mom buys me a cool Duo-Tang with a clear plastic cover to put the project inside, and when I give it to Ms. Dally she exhales in elation. For the first time in my life, I’m actually proud of something I’ve done in school.

Forty-Three

Up.
Up. Up.

I find the paper Eric gave me, call the group home and make an appointment. The supervisor, Pat, takes me on a tour of a huge old-lady house that feels a hundred years old. Even the furniture smells old and musty. At first, I think it is a mistake to be there and I almost walk out. But then I see a list of names on the fridge and some photos, and it turns out the group home is the same one that Jasmyn and Snow, a pregnant girl who used to go to the day program, are living at.

I stop and point to the photo. “I know these girls.”

Pat is immediately at my side. “You do?”

“Yeah, Snow and Jasmyn.”

“Ah!” She raises an open hand to stop me from speaking. “You shouldn’t have told me any names. We’re unable to discuss the whereabouts of our clients. And it doesn’t help in your application if you know current residents. It’s necessary for us to keep a safe mix of girls here.”

Residents? Clients? Safe mix of girls? What is this place?

“Can we wear shoes?” I ask sarcastically.

She smiles, knowing exactly what I’m saying. “It’s not prison. You can wear shoes.”

Pat’s smart. I like that. I like her.

At the end of the tour, we sit in this teeny room by the front door, crammed with a desk, a computer, and a futon couch. There’s barely enough room to stand. I take a seat, squashed up at the desk, and fill out an application. Then Pat gives me a list of house rules to help me decide if it’s the right place for me. The list is long. Real long. She tells me if I want to continue with the application, we’d have a few more meetings. “You know, Melissa, you
might
actually enjoy living here. Many girls do.”

“Hmmm … maybe,” I respond, wondering if that would be possible. How could I live with so many rules and a bunch of girls knowing each other’s business 24 –7? Arts and Crafts Night and day trips to Wonderland sound all right, though, as long as the group home pays for everything.

Pat tells me to take a few days to think about it. If I’m interested, I can call her back and she’ll set up the last two meetings, one with my mom and one more with just me. Then I can move in right after that. I thank her, take the orientation envelope, and leave.

I decide to walk a few blocks before I hop on the bus. I smoke three cigarettes in a row, trying to work out what’s on my mind. Now that the group home might be a reality, I’m feeling kind of scared. It’s like committing yourself to jail—you’d have to be insane to do it. But I look at my life and what’s happening, and I’m only sixteen. It can only get worse. My mom will never give me rules, and even if she did, I wouldn’t follow them. And I can’t get my own apartment yet because
I don’t have the money. Or if I wanted to save up for first and last month’s rent, I’d have to quit my job at the animal hospital to get another one that pays better. I could move in with someone, like Jasmyn’s friend, but then I’d only party all the time. And for sure I’d end up dropping out of school. And then what?

I turn onto a side street to take a shortcut. This car speeds past and—SPLAT!—a squirrel appears from beneath the tire. I can’t believe it! It’s horrifying! A black blob is lying on the road about twenty metres up ahead, and just as I’m about to rush out to see if I can help it, I see this little baby squirrel, all patchy fur and twitchy tail, tentatively move toward the body. It pauses and then approaches slowly to nudge the mother with its little nose. It pokes and nudges and steps back, then climbs right on top of her and nudges more, carefully inspecting. An approaching car scares it away up a tree, but then it comes back again, climbing up on her.

“Ooohhhh!” I shout, and hurry my pace, worried that the baby will get run over too. When I reach the body, the baby runs up the tree again and waits on a low branch, watching me inspect the remains: eyes bulging out, lower body squashed, blood coming out of its bum. Totally dead.

I don’t want to touch it, but I don’t know how to move it, so I end up pushing it along the ground with my foot to the gutter. I look up to the baby, who is now halfway down the trunk, watching me closely. Poor thing. But what can I do?

I step back and let the baby examine its mother’s dead body once more. It nudges and pokes with its nose, climbs on top again, and sort of sits there. Another car whips past, but it doesn’t scurry back up the tree ’cause it’s safely by the curb now. I watch the baby for about ten minutes before I walk away. It’s the saddest thing to see. The baby just doesn’t understand what happened to its mother. And it won’t leave
the useless carcass because it doesn’t know what to do without her.

I decide to walk the extra few blocks to the subway station. Mother Nature has a funny way of sending me messages. It’s not the first time something coincidental has happened to me like this. It’s strange, because just before the squirrel got hit I was starting to think about my mom and having to tell her about the group home, and I was imagining how upset she’d be. Even though I make her life hell, I think deep down she knows she’d be lost without me. I was thinking I’d feel too guilty to leave her alone and then—BAM!— this baby loses its mama but it can’t let her go, even when it must in order to survive.