This Raging Light (2 page)

“Hi, girls,” she says.

“Hi, Janie,” Wren says, immediately collapsing onto the floor with BC.

I wave.

“It smells really good in here,” Wren says from under white fur. “Are you making vodka sauce?”

Janie smiles. “Vodka sauce? That's a little advanced, isn't it?”

“Food Network,” Wren says, jumping to her feet, “and also Gino's. They have good vodka sauce over there.”

“Well”—Janie points to the cabinet in the dining room, and I start pulling out dishes—“that's very impressive, Wren. No, this is not a vodka sauce. It's plain old marinara, but hopefully you'll like it.”

“Oh yeah,” Wren says. “I will like it. We've been eating frozen pizza for weeks.”

“Have not,” I say. That really is a gross exaggeration.

“Yeah, everything Lucille makes is from a box.”

We had a lot of pizza in the freezer.

“What about your mom?” Janie says. “She's not bad in the kitchen.”

“She's not here,” Wren says, then looks at me with a what-am-I-supposed-to-say shrug. “'Cause she's on vacation,” she adds.

“Oh, right,” Janie says. Her face pinches.

“Maybe you want to watch some TV until dinner?” Eden says, wedging between Janie and Wren.

“Ten minutes,” Janie says, turning back to the kitchen a bit reluctantly. “Finish setting the table, girls.” It feels good to take orders.

“You know,” Eden says, “there is something really messed up and sexist about the fact that we are all in here cooking and acting like domesticated livestock while the males are outside playing basketball.”

“Oh, for god's sake, Eden,” Janie says as she pours dressing into the big wooden salad bowl. “I love to cook.”

“His Royal Highness could at least set the table.” Glasses clink.

“I thought he could use a little time with your dad.”

“Yes, he could. Setting the table. Doing something besides displaying his Neanderthal abilities. You're encouraging and perpetuating male privilege, you know.”

“Eden, I'm making dinner for my family, which is a joy for me.” She emits a giant sigh. “I shouldn't have to defend it. And it's no crime to let them play every once in a while.”

“Yeah, but when do
we
get to play, Mom? That's my question.”

My eyes fill. My breath gets weird. They're so stupid, arguing over this. They don't know. They don't know.

“Lucille,” Janie says over Eden's head, “would you do me a favor and grab the boys? Tell them dinner is about ready.”

Drat.

How does a person go from being like a decorative component in the house that is your life—a nice table, perhaps—to being the pipes, the foundation, the center beam, without which the entire structure falls apart? How does a barely noticeable star become your very own sun?

How is it that one day Digby was Eden's admittedly extra-cute brother, and then the next he stole air, gave jitters, twisted my insides all up? Is this hormones? A glitch in the matrix? A product of internal desperation and my lack of developed self?

I have tried a million times to puzzle out the moment he turned so vital, and I can't do it. I only know that my stupid, annoying feelings have completely compromised my ability to function around him, that I want to close the space between us and wrap myself around him. My whole being would exhale, I think. It's ridiculous.

Which is why I stare at my plate. So hard I stare at my plate. I eat my meatball (I can only seem to stomach one), while Eden and Digby throw one-liners at each other. Nobody notices much, and I am afraid to look up, because Digby is exactly across the table from me.

Wren stuffs meatballs all in her face. Sauce drips down the front of her shirt.

“Oh my gosh,” she says to Janie, “you're, like, a culinary genius.”

Janie beams in my peripheral vision.

“You come here anytime you want,” she says. “You are officially my favorite guest.” She spears some asparagus, smiles, and says, “Culinary.” Shakes her head. “So, Lucille, how long is your mother out of town for?”

Forever. “She should be back in the next couple of days.”

“Is she doing okay?”
Since,
she wants to say.
After.
Janie looks so intense all the time.

Wren tilts her head toward me, and I unfreeze.

“You're doing all right by yourselves down there?” Janie presses.

“Oh, totally,” I say, going in for some asparagus myself. “Mom will be back.”

It all stops. The movement at the table.

“Of course,” Janie says. Her fork
tic-tic-tic
s against the plate. “Obviously she's coming back.” She takes a bite and chews. “I've left a couple of messages for her, you know. Just checking to see if she needs some help. She hasn't returned my calls.” Straight to voice mail. Yeah, I know all about it. “She must really be enjoying her time away. She must need it.” There's something in her tone that doesn't register on her face.

I make myself meet her eyes. Nod. Present a meek smile. On the way back to my plate, those traitorous jellies that live in my head rest on Digby's, and roller-coaster rush number 892 thrashes through me. He drops his eyes, twists spaghetti, and pays really close attention to his mom and what she is now saying about the wedding she is catering this weekend.

I thud, kick Eden under the table. Mean footsies.

He knows about my mother.

Digby knows.

“All things truly wicked begin from an innocence,” Eden says.

Janie has Wren making some kind of cookie thing, so we are in Eden's room after dinner, and she is stretching and bending in a way that makes me uncomfortable because those are things the human body shouldn't do. Also, her feet are disgusting, and I have to look away when she pokes one of them in my face, not on purpose but because she is in the midst of some bananas contortionist move.

“Sick,” I say to a bunion, to a ripped purple nail, to a bloody flap of skin.

“Hemingway,” she says, and flutter, flutter, flutter goes the foot.

“Seriously, you need to do something about that. It looks infected.”

“Baloney,” she says. “Are you listening to me?”

“Hemingway,” I say, wondering how this will ever help me in my life.

“Nobody
means
to be a douchebag, much less wicked.”

“Serial killers?”

“Even them, I bet. Personality disorders complicate my theory, but you have to figure even they were cute little babies once upon a time. They can't help it that they got the raw end of the human gene stick. Compassion,” she says.

“You called her a bitch.”

“That's what I'm saying.”

“That my mother is wicked?” Sometimes I wish she would just spit it out instead of making me work so hard.

“No. That she's not. That her behavior is. That it stems from innocence . . .”

“But she's still a douchebag.”

“And a bitch.”

“Nice,” I say, like it's not nice, which it's not.

“But I still have compassion for her. It can't be easy. But now for you,” she says.

“For me.” Numbers start dancing in my head.

I stare at the ceiling, the spot over where Eden sleeps.
BEWARE, GENTLE KNIGHT
reads the piece of paper taped across the ceiling.
THERE IS NO GREATER MONSTER THAN REASON
.

“Believe it,” she says, pointing up with a particularly nasty toe.

“I have to pee,” I say.

“McCarthy,” she says as I make my escape.

Into Digby, who is going down the hall in the opposite direction, wet, with a clean T-shirt and shorts on, which feels weirdly intimate. He was recently in the nude.

He reaches for me. His hand moves from his side, where it was just dangling, not doing much of anything. Now it is awake and touching. It traces my shoulder, skips down my arm, slides across my hand. And then he's gone. He keeps walking. He never even looked at me.

I fall into a family portrait. I'm surprised that the earthquake inside me doesn't bring the entire wall of pictures tumbling down. My skin burns. All the blood in my body charges for the spots he touched.

A war.

A fight to the death.

Sometimes, I think as I wander into the steamy bathroom like a half-starved zombie, something slow happens fast and you can't quite grasp the moment, whether it was an important one, whether it actually happened or you made it up. It's already like that. Did he really do that? Did he really run his hand across me like that? Did he? Was he taking liberties? And oh snap, double snap, if this is what happens to me from one tiny finger, then take what I said before about the should-not-ever-kiss thing and times it by about a jillion.

There is a scar now on my arm, where he touched me. It forms on my skin, watery blue, shimmery sort of, like how burns get shiny sometimes, after. How the burnt skin is new at the same time as it's forever damaged.

I am dramatic.

Flush. Wash. Wander.

Eden.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she says, petting BC, who has flopped himself onto her bed and is lying across her lap, panting.

I give her a look.

“Are you high? Did you fall into a K-hole while you were gone?”

What if Digby can hear her from wherever he is?

“Cookies!” Wren calls from the kitchen. She sounds delighted.

When we have reconvened around the table and are scarfing down chocolate-chip-oatmeal cookies (except Eden, who would never), Digby slips by. He still doesn't look at me. There is no secret connection. He grabs the ball by the door, nods in the general direction of the table, and is gone.

It's four o'clock in the morning. My belly is digesting a single meatball, too much bubbly water, and several cookies. Obviously, I am having trouble sleeping.

In my right hand I hold a pile of paper. Within these many folds of paper are numbers. Bills. Electric. Oil. Car insurance. Now quarterly bills that piled in last week. Water. Sanitation. And then there's the phone. That, too. That one must be paid. If Mom ever does decide to call, it has to be working. We need food, and Wrenny needs new clothes, and me too for that matter, although let's just call that one a forget-about-it-for-eternity.

My right hand shakes harder.

In my left—yes, my left hand, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls—I hold a crisp and shiny one-hundred-dollar bill. That is how I know she is still alive. That is what I got in the mail yesterday. That is how I know that somewhere my mother is still walking this earth. She didn't get hit in the head. She doesn't have amnesia. She isn't dead in a gutter somewhere. She is simply not here. She is somewhere else. One hundred dollars that came in an envelope with no return address, and a postmark so I know it came from California. She must be there with long-lost friends, maybe rediscovering her past or something. A note:
I'm trying. Love you, Mom.
That's it. That's all she wrote, folks.

What does it mean? She's trying to get back to us? Trying to get better? Trying to get a job? Maybe it's just her way of keeping us from sending the FBI out to look for her. Effective tactic. I wish my last memories of her were of someone I recognized, someone whose behavior I could predict. It kind of makes me want to tower over her with my hands on my hips and tell her that trying is just not good enough, young lady.

Yeah, Mom. I'm trying too.

I trail the hundred across my field of vision, let it tickle at my eyelashes. There was a time when a one-hundred-dollar bill would have been the most exciting thing, the promise of a free-for-all at the toy store, something to be tucked away for an indulgent moment.

Not now. Now it's part of a great big equation that adds up to me being totally screwed. I know she meant to come back. She didn't leave me the bank card or checks or anything that I've been able to find. She would have left me something if she thought she was going forever. She is not wicked, or at least she didn't start out that way. Still, she isn't here, and I don't have what I need to do this job. All she left me was her car and this house.

And Wren.

My left hand is a fist.

I'm in the park. It's a beautiful day.
The sun is shining, birds are chirping, a cool breeze is blowing. The kind of day I always wish for here, a rare one that's not too humid or too cold. Just perfect. Too bad I'm fluttering on the inside, having trouble breathing.

We're almost out of food. I have officially scoured the house for every last bit of change. In jars, under couch pillows, deep in pockets. I took a bag of dusty quarters, crusty dimes, and sticky nickels to the machine at the Super Fresh and traded it all in for dollars, and not many at that. How many more days before I am on my knees in front of some social worker, begging her to leave me my sister, to leave me that at least?

Wren is on the swings, going high, laughing with a friend. She has been playing with this girl, Melanie, at school and I want her to feel normal, so I'm here even though I have so much to do. Melanie has braids with little beads on the ends and is decked out from head to toe in shiny things. I like watching them there, swinging easily on such a nice day, even though every time the swing goes up I think
bills
and every time it goes down I think
money
. Melanie's sister, Shane, is next to me on the bench. They're kind of new around here, and the high school is where they put the whole county, so it's easy enough not to know everyone, but now I have to know her. At least a little.

She's been asking me questions in between texts. She gets a lot of them, so she's pretty busy, and she does a lot of laughing, says oh-no-you-did-not when she reads them. Yesterday she started talking to me. I want to ask her questions, but I don't want to answer any, so I stay quiet, keep my hands on my lap.