All We Had (21 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Preservation

. . . twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.” I huffed. I was doing push-ups in my room.

Dear Lady Pam-o-lot,
I composed inside my head.

The charade is finally waning. Mother still plasters on a smile when he boasts about his golf game, but a grave expression sometimes grips her face when he smiles at me. I can no longer wait, though. I may have to drug her to get her out and I will kill him if I have to.

Your Dearly Beloved Cousin Ruth

P.S. Do you believe in miracles? It occurred to me that I never asked you and I really want to know.

I had to get us out of here. I wasn't sure how, but I was preparing myself. I developed a high-intensity aerobics routine and I did the routine twice a day. If I worked myself up into a big
enough sweat, my fear would dissolve into a sense of calm and power.

I put myself on a fat-free, sugar-free, cholesterol-free diet and I started building up my lung capacity by holding my breath until I almost fainted. And even when I wasn't doing anything, like when I watched TV, I'd squeeze my stomach muscles tight and hold them. Basically, I was always improving and I was training my brain. When Vick looked at me, I looked right back at him. I'd pick a spot on his forehead and imagine seeing smoke as my eyes bored a hole through his skull.

I flipped over and started doing crunches. I was blasting through them when my mother stumbled through the door.

With her new Gucci bag slung over her shoulder, she careened across the room, aiming a goblet of wine for the night table. Half of it sloshed out and hit the wall as she set it down. It was only four o'clock.

She sat on the edge of the bed teetering. Her hair had almost completely fallen out of her bun. She reached back, gathered it off her neck, and futilely tucked it in. Then she fumbled through her bag, pulled out a cigarette, an ashtray, and an aerosol can of Glade. She struck a match but her hands shook and the match went out. She went through five matches, tossing and missing the ashtray with each one. When she finally got one lit, she widened the V of her fingers, pinched the cigarette between her lips, and inhaled hard. Her cheeks caved in and her shoulders dropped as if she'd just breathed in the sweet smell of roses. When she blew the smoke out, she picked up the aerosol can and gassed it away with a mist of lemon Glade. He still didn't think she smoked, but she'd gotten tired of standing outside, so this was how she did it now. The vapors made me choke, but the nicotine pepped her up a bit.

“So I'm through with yoga,” she said. She'd taken it up for only a day. Early one morning she watched a supermodel do it. But my mother couldn't even hold child's pose, so she immediately quit. “And I'm not going to do crocheting either. I'm taking up felting instead,” she slurred. “Vick showed me a hat Lynette made. You should see how cute it is.”

I didn't bother to comment. I had moved on to my isometric squats and lunges. With my hands on my hips, I made my way across the room. With each stride, I stepped a little lower so I could feel my legs burn.

A thin smile traced my mother's lips as she changed the subject. “When I see you in your cap and gown walk across the stage, I'll be whooping and hollering.” She raised a finger and twirled it around like a noisemaker. “ ‘That's my daughter!' I'm gonna shout.” She blasted away another cloud of smoke, then took a swig of wine. “Yup,” she said, “that's how I'll know that this life of mine was worth something.”

I broke out into jumping jacks and grunted through them. Jumping jacks were not part of my normal routine, but I'd eaten a cookie that day so I was really pushing it.

My mother finished her cigarette and stuffed a handful of Tic Tacs into her mouth. “I'm so proud of you,” she mumbled, tilting her head to keep the mints from tumbling out. She slugged back some wine and unconsciously swallowed them like pills.

She lit another cigarette and exhaled. Her mouth twisted. Then she started in. “If anything ever happened to you, I would
die
,” she said with an emphatic spritz of the air freshener. But she was drunker now and her aim was off so the cloud of smoke floated to the ceiling while the mist of Glade hit the ground.

“And if anyone ever lays a hand on you, I'll kill them!” She guzzled the rest of her wine and banged the glass down.

I made quick little pumping motions with my arms and concentrated on my breathing. My face was red-hot. My temples throbbed. I could feel oxygen coursing through my arteries.

“You know that, don't you?” she asked. “Don't you?”

I kept jumping
. Faster, faster, faster
. I could not believe how fast I was going. Adrenaline flooded me. I felt as if I could fly. Not a single thing could weigh me down.

“DON'T YOU?” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

A smoky, alcoholic fume mushroomed from her mouth. As she raised her can of Glade, the tiny spray nozzle closed in on me and a haze of lemon gassed me. At first I felt my limbs propel me up, then—
bam!
—like that, I hit the ground.

Five minutes or an hour could have passed, I couldn't tell. But when my eyes slowly opened, my mother was there. She seemed sober now, kneeling next to me, dabbing my forehead with a washcloth like a nurse.

“You're okay,” she said. She'd tucked a pillow under my head. “Here.” She reached up and grabbed a cup of ginger ale off the night table. “Have some.” She cradled my head in her hand, raised me up, and held a straw to my lips, then gently laid me down again.

The sprinklers went on outside and the sound of shooting water pulsed up and down the street. The fading daylight moved across the room in tints of orange.

My mother cupped her hand around my face, then bent over and kissed me on the forehead.

“Your nose is cold.” She pulled a blanket off the bed. “Come here, I'll warm you up.” She wrapped herself around me.

The sound of the sprinkler system outside slowed. The synchronized arcs of water fell. The sun lowered in the sky and swaddled us in bluish gold.

Piney Hills was a deadening place. But that afternoon, something shifted. I could tell by the way my mother looked off into the distance, her wheels were turning. She and I would leave this place and laugh at it someday. The only question now was when.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Purgatory

N
o matter how hard I tried not to, I could always hear them having sex. With formulaic rhythm, my mother's manufactured high-pitched whimper would slowly bloom into a vapid, overdone crescendo.

Then I'd wait. With every guy we'd ever lived with, I'd eventually hear the sound of her feet,
pat
,
pat
,
pat
, as she made her way across the hallway. “Push over,” she'd say to me. “I can't sleep.” And this was how I knew for sure the end was near. She and I would eventually leave together and the warrior that was my mother would reappear.

The moonlight sank below the houses and the long angled shadows traveled westward up the street. It was a Friday night when I finally heard the shuffle of bare feet coming toward me on the carpet. We'd been at Vick's for almost a month by then.

My bedroom door slowly opened.

“Mom?” I said.

In my mind, I will forever see the two of us sitting up in bed. I can picture her gathering her hair and laying it back down
on the pillow behind her. I hear us laughing as she recounts all the crazy things we'd done together. And I can see the tip of her cigarette—how it lit up her face when she smoked, how it waved around and rested between her two fingers as if it had always been there, a graceful part of her hand. And I would think: there was nothing I ever wanted more than to sit and watch my mother smoke.

“Mom?” I asked again.

A figure stood by me.

“Push over,” I waited to hear.

But in the dark I realized it was Vick standing over me. The waning moonlight inside the room gave his face a purple glow.

My heart began to pound. There was a drumming in my ears. My throat closed up. Bits and pieces of my life flashed in my mind: the California skyline, the gap in my mother's smile where she was missing her tooth, Peter Pam's mules, Patti's ponytail.

I was afraid to move. My eyes drifted down expecting to see an axe in his hand, but instead I came face-to-face with something far worse.

Vick's erection bounced in the pup tent of his pajamas. The little yellow birds printed on the fabric winked as they rode up and down.

I looked at his face again. He was shaking now. He winced and sucked his bottom lip in. His eyes were moist and pleading as if to say,
I am mortified by what I want to do
.

Enh!—Enh!—Enh!
My adrenaline kicked in and an alarm went off inside my head.
Procure the fireplace poker just in case
,
Peter
Pam had written in her last letter. And I had. I jumped up away from him, dropped to the floor, and reached under the bed where I kept it. I grabbed the handle, stood up, and wielded it above my head. I was going to kill him if I had to. I lifted the poker higher, but then something stopped me.

My mother, I realized, was standing in the doorway. A stripe of moonlight trailed along the wall and fell across her face.

Vick turned and saw her. His cheeks glowed bright red. “I was just leaving,” he said. Hunched over and covering his erection, he scurried out the door like a rat.

I dropped the poker. My mother barely looked at me before she turned and followed him. There was no time to plot things out. She and I both knew the drill.

“This is my daughter, Ruth.” With every guy we'd ever lived with, this was how she'd introduce me, simply as Ruth. “Now, I don't know where you and me are going”—she'd point back and forth between him and her and curl her lip—“but you ever try laying a hand on her and I will kill you.” That night in Fat River hadn't been the first time my mother threatened a guy with a gun.

With the same garbage bags I used when we moved from Fat River, I ran around feverishly packing. I stuffed my clothes into the bags and, on the dresser where I kept them, I gathered up my Mary figurines. In the middle of the night, she would come and get me.

I imagined we'd tie Vick up, steal his car, and douse his house with gasoline. I could hear our tires squeal, spinning backwards down the driveway, where my mother would pause long enough
for me to strike and throw the match. She'd shift the car, and as we lurched forward, she'd flip her middle finger out the window and yell “Fuck you!” to the insolent squirrels flanking his driveway. Then the house would explode. Silhouetted by the yellow moon we'd streak across the earth and the sound of our triumphant laughter would fill the streets.

With an overstuffed garbage bag under each arm and the poker lying across my knees, I sat up and waited. In increments, the night sky lightened. The afterglow of my mother lingered in the doorway until the sun rose, but she never came to get me.