I have to leave soon, thank you. She downed the rest of the glass despite the bitterness. I appreciate your help, she said. She looked at Pastor Levi, his kind eyes, his tired face, his spotless home.
Could I ask one more favor?
Anything.
Could tell me how to get to Colleen’s house?
5
James chased the girl through the woods, toward the high school. Running toward that school made his stomach recoil and he fell back a step at the thought of it. The girl was young, and long-legged, and she’d outrun him if he didn’t go faster.
He had hated it at Heartshorne High School—fucking spinster teachers and bastards with their paddles they hit you with and offered you right after to write your name on, like it was really a prize to let them hit you. He’d written his name large across the width of the paddle and dug his name in deeper each time he was sent to the principal’s office, where he was offered a paddling or detention. He always chose the paddle instead of detention, and each time he had to bend over the desk and let that fat fuck Principal Knight hit him square in the ass he thought
they will all pay
. All he could remember of those punishments was the anger it created in him, the feeling that he had to go out and punch something, hard, until his knuckles split and the person or thing he was beating broke, too. But they didn’t pay—soon after he dropped out in eleventh grade, he was arrested and spent for his 4-year jail stint for burglary. James didn’t know what had happened to Knight after he’d left school. He probably had a cushy retirement to Keno. Probably thought that he had touched the lives of many children in a positive way and woke up proud of himself every morning for what he’d accomplished.
School and jail, the two places he’d hated the most and spent more time in than anywhere else so far in his adult life. They were both pretty much the same, and he wasn’t going back to either of them. But he needed the girl to be sure of that. He pushed harder and reached her, snagging her hair as it flew behind her, a hunk of it escaped from her stiff hairdo. She screamed and he pulled her close, covering her mouth with his hand. She didn’t bite, as he feared she would, and she seemed to go limp. She knew when she was caught, at least.
Shhh, he said, shut up. I’m not going to hurt you. Not if you do what I say and shut the fuck up.
6
Emily came home from her visit with Levi and almost immediately fell asleep. Too tired to make it even to her bedroom, she pressed her body into the seam of the couch, her knees drawn up against her stomach, her arms over her eyes to keep out the sunlight the miniblinds.
Before that first dream of driving with her mother, she hadn’t remembered much of her dreams. She had become too used to sleep uninteruppted by anxiety, sleep that was just sleep—a complete shut-down of the body with pleasant or puzzling or harmless images flitting through only to be forgotten upon waking. She had attributed it to peace of mind, but she wondered now if it were simply another symptom of her growing boredom; even her unconscious had been too numb to make up something interesting.
Now, she could feel herself entering the dream and could also feel her bare knee pressed against a hard plank of wood that made the couch backing. She tried to wake herself, but it didn’t work. She could feel both the low sun slanting on her shoulder and the cool air on her face; she was in the car again with her mother.
She was herself, not a child, but an adult, all of the small scars and wrinkles in her hands, the subtle feeling of bra straps sinking into her skin.
Thank god I’m old enough to fight her, she thought, and felt upset with herself for being so petty. Here her mother was, alive again, and she was already gathering her weapons.
Emily said nothing. She didn’t even look over at the passenger seat where she knew that her mother was seated (she knew as you know things in dreams—with absolute certainty and the ability to hold impossibilities in your head).
Look at her, her mind said, the mind that was curled on the couch asleep, vaguely feeling the world outside that pressed against her body. The mind in her dream, though, looked out at the road before them, a wide, featureless highways, the same boxy gas stations and convenience stores passing by over and over again. They could be anywhere.
You shouldn’t be mad at me, Connie said.
Emily turned to look at her mother, who was now the age she’d been at her death: fifties, her hair in patches from the chemotherapy, cheeks sunken, her mouth cracked and dry. She held a cigarette in one hand and had the other on the steering wheel.
What?
You shouldn’t be mad at me. It’s your pickle.
Emily imagined an actual pickle, a sour, green thing suspended in vinegar.
It is your fault, the way you feel right now, Connie said. You’re not taking responsibility.
You always say things like that, Emily said. You always put it back on me.
Her mother took her hand from the wheel and wagged it at Emily. Avoid words like
never
, like
always
. Don’t you remember all those books you read about communication? You tried to get me to read them. Maybe I did read them. It’s not liked you’d know the difference anyway. You thought the worst of me. She turned back to the road, which was so straight that she scarcely had to steer.
You assume so much about me, Connie says, about why I did what I did. She threw the cigarette out the window and closed it, making the air still and filling the car with the smell of mint, a smell that Emily associated with her hospital room and the candies that filled a bowl by her bed, god only knows why: a gift from somebody, probably, since Connie couldn’t eat through her mouth by then, just through a tube. The candies had staled and filled the room with their aggressive perfume.
I can only assume, Emily said. You don’t tell me anything.
Connie shrugged.
It’s strange how like our real conversations these dreams are, the waking Emily thought as her sleeping self started to feel that familiar irritation rise up from her stomach, one she hadn’t felt since her mother died.
Her mother took her hands from the wheel, turned, and took the dream Emily’s shoulders and shook her, hard, until the waking Emily was gone and couldn’t comment anymore.
Listen, she said, her teeth yellow, her breath sickly, her hands bony and dry, catching the fabric of Emily’s shirt. If you want to know, just ask.
Ask who?
Ask everyone who might know. Just ask. Stir the pot. Make the graves come up. Drag the bones out of the trash. Do what you need to. Stop blaming me and do something.
The car continued to travel down the straight road, though Connie no longer had her hands on the wheel. She started another cigarette and leaned the seat back, napping. Emily turned on the radio, looking for a classic country station. She wanted to hear Patsy Cline’s
Crazy Arms
, but all she could find was Willie Nelson singing about the things he should have said and done and Hank Williams crying that he hadn’t had any kissing or loving or hugging for a long, long time.
Emily woke feeling dirty, her face sticky from the press of her arms against her cheek, her hair matted against her head, her whole body hot in the sunlight and the itchy polyester of the couch.
She tried not to think of how her mother had been in those last months. Emily had not visited as frequently as she would’ve liked, not until the end, but still, she had too many memories of Connie’s decline, of her scalp showing through the thin hair and her anger at her body and her final inability to even be angry anymore, which had frightened Emily more than anything: anger was the current that ran through her mother’s personality. Anger made Connie go right back into the elementary school when Emily was in fifth grade and had come home with a bruised eye and demand that the teachers find out who had done this to her little girl. Anger made her lock a sixteen-year-old Emily outside during a January winter when she had broken curfew. Anger made her move from town to town, job to job, unsatisfied with herself and the people who she said stood in the way of her happiness.
When the anger was gone, there didn’t seem to be anything left. She asked for the television turned on and her pills and her juice and she could hardly keep her eyes open when Emily was in the room and instead dozed fitfully.
She had not died like people on television or in movies, people who suddenly became oracles or started to live their lives to the fullest just as life was being permanently taken from them. She didn’t exhort Emily to do something that would make her happy. She didn’t make proclamations of her love. She died as bitterly as she had lived in her last years, seeing this as nothing but more bad luck.
Maybe, in those last moments, when only the nurse was there, she’d made a reversal, had wished to give some message to her only daughter. But it was too late, by then. She hadn’t earned a loving daughter to sit by her side and so the moment had been lost, if it had existed at all.
So, Emily didn’t think of that time if she could help it. There wasn’t much of a reason, there were so few reminders: no family, few pictures. For years, she’d practiced forgetting. She’d made her mother’s death a numb space in her head: she imagined it as a spot on her brain that she could press her fingers and nails into and get no reaction at all.
The dream had brought it back—how slow her illness seemed (and how often Emily had wished it could finally be over), and then how quick it seemed when she was finally gone, having dreamed her way into a coma during the night and then dead the next, slipping out of the world as tracelessly as she had left towns and rental houses and post office boxes and people who had disappointed her.
•
Emily let her shower water heat up until it was almost unbearable and stepped under the spray until she couldn’t stand it and let the cold back in. She scrubbed her hair hard with the pads of her fingers as her mother had when she was a child and had gotten sticky and dirty from playing outside all day in the summer. She stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, washing the sweat from her hair and skin, letting the thoughts of her mother go.
She rubbed away a circle of fog from the mirror. She saw her own face, red and puffy, bearing the same creases from nose to mouth, the same slightly dented chin, the same hair that naturally split in a perfectly middle part, as her mother’s had.
When her mother was thirty, she’d had a six-year-old daughter. She had been alone in West Virginia, learning how to cut hair during the day and waiting tables at night after Emily went to sleep. By all accounts, Connie had, at the very least, a real life: a child, a job, and, always, the thought that soon, when she got the money or time or found exactly the right thing, she would finally be who she was supposed to be.
I don’t have that, Emily thought. I’m not real. Emily had nothing to anchor her in any place, nobody to be responsible for, no reason for waking up and nowhere to go when she did wake up. Connie at least had that. She had something to care for aside from herself. She couldn’t just drift. She had to establish herself quickly, find a place to live, shoes, a place for her child to go to school. And she always had.
This is going to be our year, Connie would say, just after they moved in to a new home or she started a new project, forgetting that each time she’d said this before, she’d been wrong.
Maybe, Emily thought, she would have been suited to my life better than I am. She wanted to be untethered. She would have used her time for something useful—she could have perfected something, become an expert, like she always wanted to be. She could easily imagine her mother as an artist, a scientist, a writer—somebody who did something solitary for hours at a time, enjoying every precious moment of absolute silence.
Emily thought of all of the projects she had dropped when they became too difficult, all of the books she’d quit reading halfway through. Connie, though, would have flourished with the time and solitude that Emily had squandered, most nights watching reality television on the small screen of her laptop.
Emily imagined her mother as a thirteen-year-old, so frightened of something that she could not, or would not, tell where she had been or what had happened to her for three days. This seemed like her, the more Emily thought of it. She was not the kind of person to tell, to let other people in. She prided herself in being able to take care of her own business. Maybe she had always been like that, always with a spine so stiff that it made it almost impossible for her to bend.
Emily tried to remember herself as a child. She remembered eating ice cream on various front steps, the feeling of being pushed from behind on a swing, the feeling of her stomach sinking when the bus pulled up, full of kids she didn’t know that she’d have to figure out exactly how to sit with. Had she always been this shapeless, spineless thing?
Emily looked at herself, at her no-longer-young face, never beautiful. What else did she have to do with this squandered life? She would agree to dig up the graves, as her mother had told her. She would stir things up. She would not leave.