Authors: S. Walden
Clara held Beatrice’s hand as they navigated the icy walkway to the front door. It was Thursday afternoon, and Clara didn’t have to work. It was the first day in several weeks she didn’t have to work, and it felt great. She wanted to spend the entire evening with Beatrice. She missed her, feeling a space between them she didn’t like—something a little uncomfortable that she couldn’t voice aloud but knew Beatrice felt as well.
“I think we should go for burgers tonight,” Clara said rummaging through her purse for the house key. “What do you think?”
“Not at that one place, though,” Beatrice said. “Not where those girls were.”
“No, we’ll go someplace different,” Clara replied.
Beatrice shivered on the porch as she watched Clara dig around in her purse.
“Why did you take the house key off your key ring, Clara?” Beatrice asked irritably.
“I can’t remember,” Clara admitted, and she couldn’t. “Where’s your key, Bea?”
“You told me to leave it at home, remember? Because you were picking me up from school?”
Clara nodded.
Beatrice searched for other things to talk about as she waited to enter the warm relief of their living room.
“Can Evan come tonight?” she asked.
She had been asking for Evan a lot lately, and it bothered Clara. She knew why. Beatrice still didn’t feel completely comfortable with her. Not since the letter opener incident. Evan was the one who made Beatrice feel safe now, and Clara felt sore and silently angry over it. She wanted to be the comfort, the protector, the one Beatrice trusted. She worked two jobs for it, paid bills for it, made dinner for it. But she lost Beatrice’s trust when she had her meltdown, and she feared there was no way to fix it.
“Ah ha!” she said satisfied. “Found it,” and she inserted the key in the lock.
“What about Evan, Clara?” Beatrice persisted.
“I’ll call and ask him,” Clara said finally.
“May I?”
Clara pushed the door open. “Sure.”
Ellen Greenwich sat at the kitchen table looking over the bills. There was something cooking in the oven, something coated with herbs and filling the whole house with a delicious, earthy smell. Ellen looked up from the papers when she heard her daughters walk in.
“Well, there they are,” she said, and smiled sweetly.
Clara and Beatrice froze. They stood staring for what seemed like hours. Clara reached over to take Beatrice’s hand protectively, but Beatrice shrugged her off.
“Mommy?” Beatrice said in a small whisper. Then recognition set in as she screamed it. “MOMMY!” and ran into Ellen’s outstretched arms, jumping into her lap, clutching at her mother’s neck while she listened to Ellen’s soft, low chuckles.
“Beatrice, you’re so grown,” Ellen said, pulling her daughter away so that she could look at her face. Beatrice’s eyes swam with tears.
“You won’t ever leave again will you, Mommy?” Beatrice asked, her little voice quavering.
“Never,” Ellen said. “I will never leave again,” and she pulled Beatrice close to her, wrapping her tight, closing her eyes in bliss as she breathed in the scent of Beatrice’s hair.
Clara remained frozen to her spot. Her brain could not register the turn of events. She was tempted to call the police. There was a stranger in her house, and she wanted her gone this instant.
“Clara?” her mother asked.
“What?”
“Don’t you want to come over here and give me a hug?”
Clara moved automatically without thought or feeling. Ellen released Beatrice and stood up, taking Clara into her arms and holding her close. Clara kept her arms by her sides fighting the urge to hit her mother. She did not recognize her voice, her scent, her body. It was a stranger holding her, somebody pretending to be her mother, and she wanted to scream into this woman’s shoulder to let go.
“I missed you, Clara,” her mother said tenderly, kissing the top of her head.
“Did you miss me, too?” Beatrice asked. She was hungry for her mother’s attention, and Clara was in the way.
Ellen released Clara and bent down to look at her youngest daughter.
“You better believe I did,” she said winking. Beatrice smiled.
“So where were you, Mommy?” Beatrice asked.
Clara wanted to tell Beatrice to shut up and stop calling their mother “Mommy.” She never called her “Mommy.” It was always “Mom.”
Ellen invited the girls to sit with her at the table. Beatrice went willingly. Clara fumed, glaring at her mother from across the table.
“Girls, I had to go away for awhile,” Ellen said. She reached over to take Beatrice’s hand. She did not take Clara’s, sensing Clara would not let her.
“Why?” Beatrice asked.
“I was unwell,” Ellen replied. “I didn’t take care of myself. I didn’t know how. And if I couldn’t take care of myself, then how could I possibly take care of you?”
“So your solution was to run away and leave us to fend for ourselves with all the bills you didn’t bother to pay?” Clara retorted. “We were scared out of our minds! We didn’t know where you went or when you’d come home!”
“Clara, stop,” Beatrice scolded.
Clara did not look at her sister. She kept her eyes fastened on her mother.
“I’m not saying it was right,” Ellen replied. “I made a mistake.”
“Ha! A mistake! Are you hearing this, Beatrice?” Clara asked, bewildered.
Beatrice ignored Clara and turned to her mother. “It’s okay, Mommy. Everybody makes mistakes.”
“I’m working two jobs because of you. We didn’t have electricity for two and half months! We were boiling water over the fire!” Clara yelled.
“Clara, I’m sorry,” her mother replied. “I can’t imagine what you went through. I hoped that someone . . . someone like Ms. Debbie would help you while I was gone. Can’t you understand that if I stayed, I still would have been no help to you?”
“Maybe not,” Clara snapped. “But you would have been here. And Ms. Debbie’s dead.”
There was silence. Clara felt the anger course through her veins. She wanted to put her fist through a window and scream until her throat went raw.
“I’m going to make it up to you,” Ellen said quietly.
“Yeah? Well there are things you can’t make up to me,” Clara replied. She was tempted to tell her mother right there about the man she slept with for money. She was angry enough to do it, but Beatrice was there.
“You can make them up to me,” Beatrice said encouragingly. She cut a hateful glance at Clara, and Clara’s heart broke into tiny pieces, sharp fragments that fell flat at the base of her stomach, piercing the lining and making it hurt.
She got up from the table and grabbed her purse.
“Clara, where are you going?” her mother asked.
“I don’t have to tell you where I’m going. You don’t get to decide to come back into this house after five months and be my mother and expect me to tell you what I’m doing and where I’m going,” Clara said. Her voice was flat, emotionless.
“Clara,” Ellen whispered, but Clara ignored her and walked out the door.
***
She didn’t know where to go. She had no place
to
go. Evan was at work. Ms. Debbie was dead. She drove around aimlessly, wasting gas, not caring. She was on a familiar road, and then she remembered. The cemetery just down to the right. She pulled in and parked the car in the visitor’s parking lot. She walked to the gravesite and sunk down next to the stone. No one was there. It was too cold, and she felt the snow begin to seep through her pants, turning her skin to ice and making it ache. She brought no flowers and searched around for something she could leave beside the headstone. There was nothing. She had nothing, and the tears spilled over—angry, vicious tears of longing and pain.
“Ms. Debbie,” she cried. She clutched the headstone as great, loud sobs escaped her mouth. She tried to quiet herself. She didn’t want to disturb the others trying to rest peacefully.
“Ms. Debbie,” she said again, regaining some control. “Why did you have to go away?”
She waited for the answer.
“Why did you go, Ms. Debbie?” Clara asked again. “I’m alone. Beatrice doesn’t like me anymore. She’s afraid of me. And now my mother’s home, and she thinks she’s going to make everything all right.”
Clara stroked the headstone as she spoke.
“But she can’t. She doesn’t know what I’ve done, what I had to do for money.”
She wanted to confess her sins to someone. She tried with God, but he never answered her, so she decided to try with Ms. Debbie instead.
“I had sex with a man for money,” she whispered into the headstone. “I needed money for the property tax. I was desperate and didn’t know what else to do.”
She wiped her runny nose with the back of her gloved hand.
“I thought I could keep doing it until the tax was paid, but I couldn’t go back,” Clara said. “I’ll never go back, and I’m glad for it even though I know we’ll lose our house.”
Clara waited to hear Ms. Debbie’s voice, but there was only the silence of a still winter day.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Debbie,” Clara continued. “Please don’t think I’m a bad person. I want to be good. I just don’t know how to be good and be poor at the same time.”
Clara’s pants were soaked through, so she repositioned herself. She lay on her side, the right side of her face nestled in the snow facing the headstone. She cried out at the sharp pain until her cheek went numb. Then she settled into a constant shiver, curling into herself to try and stay warm. She tried to ignore the dull burning deep within her muscles. She didn’t want to leave Ms. Debbie. She thought if she let the chill sink into her bones, become a part of them, then she would be able to stay all night, lying beside the woman who gave her the silver earrings, the ones Clara now wore.
“I miss you,” she said, her warm tears falling to the ground, cutting deep holes in the snow.
Clara closed her eyes against a bitter wind that swept through the cemetery. She felt the wind drag something out of her, toss it up into the heavens where it disappeared forever. She thought it was part of her soul severed from her, cut out by a god who did not know her but thought to punish her anyway because she didn’t know how to be good and poor at the same time. She breathed in the icy chill, feeling her chest burn, thinking that some people were just better than others.
***
She heard his voice in the distance. It sounded like a dot on the far side of the world, and as it came closer, growing louder and more urgent, it turned into a blaring megaphone. She closed her hands over her ears to block out the noise.
She felt her wet body lifted off the ground, carried to a place warm and soft, and she relaxed on the backseat feeling the blast of heat hit her face.
I must be in heaven
, she thought.
I made it to heaven!
She felt herself moving and fell asleep promptly, believing that heaven was a warm car that traveled around the world and never stopped.
Something plastic with sharp edges was shoved under her tongue. She wanted to take it out, but her hands wouldn’t cooperate. So she let it stay until someone pulled it out for her.
“Jesus,” she heard her mother say. “A hundred and one.”
“Should we take her to urgent care?” a boy asked. It sounded like Evan.
“Let’s try to get the fever down with ibuprofen first,” Ellen said.
Clara felt Evan pull her up gently, ask her to open her mouth, then deposit four tablets on her tongue.
“Swallow, Clara,” he said putting the glass of water next her lips. She obeyed tasting the metallic of the medicine tablets as they went down.
“I’m going to see if she’ll eat some soup,” Ellen said.
“I’ll feed her,” Evan offered.
“It’s okay,” Ellen said. “I’ll do it,” but she allowed Evan to feed her daughter when Clara shook her head violently refusing to let her mother near her.
Ellen brought Evan the bowl and then hung back in the shadows. She didn’t want to leave Clara.
“Get out,” Clara croaked, refusing to eat anything until her mother was gone.
“Clara,” Evan said soothingly. “Let your mother stay.”
“No,” Clara said, the pain in her throat so great she wanted to rip out her esophagus.
Ellen slunk out of the room, and Clara thought she heard a muffled cry.
Evan looked at his girlfriend and then at the bowl of chicken broth.
“Do you think you can try to eat something?” he asked.
She nodded, and he brought the spoonful of soup to her lips. She drank it, feeling it coat her throat with warmth and take out the stinging burn as it went down.
“Were you going to sleep there all night?” Evan asked, putting the spoon to her lips once more.
Clara shrugged. She didn’t know what he was talking about.
Evan continued to feed her as he spoke.
“Your mother loves you, Clara,” he said. She screwed up her face in a scowl. “She made a terrible mistake leaving you girls. She knows that.”