Authors: Nic Brown
“It's this nerve thing,” her mother says. “Oh God. It's my legs.”
Maria swats at Jack and raises the Hello Kitty mask. “I got them,” she says. “I totally forgot to drop them off. I'm so sorry.”
In the parking lot, Maria leans into a cold wind. Old leaves stick to damp corners of banked concrete. Panicking with guilt, she tells herself that she must remain focused. The Rite Aid stays open all night. The prescription is in her pocket. She tries to envision her mother's imminent death, as if this meditation will calm her. But the scene is one she cannot conjure. Everything is inevitable, she tells herself. Everything will happen. But she cannot believe it.
The Volvo is not parked where she'd expected to find it. She looks frantically from side to side. She presses the panic button. In the corner of the parking lot, the car flashes and screams as a trio of passing students yelps in delight.
Maria drives slowly through the empty lot, shuffling oil change receipts and paper napkins from the glove box in a desperate search for a cigarette, which she knows she is not supposed to smoke, but what does it matter? She surprises herself by even taking the child's health into consideration. It is as if she has discovered a secret plot within her own brain, one covertly planning a safe transition into motherhood. She has the feeling that she should not indulge it. Her fingers locate a loose Parliament, and this is when her face smacks the dashboard. The car shudders. The engine ceases to run. The radio falls silent.
Maria raises her head to a cracked windshield, on the other side of which the hood now holds a loose grip on a concrete telephone pole. She drops the now broken cigarette and gingerly lifts a hand to her forehead. Her fingers come away dark with blood. The rearview reveals a small cut just below her widow's peak.
“I hit a telephone pole,” she says into her phone, gasping.
“Where?” Jack says.
“The parking lot!”
Within minutes Jack appears, wearing a yellow fanny pack secured beneath the camel hair blazer that Maria bought at Goodwill. It is too small for his frame. He shivers in the light from the arc lamp.
“How fast were you going?” he says.
“One mile per hour?” Maria says.
“Will it start?”
“I don't know.”
Jack looks closely into her eyes, then removes Maria's hand from her wound.
“You can't go to Rite Aid,” he says.
“I'm fine.”
“No, I mean, even if they're open, the pharmacy won't be. Give me the phone.” He dials. “Dr. M? We can't find your pills. Maria's upset. But I have some stuff. And it's medicine in most states. OK?”
Maria has never heard Jack speak like this to anyone. Some inner leader has been unleashed. She has been her mother's caretaker for so long that she can almost feel a physical weight lift from her as Jack backs the Volvo away from the telephone pole. The grill falls off the car and wobbles slowly on the concrete as they pass it.
“I still have one,” Jack says.
He opens his hand to reveal a pill, oval and yellow and small.
“If we give her just one, she'll know you've been taking them,” Maria says.
“Then you take it,” Jack says.
Maria does not know if Jack has read the label on the bottle yet or not, but she doubts it. And if a pregnant woman does take these pills, then what? Maria has knowingly avoided prescription drug warnings
too many times to count. One of anything will not matter. And if it does matter, she thinks, maybe that's a good thing. She scrapes the pill off Jack's palm and swallows it dry. It lodges somewhere inside her neck, feeling ten times its actual size. She is scared it will become some time-release choking hazard, swelling to block all oxygen at a later hour. Silently she swallows again and again, willing it out of her throat.
A campus devoid of life. The lake. The streets of Maria's childhood. Stenciled by the fingers of bare limbs, here and there a window still glows softly. They reach her mother's house. Almost every light is on. Long rectangles of pale yellow stretch across the lawn. The back door is unlocked. The kitchen wall holds an odd, semi-abstract portrait of Maria painted by Professor Rigby. The image embarrassed Maria as a child. It now seems profound. In an uncontrolled rush, she feels the desire for this object once her mother is no longer alive.
Jack says, “Dr. M?”
“In here,” her mother calls. Her voice is labored and distant.
They find her in the bedroom wearing a bright pink robe. Each leg is propped on a pillow. An electric blanket is draped over them. Maria feels the presence of an invisible malicious magic. She does not understand the biology of this pain, why this disease should do anything other than make you cough and die.
“Mom,” she says, and climbs on the bed. “I am so sorry.” She lays an arm across her mother's chest, once so buxom; Maria is still surprised to find it flat. At her touch, Maria's mother flinches.
“What happened to your head?” her mother whispers.
“I banged it on my bedpost,” Maria says, unsure of where she found this lie, knowing that it sounds even more illicit than the truth. “It's fine.”
Jack unzips his fanny pack and says, “You smoke weed, Dr. M?”
Maria's mother doesn't even open her eyes. It as if the pain in her legs, the disease, and the hour have all conspired to render anything they say impossible to shock. “Not in a long time,” she says.
“Nothing better for pain,” Jack says.
He produces a glass bong emblazoned with a yellow alien and places it on the nightstand. Maria's mother is in so much pain that she is beyond addressing the strangeness of this scene. Maria lets Jack maintain the direction. He lifts her mother's iPod and says, “This will help,” then spins his fingers across it like he's casting a spell. The Wu-Tang Clan emerges quiet and insistent through the room's built-in speakers. Maria worries that even the soft bass line will hurt her mother's diseased nerves.
Her mother closes her eyes.
“Dr. M, open up,” Jack says. “Go ahead.”
“I don't know how. Do you know?” she says, turning to Maria.
“Sort of,” Maria says.
“Help me.”
“OK,” Maria says. “Like this.” She holds a lighter to the bong and inhales. “Here,” she says, thick smoke curling out of her mouth.
“That's right,” Jack says. “We're the three musketeers.”
Maria's mother follows her lead. She coughs, smoke sputtering from her face. Tears stream from each eye. She leans her head on Maria's shoulder and shudders.
The music fills the air like fog. Verse after verse pumps into the room. Jack turns off the lamp, and in the new darkness, a cold light shimmers faintly from the skylight above. Maria's mother lies, eyes closed, on the pillow, silently moving her lips to the lyrics.
Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with
, they sing.
Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with
.
“Yeah,” Jack says. “Let it go, m'lady.”
Her mother begins to sing aloud. “Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with,” she says. “Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with.”
“That's right,” Jack says. “The Wu-Tang Clan
ain't
nothing to fuck with.”
Maria lowers herself to the remaining edge of pillow. She closes her eyes. The music thumps through the mattress. The heat from the electric blanket warms the side of her thigh.
Jack begins to sing with her mother now. Together they sing, “Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with.”
Maria feels left out. She cannot remember ever having sung anything other than “Happy Birthday” with anyone before, but now opens her mouth and raises her voice.
“Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with,” they sing. “Wu Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with.”
Their voices rise in volume, with each word growing more comfortable with the other. Maria feels her mother's hand crawl clammy and bashful atop her own. She opens her eyes. Framed in the skylight above are a handful of stars, radiant and distant and cold. The three of them chant to that unnamed constellation, emphatically telling those inevitable heavens exactly what should not be fucked with.
S
CHOOL IS OUT
for summer. Maria is six months pregnant. Through the humid nights of June she sweats in her childhood bed, tucked beneath a thin orange quilt. In this house the air conditioning never runs: these days, Maria's mother is always cold.
A specter of steam rises from Maria's coffee cup and fogs the glass of the dining room window. Though the room is assigned for meals, Maria has not, in fact, dined in it since she was fifteen. For the past four years it has been her mother's office, the walnut table stretched to its grandest length. This was the vast and busy staging ground where her mother drafted her last book. And the table still holds notes, but they have not moved in months. The same five piles of paper have stood there since her mother's breasts were removed. The sheet of high-pound stock topping each was once bright white but has now grown yellow and dusty, and though Maria knows that their cursive notations are destined to never again engage with the mind from which they once sprung, she will not move them or even touch them. To do so would signify much more than the need for more table space.
But Maria is not there to look at her mother's old paperwork. She is waiting for the blue Lexus that is, at that moment, slowing to a stop at the curb. A young brunette emerges. Maria assumes this is Anne Vanstory, caseworker for the Children's Home Society of North
Carolina. Anne is in her midthirties, thin, and smart in a navy linen dress cinched around her waist by a leather belt. The wind flatters her by pressing the fabric close against her flesh. Maria has never met Anne, though the woman is not exactly a stranger. If you are a professional in Chapel Hill, if you go to fund-raisers at the Ackland Art Museum, if you shop at Southern Season, if you listen to bluegrass on the lawn of the Carolina Inn and get your coffee at Caffé Driade, Maria's mother knows you. And so it is with Anne Vanstory, who, in addition to being an adoption counselor, is a former student of her mother's.
Anne Vanstory appears representative of a whole race of women refined in a climate separate from Maria's. She wears a pearl necklace. Her large purse is of some perfect untanned leather. She is beautiful according to scientific proof, a gem polished by breeding.
Maria, on the other hand, is unbathed and clad in one of Jack's sweatshirts. It says
CORROSION OF CONFORMITY
and is torn along the left cuff. He gave it to her with great ceremony after staying up until sunrise on the night of his twentieth birthday, when Maria had said, “I'm cold,” shivering in the front seat of his black Scirocco. Above her the sky had begun to pink up between the bare limbs of the maples lining the eastern edge of the Rainbow Soccer fields. They had parked there for the explicit purpose of seeing the sun rise. Jack said he had never before seen it happen. Maria had many times, though. At Camp Celo, a Quaker back-to-nature place where she worked as the horse counselor for the previous three summers, she rose before the sun almost every day.
“I'm cold too,” Jack said, pulling the sweatshirt over his head. He handed it to her and said, “but with you, I'm happy to freeze to death.”
His breath tumbled from his nose in two blossoms of steam and reminded Maria of the horses at camp, the old ones who would breathe on her neck as she bent to fill a bucket in the morning chill. The velvet of their noses. She misses those summers and their simple pleasures. She misses the other counselors too, whom she thought she would never befriend because they were all so different, religious and athletic and gregarious, but grew to love despite it all.
Now Maria does not have many friends. There are girls who listen to the same music, who drive jittery old cars and pick her up and take her to shows at the Cat's Cradle, who skateboard, who smoke and have an increasing array of tattoos. One calls herself Icy People and raps over drum machines at the Nightlight and the 506. Another, Jane, owns the brown Dodge Diplomat in which they most often cruise. When Maria first told these girls that she was pregnant, they all played it cool, said shit, said I had an abortion last May, said that was quick. Icy People hugged her, but Maria could smell fear. As she grew larger they stopped calling. How can you not drink! Jane asked once, incredulous. Maria does not enjoy sports, is not interested in Chapel Hill basketball, is not in any type of club or sorority. To her, Jack and his accouterments, sweatshirt included, are totems of team loyalty. But as Anne Vanstory ascends the three front steps, Maria feels this allegiance challenged. She lifts the sweatshirt over her head and tosses it into a shadowy corner.
At the door, Anne Vanstory says, “Maria?”
Maria slaps both hands on her swollen abdomen and smiles.
The living room is filled with blue leather chairs set upon an expansive Turkish carpet that camouflaged every dropped earring and paperclip of Maria's childhood.
“How far along are you?” Anne says.