Phil stopped and finally turned around. “Do I think
what
?”
“Well, what if he tried to kill her but she survived? What if he
thought
he killed her, but he
didn’t
?”
“Do you even know how retarded you are?” He shoved me hard. I slipped off the curb and fell on the street, scraping my leg. I didn’t cry. Tears didn’t come easily anymore.
“Stop running to me with all your crazy ideas,” he yelled. “She’s gone. And you know what? I don’t care where she’s gone to, either. She could be lying on a beach working on her tan for all I care.”
I thought of the windowless room, where no sun could touch her. How dare he think she was lying on a beach. How dare he forget she couldn’t tan but only sunburned.
“You know what else?” he said, starting toward the school again. “Stop tagging along all the time. You’re starting to get really strange.”
I stared at every bump of gray and black in the road until I could see patterns. I bit down hard, wishing I had something between my teeth. Phil didn’t deserve to know any more about my time with Momma. He had given up. Believed the worst about her. And since that was how he wanted it, I would keep her to myself.
I took my time straightening my homework papers, then boldly I stood up and walked to school. Phil was out in front, and I let the gap between us grow. I concentrated, instead, on showing my poems to Mr. Woodson—sorry I couldn’t also show him the note from Momma.
• • •
“We missed you yesterday,” Mr. Woodson said. “How are you feeling?”
There were no words I knew of to answer his question. I stood there, silent, and after some time, I simply handed him my assignment. The school bell rang, but he didn’t make a motion to start class. He read each page, studied every picture, turning very slowly to the next. I watched closely when he got to my favorite poem. It was about the moon, about trying to catch it with a string and pulling it down to see if the face was friendly or more like a goblin’s. Mr. Woodson’s face was tense with concentration, and I waited where I was until he reached the end.
“Well, it’s a good thing that you’re standing right here,” he finally said. “I was thinking of writing ‘See me’ at the top of your … report … and now I don’t have to.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No. You’re not in trouble. But you understand this wasn’t exactly what the assignment was, right?”
I nodded.
“Because this was meant to be a one-page science report,” he said. “You wrote down the assignment, didn’t you?”
I nodded again.
“Tillie.” He sighed and flipped through the pages. “I’d like to hold on to this and give it a more careful look. Right now, my thinking is that even though you didn’t follow the assignment, not even close, actually, I’ll simply have to give you an A.”
When he started to smile, my whole face burned like the fever had come back. “I was with my mother yesterday,” I blurted out. “She wrote you a note, but I can’t find where I put it.”
And now another sigh and the crooked crease that showed between his eyebrows when he was thinking hard. “You have a
tremendous imagination, Tillie. There’s a great deal going on inside that head of yours.” He drummed his fingers on top of my poems. “I think it’s time I start class. What do you say?”
I nodded, beaming.
“Next time, let’s see what you can do if you read the directions a little more closely.”
I nodded again and turned to walk back to my seat. Some people, not many, can reach the most tender spot within you and hold you there—sometimes without even knowing that’s what they’ve done. As I made my way between the desks, I felt so good I thought the sound of the bells was coming from me. But it was Shirl, clapping her shoes together under the desk.
I’d been unable to explore the basement during the day; someone was always home. And I just couldn’t make myself stay up late enough at night to avoid Dad. Instead, I paced the house, trying not to look suspicious. Sometimes I wondered what our neighbors thought—if they knew anything about us beyond our comings and goings. Had they seen my mother that day she went into the house and never came back out? Did they wonder where she’d gone or what had happened to her? I supposed these questions—like asking who you voted for or how much money you made—were the kind polite people didn’t ask.
When Friday finally arrived and I’d finished school and my chores, I raced my bike up the street to talk to Hope, who was drawing on the sidewalk with chalk. “I saw her,” I said. “My mother! You’ll never believe where I found her. Come see!”
Hope finished the bubble letters in her name, each one connected. “You found her?” she asked, setting down the chalk.
“Yes! Come on!”
“Where are we going?”
“My house. The
basement
.”
I pushed off, and now she jogged alongside. “Dead or alive?” There was an excitement to her question, and I could tell she wanted a gruesome discovery.
“Alive,” I said, irritated. “She’s been locked in the basement closet. But it’s not a closet. I’ll show you where it is.”
“Who would lock your mom in a closet?”
I dragged my feet until the bike came to a stop, then threw it to the curb. I led Hope down the side steps to the basement door, feeling sick with too many thoughts, all terrible and implicating my father.
As we approached the basement door, Hope hopscotched on the walkway.
“Sh!”
“O-kay!”
“Don’t let the door slam.”
“Okay. Okay.”
We walked cautiously through the basement door, as we always did, because we knew we weren’t allowed down there. Now, the danger seemed greater, something darker than rats or stepping on a nail, a danger harder to identify. I tiptoed along the drywall. “That’s the door,” I whispered, pointing, but not going close.
It seemed impossible that Momma could be in there, behind the door that so clearly seemed to lead to a closet or storage space.
“Well, let’s see,” she whispered. “Open it.”
I paused, thinking of how Momma hated visitors, and how pale and thin she looked. I worried that Hope wouldn’t find my mother as wonderful or pretty as the stories I’d told of her. She might even regret all of our searching.
“I don’t know if we should go in,” I said. “Momma gets very nervous with company, and I don’t want to upset her.”
“Wait, she’s still in there?” she asked. “You found her and left her there?”
Hope always came up with the most horrifying thoughts, things I never considered.
“Don’t you think she’s probably starving to death?” she asked.
“I’m going to feed her tonight,” I said, panicked and angry that I didn’t think to set her free when I’d had the chance.
“It’s awfully quiet in there,” she said, and gave a grim but smug expression, as if pleased that she was right.
“Well, I’m not going to let you in to see her,” I whispered more loudly. “You can forget about meeting her.”
“That’s because you made it up,” she said.
“I did not!”
I grabbed her arm, squeezing hard, and pulled her to the other side of the basement. I tugged on the string to open the door to the clubhouse, and we climbed into the damp and dusty room, where Hope wrapped her hands around the fattest pipe and swung her legs back and forth.
“It’s all a bunch of BS,” she said. “I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Why don’t you just go home?”
“Sure,” she said, jumping down from the pipes.
“And you’re not in my club anymore.”
“Fine,” she said. “Then I’ll take this with me.” She removed a package of giant Sweet Tarts from her pocket and held it in front of my face.
“I don’t care,” I said, and stupidly added, “I don’t even like candy.” After she stomped out of the clubhouse, I wrote “Hope stinks” in the sand.
• • •
For days after our fight, I tried to sneak to the secret room, but I was frightened I’d be caught and only got as far as the basement door. Standing there, her room eerily silent, Hope’s words haunted me.
It’s all a bunch of BS. I don’t believe a word of it.
I felt desperate to prove her wrong, and angry I hadn’t just opened the door and let her see Momma for herself. As the week rolled on, I felt more panicked, needing to find a way to visit, needing to see her again with my own eyes and prove to myself that she was real.
I began collecting food, a handful at a time, so I’d be ready. But I needed a plan for waking up at night that didn’t also wake up Dad or Phil. I couldn’t use my alarm clock. I had to be clever. My bedtime was eight and Dad was always in bed by ten, so I needed to pretend to sleep until ten, and then somehow keep myself from nodding off during the wait.
Just after my bedtime, I drank a pitcher full of water, and in the middle of the night, woke up urgent. I peed, but did not flush, and then put on my bathrobe, which already had the pockets stuffed full with carrots, salami, and Saltine crackers. I crept through the house, butter knife in hand. Down the last set of stairs, I held the rail with both hands so I wouldn’t fall into the black. And when I reached the bottom, I felt along the wall for the door and then the handle.
I was afraid of what I’d find—Momma starving, or worse, nothing more than a closet, just as Hope believed. I inserted the knife into the keyhole, and slowly let myself in. There. The blue flickering light. Something glowing in the corner of the couch under the small lamp. It was her. I breathed a sigh of relief to find Momma sitting up in her bathrobe, books
crowded into her lap, and the television showing the same picture on it.
“I didn’t tell him,” I whispered.
“Good girl,” she said. “Come sit with me. I was just about to read.”
It felt like something the size of an acorn had just become lodged in my throat. I inched toward the couch, wanting badly to hear a story, and when she scooted the books out of the way, I curled up beside her. I’d often thought about the last chapter in
Alice in Wonderland
, wondering which way the story turned. I could have checked out the book at the library and simply read that final chapter myself, but it was Momma’s smiles and tears for Alice that I longed for, and how she always read until I drifted off.
Remembering the food I brought for her, I reached into my pocket and placed it between us. She smiled and then opened a book with the odd word “PLATH” written across it and started to read out loud:
The claw of the magnolia
drunk on its own scents
asks nothing of life.
I had no idea what a “magnolia” was. The other words I knew, but they seemed like they were in the wrong order. Still, I loved how she read the poem into the top of my head, her lips touching. It was a feeling of being in a brand new world and wondering how I’d ever tolerated the old one. “Read some more,” I begged.
Momma read from other books that night—strange, serious books that were nothing like the ones I’d read before. Each
time she finished, she passed me the book, warmed from her hands, with her favorite passages underlined perfectly in felt-tipped marker.
When I was so tired I didn’t think I could make it back up the stairs, I waited for a space in Momma’s talking, where I could say good-night. She seemed to sense I was about to go, and whispered, “I love you the best.” She said it with a kind of fierceness.
“Do you want to come with me?” I asked as I opened the door. This was a test to see if she wanted to escape, or if she was too afraid.
“I better stay here,” she said, and smiled with her lips closed, one side of her mouth curling upward, the other side flat and guarding her secret.
At the bottom of my pocket, I felt for a piece of paper that had been folded over and over into a small square. I dusted the cracker crumbs off of it and handed it to Momma, my hand shaking. It was my poem about the moon.
M
Y FATHER’S WORK INVOLVED
creating some kind of navigating system in which things on earth could be tracked, and possibly even directed, from space. Sometimes at breakfast he tried to explain this idea to me, describing satellite geometry and signal frequencies. It sounded like science fiction, and I found it hard to be interested in space and in the future when more important things were taking place right here in our own house.
Still I nodded, saying the occasional “hmm” so as not to raise suspicions. But what I really thought about were his lies. Even the times I remembered as good ones—camping in the backyard or going to the Pentagon with him—were different now because of what I knew. When I was missing Momma and begging to know where she was, he could have told me.
My head could nod. My mouth could smile. My body could rise and collect my book bag and find its way to school. I could do all of this by rote, though my mind was somewhere else
entirely. Sometimes it was churning with questions:
Why did he do this? How could he be so cruel?
Most often, my mind was far away in the secret room, reliving favorite scenes with Momma over and over, but revising them so that my words were smarter and there were fewer pauses in-between.
I walked down the hallway at school, wondering where the day had gone. Students were packing up to leave for home, and those of us cast in
The Wizard of Oz
headed to the cafeteria for our first rehearsal. The janitor had transformed the room into an auditorium by putting the lunch tables back into the walls and setting out rows of metal chairs. I sat in back, slumped in my brother’s Baltimore Colts shirt, since none of mine were clean, and tried to work up the nerve to quit the play.
“We’re going to play a little get-to-know-you game,” our director, Mrs. Newkirk, announced. “Everyone, pull your chairs into a circle.”
The game involved a ball. You had to say your name, your part in the play, and then throw the ball to someone you hadn’t thrown to yet. The ball went back and forth between the popular students who shouted out lead roles. At last, out of necessity, someone threw the ball to me. I said my name, and my voice sounded small, the way I sounded when Hope and I recorded ourselves on her cassettes. I was meant to keep up the rhythm—name, role, throw—but I stalled. I couldn’t say the name of my part, even when the other students laughed and said it for me. I felt desperate to return to Momma’s blue-lit room, and when I threw the ball at another student, I threw it like I was playing dodge ball. The next time the ball came to me, I threw it even harder.