Chapter 13
WHEN I’VE BLINKED THROUGH THE DAYTIME brIGHTNESS, I see my mom swaying there, a chunk of cement in her hand—where did she get that from?—and a smug look on her face. My car windshield is a kaleidoscope of spiderweb cracks.
“This,” I say. My face is hot. My whole body’s hot.
“This is why I hate you. Because I’ll never be good enough for you, and you think that means you don’t ever have to listen to me.
” Am I shouting? My mouth is moving on its own.
“And you know what? You need me more than I need you! Can’t you get that?
You need me! So why can’t you just fucking listen? ”
She falters. Is it because I rarely see her outside, in the sunlight, that I haven’t noticed how old she looks? My legs are shaking. I reach for her, but I can’t get the right words out and suddenly I’m afraid of making it worse, of saying something unforgivable. Maybe I already have.
“Ellis?” She’s near tears again. “Are you okay?”
No, Mom, I’m not okay. I haven’t been okay for a long time, maybe ever. I was born with a prison in my heart, but you made a prison of my life. Or maybe I made it, because you built the iron bars, but I was the one who stepped inside and handed you the key.
“Of course I’m okay,” I reassure her. My eyelashes are wet. I’m not supposed to be crying. “Go upstairs. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
She does it. Gentle, obedient, leaning heavily on the railing as she hoists herself up, stair by stair. I scrub my eyes with my fists until the tears are erased.
There’s something rotting me from the inside. Maybe that’s all I am, really, the rot, and the rest of me is just my mom’s imagination.
It doesn’t matter. I still have to take care of her, which means I have to stop feeling sorry for myself and start figuring out how I’m going to make it to northern Nevada now that she’s busted my car. I’ll go for a walk, get my head together.
Our neighborhood is a suburban facade starting to show its cracks.
Sprawling apartment buildings and beat-up single-family homes with trucks in the driveways.
Patchy grass. No neighborhood watch signs.
I get two blocks, then perch on the edge of someone’s cinder block planter and call the first mechanic that pops up when I search.
“Sure,” he says. “Six hundred bucks.”
“Okay.” Like I have that kind of money on hand. “Can you have it done by tomorrow?”
His laugh is a hoarse bark. Then he realizes I’m serious. “Sorry, ma’am, but it’ll take a few days to get the replacement windshield in. You’ll have to call around and find some place that already has one.”
I thank him and hang up. The sun’s making my shoulders itch. I call three more places, and they all quote me about the same price and the same timeline.
I can’t wait for a replacement windshield. Brian’s expecting me, and there isn’t enough blood left in the freezer for me to reschedule.
I try rental car places next. But it’s spring break and tourists are coming and going with advance reservations, and no one seems quite sure they’ll have a car for me that’s not a monster truck like Uncle Bill’s and as expensive to rent for a few days as my windshield will be to replace.
Like I can cover the expense of both. Like I can even cover the expense of one, really, on top of bills and food and my mom’s medications.
But what other choice do I have? I tell the rental car place I’ll be there in an hour, and I call the mechanic to say I’ll drop the car off as soon as I can.
“Stay safe,” the mechanic says. “If you have AAA, you know, you can get a free tow.”
That gives me an idea. Uncle Bill’s truck. I dial 311. When I wipe my free hand on the edge of my shorts, the skin of my thigh goes white and chalky where I press it.
“Hello,” I say once I get past three levels of automated menu, “have you towed a black truck in the last couple of days? A Ford Ranger?”
“What’s the license plate?”
I squeeze my eyes shut until I remember Uncle Bill’s license plate number. I can hear her typing in the background.
“Yeah, yeah, we got it in a couple days ago.”
My tongue is lead. It takes so much effort to ask, “Where did you find it?”
More typing. “I’m seeing here, hmm, out near Highway 95, a few miles up the 156 turnoff. Do you want to come in today to pick it up?”
That’s way out in the desert. Uncle Bill wouldn’t just abandon his truck out there, on the side of the highway.
“You’ll need registration and a photo ID,” she adds before I have a chance to respond to her first question.
“What if I’m not the owner?”
She sounds tired. “Then you’ll need the owner to come with you.”
“What if I don’t know where he is?” Panic cracks my voice high and strained over the last words. The woman on the other end of the line goes quiet, and I wait for her to say something that will break the spell of dread that’s suffocating me.
The typing picks up again. “Well, once you find him, have him come on down to the impound lot and pick it up. Towing fee’s $150, plus $30 a day for every day it stays here.”
“Can’t I,” I begin, but she interrupts me.
“I’m sorry, honey, but if it’s not registered to you, you’re out of luck. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
I don’t even tell her no. Just hang up. Then I walk back home as the sun runs tracks of sweat the length of my spine. Uncle Bill isn’t on some weekend trip. He’s just gone. He left us, like Mom always said he would. Or something worse.
I won’t let myself think about that. He’s fine. He fucked us over, he abandoned us, but he’s fine.
“Hey, honey,” my mom says when I let myself in. “I made sandwiches.”
She’s washed her face and redone her lipstick, and her menopausal cherub’s face is framed by a freshly washed blue sweatshirt. Minnie Mouse smiles wide and inviting from the front of it, mocking me.
She doesn’t remember.
I bite into one of the sandwiches. An oil spill of grape jelly floods my mouth. “Thanks, Mom.”
I take another bite and gag on the combination of dry bread and saccharine jelly. I want to hurt. I want to hurt in a way I’ve never hurt before, in a way that will strip me clean of the guilt and the terror long enough to think. I want to punish myself.
So I’ll punish myself. What’s the worst thing I can think of?
I chew the sandwich till it’s mushy enough to swallow without choking.
Then I excuse myself to the bathroom and run the shower so hot it steams up the mirror.
Water pings off my exposed shoulders like tiny burning bullets.
I kneel on the slick shower floor and retreat inside myself, reaching for cold iron and the beast beyond.
A small, useless voice inside me resists. Isn’t it enough that I’ve given up my independence, that I’m maxing out my credit card to rent a car and drive alone into the desert, isn’t it all enough suffering already?
A whimper. Chain rattles. I smother that voice and whisper, “Run.”
Pain like a burning brand, like a thousand hot needles sliding into the divots of my spine.
I bite my tongue and hope the remnants of the scream that leaks around it will be disguised by the hiss of the shower.
My curse hurtles through the pathetic confines of my musculature, burrowing into creaking joints, seeking a weak spot where it can burst through.
If I stumble, if I give in, it will pin my elbows back and thrust apart my ribs and I will no longer be hunger hiding in a human body, but a mutant creature primed for violence.
Stop. I crumple, sliding on my knees across the shower floor. Stopstopstop. My jaw warps. Saline floods my mouth.
It’s too much.
It’s what I deserve.
It only stops if I can stop it.
I grasp the chain at its root, a knot of iron deep in my chest. My senses are full of the wet smell of the air, the slip of water down my back, the brutal ache in my ligaments to run, to hunt, to show my teeth and what they were made for.
Pressure like someone has pried open my chest, taken my heart in their hands and dragged me veins first from the bathroom, out of the apartment, across sidewalks and streets and highways till the scent of the desert surrounds me.
As my nails turn to claws and my wrists twist in their sockets, I remember: Veer’s driving to Reno today.
Not tomorrow, she’d said, her eyes liquid and hopeful. I’m going up to Reno. But maybe next week.
I thrust my will back inside myself, grip the chain and pull. I shouldn’t call her. I rejected her. The beast bucks against me, ready to snap its jaws down on my throat. Don’t think about her.
And don’t call her. I want to, I’m desperate to have this reason to, and that’s proof enough that I shouldn’t.
Right?
When I catch my breath again, I’m on my hands and knees, vomiting up pale foam that swirls down the drain so fast I might have doubted it came from me at all, if not for the taste of stomach acid.
I already have my solution: a rent-a-truck I can’t afford, and a long, lonely drive into the sweeping nothingness up north.
Discoloration splotches my hips, crawling up my sides like finger marks in rotten fruit.
I press my thumb into the bruise at the top of my thigh.
It burns, blanching red to white like a flame turned up hotter the deeper I dig in.
As soon as I wrap myself in a towel, my phone’s in my hand. She picks up on the first ring.
“Hey.” She sounds breathless. She clears her throat, pitches her voice lower, casual. “Uh, how are you?”
“Fine.” It slips out unthinking. Liar. And what would Veer say if I told her about my mom, my hunger, Uncle Bill’s truck in an impound lot? Maybe my mom is onto something, after all. To be vulnerable with anyone but family is to show someone how to leave you. To open the door and push them through.
Veer clears her throat again. I’ve waited too long to respond.
“Is this about earlier?” I imagine her slouched over the arm of a beat-up couch or curled fetal on the floor of a beige-walled bedroom, worrying at her fingernails. “Because really, it’s cool, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. It’s just, I don’t know, it seemed like we were…”
She trails off, and I’m quick to jump in. “It’s fine. Seriously.”
“Okay. Good. So what’s up?”
Hang up now, Ellis. There’s still time to stop this from becoming dangerous.
My fingers don’t obey me. Neither does my tongue. “Are you driving up to Reno today?”
“Yeah. Why?” She barks out half a laugh, and I imagine her stretching her hands above her head, taking up space in triumph. “You looking for a ride?”
My throat is tight. “Maybe.”
She chuckles, this one lower and quieter. Intimate. “Yes or no, Ellis.”
There’s still time. There’s still time. And woven between my ribs is a craving that runs the length of me, and no matter how many cages I try to put myself in, I will always be an animal inside and I want, I want, I want.
“Yes,” I say. “Please.”
She’s actually driving up to a little town northeast of Reno, she says, and Brian’s place isn’t too out of the way.
She likes to do the drive up all at once, stay overnight at a highway motel, do her business in the morning, and get back to Vegas before it’s dark.
Same general idea as I had. She doesn’t say what her business is, just that she’s got family to see, and I try not to think too much about the motel.
“I need to drop my car off at the mechanic,” I tell her. “Could you pick me up there?”
“Sure. Where is it?”
I give her the address and say I’ll text her when I’m on the way, and she says that’s great and laughs, and I feel hopeful for the first time in weeks.
My mom’s in front of the TV when I head for the door a final time.
After all that. She hugs a pillow as Rose regales Dorothy and Blanche about pickled herring.
I look at her, and my mouth is filled with the bitter taste of the words I wish I could take back.
When her mind finally fragments into so many pieces that she no longer recognizes me, what will be left of me?
Who will I be without anyone to keep score of my flaws?
“Is it a good episode, Mom?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer, just huddles deeper into the pillows. For a second, I wonder if she does remember and is just pretending. Then she mumbles, “Mm-hmm, Rose is my favorite,” and I remember that’s not how this works.
I palm our last two vials, nestle one in cold packs and bury it in my duffel bag, and pour the other into a red plastic cup from the back of the cabinet—Shrimp Factory is stamped on one side in white, along with a grinning cartoon shrimp—along with water and a packet of Emergen-C.
Hopefully the fake citrus is enough to hide the smell of blood.
Hopefully Joanne won’t even notice it. I snap a photo of the cup and my mom’s pill bottles, and text it to her so she knows what to look for when she comes by tomorrow.
Then I kiss my mom on the cheek and tell her I’m going to work.
She doesn’t question it, and I tell myself the lie doesn’t matter.
Only once Veer’s dented Camry rolls to a stop in the car-shop driveway do I realize how much I didn’t want to be alone for this.
The car chirps as its locks disengage. She’s wearing battered black Wayfarers and a ratty Leonard Cohen T-shirt.
She rolls down the window. “Are you coming, or what?”
The car smells like diet soda and the foil insides of vending machine snacks. I suck in the recycled air and remember that dust is made of tiny fragments of dead skin, that I’m absorbing pieces of her just by breathing.
The sky is blue and endless as we turn onto the highway.