Chapter 4
MY MOM’S WATCHING NIGHT COURT AND DOING HER nails when I come in. On the screen, Judge Harry Stone ogles a beauty queen in a witch hat and bad wig. My mom leaps up, and half a set of checkerboard press-ons cascades to the floor.
“Hi, Mom.” I nod at the plastic bag dangling from my hand. “Let me get these into the freezer.”
Her face crumples, and she slinks back to her seat. On-screen, the clerk shouts, “Why didn’t you use a knife?”
Through the fuzzy TV speakers, the canned laughter sounds especially hollow.
“How’s your morning?” I ask as I pry the slippery cold packs free.
The apartment is laid out in the shape of a T, living room and kitchen mashed together in the front, our two bedrooms and a bathroom in a row in the back, with beige walls and laminate flooring that looked slick when we moved in but has since deformed at the seams. Constellations of Post-its crawl across the walls, the door, the countertops, like neon cicadas waiting for dusk.
Can opener in here stuck on one drawer in vivid pink.
Wash hands before eating! next to the sink in eye-watering orange.
The books I read suggested I show her old photo albums, ask her for old stories, force her to keep a grip on her memories by repeating them out loud. But we have no photos in the living room, and my mom has never been one to dwell on the past. Most of her stories end in disappointment.
“My nails,” she moans. “They’re all over the floor.”
“I’ll get them in a second. Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know.”
The ice machine spits out a few forlorn cubes as I wedge the vials into the corner of the freezer.
They teeter on top of stacked bags of frozen vegetables, but I can fix that later.
Right now, I need to focus on my mom. It’s a delicate thing, judging whether she’s actually incapable or just demanding things of me because she knows she can.
It changes day to day. Maybe she really is overwhelmed by something so small.
The knotty edge of the living room carpet digs into my knees as I scoop the scattered nails into her waiting hands.
“Let me do it for you,” I say.
“Do what?”
“The blood. If you’re hungry.”
She frowns. “You know, baby, I nearly passed out when I had you, not from the pain but from the sight of all that blood.”
When I look at her, the brown flecks in her eyes seem swollen against her gray-green irises. Her face is slightly slack, her expression vacant.
“I’ll be right back,” I promise her. “I’ll take care of everything.”
My mom isn’t afraid of blood. You can’t be, with a hunger like ours. But I don’t mind her lying about it, because it’s something she always claimed, all my life. Means she’s still in there, somewhere.
The truth is that I was born in the bathroom of a Motel 6 on the side of the highway between Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas, and from that moment I was my mom’s best friend, her safeguard, her identity.
Her family left her by degrees, her father first, left a corpse as her mother sped away on the interstate, then Uncle Bill hitting the road when she was in elementary school, and finally, her mother disappearing on a sweltering June night, her only goodbye a scrawled note of I can’t do it anymore, be good, I love you.
All those abandonments carved a hole in my mom’s heart, and my reason for existing was to fill it.
The truth is, too, that we were each born with ribs suffused with iron, and a need for blood each day to keep the prison of our bones intact. Only that blood and that cage and our will keeps hunger from invading our bodies and devouring everything before us.
“Once, when man was just another animal” is how my mom began the story of what we are.
Before I remember anything else, I remember her voice, telling it.
“The flayed god crouched at the edge of time and sanity, and breathed life into a blade of iron. It grew arms and legs and a snout and teeth. So many teeth. It was our ancestor, but unlike us, it couldn’t control its hunger. ”
She’d brush the tiny floating hairs back from my forehead, her touch light, tender. Loving.
“One by one, men fell before its appetite. Until, at last, it came to the home of a great warrior. ‘A curse upon you!’ the warrior cried as he, too, met death at the jaws of the monster. But that didn’t matter, because the creature was already cursed.
“As it finished devouring the great warrior, the warrior’s daughter emerged.
She howled, not a howl of vengeance but a howl of gratitude.
The warrior had kept his daughter like a prisoner all her life and now she was free.
Even with her father’s blood still dripping from its muzzle, she loved this terrible thing.
It did not know language, so she spoke to it in the only way she could: with a knife pressed over her heart. ”
My mom tapped that same place in my chest, showing me just where my own monster hid.
“The creature stilled its rampage. With its long black tongue, it licked her wound clean, and from her blood it gained the power of speech. It cut the skin from one of its victims and stepped into it and became a man. And so the monster and the warrior’s daughter became a family, and they taught their children how to keep safe from their hunger so they would never devour those they loved. ”
No one becomes like us. You’re either born human or born hungry. And no one can ever understand me, can ever love me down to my bones and the snarling beast beyond like family can.
I lay out a fresh syringe and numbing wipe side by side on the counter. The vials defrosted enough on the drive here to be liquid inside, despite the cold packs.
“Roll your sleeve up, Mom,” I call over my shoulder.
She wiggles around, head hanging over the armrest. “What’s up with you? Are you mad at me?”
“Just roll up your sleeve. You pick which arm.”
I fill up the syringe. When I turn around, she’s pushed both sleeves up above the elbow.
She relaxes at the sight of the needle. It’s instinct after a lifetime of need, even as she asks, frowning with confusion, “What’s that for?”
I crouch next to her. “How about your right arm?”
She nods and offers it up.
When I was a kid, my mom only ever held my hand in public.
She’d scoop me up and perch me on her hip, leaning in to charm the other parents, to tell them how fast I was learning—and already growing her adult teeth!
But when it was just the two of us, there was always a distance.
Between the daughter she wanted and the person I was.
A distance I tried every day, every month, every year to close, and always failed.
Now, when I trace the spidering lines of her veins with my thumb, a private highway traversing the tender underside of her forearm, she smiles a small, secret smile and closes her eyes.
When the needle breaks her skin, she squeezes my hand so tight it’s like she’s trying to fuse us together.
“What would I do without you, Ellis?” she mumbles, eyes still closed, her dark hair fanned out over the back of the chair, the gray threads in it glittering like stars.
My throat catches, and I can’t get out a reply. So I retreat to dig under the sink for the empty detergent bottle we use for old syringes. She murmurs something else I don’t catch.
“What was that?” The syringe clatters into the orange plastic expanse. On the TV, the Brooklyn Bridge zooms into focus, grainy and overbright.
“You’re not going to get rid of me, are you?”
“No, Mom, of course not.” The screen fades back into the make-believe courtroom. I sink down to kneel at her feet. “I love you.”
“Love you too.” She strokes a hand through my hair, and suddenly I’m desperate to have the long, silky, elegant hair she always wanted for me, not this half-grown-out bob left stringy after a long night.
This is the real her, who remembers, who whispers her gratitude, who tells me she loves me.
Maybe it’s all been a misunderstanding, maybe today is when we’ll really feel like mother and daughter, maybe it’ll all start to be easy.
I’ll grow my hair out, I’ll start taking better care of myself, I’ll find something to wear that I didn’t buy in college.
I won’t have to fight to remember what’s real and what’s not.
She pats my hair again, and my scalp tingles with hope.
“Are you going to work already?” she asks. Her gaze isn’t on me, but the scuffed sneakers still on my feet. “I want some more of that bread from the Colombian bakery. The one on Sahara. You don’t mind getting it while you’re out, do you?”
Oh, that’s right. Hope is for other people.
“Sure, Mom.” I fix my eyes on the cracks in the ceiling. “Right after I shower.”
It’s an old trick. By the time I finish showering, she’ll forget that she asked.
As the water runs, I thrust my awareness inward, groping past my sternum and around the slimy curves of my lungs until I find a beast on an iron chain. I whistle softly. Its dark-furred ears perk up. It strains against the pitted curves of its prison.
I trace the cold, sure edges of this cage that is my heart.
My skin prickles with savage excitement, with the possibility of throwing the lock and letting the creature inside me run.
How would it feel to embrace all my pent-up violence, to let the viciousness soaked through me have its way?
I’m not so stupid as to give in to that temptation.
But sometimes it soothes me to place my fingers within snapping distance of the sharp jaws of my ferocity.
It’s the only time I’m sure that I’m real.
A text from Uncle Bill pops up on my phone as I’m drying my hair.
Stay safe, it reads. Both of you.
I text back, Don’t we always, with a smiley face. It’s hard to know what these things mean with him. Maybe he read something fucked up in the Review-Journal. Three dots appear, vanish, reappear, as he types, deletes, types again.
We will, I add quickly. I want to get to bed, not have a drawn-out text conversation. Thanks. Love you.
There is no safety for us, not really. We choose between scheming and stealing to get the blood we need, or a brief brutal burst as a monster.
We tell kids that the flayed man can only smell us when we’re transformed, that he’s always hunting, always hoping, but as long as we stay human, we’re safe from him—we tell kids that, because the truth is scarier.
If I got so hungry my bones came through my skin, it wouldn’t be the flayed man who killed me.
It would be a cop or a guard or some other guy with a gun, and he’d be right to do it, because once we transform, there’s nothing left but destruction.
We have stories about that too. Abandoned infants who become killing machines, mothers whose jaws slip loose from their sheathes. Teenagers testing their limits, put down by a bullet.
I crawl into bed, the sun slashing slivers of brightness around the edges of the curtains, and do my best to forget it all.