American Elsewhere (20 page)

Night-night.

As Mona watches, the old pain in her arm and stomach returns.

Did Momma have that with me?
Mona wonders.
Did I? Could I have ever had such a thing?

Put it away. Push it all away.

You are empty. Empty.

Mona asks, and asks, and asks. But she gets no answers. At first she suspects the entire town is hiding something from her. But after a while, she begins to believe them: they really don’t remember her mother’s time here. Was her mother here in secret? Did she live under another name? Was it something to do with Coburn? They cannot say.

Despite this, Mona’s first weeks in Wink are some of the most pleasurable ones she’s ever had. The afternoons are so beautiful they almost hurt. She has never wanted to shed her life and start anew as much as she does here. She almost wants to give up finding out more about her mother. But then she finds the cans of film in the attic.

It’s real film, motion picture film, spools and spools of ghostly amber images. She has to find an old-school projector to view it, but this isn’t hard to find in Wink, where the stores keep plenty of old appliances. She has to go through a tutorial to figure out how to feed the film through the projector (a marvelously complicated process), but when she figures it out she returns home, shuts all the curtains and doors, feeds the film in, and turns the projector on.

There’s a whir, and a blob of dancing colored light appears on the living room wall. She fiddles with the knobs to get it to resolve into distinct shapes, and soon faces and hands emerge from the colorful fog.

What the camera is projecting is a room. This room, in fact, this very living room in this house, and it’s not empty, but full of people. It’s some kind of holiday party, one set during the summer—on the Fourth of July, probably, judging by the red-white-and-blue cake—and everyone in attendance is about the same age, around thirty or so. The men all wear open-throated shirts with blue or brown sports
coats, and the women wear incredibly bright dresses, so bright they look like Christmas ornaments. The air is thick with smoke, everyone has a glass of punch, and they all laugh as they walk in and out of the French doors in the back. Some of them wave to the camera, or squint irritably when the cameraman turns its blazing light on them. There is no sound, so the images are accompanied only by the rattle and whir of the projector.

One man calls across the porch to the backyard. Mona can see a woman turn and say something, but she’s far away and out of focus. The man (to Mona he looks like a professional golfer) says something again, louder, and the woman shouts a response so loudly she practically bends double. Mona feels certain she’s just witnessed the “What?…
WHAT?
” exchange that has to happen once at nearly every big party. The golfer, giving up, waves to the woman, and she comes trotting in, moving very gracefully in such huge high heels.

It is Mona’s mother, Laura Alvarez herself, wearing an amazing red dress, and she is undoubtedly the life of the party. A silent cheer goes up among all the attendees when she strides through the French doors, and she laughs, embarrassed but gleeful, her fingers fluttering to her chest to calm her heart. And as she laughs, something in Mona breaks, and she begins crying as the ghost of her mother smiles at her from the wall.

This is all just not fair. It’s wrong—no, it’s just fucking
rude
—for Mona to see her mother living a happy life among all these happy people. The blurry woman laughing on her wall has no idea that just ahead of her lie years of madness spent in dark rooms, and somewhere in one of those rooms will be a child who can’t understand why every sight seems to make her mother weep.

Suddenly Mona hates them all. She hates her pleasant neighbors in Wink, she hates the sound of the kids laughing as they fool around on the baseball field, she hates the cheery neon lights and the waves of hello, and she hates the painted people on the town’s sign who stare at the antenna on the mesa with eyes full of hope. She hates them all for having a happiness that is denied to her, because they don’t
know
, do
they? They don’t know what the world is like outside Wink. Those people in the film don’t know that their dreams will come to nothing. They don’t know how things really are, how they will be.

But Mona knows. She knows too well.

Mona’s last name wasn’t always Bright. Once, only a few years ago—though it feels like a lifetime now—when she was on her fourth year with the Houston PD, she happened to meet a state trooper named Dale Loudon, a brick wall of a man who had large, sad eyes and a soft, slow way of speaking that charmed Mona’s hardened (or so she thought) heart. Dale liked old movies, mowing his grass, and making fly-fishing lures, though he was a terrible fly-fisherman himself. He was kind, he was attentive, he was, more or less, thoughtful; in other words, he was everything Mona had missed out on so far in her life. And the fact that he had a dick like a plantain certainly didn’t hurt his case.

They got married when Mona was thirty-two, and she was, to her suspicious disbelief, quite happy. The quiet, dull domesticity Dale offered appealed to her, resonated with her. She had never known you could live like that, so relaxed, just simply
there
. There was something perfect about the Sunday mornings when they would lie in bed lazing away the day. It was like some kind of wonderful exotic drug—but then, it would be, because never in her life had Mona ever had a home like that. A
real
home.

She was pregnant four months into the marriage. It was not something either of them had intended, yet she couldn’t ever call it an accident. Because Mona was, despite all logic, quite thrilled at the news, which was not something one would expect. Honestly, no one could ever hear the question “Would you like for your body to play host to a whole person, and, upon painful extraction of that person, would you allow every waking and even unwaking moment of the next years or decades of your life to bend at the whims of a tiny, tyrannical, larval human, to the complete devastation of your financial and social life?” and respond in the positive. Let alone Mona Bright, she of the fierce
right hook, cold grimace (which she picked up from her father), and deadeye shot (for Mona had been far and away the best shot in her graduating class—something else she had learned from her father).

But Mona did. When she saw the tiny pink plus sign on the white stick, something inside her opened up, unfolded its limbs, and stretched its palms toward sunlight. She could not articulate it, but it felt like she now had a chance to make things
right
, even though she was never entirely sure what had been wrong. (Besides, a tiny voice always reminded her, absolutely everything.)

She soon found herself buying all sorts of ridiculous shit for the nursery: carpets and drapes and a crib and bedding (all vetted by the most scrupulous baby magazines, which suddenly seemed terribly wise) and onesies and hats that would only ever be worn about twice before the little thing’s head grew too big. Most of these items were a gender-neutral yellow, because Mona could never get her head around this binary blue/pink bullshit. She also refused to learn the baby’s gender, because that would just ruin all the damn fun, wouldn’t it?

Dale bought her similarly ridiculous maternity shit. Slippers. Body pillows. A foot massager for her swollen ankles. He even bought her a pink maternity dress. A
pink
one, because, bless his heart, Dale could never get his own head around Mona’s problems with the blue/pink situation. But the thing was, Mona had
worn
it. Even though it made her look like a deflating balloon or a piece of goddamn chewing gum, she’d worn it. And she hadn’t cared. The second she saw the tiny dancing shrimp-person displayed on the screens at the ob-gyn, none of that niggling stuff could ever bother her again.

If anything bothered her, it was the whole family process—and there
was
a process. She began to think about the phrase
start a family
more and more: it was like
start a car
, suggesting that there was a preassembled apparatus and you could just hop in and hit a switch and off you would go. Or as if there were a cheap-suited huckster who, once you had a ring on your finger and a mortgage sucking off dollars from your bank account, could fix you up with the right kind of family and you could drive it off the lot to
day
. It was a creeping feeling she had when reading the magazines, as if they were saying, “This is how
one births and rears a child,” and they’d brook no other suggestion. You had to look
exactly
like the picture in the magazine, otherwise you were doing it wrong.

And none of that seemed right to her. She didn’t want this to be a product, a commodity, something that had to look like what was advertised on the fucking
box
. This was her one chance to give love she’d never gotten herself, and she didn’t want it to be turned into something she was being fucking
sold
, just buying the Motherhood Experience, one internet purchase at a time.

Her life and her child were the only things she’d ever really had. And she made herself promise never to forget that.

It was eight months into the pregnancy when it happened. Eight months of nausea, of swollen feet and fingers, of nosebleeds and blurred vision and exhaustion; eight months of little wiggles and shimmers down in her belly, the poke and prod of tiny limbs; eight months of black-and-white photos of the slumbering stowaway growing inside her; eight months of mounds and mounds of impossibly tiny clothing. And then when she was on her way back from the grocery store she passed through an intersection with the blessing of two green lights, and yet just as she trundled through she caught a blur of red in the corner of her vision—just the tiniest blur, like the flit of a hummingbird’s wing. Then she felt her head snap back and her arms go limp, and in that moment her world shattered.

The entire earth seemed to buckle up and throw her car several feet to the right. She blacked out briefly. When she came to, with screams and tinkling glass and the hiss of machinery in her ears, she looked through what was left of her driver’s-side window and saw the crumpled front of a red Ford F-150, its windshield sporting a frost-rimmed, gaping hole on the right side, created when the driver—unbuckled, drunken—had been ejected through the windshield like a man shot out of a cannon, his face pushed back through his brain as he dove through the glass.

And all she could think was—
Where did that come from? Where did that come from?

Then the ambulance and the parade of lights, some red and blue,
some cold white. So many white flashing lights, light after light after light, and pokes all along her side as they put pins in the bones of her left arm… and then there was Dale, seated beside her bed with his big hands clasped before him, his face the color of a currant and his eyes dripping tears, and he said, honey, honey, she didn’t make it.

And Mona said, Who? Who didn’t make it?

And Dale said, Our little girl. She died. He killed our little girl.

And as Mona understood who this
she
was and realization dawned in her sputtering, bruised brain, some little shelf under her heart collapsed and she caved inward, crumbling to pieces and falling down the big, dark mine shaft that occupied the space where her daughter had once peacefully slept.

Dale kept talking, but it didn’t matter. Mona was walking through the hallways of her mind, turning off lights, shutting off switches, locking doors, shutting everything down, down, down, until all that was left was the barest fundamentals.

Shut down. Turn it all off.

Make yourself empty, and drift.

After the funeral Dale held her hand and said she’d be all right. He said they’d get through this. He was wrong on both counts.

She wished so badly to have known her at least a little before she lost her. Much in the same way, Mona knows, that she wished to have known her mother before she excused herself from this world.

Why is it
, she thought,
that people always leave us just before we know them?

After her marriage fell apart, her old lieutenant came by to pay her his respects and offer her her old position. But Mona turned it down. The person who had worked that job was gone, just as the happy creature of lazy Sunday mornings was gone. Now she could tolerate nothing but endless highways and miles of ugly country and the constant shuffle of motels, a beery, dreary life of mundane odd jobs and faceless, wordless lovers. And somewhere in the midst of all that miserable wandering she looked at herself in the mirror and saw a glimpse of the trembling, mad woman who had once told her to stay in the yard until the ambulances were gone, just before she lay down in the bathtub and stuck her chin on the barrel of a twelve-gauge.

Mona considered doing the same. Perhaps, she thought, it was a kind of family duty, carrying on in her mother’s footsteps.

Yet almost as the thought crossed her mind she got a letter notifying her that her father, Earl Bright III, had sloughed off his mortal coil to transcend this earth and touch the heavens, and so on and so forth, and waiting in the bleary wreckage of his life was a confusing invitation to come visit this little slice of paradise in the shadow of Mesa Abertura.

Now Mona is here, sifting through the remains of another person’s life, yet this life was over long before she died. How and why this happened, why some germ of madness infected her mother’s brain, remains a mystery to Mona. And though she hates herself for it, she feels nothing but anger at the woman projected on the wall. She hates that Laura Alvarez and the rest of this town has a joy that has always eluded her. She hates that this place is perfect forever, whereas she has only a dream of something that now feels as if it might never have happened, a dream of two people, mother and child, who never truly were.

Mona isn’t really paying attention to the movie anymore; she’s just staring through the morass of flickering blue faces as she imagines her own failings. Yet then her anger goes cold and something in her brain, the tiny cop part that still scrutinizes everything she sees, speaks up and says—
Did I just see…?