One of Us (7 page)

“I’m getting old.”

“You look great.”

“I guess I am old. I guess it’s better to be old than dead.”

She hands the mirror back to me, all the excitement she felt over it and her cupcakes draining away in front of me.

She stares at her pale hands lying lifeless in her lap like two broken albino bats. I prefer them to be busy. I look around for the latest hat she must be knitting or handkerchief she might be embroidering.

“Is something wrong?” I ask.

If ever there was a loaded question to ask my mother, this was it.

“Did you take your pills today?” I follow up casually.

She smiles at me.

“I saw Molly.”

Her proclamation catches me completely off guard. I stare at her, dumbfounded, with no idea what I should say next.

“No, you didn’t,” I tell her.

“I saw her.”

“Molly is dead.”

“She was here last night. In my room. With Great-grandma Fi.”

This information given in such a matter-of-fact manner sends a chill through me.

My mom used to hallucinate about my sister when she was in prison. She used to think she was still alive. She’d talk to me during our visits about Molly being in a crib back in her cell, and I remember one particularly horrifying time when she sat on the other side of the Plexiglas cradling an invisible infant and cooing to her. I couldn’t get her to pay any attention to me, and when I finally cried out to her in frustration over the dirty phone receiver that always smelled like beer and french fries, she turned her burning black gaze on me and said, “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you love your sister?” Then she stood up and screamed at me, “Don’t you love your sister? Don’t you love your sister?” She was still screaming it when the guards dragged her away.

“You know that’s not possible, Mom,” I say calmly. “They’re both dead. You probably had a bad dream.”

“No. They were here in this room. Standing there.”

She points to the foot of the bed.

“They were holding hands. Molly was all grown up, and Fi was young again. Not like in her picture. They were the same age. Young women. They couldn’t talk. They stood there staring at me with their mouths open. Their skin was gray. They were angry.”

My chill deepens to a shudder.

“I’m sure it was a dream,” I tell her again.

“I don’t want them to come back.”

“Mom, it was a dream.”

“I want a gun.”

“A gun?” I cry. “What are you talking about? No, Mom, you can’t have a gun.”

“Why not?”

“Well, because—”

“I know. People think I’m crazy.”

I don’t comment.

“Then I want a dog. A dog would warn me if they come back. I don’t like the idea of them walking around while I’m asleep. Do you think they’ll hurt me?”

“No one’s going to hurt you,” I promise her. “It’s all in your head.”

“Don’t say that to me,” she says, irritation mounting in her voice. “Everyone’s always telling me everything’s in my head. I know what’s real.”

“I know you do.”

“Stop saying what you think you should say! I’m not stupid!”

“I know.”

“You wish I was dead.”

Her words cut through me. There were times as a child when I wished she were dead. Not because I hated her, I told myself, but because I loved her. If she were dead maybe there’d be an end to her pain, I’d reason, but deep down I knew it was my own pain I wanted to ease. Maybe I wouldn’t have to think about her every day if I knew she was safely in Heaven instead of locked up in jail. Maybe people might feel sorry for me and be nice to me because I was a boy without a mother, instead of giving me dirty looks and calling me names behind my back because I was the son of a baby killer.

“Please, Mom. Don’t say that. I don’t wish you were dead.”

She gets up from the table and for a moment I think she’s going to slap me, but she steps up next to me and peers intently into my eyes.

Who is she seeing? Who is any mother seeing when she looks at her grown son? The baby she nurtured, the little boy she knew so well, the stranger he became.

Is she disappointed? Does she see my failure? Does she hate me for not being able to help her?

She gives me a quick hug then drops to the floor where she retrieves something from under her bed.

“Here.”

She extends a brown paper lunch bag toward me. My name is written on the outside in crayon.

“I made you a hat,” she says. “Don’t open it until you get home.”

I take it from her and say my good-byes. Visits with Mom can drag on for hours or be over in a few minutes. She gets distracted easily and either wants me to leave or doesn’t care if I leave or demands that I stay.

I’m on my way down the corridor to the elevators when her attending psychiatrist, Dr. Versey, calls out my name. I’ve only met him once but have spoken to him on the phone several times.

“How nice that you’ve been able to find some time to see your mother,” he says to me, the implication being that I don’t find the time often enough.

We shake hands and eye each other up and down. He’s wearing a gray plaid, polyester-blend department store suit and some type of unidentifiable black shoe with white salt stains on the sides. I’m wearing dark wash Burberry jeans, a Ferragamo turtleneck, a Calvin Klein tweed jacket, and Dior Homme sneakers. I win.

“Doesn’t it make you feel good? Aren’t you glad you got to see your mom?”

“Yes,” I answer him.

I’m not lying exactly. I’m always happy to see my mom, but it’s a wretched kind of happiness, similar to what a wounded soldier must feel when he wakes up and finds out he’s going to live but without his legs.

“How is your mother?” he asks like an old acquaintance who hasn’t seen her in years.

“Shouldn’t I be asking
you
that question?”

He laughs.

“I think she’s doing wonderfully.”

“She seems good.”

“Did she discuss her plans with you?”

My mind jumps back to the work sheet. Which ones? Gardening or purging evil?

“Her plans?”

“I see.”

He clears his throat.

“Patient privacy laws being what they are, I shouldn’t even be telling you that she’s about to be released.”

“What?”

“We only have a hundred and twenty-eight beds.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Your mother is fine.”

My scalp begins to prickle.

“‘Fine’ is a relative term.”

“I realize that. What I mean is, considering her illness, she’s doing very well right now and we simply can’t justify keeping her here any longer, and once the legal restriction is removed, she’s free to do what she wants, and she wants to leave. She’s made that very clear. I can give you the names of some excellent private facilities.”

“Believe me, I have all the names. I really have to get going.”

Before he can say another word, I walk quickly away from him down the corridor and turn the first corner. I lean against the wall trying to look as nonchalant as possible and take deep breaths. It’s been a while since I’ve had a panic attack, but if anything could trigger one, it would be this information.

I open the paper bag my mother gave me thinking I can use it if I start to hyperventilate and find an orange hat inside. Along the band is stitched
A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR.

seven

A
FTER VISITING MY MOM
I always try to dwell on a good memory and disregard the fact that now I know most of them were the beginnings of one of her manic episodes that were destined to end in disaster.

Driving back to Lost Creek today, I think about the time we painted the garage pink. I wasn’t sure Dad would like the color, but Mom kept assuring me he would. She painted like a fiend and by the time we finished, I agreed with her that he would have to love it. Who wouldn’t love a garage the same color as Bazooka bubble gum?

She was so pleased with the results she wanted to share our good fortune with others, so we went next door and started painting the neighbor’s peeling front porch. It was a perfect sunny day and as I watched the old drab gray flecks beneath my feet disappear beneath a pretty, glossy coat of pink, I felt anything was possible. Even this bleak, run-down town could be given a new life. With Mom and me leading the way, this could become the most beautiful place in the world.

Then the neighbor came home and she and Mom got in a big fight that ended with Mom throwing the remaining paint on her and running away.

Mom still hadn’t returned by the time Dad got home from his shift. He stood in the driveway for the longest time and just stared. His gaze
was so intense and his stance so fixed, I started to think maybe he liked it after all.

Tommy’s truck came rumbling up a few moments later. He parked and slowly got out, unable to take his eyes off the offending structure, too. He held out a hand to me, still grimy from a day of work, and said to my father, “I’ll take the boy.”

I spent two days at Tommy’s house and when I returned the garage was painted mud brown and Mom was in her bed silently staring at the wall plucking loose threads from her sweater.

I can hear Tommy’s voice in my head trying to comfort me as clearly as if he were in the car with me now.

“I know your mother has her share of problems, but at least you have a mother. Your great-great-grandfather Prosperity never knew his mother because she died
before
he was born.”

This was the way Tommy always began this particular story. He doesn’t have to be with me for his words to soothe me. I settle back behind the wheel of my car and listen.

“Prosperity’s mother wasn’t one of these women who died
during
childbirth. This, at least, was a phenomenon a fellow could try to begin to understand once he finally learned that women carried babies around inside themselves before finally expelling them into the world in a manner no one dared to seriously contemplate.

“To expire during the commitment of an act was common enough. Soldiers were often shot dead while in the middle of soldiering. Prosperity’s friend Billy Kelly—the more reliable of the Kelly boys—loved to tell of his own uncle falling down dead in the middle of haying. Everyone had heard of the woman in Goleen who died while in the middle of pouring out tea for the parish priest.

“But to die
before
you began to do something, this was something entirely different, and Prosperity was greatly impressed by the idea. Throughout his young life, he would raise his fists to anyone who failed to give his mother the proper respect due to a woman who had shown such willpower and foresight. As far as he knew, very few people accomplished anything of worth after they were dead.

“He would never know the exact facts of his tragic beginnings,
although Fiona would eventually unearth the details after they were married through a correspondence she struck up with the aunt who raised him.

“The truth of the matter was that his mother did die during childbirth—not before—but she was half-starved, frail and sickly, and lost consciousness after the first wave of pain and passed away shortly thereafter. The doctor had to cut the infant from her body, a procedure so gruesome for the times that the two neighbor women attending him were struck dumb by the sight of it and could never bring themselves to gossip properly about it in the future.

“Whenever they tried, their minds would fill with the poor young girl’s face, looking as pale and quiet in death as a sleeping child’s, sitting atop the flayed, bloody carcass, and all they could manage to do was cross themselves and mutter ominously that she died before the child was born.

“Like his mother dying before he was born, Prosperity’s father had left before he was born. He had gone to England to look for work, since there was none to be found in Ireland. He hadn’t known the girl long or well, just long enough to marry her and well enough to get her pregnant, although no one was ever quite sure of the sequential order of these events. People tried to contact him after the birth of his son and the death of his wife, but he was never heard from again.”

I feel a little better after recalling Tommy’s story, although I still dread having to tell him Mom is getting released again. He’s too old to deal with her anymore and I can’t have her live with me in the city. She needs to be watched constantly. I don’t know what we’re going to do. The enormous expense aside, facilities for the mentally unstable have become few and far between, and many of them are terrible places not much better than the prison where Carson sits waiting to die.

Tommy seems physically fine. We talked last night over dinner and decided there’s really no reason for me to stay, but I can’t leave him here alone with Mom. At least not at first.

I’m distracted and not paying much attention to the drive, but even so, I can’t help noticing the commotion going on at the gallows.

One of the town’s black-and-whites is parked there along with
Rafe’s car. The surrounding streets are also full of cars and pickup trucks. A crowd has gathered inside the prison yard and formed a motionless chunk of rapt parka-clad humanity with a hundred arms, all of them holding phones aloft taking pictures and video of the gallows.

I don’t see Tommy’s truck anywhere and I decide to stop partly out of curiosity but mostly because I might be able to learn some town gossip before he does.

A woman in a winter coat and rubber boots is sitting on the gallows in a chair and a man is sitting on the edge of the scaffolding holding a rifle with his feet kicking casually at the air.

I recognize the woman as Birdie Connolly, the activities secretary for the NONS, a plump, pleasant grandmotherly sort with soft white hair like a cap of cotton balls. She’s tied to the chair with what looks like clothesline, but she doesn’t seem to be in any distress. Her lower arms poke out from the layers of rope and she’s busily knitting.

The man is the NONS volunteer groundskeeper, Parker Hopkins. He’s in tan winter coveralls and an orange ball cap with an expired hunting license pinned to the front. His gun rests in his lap and his head keeps drooping forward. Despite the cold and the fact that there’s a bound woman behind him, he looks like he might fall asleep.

Looking around me at the expectant audience and back again to the two patient players on their empty stage, I almost feel like I’m attending a Lost Creek interpretation of
Waiting for Godot
.

Rafe’s here along with Billy and Troy. They’re in uniform and he’s in his camouflage hunting jacket and if possible, pants that are even more wrinkled than the ones he had on yesterday. His blue tie is covered in leaping green and orange frogs. I pray it was a Father’s Day gift from a grandchild.

A bulky woman made to seem even bulkier by the metallic sheen of her gray ski jacket is standing next to them. It’s Moira Kelly, a member of one of the largest local tribes. The patriarch is a good friend of Tommy’s, a descendant of Prosperity’s best friend, Kenny Kelly, who swung in the noose next to him, and the owner of Kelly’s Kwik Shop. Moira’s one of ten offspring that were produced during the twenty-odd years of
Mrs. Kelly’s childbearing capabilities. The oldest sister, Glynnis, was Rafe’s second wife. Moira is somewhere in the middle and manages the store for her father. She and Rafe don’t get along.

“What’s going on?” I ask Rafe and the two young cops who aren’t doing much of anything.

“Parker’s taken a hostage,” Rafe replies without emotion while rolling a piece of candy around inside his mouth.

“What?”

“He’s trying to keep the gallows standing,” Billy Smalls explains. “He says Simon Husk was just the beginning and more people are going to die if they get torn down.”

“He’s trying to keep the gallows standing because once they’re gone and Dawes starts fracking, he’ll have no place to mow,” Rafe adds.

“I think it’s kind of cool,” Troy says.

“Cool?” I wonder.

“I mean, all the attention the town’s getting. It’s been a while, but we got a paranormal-reality TV crew coming here again. Someone from the show called the station about it.”

“I hope it’s
Ghost Sniffers,
” Billy joins in. “We might get to meet Wade Van Landingham.”

“Who’s Wade Van Landingham?” I ask.

“He’s this psychic who sniffs out spirits,” Troy explains.

“Intuitive investigator,” Billy corrects him.

“I don’t think it’s
Ghost Sniffers
, though,” Troy goes on. “I think it might be
World’s Creepiest Destinations
.”

“How about that, Moira?” Rafe says. “There’s a TV show about your lady parts.”

She gives him the finger.

“Isn’t anyone concerned about what’s going on here?” I have to ask. “He has a gun.”

They all stare at me almost with pity.

“You know Danny Doyle, Tommy’s grandson?” Rafe asks Moira.

“Sure. He’s been in the store. He’s never friendly, though.”

“That’s not true,” I practically gasp. “I always say hello.”

“You never mean it.”

“How can someone not mean hello?”

“Don’t you live in the ’burgh’?” she says to me.

“I’m on the other side of the state. Philadelphia.”

“Eck. Philly. I hate that place.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“You don’t have to go somewhere to know you don’t like it.”

“Yes. Yes, you do.”

“I’ll never understand why anyone wants to live in a city.”

I just nod. I don’t want to get involved in a discourse on the evils of urban life. I’m well acquainted with small-town moral superiority. I don’t bother telling her the worst things I’ve experienced have all happened here.

“Parker!” Rafe suddenly shouts. “Give me your gun.”

Parker’s head jerks up.

“No.”

“Come on. This has gone far enough.”

“It’s not even loaded,” Parker shouts back, holding his rifle up in one hand.

“Then why the hell do you have it with you?”

“To make it look like I really kidnapped her. We want to get on the news.”

Rafe looks around him at the multitude of cell phones hard at work posting photos to Facebook and sending video to YouTube.

“Here’s what’s going to happen, Parker. You’re not only going to get on the news. You’re going to attract the attention of the state police, who might already be on their way here, and once they get here I can’t help you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Right now this is a harmless misunderstanding, but if a trooper shows up this becomes kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon.”

“What if I say I’m here willingly?” Birdie chirps up, her knitting needles flying.

“Which carries a life sentence,” Rafe finishes. “You think about that a minute.”

Another woman detaches herself from the crowd and starts heading
in our direction. She’s half the size of Moira, wearing jeans, harness boots, a fleece-lined denim jacket, and red mittens.

Moira notices me watching her approach.

“Stop eyeballing my sister,” she warns.

“I’ve never eyeballed anyone in my life,” I tell her, trying to control my exasperation again. “I don’t eyeball.”

“You were eyeballing,” Rafe says.

Moira leans toward me and lowers her voice.

“Here’s the lowdown. Her name’s Brenna. She’s single. She’s got two grown kids. Two ex-husbands, both assholes. One’s a deadbeat, the other’s a foreigner.”

I glance at the sister again. Was she actually married to a foreigner, I wonder, or just someone from Altoona?

“You need to put an end to this, Rafe, before he really gets in trouble,” Brenna says upon her arrival.

“I agree,” I say.

She gives me a frank look with a pair of golden brown eyes that remind me of an amber amulet my mom stole from somewhere. She keeps it in a change purse along with her mother’s wedding ring, her own wedding ring, a charm bracelet of multicolored stones I bought for her at Woolworth’s when I was eight, a tiny bird carved from blue marble that she also must have stolen, and some petrified candy corn.

“What if I say I won’t press charges?” we hear Birdie cry out.

“You know Danny Doyle?” Moira asks her sister.

“Not really, but I think I remember you,” Brenna says. “You were about four or five years ahead of me in school. You were some big cross-country runner.”

“Not many people remember cross-country,” I respond eagerly.

“That’s for sure,” Moira comments.

“I wasn’t too bad,” I add. “My sophomore year I finished in the top thirty at states.”