Pieces of My Mother (18 page)

We make a lot of trips down Center Road to the 7-Eleven. This morning my dad asks me to come with him to pick up some breakfast cereal before school. I'm in eighth grade. When my dad is upset or nervous about something, he says “Jesus Christ” a lot, and I mean a
lot
. He has already said it five times and we are not even to 7-Eleven yet.

“What's wrong, Dad?”

He is silent for a few moments.

“I'm in a bad situation.
A
really
bad
situation
,” he says.

We pull into the 7-Eleven parking lot. “Jesus,” he says for the sixth time.

“What's so bad about it?” I ask.

“You see that change?” He points his finger to the console between the two seats in the van—we call it the dashboard. I look down. I see Dentyne gum wrappers, Tic Tacs, a tipped can of Pepsi, and an empty bottle of Excedrin. There are coins too. A handful of pennies, some dimes and quarters. It's exactly how the dashboard usually looks.

“That's it,” he says. “That is
all
we have.”

My dad can be a real joker, a teller of tall tales.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“That change there is the only money I have to my name right now.”

I don't believe him until I see that his eyes are full of water, like he might cry. I can tell by the way his hands are squeezing the top of the steering wheel. It's not the first time he's told me about the money problem, but he's never said that it was down to the change on the dashboard.

“I'll tell you this though, Melissa. I am going to figure it out. I don't know how yet, but I am not going to let you kids down.”

I believe what he says but I am also scared.

“You wait in the van. I'll be right out,” he says.

He starts scooping the coins into his hands. He leaves behind the pennies that are sticky with Pepsi. I watch him walk into the 7-Eleven to buy cereal.

Now I feel awful for stealing the forty-nine cents off his dresser. I've done it at least four times because that's how much four-inch houseplants cost at Goodman Building Supply. Just last week I pedaled down there on my ten-speed. I know every variety of plant they sell at Goodman's: rabbit-foot ferns, emerald ripples, creeping Charlies, spider plants, and piggybacks. Just forty-nine cents for a living plant. At the time, it seemed like such a good price.

My dad is quiet when he gets back into the van. He doesn't say “Jesus Christ” or talk about money as we drive.

“Don't worry, Dad,” I say. “You're right. It's all going to work out.”

He doesn't respond.

There must be something that I can do to help him. One by one, I start to unstick the pennies from the dashboard and stack them in piles of ten. Short stacks of sticky copper pancakes. As if that's going to save us.

From the hallway, I can hear Jamie swearing in his room.

“Goddamn motherfucker,” he says.

It is early on a Friday morning before school. I pull on a pair of white tube socks and walk quietly into his room. He is sitting up, tanned and bare chested in a tangle of wool blankets. He swears all the time lately.

“That fuckin' thing was here last night,” he says to me. His eyes are slightly swollen and deep pink around the edges. I don't need to say, “What
thing
?” I know what he's talking about, and I know things are happening in our yellow house these days that cannot be explained.

He first told me about it, this thing, a few months ago. It hasn't left my mind, the way his hands were shaking and his eyes were wide and different that morning.

“It's a little dark motherfucker devil that hides under my bed when I go to sleep.” He said it wakes him in the middle of the night by shaking his bed from underneath. He said he's scared shitless, but he can't get out of the bed because it's shaking so badly.

“This ain't my fucking imagination,” he reminds me. He told me he's actually
seen
it twice. Sometimes it will dart out from underneath his bed and hide in the corners and the shadows of the room—a small animallike creature, always silent and afraid of the light. Whatever it is, he claims it to be part devil or something the devil sent. He said it follows him everywhere, even when he was up in Washington visiting Mom, even when he spent the night at Matt Pheffer's house. I know my brother, and he might be a liar sometimes, but he does not make up stories. Eden makes up stories, but not Jamie.

“Dad thinks it's a bunch of bullshit,” says Jamie, kicking the striped blanket onto the floor. I sit on the end of his mattress because I can tell he needs someone to believe him. I'm trying to come up with an answer, but I don't really have one. Ever since he started high school and wearing Ben Davis pants, we don't talk much. Part of me is glad just to be sitting here with him when he's not bragging about how tough he is.

Right now, I see my brother who loves to fish for steelhead, read
Field
and
Stream
magazines from cover to cover, and draw amazing pictures. He says he's going to drop out of school, get out of this crappy town, join the marines, and cover himself in tattoos. My dad says if Jamie is not going to finish high school, then he can't live in our house.

“Look what it did last night,” Jamie says. He points to the giant oak headboard behind him. I see it then, a two-inch-wide crack in the wood. It's a vertical split from the top, about a foot long.

“How did that…” I pause. “When did that happen?” I ask.

“It split the bed in two, in case you can't see that,” he says. “Sounded like a fucking lightning bolt hit me in the head.”

I lean all the way forward and stick my finger into the fresh split in the wood. This is not a lightweight bed; this is a bed that has been around for a hundred years. It is solid and sturdy with fat acorns hand-carved into its thick edges.
Man, Dad is going to be pissed off
, I think to myself. I am bothered by something as I pull my finger out of the splintered oak—the split goes down against the grain of the wood. I know from wood-shop class that wood gets split along the grain. That is the way people cut wood and that's the way wood works. My mouth turns dry, like I have swallowed every bit of spit in my mouth. Jamie did not do this—he is not a bed splitter.

The little devil creature jumps into my world right then, because it is not just in Jamie's head anymore. I see what it is capable of. I slide off the broken bed and head toward the door. I don't want to think about this right now. I don't want to be this afraid. I want to go back to my room where all my knickknacks and glass animals are in order. I need them in order. I need the blue glass birds next to the nest of blue marbles. I need the tiny elephant beads to stay hidden inside the metal box.

We're all changing so fast. I don't know what to believe anymore. My dad really doesn't understand what's going on when he's not around. He doesn't know that I am stealing change off the top of his dresser, that Jamie is drunk and stoned too much, and that Eden is experimenting with drugs. We are all heading in the wrong direction. I look back at Jamie. He's scared. I walk out of the room, glad that it is day, glad that there is light.

I sit at the upstairs desk, deciphering every sound in the house. The paws of dogs padding across the hardwood floors, the television downstairs tuned to a sports channel, my aunt turning the pages of her book and sighing in the room across from me. This last birthday of my mom's feels completely uncelebrated. How can I leave Olympia with all of these unsettled pieces still rattling around inside me?

There are things of my mom's that I would like to take home with me. I grab the framed black-and-white photograph off the dresser and pack it in my suitcase. It's an old shot of my mom and Jamie that ran in the local newspaper, both of them young and beaming with huge, happy smiles. I will send it to Jamie when she dies so that he can remember how radiant her smile was then.

Again, I go back to my mother's folder of letters and dabbles. I pull out a letter to Jamie—never sent.

Jamie (Numero Uno),

Soon to be another year since you struggled into this world. How sad I am that you are struggling yet. I implore you, would that I could even bribe you—turn it over, my son. Please turn it over. I have been thinking of you so much these past weeks. It was no surprise to hear you were in jail—some sense of despair kept ragging at me. And though you are out now, the despair remains and I am truly frightened. It is as if I feel your despair, your loneliness, and your fear. You need to get help for your addiction and realize that you have been living in a world of demons and horrors that only exists in your mind and heart. You can deny it all you want—it is only part of the dream. Feeling the world is totally fucked, that the bomb could fall any day, that value is fleeting and therefore unimportant beyond the moment, some are born to suffer—all dream-stuff. Truth is you could have 50 years of gratification ahead of you—of embracing this life and yourself, and going for all you're worth, which is everything. It's time. I know. The message grows within me as strongly as you yourself once did. The hourglass is running out—acceleration as the sands dwindle—you cannot stay there any longer. Please come in. I am so afraid. I send my guardians to watch over you. Lord, I must sound nuts—but I am so afraid.

If only it weren't so late by then, Mom. You could have helped Jamie when he was struggling to find himself. This wasn't the first time he was in jail. I lost count of the times Jamie and Eden ended up in juvenile hall. Later, it was county jail. Drugs, vandalism, stupidity—I'm not sure what their records show. What stopped you, Mom, from sending your letters to us? Or from just coming back and hugging us?

Our garden this year is abundant with huge, juicy beefsteak tomatoes, dark green and red chards, pole beans, curly lettuces, and cornstalks as tall as you'd find in Iowa. There are lemon cucumbers that we eat right off the vine like crunchy apples. There are giant zucchini and baby pink radishes. We are also the only family to have an African tomato tree growing in our garden.

My dad says that it's an extremely rare species of plant. I ask him when it will get its tomatoes, and he said it all depends on the number of full moons and certain weather patterns, and that we might have to wait some time before we see any fruit.

I've been keeping an eye on the African tomato plant, checking for signs of delicate yellow blossoms that could yield such rare fruit.

After school while I am taping up cards and pictures on the walls of my room, I hear my brothers rushing up from the bottom of the stairs. Both of them bound through my door out of breath, their faces flushed red. The entire African tomato tree is in their arms. Jamie has the front end and Eden holds the back end, dirty roots and all.

“What are you doing?” I scream.

“You gotta help us, Melissa,” says Jamie.

“What did you do to our African tomato tree?”

Jamie laughs. “It's not an African tomato, Sis. There's no such thing.”

I'm confused.

“It's dad's pot tree,” says Eden.

I feel so stupid. “Just get
out
of my room!” I yell. I fully believed in that African tomato tree.

“No, no, we need to hide it in your closet, just 'til tomorrow.”

“Come on, Melissa. We really need your help,” says Eden.

“No. Go hide it in your own closet,” I tell him.

“Your room is the only safe place. Besides, you're a lot cooler than you used to be, now that you're in junior high,” says Jamie.

I can tell he's trying to soften me up, but I think about how it's true, that once you're in junior high, you have to act differently. Suddenly, my organized little room looks pathetic with everything in its place, and I think, yeah, I want to help them. I want to be a part of their club, whatever it is. I'm looking at both my brothers' flushed faces and their blue eyes against the vibrant green tree now standing upright in my room, and I see that I have a chance to be on the same side as them. Maybe I'm tired of doing everything right.

“Okay,” I say.

Jamie turns the tree upside down and stuffs it up high into my closet, just like the Grinch does when he pushes little Cindy Lou Who's Christmas tree up the chimney.

“Hey, Jamie, take it easy on those leaves!” says Eden.

Then Eden sits on my bed and talks to me in a voice so nice that I feel like I can forgive him for that long-ago bloody nose. He pulls off a green leaf that is almost as big and broad as his hand.

“We're going to get frickin' rich off this stuff. You understand, Melissa? You see this one leaf? Each leaf is worth twenty-five to fifty cents. Now, look up there at all those thousands and thousands of leaves.”

Jamie, Eden, and I stare up in the same way we used to when we stayed up late in our sleeping bags outside, searching for the Big and Little Dippers and shooting stars.

“And it's not even the leaves that are so valuable, it's the buds. Man, the buds are big money. Isn't that right, Jamie?”

Jamie nods like the expert. “You gotta keep your door shut between now and tomorrow because Dad has a nose for it.”

“Well, what happens tomorrow?” I ask.

“Tomorrow after school, we bake it in the oven,” says Jamie.

“But what happens when Dad finds out it's missing from the garden?”

Eden changes his tone. “Hey, you can't think about Dad in this. He shouldn't be growing this shit anyway. We're probably saving him from getting arrested. Right, Jamie?”

“Yeah, he's going to think one of his hippie friends ripped him off,” Jamie says, laughing.

“Melissa, you better not mess up, or else someone is going to end up in jail,” says Eden. “You get it. Right?”

“Yeah, I get it.”

Once it turns dark, I tell my dad that I am tired and going to sleep a little early. But I am not tired at all. I am staring at the dark pine knots on my bedroom walls and thinking about the importance of my role. I am the keeper of the pot, the good one, the trusted one. But why can't I become something more? I could make money so I don't have to steal change from my dad's dresser anymore. I could become a dealer.

Overnight, I could quickly carve out a new image of myself at school. Instead of the quiet, flat-chested girl with the long, blond hair, I could be the girl with the long, blond hair who has pot for sale. I know people outside my brothers' circle that I could approach. Lola would definitely help me, and she said she would do anything to get popular. I might even be allowed on the field at lunch with the stoners if they knew I had something to offer. I could follow in my brothers' footsteps. I wouldn't have to smoke it, just sell it or at least be known for selling it.

My alarm clock goes off at four in the morning. I hit the snooze button and wait in bed, listening for sounds of anyone awake in the house. My room is quiet and completely dark. I crack the door open for some hallway light. I follow the thin line of light to the closet and reach my arms through clothes and jangly metal hangers until I feel the leafy branches. The delicate leaves are like feathers against my wrists, but the scent is staunch and crisp. It is a fresh smell, like the garden, but distinctly different from pole beans and lemon cucumbers.

My body rattles like the metal hangers as I pinch off my first leaf. The leaf is like my hand with five thin, reaching fingers. I pinch off another, and another. I count eight leaves. No one will notice just eight missing. Maybe I can take more. I think maybe fifteen. I am careful to pull each leaf from a different stem. I hold my fifteen leaves gently, like butterflies cupped in my hands, then set them behind my dresser so it looks as if a clump may have fallen there accidentally.

I lie back down on my bed, stiff and straight with my knees locked and a wild stirring still inside me. I reach my hands up underneath my shirt, feeling for the beginnings of breasts. Not much there, but they are small and soft like apricot halves, and I keep feeling them anyway. I am interesting and more alive than ever. Jamie and Eden were right. No one will ever suspect me, the good one, the one who always stays away from trouble. Now I have my own secret. I am full of mystery and potential, and I am on my way.