Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(42)
Halloween has been officially canceled this year; the town deemed the darkened streets far too dangerous amid broken limbs and downed wires.
“It’s so unfair,” Hudson wailed when she found out, and Allison wanted to cry along with her. She’d looked forward to it just as much as her children do.
As a child, she’d always considered Halloween—the candy and the costume—one of the few bright spots in the year. It was the one holiday that didn’t really revolve around family. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter . . . she invariably spent those days wistfully imagining what it would be like to be gathered around a table with parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins . . .
There was none of that in her household. Before her father fell off the face of the earth, her half brother, Brett, married young and moved to his in-laws’ cattle farm out in Hayes Township. So it was always just Allison and her mother, pretending—wishing—that holidays didn’t exist.
But Halloween was different. Halloween was just for kids.
Allison coveted her classmates’ store-bought costumes, but poverty forced her to create her own getup out of whatever she could beg or borrow and fashion into something suitably glamorous.
When she was eight, she dressed up as Marilyn Monroe, complete with water balloon breasts that, looking back, must have been incredibly inappropriate. Her mother didn’t stop her, and she herself was probably too focused on the loot she collected at every door to notice any raised eyebrows.
At eleven, she was Anna Wintour, wearing sunglasses and a wig castoff from a classmate’s Cleopatra costume.
“See that? You can’t buy Anna Wintour in a box!” Her mother slurred her approval.
Of course no one but Mom even knew whom she was supposed to be that year, but Allison didn’t care. They didn’t get her style even when she wasn’t wearing a costume.
Well, perhaps Tammy Connolly, her one true friend back in Nebraska, did appreciate it. She was always complimenting Allison on what she was wearing. One day, she even said, “You should be a fashion designer when you grow up, Allison”—words that stayed with her long after Tammy moved away from Centerfield and disappeared altogether from her life.
Allison always covered as much ground as possible when she went trick-or-treating, returning home several times over the course of the evening to dump the contents of her pillowcase into her pajama drawer, emptied out for the occasion. Of course, she didn’t have one of those coveted plastic pumpkins all the other kids carried. Either her mother didn’t have the money, or she couldn’t manage to get herself to the five-and-dime, or they were sold out by the time she got around to it.
But she always managed to buy her drugs, didn’t she?
Oh well. Regardless of how Allison carried it home, all that candy was her own precious stash—Sugar Babies and Snickers and mini boxes of Chiclets and Charms Pops . . . She hoarded it in her room, making it last for as long as she could, savoring a sweet treat every day well into the new year.
Last week, before the storm, a note came home in Hudson’s “backpack mail” requesting that parents send their children’s “unwanted” treats to the school office to be distributed to charitable causes.
Unwanted? Who doesn’t want treats?
There was also a reminder that costumes would not be allowed in school on Monday, and that anything remotely costumelike would be confiscated and not returned until November 1.
“A little killjoy, don’t you think?” she asked Mack, during one of their harried daily phone calls while he was at work. “I feel like they’re trying to suck the fun out of the holiday. Do you know what they’re having as snacks for the classroom party? Baby carrots.”
“You’re the one who’s always trying to get the kids to eat healthy food.”
He had a point. Why did it bother her so much? Lately, parenting felt like an ongoing exercise in contradiction.
“But it’s Halloween!” she told Mack. “Carrots?”
“Look at the bright side—at least they’re orange. And at least they’re having a party.”
“I know, but it’s just . . . things are so different from the way they were when I was a kid.”
“Most of the time, that’s a good thing, Allie.”
“I know . . . but not with this.”
She can’t imagine how she’d have reacted if someone had told her Halloween had been canceled, or that she was supposed to give away all her candy to charity. Hell, she was the local charity case, and she never forgot it. No one would let her forget it while she was living in that town, and she wouldn’t let herself forget after she moved away.
Memories are good for nothin’—that’s the bitter lesson her mother had learned, and tried to pass along to her. But Allison refused—still refuses—to buy into the theory. Memories, no matter how painful, are good for something. Whenever she looks back at her old life, she appreciates this one even more.
You’ve come a long way, baby.
That was the marketing slogan for the cigarettes her mother smoked, Virginia Slims. Sometimes, Mom would say it sarcastically, usually under her breath to—and about—herself: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”
Brenda Taylor had grown up in a well-to-do Omaha family. Her conservative, controlling parents disowned her when she got mixed up with the wrong crowd as a teenager, winding up pregnant with Brett—and no idea who the father was.