Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(44)
One year she dressed the girls as a plush ladybug and bumblebee; another, Dora the Explorer and Minnie Mouse. Last year, Hudson was Snow White and Maddy one of the seven dwarfs—Bashful, quite aptly.
But things have changed, and it’s because the girls have been asking questions about Allison’s childhood, as if they’ve finally absorbed the realization that she was actually a little girl once, too. When the subject of Halloween came up a while back, Hudson, in particular, listened with interest to the news that Allison used to make her own costumes.
“How old were you?”
“Around your age.”
“You mean your mom let you cut fabric and sew stuff? She didn’t even help you?” The pathos in it clearly escaped wide-eyed Hudson. “You were so lucky! Can we do that?”
“You don’t have to, sweetie. We always buy our costumes, and you can choose anything you want.”
“But we want to make them! Please!”
Taken aback by this ironic turn of events, Allison asked, “Why?”
“Because it would be so cool!”
Cool. Imagine that.
Allison had to remind herself that just because her kids can have fancy store-bought costumes doesn’t mean they want to.
She agreed to the plan, impressed by her daughters’ creative, independent streak. Well, it was mostly Hudson. Mild-mannered Maddy went along with it based on a single stipulation: that the costumes had to be storybook characters this year. That was fine with her big sister, who welcomed the challenge with typical gusto.
Hudson came up with a Seussian theme that even includes J.J. He’ll be a miniature Cat in the Hat; his sisters, Thing One and Thing Two.
Allison loves watching her girls interact with each other, though it makes her a bit wistful, too. Her own life would have been so different if she and Brett had been closer in age—or just plain closer. Or if she’d had a sister instead of a brother, or in addition to him . . .
One night, as a little girl, she had such a vivid dream about a sister that she woke up convinced it meant her mother was going to have a baby. That was the morning she learned her father had left them—and the morning Allison’s imaginary sister, Winona, came to live in her head.
That was probably a healthy thing, in retrospect. She’d talk to Winona when there was no one else around—which was most of the time. Winona always listened in silent agreement. Eventually, of course, she disappeared, the way imaginary friends do.
Oh hell, the way people do.
“We’re almost ready,” Hudson announces, patting the pile of fuzzy electric blue yarn into place on her sister’s head. “Does this look like blue hair?”
“Absolutely,” Allison tells her. She’d offered to order wigs, but Hudson declared that cheating.
“I bet your mom wouldn’t have made you order a wig,” she said, and Allison couldn’t argue.
She’s never painted a rosy picture of her childhood, but she hasn’t come right out and told her daughters the harsh truth, either. They know that her parents were divorced and that her mother died young, but it hasn’t yet occurred to them to ask for the gory details.
Just as well. Their own lives are safe and snug and wholesome; they simply have no frame of reference for a world where little girls go cold and hungry, or are abandoned forever by their father, or after years of disappointment and a string of broken promises, find their mother dead on the bathroom floor . . .
A mother who once told her drug counselor, “Weakness is my weakness.”
Thank God. Thank God my children will never know that pain, that fear, because their own mother’s motto is “Strength is my strength.”
And I would never break a promise. Ever.
Ten minutes later, Allison puts out a big orange ceramic bowl of candy next to the lit jack-o’-lantern on their top step.
“What’s that for, Mommy?”
“Just in case some other mom decides to take her kids out trick-or-treating.”
“Even though it’s against the law,” Hudson specifies.
“Right.” After making sure she has her house key and phone in the back pocket of her jeans, she locks the door after them.
“Okay, everyone . . . ready to trick-or-treat?”
Naturally, the girls are, but J.J. clearly isn’t thrilled, to say the least, about his role in the charade.
“Mommy, tell him he has to leave the hat on,” Hudson admonishes, swinging her own bag, mail-ordered a few years ago and embroidered with her name. Maddy has a matching one.
Allison says, “J.J., leave your hat on,” because that’s much easier than pointing out the futility to Hudson.
“Yeah, if you don’t, J.J.,” his oldest sister adds, “then you’ll just be a plain old cat and it doesn’t make sense. Right, Mom?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll put it on him before we ring Mrs. Lewis’s doorbell.” Allison tucks the red and white striped stovepipe hat—which Hudson fashioned quite impressively out of felt—into the pouch hanging off J.J.’s stroller.
The rest of his costume consists of an oval bib of white felt glued to his so-navy-it-looks-black blanket sleeper, and a red bow tie at his neck—also glued. Hudson enjoys glue.
Of course, she originally wanted to tie the tie around J.J.’s neck for authenticity’s sake. But Allison drew the line there; she couldn’t bear to think of the potential danger a necktie would create for J.J. the acrobat. As it is, she spends her son’s every waking hour in a perpetual state of hypervigilance that leaves her utterly exhausted by the end of the day.