Life and Other Inconveniences(77)

There wasn’t a good reason for a noise to be coming from in there.

I did not want to open that door. I hated our garage. One time, when I was little and it was Halloween, Daddy had hidden in here with a mask and jumped out at me when Mommy and I were just getting back from trick-or-treating. I screamed and felt the hot rush as I wet my pants. Mommy had yelled at him, and I cried, and he felt bad. He said he was just trying to have fun, and Mommy said, “She’s four, Clark! For God’s sake!” I loved her for protecting me and also felt bad for Daddy, because he was always wrong in some way.

He’d had an old man mask on, the skin gray and leathery. I still remembered how ugly that mask was, with heavy wrinkles and a sagging, wobbly mouth. The hooded, uneven eyes.

Somehow, I was very, very afraid that an old man was in the garage now. Not just Daddy with a mask.

The garage was connected to the house by a breezeway. I went down that hallway slowly. The plants Mommy had out in a little wicker stand were dead, I saw. The African violets she loved and that usually bloomed in such fat, happy clumps. Why hadn’t I noticed they were dead?

Yes. The noise was definitely in there. Was it the car?

“Mommy?” I yelled, suddenly angry. Why would she be in the garage all this time when I was home? Why was she scaring me by not answering? She knew I was afraid of the garage! She never made me take the trash out if it was dark. She was so nice that way, when Daddy always told me not to be a baby.

I felt like a baby now. “Mommy!”

Open the door. Open the door. Some older, sadder part of me told me what to do, and with a great rush of terror, I flung it open.

Her car was in there. Running. The garage was foggy, but I could see she was in the car, and I was terrified before I knew why.

“Mommy!” I screamed, because she wasn’t moving and her eyes were closed, and I knew I had to save her, but what if the old man was there, the Halloween man, what if he had started a fire and that was why there was smoke in here? It smelled bitter, coating my throat.

I yanked open the passenger-side door, and my mother tipped toward me, sliding out and to the ground.

I felt a hot rush down my legs and I screamed, a thin, helpless sound. Grabbing my mother’s arm—it was cool, she was chilly—I pulled as hard as I could. Did the old man kill her? Was she asleep? Sick?

“Mommy! Please!” I shrieked.

And then Mrs. Fitzgerald was there, grabbing me around the waist and practically tossing me back out of the garage. “Call 911!” she said, and then dragged my mother into the breezeway. She slammed the door to the garage, and my mother . . . my mother’s face was gray, like the Halloween man.

“Call 911, Emma,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said again, more gently this time.

“I wet my pants,” I sobbed.

“It’s okay, honey. Call 911.” Then she bent over my mother and breathed into her mouth.

From that point on, I only had flashes of memory. The ambulance lights. Mrs. Fitzgerald helping me into clean pants and driving me to the hospital. The relief of seeing my pop and grammy come into the waiting room, how I felt like everything would be okay then.

But it wasn’t.

My mother had died in that garage. On purpose.

I didn’t have memories of her funeral. I knew that I didn’t go to school. Gigi came out and shook her head at the sight of me and had many whispered conversations with my father. She stayed at a hotel because Daddy and I were staying with Grammy and Pop, but Gigi came over every day. She told me not to cry, but I did. She told me to be strong, but I wasn’t.

Grammy and Pop tried hard to be cheerful around me. But their eyes were so sad. Grammy looked old, and Pop had to stand in the backyard for long periods of time after dinner. Grammy was sick and needed a wheelchair, and Pop worked and couldn’t skip his job like my father. Pop yelled at my father one night, and Daddy took me back to our house, and we watched TV and ate pizza, and I cried for my mother.

After a while, my father told me we were going to visit Gigi. We got on an airplane and flew to Connecticut, where I had never been. My dad rented a car and drove us to my grandmother’s house, which was huge and pretty with lots of blue flower bushes. It was like a castle on the water.

“Stay here,” my father said, leaving me alone in the big front hall. There was a lot of hushed talking, then some sharp voices.

When Gigi came into the front hall, I had to pee so badly I was afraid I’d wet myself, same as I had the day Mommy died. My grandmother looked at me, her lips pressed tight.

“Donelle will get you settled,” she said, and another lady picked up my suitcase and led me upstairs where, finally, I got to go to the bathroom.

When I had washed my hands with the lemon-scented soap and dried them on the softest towel, I came back out. The lady was gone, but my things were unpacked. I sat on the bed and looked out the window. That was the ocean, I guessed.

I sat there for a long time before the woman, Donelle, came back to tell me it was time for dinner. My father had already left, but Gigi said he’d come back to visit.

It took me a long time to realize my father had deserted me. That I’d be living here permanently.

To be honest, I was glad not to have to live alone with my father, who had drunk a lot of yucky-smelling brown stuff and didn’t know how to do laundry. I wanted to live with Grammy and Pop, but I understood that wasn’t happening.