Every Single Secret(55)

. . . what we’ve done . . .

That’s what he had said.

Sleep started to nibble away at the edges of my consciousness. The bed felt like a boat that was rocking gently over waves. I’d forgotten to take off my earrings and ring, so I pulled them off, dropping them on the nightstand. I was drifting, drifting, drifting—back to the apartment where I lived with my mother. To the small pink room, my white-painted bed with the spindled posts and daisy-chain comforter. The purple lampshade. The little TV on the chest of drawers.

I was six or seven. Or, I don’t know, maybe I was older. Mrs. Tully, our down-the-hall neighbor, had used her extra key to let me in. She’d persuaded the super to let her cut a spare after the first half a dozen times my mother stayed out all night and Mrs. Tully had seen me boarding the school bus the next morning in the clothes I’d been wearing the previous day. Mrs. Tully unlocked the door and told me to go put on my pajamas and brush my teeth. She would gather some of my dirty clothes she could throw in her washing machine.

I heard her from the bathroom, talking in a low, urgent voice. When I came out, toothbrush sticking out of my mouth, I saw my mama hunched over the recliner. She’d dropped her purse on it, pulled off the scrunchie that had held back her yellow-blonde hair, and dragged her fingers tiredly over her scalp. She was wearing a denim miniskirt and a ruffled eyelet halter top that showed a strip of doughy skin between the two. She leaned over to shuck off her sandals—the high-heeled brown strappy ones I used to like to clomp around in. I wondered what had made her have such loose skin. It was like some of her insides had been pulled out, and left her body like a week-old balloon.

“Where have you been?” I wanted to ask, but I didn’t. After Mrs. Tully left, Mama finally noticed me standing in the hallway, the toothbrush still in my mouth.

“You want to come along next time?” she said. “I bet I could get a stack of pesos for your hot little ass.” She laughed, a loud, honking noise, and I melted back into the bathroom.

As I spat into the sink, I thought it over. Since she was high, it would be easy to push her off our second-floor apartment balcony, up and over the railing, and down to the cracked, weedy parking lot below. Maybe she would hit a car. Or crack her head on the concrete. I wondered what she would look like, dead, all that pale, flabby skin below the balcony.

And then I wondered how bad a child must be to think things like that about her own mama. Children were supposed to love their mothers, even I knew that. Good children.

Maybe I wasn’t good. Maybe I was a monster . . .

In our room at Baskens, sometime later in the night, I woke to use the bathroom. Back in bed, I was restless. Had my mother really said such a horrific thing to me, or had I, through the haze of years and bitterness, painted her more of a villain than she really was? Our minds were tricky things, manipulators of time and space, coloring events with our personal palette of rage, fear, or desire.

I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep, I thought, not now. And I couldn’t bear to lie here, being recorded by the extra cameras Cerny had hidden in our room. I decided to go outside, let the night air wash over me. Maybe I’d sit on the metal chaise on the patio, try to get a glimpse of the stars, and fall asleep there. Let Luca cover me with a quilt when he found me in the morning. I fumbled for my glasses, wrapped myself in the fuzzy throw from the foot of the bed, and crept down the stairs.

The moon was high and bright, and frost had crystallized on the velvet grass of the backyard. But between the two, just above the ground, a layer of fog hovered, wispy and spectral. At the far end of the yard, it shrouded the barn. Down the terraced levels to my left, it gathered thickly over the bird garden. How strange, that the sky above me should be so clear but down here, all was obscured.

It was cold and I was barefoot, but I felt myself pulled to the bird garden. Something worrying at the edges of my mind, an insistence. I picked my way past the vegetable beds and down to the redbud trees, each step filling me with greater dread, until the weight of it was as tangible as the mist I was passing through.

Just as the birdhouses materialized through the haze, I felt a lump of something under my bare foot—soft and solid at the same time. I jumped, then looked down to see a dead bird on the grass. My hand flew to my mouth, but then, after another moment, I had to adjust my glasses. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

The grass beneath the birdhouses was strewn with dead birds. Dozens of them.

I was standing in a graveyard.



Friday, October 19

Night

In the bathroom of Mama June’s restaurant, I press against the floral-papered wall. But the three women don’t even look my way. Chattering nonstop, they head to the single sink and crowd around it. One woman, with long, carefully curled red ringlets and a knee-length crocheted vest, jabbers as she washes up.

“I told her, I said, ‘Dee, if you don’t do something, he’s just going to stay up all night looking at porn, chatting with those inter-sluts.’”

“Inter-sluts,” cackles another, yanking paper towels out of the dispenser.

“Lord, Natasha,” the third one says. “That man is not chatting with women. He’s a pastor.”

They rotate places. Natasha flips back her curls and points a French-manicured finger at her friend who’s now at the sink. “That man hasn’t stuck it in her in over six months. Mark it, he’s either sticking it somewhere else or talking about it. You know as well as I do, you gotta watch them pastors.”