Heart Berries: A Memoir(25)

I searched for irrefutable things to tell my mother. None of it compared to the days they went clamming together, or collected devil’s club in the valley. My mother never liked the beach until Larry came around with his rake and gloves. They waded in gloomy water as I watched from the truck. They seemed content. It didn’t matter if he groped me. It didn’t matter if he groped my cousin. None of that mattered.

I told my mother that she might have stopped drinking before I was born, but she was still a drunk. She stopped bringing Larry home. Instead, they went to his place in the city. There were only so many places where men like him could live. I took a bus there to find her. I saw my mother differently.

Larry lived on the first floor in what I thought was a drug house. Women, girls like me, sat outside on couches with babies, stood inside the hallway, and made tea in the kitchen. I knocked on his bedroom door. My mother was ashamed, under the covers in his bed. She rummaged through her purse and handed him twenty dollars.

“Here,” he said. “Go back to the rez.”

This is how we go missing.

This is how we decide to leave.

I left on Valentine’s Day after the dance. The hall wasn’t decorated. The girls and I stood in circles in strobe lights and had sweet drinks in our small purses, and we had my talk of leaving.

“Fuck it,” Lucy said. “Don’t come back.”

Lucy was shorter than all the Chehalis girls, but she walked up to them anyway to start shit. We left, drunk, and went out along the highway. The trucks honked at our silhouettes. Nobody wants to know how we leave. I only had one bag to pack, and I didn’t have money. My boyfriend, Vito, let me live with him in his mother’s home. It was better than foster care.

His whole family was large and Republican. I acclimated from my Marxist-Leninist mother to their lifestyle. We ate top sirloin and fried shrimp, and Bush became the president again. They asked me to vote and drove me to the polling station, and I went in and stood there long enough. Every day was like that for me.

I called my mother to show her I could leave.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Not be there,” I said.

“Where are you?” she asked.

When a man’s hands become a ghost, there is no way to strip them from a body. Haunting, what a mother does not see. Native women walk alone from the dances of our youth into homes they don’t know for the chance to be away. Their silhouettes walk across highways and into cars at night. They are troubled by nothing but the chance that they might have to come back someday to bury their mothers.

My mother died on Thanksgiving. My brother was watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the next room. Larry was already dead from liver failure. I flew in from a place far removed. I worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I prayed over her body and touched her delicate skin. A bloat protruded from her neck, and I felt that too. I felt the deficit.

I took her house and its contents and let her ghost in. The people said to put away the pictures, but I didn’t. They said to cover the mirrors, but I didn’t. The ritual of death was not interesting. And then I left her home again.

I found humor in leaving.

I punctured a friend’s chest with a fork. He heard me when I said no.

Another dug his knuckles into me. I didn’t cover the marks. He gave me his credit card, and I bought diamonds and hammered silver.

Another, I left in the waiting room of his lawyer’s office. He wanted to prove he didn’t sleep with a student of his. The lie detectors—and his guilt—were enough for me. He gave me my first STD. He gave me three thousand dollars, and I bought summer classes. When I graduated, he asked for a picture, but I didn’t reply.

Another, I left in Miami. He didn’t think I was like that, but I was clearly like that. I only smiled at room service.

“What do you want?” I asked men, like an indictment.

Another has white guilt and thinks it’s progress to bind me.

“Can you say all you want from me in one breath?” I asked.

Barbara asks what I get in leaving. I tell her that my husband left me in the hospital once before we were married.

“I guess I took him back to leave him?”

He visited me in the hospital for finality. Suicidal ideation troubled him too much. I asked if he felt culpable. There was a crafted tree on the walls for the sick women, made of paper and crayon and glue. The tree had leaves, thirty different colors, with words on them like “Intelligent,” “Smart,” “Brave,” “Bold,” “Strong” . . . Casey pointed to “Sexy.” I put the leaf in my pocket and used it as a bookmark for a year.

Barbara tells me to go back. He doesn’t hit me, she says. He’s intelligent. We have a baby. The wet sweetgrass she braided is dry and straight. She puts it below the windshield in my car and when I drive back I’m not sure I will stay.

Her house is a lot of old pictures and plants and draped scarves. A blue budgie sings in her office, and there are a few old drums around. It is everything of my mother and home.

I hold my sons at night, and they are so still, like rocks. I run my fingers over their foreheads and wonder how they don’t collect dust. Boys asleep, and I am a rare carcass in the river, bloated with deficit. Every time I see wings flap I think of leaving. It used to feel like breaking vertigo, and now it is just breaking.

Now that I stay, we have the same fight.