The Last House on Needless Street(11)

The car rumbled through the coming night and I felt happy. Everything was gentle, inside me and out. Only children can feel that kind of safety; I know that now. I must have drifted off because waking was like a slap to the head, shocking and sudden.

‘Are we home?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Mommy said.

I raised my head sleepily and looked out. By the beam of the headlights I saw that we were pulled over on the side of a dirt road. There were no people or sidewalk or other cars. Great ferns like ostrich feathers grazed the windscreen. Beyond that were the sounds and scents of trees talking, night insects making sounds like tick, tick, tick.

‘Did we break down?’ I asked.

Mommy turned around and looked at me. ‘Get out, Teddy.’

‘What are you doing?’ The tone in Daddy’s voice was fear, although I could not have named it so, at the time. All I knew then was that it made me feel disgusted with him.

‘Go back to sleep.’ To me she said, ‘Teddy. Now, please.’

Outside the car the air felt solid, like wet cotton on my cheek. I felt small in the rolling dark. But another part of me thought it was exciting, to be in the forest at night with Mommy. She never did things the way other people did them. She took my hand and led me away from the car, from the light, into the trees. Her pale dress looked like it was suspended in the dark. She was like a sea creature floating across the ocean floor.

In the forest, even familiar things were strange. The constant wet patter of the night became the chilly drip of a dungeon. The creak of tree branches was the shifting of giant, scaly limbs. The snagging pull of a twig was bony fingers grasping at my sleeve – the fingers, maybe, of something that had once been a child, who wandered into the green light and never returned. I began to be scared. I squeezed Mommy’s hand. She squeezed back.

‘I am going to show you something important, Teddy.’ She sounded normal, as if she were telling me what was in my sandwich that day, and I felt better. As my eyes adjusted, everything seemed to glow in the half-dark, as if the air itself held light.

We stopped beneath a towering fir tree. ‘This will do,’ she said. In the distance, through the crackling branches, I could still see the faint beam of our headlamps.

‘I bought you that cat today,’ Mommy said. I nodded. ‘Do you love it?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘How much?’

‘I love it more than I love … ice cream,’ I said. I couldn’t think how to explain my feelings for the little wooden cat.

‘Do you love it more than you want Daddy to get a job?’ she asked. ‘Tell the truth.’

I thought about it. ‘Yes,’ I whispered. ‘I do.’

‘You know the little girl I look after at the hospital, who has cancer? Do you love the cat more than you want her to get better?’

‘No,’ I said. Surely I couldn’t. That would make me a mean, mean boy.

She put a cool hand on my shoulder. ‘Tell me the truth,’ she said.

My throat felt like it was full of knives. I gave a single nod. ‘I love the kitty more,’ I said.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘You are an honest child. Now take it out of your pocket. Put it on the ground right there.’

I laid her gently on a patch of moss at the foot of the tree. I could hardly bear to let go of her, even for a moment.

‘Now, back to the car. We are going home.’ Mommy held out her hand.

I made to pick Olivia up, but Mommy’s fingers were like a cuff about my wrist. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That stays here.’

‘Why?’ I whispered. I thought of how cold and alone she would be, here in the dark, how the rain would wet her and rot her, how squirrels would chew her beautiful head.

‘It is practice,’ Mommy said. ‘You will thank me in the end. Everything in life is a rehearsal for loss. Only the smart people know it.’

She pulled me back through the forest towards the car. The world was a dark blur. I was crying so hard, my heart felt like it would burst in my chest.

‘I want you to feel the power of it,’ she said. ‘Of walking away from something you love. Doesn’t it make you feel strong?’

The spiny stars of the headlights drew closer and I heard the car door slam. My father smelled of what I thought was plum pudding and sweat. He held me tightly. ‘Where did you go?’ he asked Mommy. ‘What’s going on? He’s crying.’ Daddy turned my face this way and that, looking for hurt.

‘No need for hysterics,’ Mommy said with a little of the nurse. ‘We tried to find an owl. They nest round here. Then he dropped that cat key ring and we could not find it in the dark. Therefore, the waterworks.’

‘Oh, kiddo,’ said my father. ‘No big deal, huh?’ His arms were no comfort.

I never asked for a kitty again. I told myself I didn’t want one any more. If I loved her I might have to leave her in the woods. Or one day she’d die, which was almost the same thing.

So it was many years before it happened that Mommy began to prepare me for her departure. I understand her better, now. Now I’m a parent I know how afraid you get for your child. Sometimes when I think about Lauren I feel almost see-through with fear, like a pane of glass.

When we got home Mommy put me in the bath and gently checked me all over. She found a scratch on my calf where I leaked out red. She drew the flesh back together with two neat sutures from her kit. Breaking me, then mending me, over and over – that was my mother.