Dreamland(63)
“What a mess,” she remarked to no one in particular, amazed again by the clutter spread throughout the room, the cabinet at a cockeyed angle, the wall half primed. She rose from the couch and shuffled to the kitchen to get a glass of water. As she drank, she felt the throbbing in her finger, the deep bruising ache. When she looked at her hand, she saw that the blood had soaked through the Band-Aids, staining them brown. It was gross, but she wasn’t about to undertake an attempt to replace them, any more than she wanted to clean the living room or the kitchen or the rest of the house. Or make sandwiches or slice carrots, for that matter. She had no desire to do any of it, at least until she felt a bit more like herself.
Instead, she went to the front porch. She turned from side to side, noting the ever-present farmworkers in the fields, but they were farther from the house than they had been the day before, working on another section of the crop under a grayish cloudy sky. There was a breeze, too, fairly steady, and she wondered if that meant it was going to rain.
Even though rain would complicate their escape, she couldn’t really summon the energy to care all that much; instead, she found herself lost in a memory of her mom. Her mom would get super tired, too, sometimes to the point where she’d spend two or three days in bed. Beverly could remember going to the side of her mom’s bed and shaking her, asking her to wake up because Beverly hadn’t eaten. Sometimes her mom would rouse and drag herself to the kitchen to warm up chicken noodle soup before retreating; other times, there was nothing Beverly could do to wake her.
As hard as those days were, though, they were nothing compared to the days that her mom cried and cried, no matter what Beverly tried to do to help. Beverly remembered being scared whenever that happened. Moms weren’t supposed to cry. But it wasn’t just the tears or the sobbing, choking sounds that bothered her. It was the way her mom looked, with her dirty clothes and hair poking out in all directions and the haunted expression on her face. She even moved differently, like every step she took was painful somehow.
Nor could her mom ever explain what made her so sad in the first place. It didn’t matter if Beverly cleaned her room or didn’t, or whether she played quietly or made noise; the blue days always came. That’s what her mom always called them. Blue days. When she got older and understood what feeling blue meant, Beverly assumed that she meant that figuratively; later, she began to think that her mom also meant it literally. Because that’s how Beverly was feeling right now, she realized—she felt as though she were slowly being enveloped in a dense blue fog. It wasn’t a pretty blue, either, like the sky or the color she’d painted Tommie’s baby room. This was a midnight blue, so dark and deep it seemed to be turning black at the edges, unwelcoming and cold and heavy enough to render caring about anything almost impossible.
“I am not my mother,” she repeated, but even then, she wondered whether it was true.
She wandered inside, trying to shake the idea that no matter what she did to get ready, she’d somehow make a mistake that would catch up to her sooner rather than later.
From the cupboard in the kitchen, she pulled down the cookie jar and reached for the small wad of bills. Thumbing through it, she counted, then double-checked the total, and again she felt the pressure build behind her eyes, knowing it wasn’t enough. Not even close to enough, and she conjured the image of her holding up a cardboard sign and begging for money, simply to feed her son.
What was the point in even trying any longer? And why couldn’t the owner of the house—this house—have been normal? Just an older woman who needed extra money, instead of a woman who wanted to use Beverly for whatever unlawful thing she was doing? In the silence, it was easy to imagine the man in the truck and the owner sitting around a battered kitchen table, with cash and guns and drugs spread in front of them.
The thought made her stomach turn and deepened the dark-blue fog. She zoned out for a while before finally zeroing in on the counter. She saw the knife and the carrots marked with splashes of blood, which made her think about her finger, throbbing with its own heartbeat. Strange how it did that, like it had its own little ecosystem, unconnected to the rest of her. Reluctantly reaching for the knife, she washed the blood from the carrot she’d been working on, then decided there was no way she’d let Tommie eat it, even if she peeled it until it was no larger than a pencil. She tossed it in the sink and reached for another carrot, trying to concentrate, making sure she didn’t slip. When she was finished, she reached for the next carrot but decided it would be better to get the chicken going at the same time.
The meat was on the plate where she’d left it, thawed and ready to go. She searched for the cast-iron frying pan in the drawer, not finding it, then realizing that it was still on the stove from last night. Turning on the burner, she tossed in the drumsticks, crowding the pan, and returned to the carrots. But as she reached for the knife, she imagined Tommie soaked to the skin in the pouring rain, in the dark, while passing cars sent more water splashing in their direction. How long would Tommie last before he began to shiver or got sick? The image was heartbreaking. Consumed by it, she wandered aimlessly from the kitchen. She didn’t think about what she was doing or where she was going; it was as though she were being pulled by an invisible string, her thoughts fading away to nothing.
She went up the steps and stood at the threshold of Tommie’s room. There had been guns under the bed, and she understood that Tommie must have found them but hadn’t bothered to tell her. The realization made her mind go blank again; it was too horrible to contemplate. Instead, when the room came into focus, she saw Go, Dog. Go! and Iron Man on the nightstand, and she reminded herself not to forget them, but even that registered only dimly. She wondered why she had come to his room in the first place, and it was only when she smelled something burning that she suddenly remembered the chicken.