Last Will

by Bryn Greenwood

  “It’ll get broke for sure, then.” Meda laughed, and let it go.

  On our way to Miss Amos’ house, we stopped for groceries, and I got a taste of the gossip Meda had complained about. The people in the store watched us too closely, as if they were storing up information for later. In the check out, the cashier said, “How’s your mother doing? I heard she was going to have surgery.”

  “She’s fine. The surgery went fine,” Meda said stiffly. The cashier went on asking questions while she rang up the groceries, and Meda kept giving short answers. While I paid, Meda turned away, and I saw how the customer and the cashier in the next lane leaned together to whisper to each other.

  In the parking lot, Meda held Annadore tightly and said, “Like she cares how Mom is. What a nosy bitch.”

  Miss Amos greeted us like there had never been a disagreement, and Annadore immediately introduced the doll to her. I joined Meda in the kitchen with the declared intention of helping her cook lunch, but I helped by putting my chair in her path so that each time she passed me, I could touch her. She swatted my hands away, but while lunch was cooking, she knelt down in front of my chair and unfastened my jeans.

  It was the act whose image had plagued me from the beginning, the fantasy that had fueled so many wasted mornings and made me so ashamed of myself. As much as I had imagined the act, I had never imagined Meda’s actual participation in it. Some girls did, some girls didn’t, and some girls didn’t have to. Meda was one of those girls—it wasn’t necessary—and she did it anyway. I was going toward panic, feeling the world headed for destruction, when she stopped. Looking pleased with herself, she said, “Hold that thought.” Then she zipped me back up and went out to the front room to tell her grandmother that lunch was ready. Sitting across the table from Meda, looking at the mobile tranquility of her face, I forgot to eat my lunch until she prompted me.

  That evening, we left Annadore with Aunt Ginny again, and took Miss Amos up to visit Muriel, with the understanding that Loren would visit later and bring Miss Amos home. Meda predicted we’d get a phone call at about ten o’clock, because Loren hadn’t come. I wondered at how hard it was to change your reputation, because changing yourself was only half the battle and not even the most difficult half. The hard part was convincing the people who knew you that you’d changed.

  Muriel looked depleted from the surgery, and when we arrived, her friend Toni was visiting, talking with her about their abductions.

  “It’s hard sometimes to go to sleep,” Muriel said. “I can’t help but think they’ll be back again. I never know when they’ll come. I once was driving at night and woke up in the ditch an hour later. Lucky I didn’t kill somebody or myself. The not knowing was hell on my nerves. Cathy, I know you’re angry, so you don’t even need to say it.”

  “It’s hard trying to live with that. Cathy, you just have to understand what your mother’s been through, and not judge her,” Toni said.

  “You know what? You don’t know anything about me, okay?” Meda said. She went out into the hallway, leaving me alone with the other women.

  “She thinks I wasn’t a good mother,” Muriel said. “The drinking makes her mad and the fact that we were always so poor.”

  “You drank so much, and nothing anyone could say to you would change that,” Miss Amos said.

  “But I just couldn’t hold it all together with what was going on. It was easier to drink until I passed out. If they came then, I didn’t know it.”

  “I know,” Toni said. “It takes about everything you’ve got to keep from losing your mind. My husband used to come home and wonder why the house wasn’t cleaned or dinner cooked and I couldn’t get him to understand. I get so mad hearing people act like it’s a figment of our imaginations.”

  Rather than hear the rest of it, I excused myself and went out into the hallway to check on Meda.

  Excuses

  Meda

  Bernie came out of Mom’s room and frowned at me.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “It’s her excuse, whatever part of it’s really something happening to her, the rest of it is an excuse for throwing her life away. I’m not going to let her convince me that it’s my excuse, too. When you’ve heard her story as many times as I have, you start seeing how every time there was something she screwed up, it’s because of the aliens.”

  “Just remember that she’s not well. Give her a little break.”

  “I’m giving her a break. I’m not saying this to her, am I?”

  “Fair enough. Let’s go down to the cafeteria and you can tell me about it down there.”

  I wanted to claw his eyes out, but I knew he was right, because it wouldn’t be good for her to hear me saying that when she was sick. I felt like a radiator, like as much as I wanted to get it out, I wasn’t sure how safe it was to take the lid off. I guess he knew, because once we were sitting down, he said, “Okay.”

  “When she talks about how they come all of a sudden to take her, how she never knows when it’s going to happen, that’s her excuse for having no control over her life. That’s why she didn’t pick me up after my eighth grade dance. I had to walk home, by myself, in the dark, wearing my stupid thrift store party dress. That’s why she never could hold down a job. That’s why we moved all the time. We even lived with Aunt M. for a while, when the State took David away because there was ‘insufficient supervision in the home,’ which means he got caught playing pool at a bar when he was nine, and we weren’t going to school regularly.

  “I remember when we were living in a trailer over on West County Road. It was a total dump and we were always about a week away from being kicked out. The landlord would threaten us and yell and then Steve would come up with a hundred bucks or whatever. Steve, he’s Loren’s father, he was a mechanic, or that’s what he said he was. I never saw him go to work. I think most of the money that kept us off the streets came from Steve selling pot.”

  “That’s nice,” Bernie said.

  Whenever I thought about what his childhood must have been like, I thought of those stupid Richie Rich comics. I knew it wasn’t true, and I had to remind myself there were bad things in his life money didn’t protect him from. Money had actually caused most of his problems.

  “Sometimes when Gramma came over after work, David and I would be watching TV and eating I-don’t-know-what. Sometimes we went to the neighbor’s trailer and basically begged her for food. We were six and four and we didn’t know any better, but it made Gramma so mad, because Muriel was still in bed. Four o’clock in the afternoon. What kind of example does that set for your kids? I know I’m not a great mother, but at least I try. At least I’m making an effort.”

  “I think you’re a good mother,” Bernie said. He looked so calm, and so nice, like he really cared. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe he was somebody I could trust, that we could make things work out. I almost told him everything right then.

  Miss Motherhood Pageant

  Meda looked at me like she wanted to say something. She looked, not just at me, but into me, like she was searching for something. I don’t know if she found it. Then she sighed and put a hand up to her forehead.

  “Everybody tells you it’s such hard work raising a baby, but what they don’t tell you is that you’re going to lie awake at night wondering if you’re doing the right thing or if you’re screwing her up, ruining her life, without even realizing it.”

  “Did your mother ruin your life?” I thought I already knew what her answer would be: half agreement, half demurral.

  “As close as she could. Didn’t she ever just stop and think how all her crazy alien bullshit was going to look to the rest of the world? How they were going to treat her kids because of it? And why did she let Aunt M. put me in all those pageants? For the longest time I didn’t know who I was. I thought I was supposed to be the person in those pageants, but I knew there was something wrong with me, because I wasn’t this smiling, cheerful little girl. It was a long time
before I looked around and saw that nobody’s like that, not even the people who are in pageants. They just play at being those people.

  “You know how crazy pageant people are? Aunt M. told me the pageant judges could tell if you were a virgin or not, just by looking at you. She said girls who weren’t virgins never won. She told me that when I was twelve. I guess she meant well. She was trying to scare me out of ending up like my mother, but for a long time I believed her. I really thought people would be able to tell if I wasn’t a virgin.”

  “Is that why you stopped doing the pageants?”

  She stared at me.

  I had made a terrible blunder, worse than usual. She might be angry that I had referred to the fact that she had been raped, because we’d never spoken about it in so many words. Maybe she had not thought of that as losing her virginity. Maybe she hadn’t been a virgin when she was raped. Maybe she thought I meant something else. I wanted to apologize, but even that was dangerous. What if I apologized for the wrong thing?

  “Have you looked at me lately, Bernie?” She put her finger to the scar on her mouth. “That’s why I quit doing pageants.”

  “I forget sometimes.” I was a moron. Meda gave me a frown of curiosity.

  “You mean, did I stop doing them because I wasn’t a virgin anymore?”

  I nodded, expecting to get blasted for it. “Well, I never had to find out whether girls who aren’t virgins automatically lose, because it wasn’t like Aunt M. tried to put me in another pageant after that.”

  After a few minutes of quiet, Meda said she was ready to go home. She didn’t want to go back up to Muriel’s room, so I left her downstairs and went back up to say good-bye. I couldn’t shake the things my mother told me were polite.

  When I went back into Muriel’s room, she and Toni were still on the alien topic.

  “I mean, obviously there’s something about the fact that they took you right before your surgery,” Toni was saying. “The doctor didn’t find anything during the operation?”

  “Obviously they took out the implants, so the doctors wouldn’t find them when they do tests on the tissue they took out,” Muriel said, and then smiled at me. “Here’s Bernie. You know, he’s paying for all this. Isn’t he the nicest guy ever? Give me a hug.” I did, gingerly, worried that I might hurt her. “I know you’re doing it because of Meda, honey, but it means a lot to me that you love her so much you want to help me.” Muriel held me a little closer, making my back hurt from being bent over her bed. “She’s so tight-lipped like my mother, but you do love her, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, even though I was terrified it would get back to Meda.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s waiting for me downstairs. It’s not that she doesn’t want to see you, but you know it’s not a good subject for her. We’ll come back tomorrow. If Loren doesn’t show up, call me and I’ll come get Miss Amos.”

  “She just needs to understand there are things in this world that don’t fit into some neat little box, things that can’t be explained,” Toni said.

  I patted Muriel on the leg and escaped.

  I was beginning to understand that abductees are working toward a linear, literal interpretation of what has happened to them. Muriel and Toni, and maybe all alien abductees, were wrestling with an experience for which they needed to create a tangible description of events, when they weren’t entirely sure of what had happened. I understood. They didn’t need the narrative to explain the event to themselves. They knew something had happened. They needed to describe the occurrence to other people in a way that didn’t sound completely insane. Clearly it was hard to strike a balance.

  After I had been in that closet for a few weeks, Amy became more intensely emotional about the situation. Perhaps she finally saw the impossibility of it ending well. I was scared for her, because the other man yelled, “Quit with all that weepy crap. You better knock it off, you little bitch.”

  Sometimes he took my head in his hands—I wasn’t a small boy, but he could hold my skull in his hands—and squeezed it hard, saying, “I could crush your head. I could crush it that easy.”

  Once when I spoke back to him, some small defiance to prove I wasn’t afraid of him, he closed his hand around my throat and squeezed up under my jaw until the world was not merely dark inside my blindfold, but dark inside my eyes. I was scared for the first time.

  Until that moment, I hadn’t believed I was going to die. I mean, I understood I was going to die eventually. Until he offered to crush my skull, I hadn’t believed I was going to die there and then by the hand of a faceless stranger. Later, after he used the bolt cutters on me, he whispered, “I have your soul. God doesn’t see you. God doesn’t know you’re here.” I was nine, maybe ten already. I believed him. I believed him more than I had ever believed the priest when he described the unstinting love of Jesus Christ.

  At the end, I remember waking up, feeling the shape of someone next to me, and knowing it was Amy. She slept with the stillness of someone drugged or unconscious, but she was warm and comforting. If Amy was there with me, I thought, everything would be okay. Whatever part Amy had in the thing, she had been kind to me. She had stood between violence and me as much as she could. I was sure it had to end soon if she was with me and I wasn’t wrong.

  I was used to hearing the two men argue, arguments full of the strangely lulling cadences of anger. The last argument was a catastrophic meltdown, where the only words I heard clearly were, “No,” “You,” “I,” and any given expletive. It was one of those fights that destroy your sense of time when heard through a wall. When you’re lying in bed at night, listening to neighbors fight, it’s the sort of argument that leaves you wondering if you should call 9-1-1.

  Amy’s boyfriend shouted, “It’s no good. It’s never going to be any good. You think you can run this, but you can’t. I went and I tried, but it’s no good.” I remember the voice of the other man was darkly calm, impossible to translate.

  What I don’t remember is being shot: not the sound of it, the sensation, nothing. I don’t know if it was what they call fate or the result of a shaky hand, a hand unsettled by fear or haste. A .357 fires bullets at over fourteen-hundred feet per second, and perhaps I was the beneficiary of the fact that, even in the short distance from a man’s hand to two sleeping forms on a closet floor, most people are not particularly accurate with handguns. Despite the killing capacity of the .357, its short barrel means that the slightest movement of the hand can radically shift the target area. At such close range, bullets fired from a handgun also tend to exit targets with most of their kinetic energy intact. All four shots fired into that closet were through and through into the floor.

  The neighbors had been willing to ignore the sounds of violent arguments, but could not ignore gunfire. The police came and found Amy’s boyfriend dead in the kitchen, shot twice in the chest. In the closet, they found Amy and me. They never found the other man at all. Except for the impossibilities of the evidence, he might have been a bogeyman I imagined.

  I sympathized with Muriel and Toni, because I was familiar with the difficulties of creating a narrative for something inexplicable. I spent almost a month in the hospital with the FBI hovering over me, waiting for me to tell them something useful. It wasn’t their fault; my grandfather rode them like a borrowed horse. I remember him barking, “Get your goddamned sketch artist in here, so he can give you a description.”

  I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell them anything. I couldn’t get a word out. Even months later when I could talk about it, it was no use. They wanted me to describe the bogeyman, but I’d never seen him. Or if I saw him, I had never allowed myself to know what he looked like. That was its own difficulty, but it was my soul’s suspension, my internal reduction, for which I could never properly craft a narrative.

  When the police and the FBI had finished with me, the psychiatrists and therapists took over, but I could only offer them the tangible events of the experience. Meticulous details of c
arpeting and corkboard and angles of light. The mechanics of being shot. I have studied ballistics as a casual observer, just as I have studied what happened in that little suburban house in Tulsa.

  When my mother and father tried to get me to talk about it, I couldn’t. How could I tell them I’d had my soul taken out and strung like bait on a hook at the end of fishing line, like some allurement to an angry fish god? That was how I started my life as a seafood metaphor. How to tell the truth and not seem crazy? I didn’t talk for the longest time, because I didn’t trust myself. I wasn’t sure what would come out of my mouth. How could I explain that I had been taken out of myself, and make it make sense?

  It may seem odd, locked up as I was, that anything could be subtracted. How can you get the gold out of Fort Knox? You can’t. It’s not a Sherlock Holmes’ mystery that features a primate and a chimney. There’s no chimney, no windows, not even a door to this room. How do you get the gold out? You don’t.

  Here’s the trick: remove the value of the gold. The soul. Take away its meaning.

  When I came home from the hospital, I remember riding in the car with my Aunt Ginny. She left the deathbed of one of her own children to come to me. It was Thomas, her youngest, her last, and she left him to come to me. She let me rest my head in her lap. I don’t remember who else rode with us, but only my aunt seemed real to me as she stroked my forehead. I remember the cool pressure of the gold band on the underside of her finger. I captured her hand, held it in my own, against my chest. I toyed with the ring, slipping it this way and that on her finger, and dazzled my eyes by catching the sunlight in the ruby.

  She was so alive to me.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BIG NEWS

  “The Hall of Fame,” I said.

  For better or for worse, those were the first words out of my mouth when Meda told me she thought she was pregnant.

  “I’ll know when I go to the clinic. What do you want to do?” She asked it with an air of defeat, and I realized I was in the middle of a conversation she was already having with herself.