Sight

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  Deputy Pesquera pulls in behind Mom’s truck. I’m so happy to see our little house with its A-shaped roof that I swallow back tears. I love how the roof slopes almost all the way to the ground to keep the snow from piling too high, and how its triangle shape looks just like the trees I used to draw when I was little.

  “That’s okay,” I say when the deputy starts to open her door. “You said you’d brief her tomorrow, right?”

  “Right. Well, good night, then.”

  Inside the house I click the dead-bolt lock into place and wave at Deputy Pesquera through the window.

  I drag myself up our narrow staircase and stand for a long time in front of the open bathroom door, scowling. There’s a slow-motion debate going on in my head. Go pee now, and avoid getting up in the middle of the night and losing sleep. Skip the bathroom and go right to sleep, and get to sleep sooner. I decide to fall down where I am and sleep in the small hallway that connects my room, my mom’s room, and the bathroom we share.

  “Was it her?”

  Mom’s been watching my internal battle from her bedroom doorway. Instead of answering, I stand back up and go into the bathroom.

  I sit on the toilet, and fall asleep. Mom wakes me up by knocking on the bathroom door and whispering, “Was it her?”

  I flush, to drown her out, and wash my hands. I don’t brush my teeth and I don’t wash my face, but I do put in my retainer. Mom has the unique and infuriating ability to tell if my teeth have shifted overnight.

  I open the bathroom door and walk past Mom, giving her what I hope is a conversation-ending nod, and go into my room. I flop face-first onto my bed, the wrought-iron bed frame creaking in protest. The covers jump and fall around me, and cover half of one leg. Good enough. I manage to flick off one shoe; the other hangs on to my big toe.

  “Was it her?” Mom has ignored my nod.

  I keep my eyes closed and groan, hoping she can tell it means yes.

  “I’d hoped … it was a false alarm. Where was she?”

  I don’t answer. I want to sleep. I want to sink down, down, down into a warm dark empty place. She waits till I fall asleep for a moment and asks again, “Where was she?”

  My body stiffens. I don’t lift my head, but say into my pillow, “Can’t you just watch the news like everybody else?”

  She makes a clucking sound. She’s not happy. She likes to know what I know, what I told the police, and what I saw. I sigh and roll over so I can glare at her. She sits on my bed and takes my hand. Then she starts to untangle my hair with her fingers.

  “I want to sleep, Mom.”

  “I know.”

  She works my hair, and hums.

  I’m still glaring at her. “Then let me sleep.”

  She shakes her head and whispers, “Not yet. Where did they find her?”

  I clench my jaw and sigh through my nose. Mom and I both highly value communication through sighing. She answers back with a whistler: making the slightest space between her lips and letting the air make a high-pitched exit. I keep my eyes locked with hers as my face reddens, my throat tightens, and tears burn my eyes.

  “Where was she?” Mom whispers. She lies down, facing me, on the bed, and takes my hands in hers. I turn and bury my face in the pillow and cry.

  She lets me. I finally turn to her, wiping my face on the pillow, and stammer out: “In the desert outside of town. In a barrel that smelled … She thought it smelled like … Her dad had this chemical stuff he used to take the MY CHILD is AN HONOR STUDENT bumper sticker off of his truck….”

  Mom shakes her head and makes an Oh, no noise. She rubs my back, which makes me cry harder.

  “That’s what it smelled like. It made her throw up and it felt like it was cutting into her head like when you stick your thumbnail in a lima bean and split it in half.”

  Mom sighs and rolls over onto her back. She wipes her eyes with her robe. I watch more tears well up and roll down her cheeks.

  “Mom, he knew. Her father knew. Right then, right when she … He was thinking to her, ‘I’m with you, I’m with you, I’m with you.’ She heard him, and then she died.”

  I don’t tell her about the dream, about the sound of crunching rocks behind me in the desert.

  Mom cries for a little longer. Then she gusts out a cry-ending sigh and, standing up, says, “You did good. Sleep now.”

  She squeezes my hand and kisses me on the forehead.

  She gets up and pulls the covers out from under me, so she can pull them over me. She lingers at the door and looks at me as she turns out the light.

  “Good night,” she says.

  “Night, Mom.”

  I study the glowing stick-on star constellations on my ceiling. I’m emptied out. A slack balloon. It’s what Mom wanted. She knows if I tell her about it, what I saw will leave me, at least for a while. Long enough for me to fall into a dreamless sleep. Mom will carry it into her room, sit in the chair by the window, and see it all for herself while I sleep.

  Two

  Ever since my dad went on hiatus, Mom’s been getting up before five o’clock every morning, no matter what’s happened the night before. This means by the time she has to wake me for school at seven, she’s had two cups of coffee and taken a run down to the lake and back again. So when she sticks her head into my room to wake me up this morning, she’s too wired to gently rouse me from sleep with sweet cooing and a loving tug of my big toe. Instead I have my dreamless, perfect sleep split in half by Mom’s full-volume voice saying, “WELL, ARE YOU GOING TO SCHOOL OR AREN’T YOU?” There are no words for the rage this fills me with. It’s actually what gets me out of bed, which I think is why she does it. I’m following her down the hall before my eyes are even fully open, before the memories of yesterday can pull down on my arms and hang like a weight from my neck.

  “Mom!”

  She glances at me over her shoulder and nods approvingly. “Going to school. Good choice.”

  “Mom!”

  “What?” She gives a wide-eyed smile that could make me spit hot lava. “I whispered.”

  “No, you didn’t!”

  “Are you sure you want to go to school today? You look tired,” she says.

  “Of courshe I’m tired!” I yell. I yank out my retainer and throw it into the bathroom sink. “I was down the hill all night!”

  She inhales sharply and grabs my chin. “Is that a bruise? Did somebody hit you?”

  “Yeah, Mom, I totally got beat up by my psychic vision.”

  “Dylan,” she says, and at first I think it’s a low warning I hear in her voice. It’s something else, though, something closer to pleading. She wants me to forget.

  It takes me a second to find the energy to play along. I do, though, because I know if I make my body play along with It’s just another normal morning at the Driscoll house, my heart will eventually believe it.

  “And it’s cold in here!” I say, stomping my foot. “And it was freezing in my room last night,” I grouch, remembering waking up for a moment to a bedroom so cold I imagined I could see my breath in the moonlight. “When can we start using the woodstove?”

  “Tonight,” she says, smiling. “If it stays this cold. Especially if it finally snows.”

  She hugs me and I can feel her heart racing faster than her happy smile is letting on. She’s playing along too.

  “You’re just so loud!” I say into her shoulder.

  She laughs and squeezes me. “I just wanted the day to start, darlin’, and it wasn’t going to start with you in bed.”

  This is the closest she’ll come to acknowledging what happened last night. She won’t tell me what the deputy says to her today when she’s “briefed.” She won’t ask me if what I’ve seen scares me, or if I think about those little kids and what it looks like when their faces go still. She’ll do the same thing the whole mountain did about the Drifter, the same thing she did about my dad. She will ignore the fact that something bad has happened until she’s so used to ignoring it, it’s like it n
ever happened.

  “Why can’t you do this when you wake me up?” I say, wrapping my arms tighter around her waist. “Why’s there have to be so much yelling?”

  “I didn’t yell. And we’re hugging now. And you’re out of bed. Two birds, one stone. You need to get ready for school,” she says, pulling herself out of my arms and walking into the bathroom.

  “So hugging me is like throwing a rock at a bird and killing it?” I ask, following her. I’m totally playing for time now, and she knows it.

  She picks up her brush and runs it through her hair. “Do you want to go to school today or not?” she asks, not looking at me.

  “No!”

  She stops brushing. “Because of last night, or because you’re sixteen?”

  “I’m sixteen and a half,” I say.

  She reaches behind me and turns on the shower. Sometimes I wish she’d sit on the edge of the tub and dump warm water over my soapy hair with a plastic pitcher, like she did when I was a kid. Instead she holds my face in her hands, gives a little gasp and a wide smile, and says, “You’re growing into your face!”

  She’s impossible to stay mad at.

  But then she says, “You look more and more like a Driscoll every day.”

  I know she means to be sweet when she says this, like, You’re one of us, but there’s another us I want to be a part of too. My mom kept her last name when she married my dad, and when I was born, she insisted that I get her last name too. It took me a long time to realize that my dad’s last name wasn’t Driscoll, and even longer to realize that it must have really bothered him. When he corrected people on his name, he’d laugh without humor and say, “No, no, I’m not a Driscoll. I’m just the donor.”

  I remember a fight they had about it, right before he left. My mom said he could change his name to Driscoll if he wanted us all to have the same name so badly. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” she yelled. “To be part of this family of freaks? Except you can’t handle it. You can’t handle what she can do….”

  I wasn’t supposed to be listening to them fight. I was supposed to be in my bedroom, playing “pool party” with my dolls and the big iron pot we used to make popcorn, filled with water. I never asked my mom what she meant when she said family of freaks. I didn’t want her to know I was listening.

  “Go on in and get ready or you’ll miss the bus,” my mom says, trying to playfully nudge me toward the bathroom. I don’t move. I can’t move. Sometimes the things unsaid between us make the air so solid that my chest can barely expand to breathe.

  “Mom,” I say, almost pleading.

  “What?”

  Our eyes are flicking over each other’s faces, each one of us begging, but for the exact opposite thing. In the end, I give in.

  “Nothing,” I say, going into the bathroom and closing the door. It’s a full thirty seconds before my mom makes the wood floors creak by walking away. I look at my face in the bathroom mirror.

  When I was born, Mom’s relatives looked at me through the Plexiglas window of the just-born baby unit, nodded at one another, and murmured their approval. I was a really ugly baby. I had the face of a full-grown woman planted on the body of a newborn. I was what Mom called a true Driscoll woman-to-be, with wide-set eyes, heavy lids, cleft chin, strong jaw, and high forehead. It was a face that would look fine on a grown-up, but on a baby, on a little kid, even, it looked completely ridiculous. It didn’t help that I had a baby-size mono-brow. I think even Mom, with all her “Now stop it, you were a beautiful baby” talk, was glad when my face got big enough to separate the fuzz that grew straight and dark across my forehead. It wasn’t till puberty that things began to even out, that my face stopped looking like it was too big for my body.

  If you look through my baby book, there’re no pictures of any of those ugly-loving relatives holding me. That’s because as soon as the doctors let Mom go from the hospital, she and my dad wrapped me in the blanket from the baby ward, hopped a cross-country bus, and took off. They ended up here, on Pine Mountain. I don’t know what that trip was like for the other passengers on board the bus, but I know from Pilar’s little sister, Grace, that newborn babies are pooping machines, and that when they’re not pooping, they’re crying. Mom says it wasn’t that long of a trip, only a couple of days, but I’m guessing that it was a long couple of days for everyone involved.

  It’s not until the hot water has steamed up the mirror that I admit I’m having some sort of major malfunction involving getting my body into the shower. It’s the sound of the water pelting the tile that’s keeping me leaning against the sink, staring into the shower through the hot fog. The sound is like sand, whipped up by the wind and peppering against a blue plastic barrel.

  I stick my fingers into my ears, close my eyes, and step into the shower.

  I spend most of the shower sitting down, leaning over my legs, my fingers still in my ears, letting the hot water stream down my back, watching it swirl around my feet and down the drain.

  Through my plugged ears I hear the muffled sound of Mom knocking on the door. She says that Dottie just drove by on the way up the hill.

  Dottie’s my bus driver, and my nemesis. She’s been driving my bus to and from school since my very first day of kindergarten, which you would think would make her at least a little fond of me, but no. She lives to torment me. And the fact that she just drove by means that I have exactly six minutes before she gets to the dead end at the top of our street, turns around, and heads back down toward our driveway. And if I’m not standing there waiting, she’ll drive on, leaving me in the dust. If she’s feeling especially evil, she’ll beep as she goes by.

  I do a two-minute wash of the parts I imagine are particularly stinky, and hope Mom’s pricey perfumed lotion will take care of the rest. I try to save time by not using a towel and depending on the absorbing power of my clothing, but the combination of water and lotion has somehow turned into a glue that makes every bit of clothing I put on adhere to the exactly wrong body part. I run down the stairs, trying to yank down my sweatshirt from where it’s wrapped like a scarf around my neck.

  “Are those your same clothes from last night? You need socks!” Mom says, as I shove my bare feet into my high-tops. “It’s going to rain again today!”

  The telephone rings and Mom and I both lunge for it on the end table. I get to it first.

  “Hello?”

  There’s only silence on the other end.

  “Hello?” I say again.

  “Do you know who this is?” At first I think it’s my aunt Peg, but even though there’s the familiar slow lilt, there’s a teasing tone that I know doesn’t belong to my straight-laced aunt Peg. “Who is this I’m talking to? Is that my niece, sounding all grown-up?”

  “Yep, it’s me, Auntie.”

  “Who is it?” Mom asks loudly, reaching for the phone. “Peg or Ruby?”

  I swat at her hand and mouth the word “Ruby.”

  “Give me the phone,” Mom mouths back.

  “Tell your mamma,” my aunt says slowly, “to let you talk to your Auntie.”

  I hold the phone to my chest. “For your information, she wants to talk to me.”

  “You’ll be late for school,” Mom says, “and you need socks.”

  “How are you, Aunt Ruby?” I ask, while jumping up and dodging Mom’s hand as she tries to grab the phone.

  “Oh, I’m fine, darling, I’m just fine. How are you?”

  I run upstairs to my room and open my sock drawer. Empty. “I’m good,” I say. “Just getting ready for school.”

  “Oh, that sounds nice.”

  I kneel down to look under my bed. No socks. I check under my bureau. Underwear, but no socks. Finally I jump up and grab a balled-up pair from the clothes hamper and head back downstairs.

  “What are you doing, Auntie?” Even though we don’t get to talk often, I know that Aunt Ruby always has the best answer to that question. Aunt Peg will just say, Oh, I’m doing the laundry or Oh, just setting the d
inner table, but Aunt Ruby will always say something interesting.

  “Oh, darling.” Aunt Ruby laughs. “I’m just setting here on the front porch filling that pickle jar.”

  Most of the time I have no idea what she’s talking about. Like now. Is she peeing in the pickle jar? Putting actual pickles in it? Catching spiders? I bet she catches spiders; she seems cool enough to do that. I sit back down on the couch with Mom.

  “What do you mean, filling the pickle—”

  Mom chooses this moment to have a silent hissy fit.

  Aunt Ruby laughs quietly. “Tell your mama not to worry herself. I’m not coming anywhere near her girl.”

  Mom finally succeeds at unpeeling my fingers from the phone.

  “Dylan has to catch the school bus, Ruby,” she says firmly into the phone. She points to the front door.

  “Fine,” I grumble, pulling on my socks and shoving my feet into my high-tops. As I close the front door behind me, I hear Mom ask, “How’s Mama?” and then, “Because I want to talk about Mama, not nonsense, that’s why.”

  Mom says she hasn’t told either of her sisters about the things I see. I wish she would. It’d be easier, I think, if at least one of us told somebody.

  Oh, crap. I see Dottie as soon as I close the front door. She’s doing a slow roll by our driveway, but as soon as she sees me, she floors it. I launch myself off the porch, landing in a run that sends me tearing out of the driveway, chasing the bus down the street toward Ben’s, the second stop on her route. It’s midway through this run that Dottie and I share our special morning moment of Zen. I fall into a rhythm, running directly behind the bus, and every once in a while Dottie will glance at me in her rearview mirror and I’ll think, That’s right, you old crank, I’m still here. And in her eyes I can see her thinking, You will never catch me, you smug little turd.

  For a moment it seems like me and Dottie and the bus are linked, that none of us could exist without the others. Then there’s a faint squeak as Dottie steps on the brakes, and the bus and I begin to slow as we near Ben’s driveway.