by Lori Roy
I don’t understand, but I nod like I do.
“Lots of important friends,” he says. “Lived here all my life. My daddy’s real important too. I told you that, right? Ain’t no one going to hurt our family to help someone like you. Ain’t nowhere for you to go.”
Again, I nod.
“You and me,” he says. He stands too close to the light at the bottom of the stairs, and he squints because it’s too bright. “That’s all there is. Your mama, she was a drinker, you know? Alcoholic is what they call it. You know that, right?”
“Yes, I know,” I say, feeling sad for Mama because not one thing in Mama’s life was easy for her. “I know she’s a drinker.”
“No,” he says. “She was a drinker. Ain’t no more.” He pauses and looks around the basement as if he’s forgotten what it looks like or maybe as if wondering what else I might need down here. “She’s gone, dead. Drank herself to death.”
I stare at him but must not answer, because he says it again.
“She’s dead. Do you understand?”
I nod and drop down into my one chair at my one table and press my hands there to steady myself.
“I ain’t no bad person,” he says. His voice is thin. He’s slipping away, and the sound of him can hardly reach me.
“Yes, I know you ain’t a bad person.”
There have been times I thought I might tell him about the trap I once tried to set for him because I think he might be proud of me for being so smart. He likes that I’m smart and can do the eighth-grade math workbooks already and that I can read to him from the newspapers he brings. Sometimes, when I’ve done something that makes him happy, he tells me about the outside. Those are my favorite times. He tells me about catching a frog that was hopping up the steps into his mama’s kitchen or pulling weeds all day on a Saturday, and the world outside blooms again just like Mama’s magnolias. The world outside is sweet with silky petals that I could stare at all day for being so beautiful, and I wanted to see that world again more than anything until now. He wouldn’t be proud of me setting a trap. He’d be angry. And Mama is gone and the part of me that once wanted things is empty, and I don’t care if I ever see the sweet, silky outside ever again.
“Next Sunday,” he says, stepping up to the chair where I’m sitting. His edges are sharp now. He’s real and solid. He runs a hand over my hair and lifts a piece of it between two of his fingers.
My heart, I think, freezes in place. My blood goes still in my veins. I don’t blink or breathe. I close my eyes but don’t move. I don’t turn my head away or pull back. Those things would make him angry. When he drops my hair, I breathe again.
“So long as the weather is good,” he says, staring down at his empty fingers and rubbing them together as if he were still holding my hair in them. “Next Sunday, we’ll give it another try.”
Chapter 31
IMOGENE
Today
Imogene pushes open her bedroom door. Its hinges creak. Mama looks up at Imogene and smiles.
“Look at what I found,” Mama says. She hasn’t yet changed out of her blue housedress, and a sheer white scarf covers her hair, which still hangs loose.
The boy sits on the edge of the bed, his bare feet dangling but not touching the floor. Mama is sitting next to him, one arm wrapped around his narrow shoulders. With her other hand, she is pushing aside his hair so she can look at the cut he got when his head hit one of the basement stairs. It bled badly, but now that it’s stopped, it doesn’t look to be too deep. Mama always said cuts to the head were the worst bleeders of all. A snug bandage will take care of it. Probably no need for stitches. Looking first up at Mama, the boy then turns to Imogene and squints though the room is dark. Someone has drawn the curtains.
“The sun was bothering his eyes.” Mama strokes the boy’s dark hair. “Isn’t that right, Christopher? And did you see this, Immy? He got a knock on his noggin.”
Imogene is still shaking. It’s all that adrenaline working its way out. She steps into the room, squats to the boy’s level, and braces herself with one hand to the ground.
“Christopher?” she whispers, afraid to get any closer. “Your name is Christopher?”
He nods.
“And do you remember me? Imogene?”
Again, the boy, Christopher, nods and rests his head against Mama. His color is good and his eyes are only half-open as if he’s not yet awake, but he doesn’t seem troubled by the quiet ticking of Mama’s heart. Instead, he seems comforted by it. Mama smiles at the feel of the boy against her and rests a hand on his cheek. She has realized the same as Imogene. Had Vaughn lived, he would have been the same age as this boy. And seeing Mama with an arm wrapped around the child and a hand to his cheek is like seeing what could have been. Imogene and Russell would have been seeing Vaughn off to kindergarten soon. Russell would’ve been looking into T-ball because he’d always been a good ball player. They’d have painted Vaughn’s room green and marked his height on his bedroom threshold with a permanent marker. It could have been Vaughn sitting next to his grandma, eyes closed, slight smile on his face as he listened to her ticking heart. The same pain in Imogene’s gut opens up as when Jo Lynne asked that question . . . what have you done?
“He was worried about getting to school,” Mama says, her hand still cradling the boy’s cheek. She is at ease with him, not afraid like Imogene. Another way Mama is so much stronger. “Isn’t that precious? Told him it was Sunday. No school.”
The hair color is the same too. Dark brown, though this boy’s hair is straight and pops out in awkward tufts. His mama has likely been cutting it with scissors too dull for the job. Vaughn had soft curls, though he’d have outgrown them by now.
“School?” Imogene asks, pushing herself off the ground. “You were going to school?”
Mama makes a quiet humming sound. “He was worried he’d overslept. He said his head isn’t hurting him.”
“Which school?” Imogene asks, backing away until she bumps against the doorframe. “Where?”
“Past the cemetery for dead soldiers and the church with two crosses.” The boy lifts his eyes to Imogene. “Did Mama come back?”
“The church with two crosses?” Imogene says, ignoring the boy’s question and looking to Mama for an answer.
Her mind had been so clear before, just there in the living room, but now the things she’s hearing are a jumble of words. She can feel herself squinting, her forehead drawn up tight, as she tries to understand what Mama and the boy are telling her.
“The Episcopal, I figure,” Mama says. “You know the one. It’s there on Elm. Two pitched roofs. Two crosses.”
“You go to school in town?” Imogene says. “Here in Simmonsville?”
“Where’s my mama?” the boy says again, this time looking up at Mama.
“Imogene?” Mama says when she doesn’t answer the boy.
Imogene steps into the room again and closes the door to shut out the extra light that is still troubling the boy. She walks slowly toward the bed so she has time to think. Squatting in front of the boy, close enough to touch him this time, she sets the framed photo she picked up in the living room on the bedside table, facedown so the boy won’t have to look at Daddy, and stares at his small feet.
“Did your mama take you to school?” Imogene says, resting one hand lightly on the boy’s knee. Something inside is beginning to fester and she can’t stop her hands from shaking. When he still doesn’t answer, she shakes that small knee so he’ll look at her. “It’s me, Imogene. Remember? Imogene with the red hair? Tell me about school.”
Christopher pulls his legs away so his knee slips from Imogene’s hands. She’s frightened him.
“I think it’s time for breakfast,” Mama says, tipping her head in the same scolding way she did when, as a child, Imogene acted up in church. “I’ll bet Christopher here is hungry. Are you hungry, sweetheart?”
Still pressed up against Mama, Christopher nods.
Standing from the bed, M
ama extends a hand to him. “Come with me to the kitchen,” she says. “Do you like pancakes?”
Christopher shakes his head. “I want to go back.”
“Back where, dear?” Mama says.
When the boy doesn’t answer, Mama looks to Imogene still squatted at the side of the bed. Imogene shakes her head in the slightest way, so even though Imogene isn’t ready to tell Mama where the boy came from, she’ll know he can’t go back.
“Mama will come home,” the boy says. He slides off the bed and stands before Imogene. “She always comes home. Always. And I have to be there.”
“Perhaps you should bring us our breakfast in here,” Mama says, lowering herself back onto the mattress and pulling Christopher up next to her. “Let’s us stay put. Wait for your mama right here. That’ll be fine, won’t it?”
Imogene stands, and as she does, the meaning of what the boy has told them is finding its way to solid footing. She should be feeling relief because this means Daddy wasn’t holding them down there, the boy and his mama. They were coming and going. But it isn’t relief she’s feeling, because it was the boy’s own mama who was locking him up.
“Do you always go to school?” Imogene asks, careful to speak softly and with a smile on her face, but the anger at this boy’s mama has taken root, and the strain of keeping it contained is making her arms go rigid. “Every day?”
The boy doesn’t answer and instead takes on that same look he had in the basement. It’s a slight tightening of his upper lip as if he’s pinning his mouth shut, and he crosses his arms.
“Imogene, that’s enough questions,” Mama says. “We need a little food in our stomachs. You’ll bring us something, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The basement was the boy’s home, and he goes to school. Or he did. Imogene didn’t want to believe Jo Lynne when she said that the boy’s mother probably locked him up down there, but it would seem she was right. If the mother had no other home, at least the basement was a roof for them, but to lock her boy in and to leave him and to maybe set that fire. That’s what Imogene can’t make sense of. Not even Jo Lynne, when she asked Imogene . . . what have you done . . . ever truly thought Imogene was the one to blame for what happened to Russell and Vaughn. It was more about Jo Lynne being exhausted by Imogene not doing things the way she ought to.
Imogene got herself pregnant out of wedlock. That was her first mistake. And then she insisted on staying in college even while she was pregnant and even after Vaughn was born and she let babysitters care for him instead of being a proper mama. She left clothes in the dryer to wrinkle, served her husband takeout, dropped her cell phone for no good reason. What have you done? It was a poorly timed question, though that didn’t stop it from stinging all these years, because even though Jo Lynne had been talking about a busted cell phone, Imogene knew in her heart that it was her fault Russell and Vaughn died. Perhaps it was this boy’s mama’s fault too that all these bad things have happened. Imogene had a child, and she let him go. This mother had a child, and she left him. The glimmer of hope Imogene had felt—the belief that she could be strong enough to help this boy when she’s been nothing but a disappointment to everyone else—is gone.
Chapter 32
BETH
Before
One week later, on the day we’re meant to go outside again, he stomps around the basement, twice tripping on the new carpet squares, and scolds me for not eating. I lie on the sofa, a blanket pulled up around me, and watch him. He digs through the ice chest and counts the cheese sticks and slices of ham. He shakes the cereal box to find it nearly full and waves an unopened loaf of bread in my face.
“You ain’t eaten one damn thing,” he shouts.
He walks through the rest of the basement. Checks the hamper where I’m supposed to put my dirty laundry. It’s empty because I haven’t changed my clothes or eaten anything since he told me Mama was gone.
“You stink to high heaven,” he says. “You have to wash yourself, comb your hair. Maybe we don’t get to go outside today.”
I stare at him and say nothing because I don’t care. The words he’s saying don’t mean anything to me. Mama isn’t out there anymore, thinking about me or missing me or waiting for me to come back home, and now I don’t want anything. I don’t even want to live.
He grabs me by the wrist and yanks me from the sofa. Like he did before, he covers my eyes over with a black kerchief. He catches my hair in it when he ties the ends off at the back of my head. It pulls my hair, but I don’t cry out or even complain.
“It ain’t my fault she’s dead,” he says as he pulls me up the stairs. I stumble because I can’t see. I crack my shin on one of the steps. Still I don’t cry out. “She done it to her own self. But that ain’t happening here.”
I know a change in the air is coming as he reaches to throw open the door at the top of the stairs. The last time, that change made my legs fold up under me and I screamed and cried because it was too much. I should be scared the same will happen again, but I’m not. The outside doesn’t matter to me anymore because Mama isn’t in it. But when the door opens, I can’t stop myself from inhaling long and slow, can’t stop my hands from shaking or my legs from turning watery again. The air is sticky and sugary, like syrup I want to lick from my fingers. I press a hand over my mouth so I won’t cry or scream and so he won’t grab me up and take me back down again. I do want something, after all. I do want to see outside.
As we walk, our feet hitting the wood planks that are soft and loose underfoot, I count my steps so I’ll keep taking them. Three steps forward, left turn, six steps and another door opens.
The air on my face shoves me backward. I stumble and choke, and I begin to cry even though I try not to. He pulls the black kerchief from my eyes as I step through the door. I squint, raise a hand, turn away. It’s painful, the sun on my skin and in my eyes, and the outside air makes my stomach swirl. Stumbling down three steps, I squat and hold myself steady with both hands to the ground. It’s dizzying, all of it together. A light gust brings with it the smell of winter honeysuckle. I remember them in an instant, like I just yesterday picked the tiny white flowers with Mama and scattered them on the railing outside the front door so we could smell them all day long. Clumps of dirt crumble under my feet. Birds and insects click and sing. Dry grass digs into my hands. When I drop the rest of the way to the ground, light-headed from so much outside, the grass scratches at my cheeks and neck.
He lets me lie there for a time. I press one hand over my mouth to cover up the crying and pull my knees to my chest because something is grinding away on my stomach. The basement is gray and soggy, and down there, I feel nothing. Never quite hungry, never quite thirsty. I never quite felt Mama being dead either, though I didn’t know it until now. Everything is more outside and it’s painful to be here. I feel what I’ve missed in a new way. They’re close again, the things I’ve gone without, and I’m reminded of them by the smells and the feel and the sounds. I miss Mama’s magnolias and her silky white hair and the tiny perfume bottle she tipped on one finger and the store-bought cookie dough we ate on Saturday nights and the stringy dollar weeds we pulled from around the house. The missing is what grinds on my insides, and now Mama’s gone and has left me behind.
Finally, he reaches down and grabs my wrist, the same wrist, and drags me to my feet. I stand without fighting him, already worn down by it all. My arms hang loose at my sides as he wipes dirt and bits of dead grass from my cheeks.
“You get lonely down there?” he asks, looking my face over.
I squint up at him. Even though the sun is low in the sky and there isn’t much left of it for the day, it’s too much for my eyes. I don’t remember the sun being too much before, and I feel the cold now. It makes me shiver as it dries my damp skin.
“I mean it,” he says, tilting his face this way and that, trying to make our eyes meet. “I can’t hardly think about you, all alone down there. It bother you?”
He’s cl
ose enough I can smell the smoke on his breath. I didn’t used to smell cigarettes on him, and he also smells like Mama’s perfume, but not quite. It’s some other woman’s perfume. Deep creases cut through his thick skin. They fan out from his eyes and the corners of his mouth. Gray hairs sparkle in among the brown. I’ve smelled him plenty, because you can’t stop yourself smelling a person, but this is the most I’ve looked at him ever.
“I see Imogene with her little boy and he sure does love her.” He stares at me, waiting for me to say something, but I don’t. It’s like I’ve lost Mama all over again in a worse way than before. “Guess you loved your mama too. You’re lonely now, ain’t you?”
I don’t know what to say. It should be an easy question to answer . . . am I lonely . . . but part of feeling so sad about Mama being gone is that I’ve already started to forget her and now I’ll never see her again and all those things I’ve forgotten are lost forever. I didn’t realize how much I had already forgotten until I touched the dirt and smelled the outside. I had been mixing up the characters and stories I read about—Laura and Ma and Pa and Mary and their house in the Big Woods—with who Mama really was and what my house really looked like and which road I lived on and the name of the town we sometimes drove to.
Even Imogene had become more real than Mama because he tells me about her and her boy and the man who is her husband. He says Imogene doesn’t think he’s stupid like most everyone else and I think that’s one reason he loves her best. I was beginning to love her best too because she was closer than Mama, and I was not quite so alone when I listened to stories of Imogene changing messy diapers or losing the pacifier yet again or getting spit-up in her long red hair. But now Mama is gone and what I’ve forgotten is gone too. I am lonely. It’s the missing and the forgetting and the loneliness that grind in my stomach. All of them together.
“Guess it’s a silly question,” he says, looking down at the watch on his wrist and then behind us at the sun. “Course you’re lonely. You’re alone. But you got to eat, right? You know that. You got to care for yourself.”
