Ashes to Asheville

by Sarah Dooley

  Zany accelerates up the on-ramp, and for a minute she’s preoccupied with merging among the coal trucks. Once we’re on I-77, rolling along at seventy-six miles per hour, which is six more miles per hour than the big white sign says we’re supposed to go, Zany reaches over and pats me, almost like Mama Lacy would. Her hands seem more grown-up than when I last noticed them. The nails are filed and painted, and there’s no tremble, even with this big thing that we’re doing.

  “It’s what she wanted,” Zany says, so soft I don’t have an answer, even if I’m not convinced.

  chapter

  3

  After about twenty minutes, we take an off-ramp. It’s way too soon to stop and pee, even for me, so I sit up and look around. When I recognize the road we’re on, I start to bounce in my seat.

  “Is Mama Shannon coming with us?” I ask. I can hear the hope turning up the end of my question.

  I want Mama Shannon to come with us, not just because that will make the whole thing safer, having a grown-up along, but because I barely ever see Mama Shannon anymore. Just on Sundays for church and even then, she’s not herself. None of us have been ourselves in the six months since Mama Lacy.

  “No,” Zany says sharply. “She’s not coming, and we’re going to be really careful not to wake her. In fact, you’re not coming in at all. You’re going to wait in the car. I forgot something. I won’t be two seconds.”

  Hot anger whooshes up through my belly and out my mouth. “You can’t tell me what to do!” But Zany ignores me and turns off the headlights, coasting through the darkness into the driveway. “Didn’t you say it’s when thieves go back that they get caught?” I remind her.

  “Stay here,” she says firmly, and she sneaks from the car.

  I count to ten, then ten again, so she’s got time to be out of sight before I follow.

  Mama Shannon and Zany live on the bottom floor of a house. The top floor is a separate apartment, but there’s still a door that connects the two. Mama Shannon has to keep it bolted or the upstairs neighbors will steal things. The first week, before she realized the door could be unlocked from the upstairs, Mama Shannon lost twenty-seven dollars and a maxed-out credit card from her wallet. She couldn’t prove who took them, but she put a bolt on her side of the connecting door and it never happened again.

  I’ve been inside the apartment before, but it still feels strange to me, in a way that my own mother’s home shouldn’t feel strange. I never lived here with Mama Shannon and Zany. They moved in after Mrs. Madison took me away. I can’t help but notice, every time I’m in the place, how different it is both from where I live now and from where we all lived as a family before.

  When we were together, we lived in a few different places, but they all felt the same because they had the same stuff, and the same people. Mama Lacy always hung pretty things in the windows. Glass bottles, strings of beads, Christmas lights no matter the season. Mama Shannon’s sweater was always slung over something or other.

  This apartment doesn’t look anything like one of our apartments. Nobody’s taken the care to fix it up. The wood-paneled walls are dark and bare, not decorated with twinkling lights to make them brighter. The couch is a heavy brown color and isn’t tucked under a familiar blanket. Instead, it’s empty except for Mama Shannon, who sleeps draped over it with her feet sticking off the end.

  Seeing her makes everything in me hurt.

  She looks tired, even though she’s sleeping. Her face has more lines than I remember, and her hair is tangled. She’s snoring softly and drooling a little and I remember how I used to tease her for things like that, but I could never tease her when she looks this bad. I want to hug her, but she would wake up. I’m also mad, somewhere in my stomach, and I can’t figure out exactly why. Something about not living with her anymore. Something about being left behind.

  It takes me a minute to catch my breath, staring at Mama Shannon. I look at that brown couch and think about where I sleep, back at Mrs. Madison’s. My bed is full-size and painted white. My sheets are flannel and the warmest thing there is. Mama Shannon isn’t even using a blanket. I have to work to keep my eyes dry, because she always wakes up when I cry.

  Zany sleeps in the only bedroom in the apartment. I make my way slowly, because the floor creaks something awful, and get to the door of Zany’s bedroom as she’s about to come out of it. She gasps but manages to hold in her scream, hand clasped to her heart. An instant later, her face goes from scared to angry and I know I’m in for it.

  Still, even as she’s gearing up to murder me, I can’t help but look past her at her room. I know I’m staring. Every time I come here, I take in more of the details. The room is small and the walls are dingy white. Her bed isn’t painted, because there isn’t any frame. It’s just a twin-size mattress and box spring sitting on the floor. Her window’s got garbage bags taped over it to keep winter out. I see pictures taped to the windowsill: Mama Shannon. Mama Lacy. Zany. Me. We all look so much happier.

  Something about seeing my own face on my sister’s windowsill makes my throat clog back up and the tears get harder to fight. I slip my hand into Zany’s and she tugs me through the house. The carpet feels damp and gritty on my one bare foot. I see the small kitchenette with a mini-fridge and a bunch of cabinets with no doors. We pass the bathroom, which has only got a toilet and a shower stall, no room for a tub, and not even a mirror. The whole apartment would just about fit into my bedroom at Mrs. Madison’s.

  At the sofa, I pull my hand from Zany’s for a minute. I know from the way she’s tugging me that she’s still upset about me being in the house, and I’m going to get an earful once we’re out. But I can’t help but stop and look at Mama Shannon, and Zany stops to look with me.

  Mama Shannon is not what you’d call a peaceful person. It’s so strange to watch her sleep. It used to be hard to catch her sleeping. She used to stay up till the rest of us were in bed, and it was impossible to beat her out of bed in the morning. Now every time I see her, she’s either sleeping or looking like she needs to. I notice she’s still dressed, wearing the shirt they make her wear for her second job at the grocery store. Mama Shannon used to build furniture for a living. Not just plain old furniture, but big wooden tables and chairs and bed frames with pretty carvings on the edges. It took her years to get up the nerve to quit her job at the phone company and make furniture full-time. Then, almost as soon as she did, Mama Lacy got sick and Mama Shannon stopped in the middle of an end table. She went to work at a cell phone store once we got back to West Virginia, and then took the grocery store job on top of that to make ends meet.

  Mama Lacy had a few jobs over the years to make money, but the job she loved, which she did on evenings and weekends, was taking photographs on people’s happy days—weddings and graduations and birthday parties. Even when she wasn’t working, she was taking pictures of her favorite things. There are dozens of beautiful black-and-white photos in a box somewhere in the closet, of us growing up, of Mama Shannon laughing and trying to cover the lens with her palm. Mama Lacy was almost never in our photos. She was always behind the camera. At our old place, the last place where we all lived together, the photos covered the walls. But when we moved, they went into a box, and nobody’s had the heart to bring them out again.

  For a few seconds, I think about abandoning Zany’s midnight mission and crawling onto the couch with Mama Shannon. The feeling is almost impossible to ignore. She would tuck her arms around me and hug me in that rough, tight way that only she can, and I wouldn’t feel so much like I’d lost both my mamas anymore. Zany seems to understand, and, mad as she is, her arm goes around me anyway. She squeezes me close and I fit under her arm just perfect. I suck in one sharp breath and push my chin up higher. We leave together, just the two of us.

  Outside, in the car, I can’t stop thinking about the empty parts of the apartment we’ve just left.

  “Where’s all the furniture?” I ask.
The place is even emptier now than I remember it being last time.

  “Shh.” She’s reversing down the drive, headlights still off. She’s breathing hard enough for me to hear.

  “Where’s the stuff Mama Shannon made instead of the ugly stuff that came with the apartment?”

  “Shh.”

  I bite my lip and wait for her to feel like talking to me, but out on the main road, headlights finally springing to life, all she says is, “You were supposed to wait in the car.”

  I sniffle a breath in, huff it out in frustration. “It’s my house, too.” I’m not sure that’s true. After all, I have flannel sheets and hot cocoa waiting for me across town, and Zany and Mama Shannon don’t. But it has to be my house, too. It belongs to my mama and my sister.

  I’m relieved when Zany doesn’t correct me. Instead, she says, “Yeah, well, you could have gotten us caught.” There’s no anger behind her words, and after a minute, her voice comes again, softer. “I know it’s your house, too. I know it is.”

  “Then tell me where our furniture is.”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Where?”

  I hear her breath wobble out, then suck in. “We sold it.”

  “All of it?” I hear my voice get shrill.

  “We had to, Fella. Bills have to be paid.”

  “You could have sold something else. Or asked Mrs. Madison. She has buckets of money.”

  Zany snorts. “Mrs. Madison wasn’t about to loan us anything. Don’t you remember how hateful she was being when we moved here? And we don’t take money from thieves anyhow.”

  I do remember, once Zany mentions it. I remember Mrs. Madison going on about how “that woman” Mama Lacy took up with wasn’t going to raise her only granddaughter in that filthy place. I remember how much I hated her back then. But I still hate her, don’t I? She is a thief, one who stole me away from my family, and at least once a day, I think about how much I hate her. Sometimes I even say it out loud. Once in a while, she hears me.

  But now that Zany’s talking about her in that angry voice, I’m thinking of Mrs. Madison buying me new clothes even though I only want to wear my old ones, and how we’ve had baked chicken and French fries nearly every night because it’s the only thing I’ll eat. I don’t know what to say and it makes me mad.

  “That’s stupid,” I blurt.

  “Fella . . .” I can hear the irritation in her voice.

  “You shouldn’t sell furniture just because you don’t have much money. I liked that furniture. I wanted it in my house when I’m a grown-up.”

  “Oh, and I suppose Mama Shannon should work three jobs to keep you from losing your future furniture. She already works twelve hours a day, Fella. She’s already too tired to stand up straight.” She hits the gas and the car hops forward.

  I have to either cry or change the subject, so I ask, “What’d you forget?”

  “Hmm?”

  “That we went back for. What’d you forget?”

  She reaches into her shoulder bag and pulls out Mama Lacy’s camera by its strap. It’s her in-between camera, not the super-expensive one she used for photo shoots for work, but not one of the cheap waterproof ones she took with us to the park or the county fair. This one is the one she used the most, her everyday camera. It dangles in Zany’s grip, twisting with the bumps in the road, until she reaches over to settle it on my knees.

  “She’d want some pictures of Asheville,” she says. “She always took pictures on road trips. I can’t believe I forgot her camera.”

  “Where are the rest of your pictures?” I ask Zany. “You used to have pictures up all over your room.” Zany wants to be a photographer like Mama Lacy.

  “I don’t take pictures anymore. After this, I won’t take any more.”

  My voice sounds small even to me when I finally get it to come out. “Why?”

  She keeps her eyes on the road, both hands wrapped tight around the wheel. It takes her a long time to answer, and she’s so quiet I almost can’t hear her when she does. “Because there’s nothing I want to remember.”

  chapter

  4

  The first mountain tunnel we drive through is lit with orange lights split by chunks of shadow. I’m torn between thinking the tunnel is pretty and worrying about the millions of pounds of earth and stone currently located above our heads.

  At the deepest part of the tunnel, under the tallest part of the mountain, the radio, which we’ve turned back on for noise, loses its signal and fuzzes out. For a minute there’s nothing but silence and static and the whir of tires on pavement and the distant blast of somebody’s horn. I imagine I can hear breathing inside the brass container on my lap. It takes all my willpower not to throw the urn back at Zany, driving or not. But the breathing turns out to be Haberdashery snuggled tight against the back of my seat, down on the floor. He doesn’t like the tunnel, doesn’t seem to appreciate being buried under tons of mountain either. Right when he’s about to panic, we burst out into clearer night and smoother highway on the other side.

  We cross the state line at seventy-two miles per hour. In the darkness, white letters stand out bright against a blue sign: WELCOME TO VIRGINIA. I peer around, but it doesn’t look any different over here. It feels like forever since I’ve been outside of West Virginia.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” I murmur at Zany for maybe the hundredth time. I take Mama Lacy’s camera from Zany’s purse to distract myself. She taught us both how to use it, especially Zany because she was really interested, but me too because I didn’t want to be left out. I snap a few pictures of the darkened landscape. The only brightness comes from several orange lights framing the road leading away from the tunnel, and I’m pretty sure it’s not enough light for good pictures.

  “Those are going to come out stupid,” Zany says. “You can’t take pictures in the dark without the flash.”

  I raise the flash and snap a few pictures of the glare on the inside of the windshield.

  “Quit it!” Zany shrieks. “That makes it really hard to see, Fella! You’re going to wreck us!”

  “You told me to use the flash!”

  “Well, now I’m telling you to quit it!”

  In a huff, I put down the camera. “Are you sure we should be crossing state lines? Doesn’t that make you like a federal kidnapper or something?”

  Zany glances at me like maybe she hasn’t thought of it this way before.

  “I don’t think it does,” she says, but she doesn’t sound sure.

  “So I guess I’m an accomplice,” I add. “And a dog thief. You’ve turned me into a dog thief!” With every new realization, my voice gets a little more shrill. “I’m only twelve and I’m going to go to prison till I’m thirty for dog-thieving! Not to mention riding in a stolen getaway car!”

  “Cut the theatrics,” Zany instructs, sounding exactly like Mama Shannon.

  “When you lose the attitude,” I shoot back, sounding just like Mama Lacy.

  I would say more, but that’s when Zany glances in the rearview mirror and then sits up straighter. I twist in my seat to look out the back glass and see what she saw, which is a police car behind us. My mouth goes dry.

  “Are we getting pulled over?” I ask, equal parts hope and fear. I’m not sure whether it would be good to get pulled over and sent home, or whether we’ve already done enough bad things that we’d be sent to jail instead. I decide it’s probably best not to take any chances, and I turn around and sit up perfectly straight like Zany, keeping my eyes on the road like she’s doing, hoping the officer behind the wheel won’t notice us.

  “Why isn’t he passing us?” Zany asks after a minute. She talks out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Maybe because you’re speeding,” I suggest, also out of the corner of my mouth, so the officer won’t see us arguing and decide to pull us over to break up the fig
ht. I keep my fingers tightly wrapped around the urn, my chin up and my eyes on the road. But without moving my lips, I keep talking. “He’s a police officer. He’s not going to break the speed limit. You’re going way above sixty-five.”

  Zany takes her foot off the gas so quick I think the cop car is going to rear-end us for a second. She presses the gas again, not so hard this time, and gets us rolling at sixty-five.

  “How long has he been back there?” she asks again out of the corner of her mouth.

  “I don’t know, Zany, why are you asking me? I saw him when you did!”

  “I wasn’t asking you, I was just asking to be asking.”

  “Oh, well, did anybody answer?”

  “You know, you’re not helping anything by being snotty.” She sounds awfully hateful for somebody who’s trying to talk without moving her face.

  “So-RRY!” I say in a tone that clearly shows how un-sorry I am. I’m proud of myself for not moving my lips at all while spitting out this bit of sarcasm.

  “Would you shut up until the cop’s gone?” Zany asks.

  “Why do I have to shut up? Why don’t you shut up?”

  “If you shut up, I’ll shut up! I can’t shut up while you’re still yapping at me!”

  Haberdashery yips and pops up like a jack-in-the-box and we both scream, forgetting to speak through the corners of our mouths. I’m still twisted in my seat, trying to shove Haberdashery into the space under the backseat, where he can’t cause any more trouble, when the police car puts on its lights and my heart starts hammering. I hear Zany gasp. She takes her foot off the gas, breathes deep, and reaches for the turn signal. I’m regretting my sarcasm now, and I send up a silent prayer that if the police car will pass us by, I will never be sarcastic again.

  After a pause long enough that I have to stop holding my breath, the police car whips around us and takes off through the night in the other lane.

  “Oh my god,” Zany says. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”