Since Monique.
“...since forever and a day,” she finished.
“That’s wonderful. But I have a feeling that’s not the big surprise.”
“When I come back, I’m going to move in with you.”
My limbs tensed, my heart alternately throbbed and halted, my Little People fluttered like a disturbed murder of ravens. “That doesn’t sound like a question.”
Beth closed her eyes. She bent her neck like a praying nun. Little Hitler let her suffer for a moment as David Duchovny made some slacker cosmic observation on the television screen.
“Hey, Angel Baby,” I said, the Insider moving my lips like sausage puppets. “That wasn’t a ‘no.’ I would like that better than anything in the world. But are you sure that’s what you want?”
She looked up and her eyes were moist, but she was smiling. “I want to start over,” she said, making no move to wipe away her tears. “To get out of this place and forget about...about her. I want it to be just us from now on, without Monique’s ghost sitting in between us all the time.”
I hugged her with both arms. One was Loverboy’s, the other Bookworm’s.
“Just you and me,” I said. “I promise.”
“I love you, Richard.”
“That L word sounds so lovely on your lips.”
“I don’t say it often, but when I say it, I don’t lie.”
“I love you, too, Beth.”
At that moment, I meant it. Darkness won each day’s battle, but there was always hope of dawn, always a thread of light in the fabric of despair. Love was hope. Love was light. Love was possible salvation.
I would have gotten down on my knees and thanked the Insider. But the Insider already had me on my knees.
Love was a word thrown in a book to get the character laid and then arc to a tragic ending.
“Now that that’s settled, what’s the big surprise?” I asked.
Beth reached behind her back for the thing she had dropped. She found it and pressed it into my hand.
It was the white carnation, dried but still intact. It smelled of meadows and funerals where the petals crushed against my sweating palms.
“I wanted you to have it,” she whispered.
She’d already given it to me once. It was the gift that kept on giving. We locked our limbs in a passionate tangle. Loverboy even let me watch as they skin-wrestled on the sofa. He was just that kind of a guy, a generous housemate, always willing to share as long as he went first.
And so I was lost in this brave and horrible new love, built on the sickest of lies. Perhaps it was Loverboy’s game, little toys pulled out of his bag of tricks that kept her amused. Maybe the attachment was solely because of the Insider’s psychic glue. But I believed some small secret part of me could still harbor hope and love and compassion and all the human things that I thought I had lost. Surely not all the closets had been swept clean and some cabinets were left unmolested, even if these emotions were only hiding under my dusty bed in the Bone House.
I didn’t know if I would stop her from loving me even if I were able. Because the Insider had taught me one lesson well. It smothered from the inside, it isolated and crushed out any flickering light of love, stomped on the campfires of the heart.
I wished I could warn her. I wished I could warn all of them. Because I didn’t know when the Insider might strike again. It stayed a riddle, but I could feel its ratwalk in the crawlspace.
Shady Valley dressed in its pumpkin colors and dry cornstalks were stacked like the bones of a gone harvest. Paper turkeys stuck to school windows and dangled from strings in the grocery stores. Tiny radios whined the first measures of yuletide carols. Church signs reminded everyone of the reason for the season even though the Julian calendar had moved Jesus Christ’s birthday around to accommodate the money changers. The town emptied as the Westridge students went on Thanksgiving vacation. The locals stooped under the weight of their fears and suspicions and went about their holiday shopping.
Beth refused my offer to drive her to Philadelphia. She said she wasn’t ready for me to meet her parents. She boarded a Trailways bus and waved from the window as it pulled away. I felt a rare moment’s joy because I knew she’d be safe for a few days.
Safe from me. Or the Insider. I no longer knew which was the lesser of two evils.
I sat in the bus depot for an hour, watching faces. I didn’t believe the Insider was hunting. It was meditating, lulled by the human stream that flowed by on both sides. It was making me wait, but for what I didn’t know. A meat puppet on a sleepy hand.
The bus pulled up and aroused a tingle in the pit of my chest. It was some sixth sense, some electrical charge, déjà vu through past-life regression. The Insider came alive, peeling back my eyelids and twisting my neck until I was staring at the bus doors wheezing open.
Mother stepped out, complete with baggage.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“I got your letter,” Mother said.
She stood at the entrance to the depot like a resurrected martyr, an ash effigy of Joan of Arc, her bony frame swallowed by a pink pastel ski jacket. The fur around the hood shadowed her face, her eyes shining like a cornered animal’s peering out of a cave. She swayed a little, as if the breeze of the passengers boarding the bus might push her over.
I hadn’t sent a letter to Mother in at least six months. What did I have to say to her?
You haven’t dared write to Mommy dearest since you found your true self. Or I should say, when IT found YOU.
But did you send the letter?
Sometimes you sleep. And when you dream, I’m awake. It’s not like you’re the only monkey that knows how to type.
I nodded in miserable understanding. Mother, of course, thought I was nodding at her. The animal eyes closed, the cave momentarily empty. I opened my mouth to speak. With a hiss, the bus backed away from the bay and pulled onto the highway.
My tongue reconnected itself to my nervous system. “What are you doing here?”
Mother looked down at the streaked tiles on the depot floor. She pushed her parka hood back with an unsteady hand. “I told you to call back if you changed your mind. And since you didn’t...well. . .”
She looked up. The skin of her neck seemed to follow with reluctance. Her once-proud chin had given up, accepted its humble lot and sagged in defeat. Her skin was gray, creased, but underneath the pallid flesh, broken blood vessels streaked outward like red roots thirsting in barren soil. She smiled with effort, as if the muscles of her mouth couldn’t stretch in an upward direction. “Well, here I am,” she finally finished.
She dropped her overnight satchel and her suitcase and they clattered on the floor. Then she looked away, her spidery eyes almost girlish with delight.
I’m glad to finally meet you, my pretty. Richard’s told me so much about you. And, believe me, the pleasure’s all mine.
I stared at Mother, still petrified, holding a chilled breath. Surely the Insider’s power couldn’t extend halfway across the continent?
But at that moment, the Insider’s power was nothing compared to Mother’s. With one shift of her eyes, she dredged up the past, stirred a witch’s brew of memories, raised the dead and flaunted the bones. With one heavy-lidded look, she made me her little boy again, weak, guilty, vulnerable. With one trembling step forward, she possessed me more completely than the Insider ever could.
“Richard,” she half-whispered, half-whimpered, and then she shredded the last of my resolve by letting one silver tear leak from the corner of her eye. She fell into my helpless open arms.
Welcome home.
She was as light as a bird, bones all hollow. Her hair stood up white and wild, Einstein tufts, Warhol with a blow dryer.
“Mother, I...”
Say it, Richard. You know you want to.
No.
Say it. Or are you going to force me to let Loverboy say it?
Please. Not him.
I love it when you beg, Richard. Now say it.
; “. . .I missed you, Mother.”
Close enough for now. But you’ll get better. Because you’re going to get a lot of practice.
“Richard, it’s been so long,” Mother said, in her cracked, smoke-saturated voice. She hugged me with a strength that couldn’t have been hers alone. Her spindly fingers gripped my coat like beggar’s lice. Her breath was tomb dust and gin.
As I held her, as I fought with myself to push her away, I felt the fluttering batwings of shadow at the corners of my consciousness. Wafting cobwebs in the Bone House.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” Mister Milktoast said, thinking she was still a weak, pathetic failure as a protector. Especially when compared to him. “Why, it seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in your lap and you were singing ‘Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread.’”
Loverboy twitched at the mention of “bread” but I shoved a loaf down his throat before he could speak.
“So you’re really glad to see me?” Mother said, and her expression was so eager, so desperate, that Little Hitler had an urge to drive his fist into her brittle jaw.
Oh, no, Little Hitler. There will be plenty of time for all that later. Remember, mental pain is so much more savory than physical pain. You can inflict your bruises and gouges, but that’s too human. I feed on fruit at the top of the tree.
“Yes, I’m glad to see you,” hissed Little Hitler.
Patience, my mad little bootblack. I promise you’ll like what I have in store for her. And don’t worry, you’ll get your turn. Everyone will get their turn, even Richard.
Especially Richard.
Mother tried to laugh but a cough caught in her throat and she made a strangled, hacking noise. She spat on the depot floor and what landed and shivered on the tiles was red and yellow, a cancerous slug. She bent and put a hand to her chest.
“Are you okay?” said Bookworm, touching her elbow. His tenderness was almost as appalling as Little Hitler’s simmering hatred.
“Yes,” she said, after clearing her throat. “Just…I couldn’t smoke on the bus.”
“You’ve logged some mileage,” Mister Milktoast said.
She stretched and I heard her joints pop. “Eighteen hours. Hard on an old woman’s back.”
“Mother, don’t talk that way. You’re not old.”
“I’m on the downhill slide and, to tell the truth, I don’t mind a bit. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life standing in a bus depot. Show me this house you’ve been telling me about.”
Mister Milktoast collected her bags and led her to the Subaru.
“Moving up in the world,” Mother said as she folded into the passenger’s seat like a crippled crab. “Remember that old car you used to drive, back home?”
Back home. She sent the first dagger into my chest.
“How could I forget?” said Little Hitler.
She put a hand on my knee as I started the car. “I can’t tell you how happy it made me when you wrote and asked me to move in with you.”
I could only scream silently, killed by my own quill, drowned by the juice of my own inkwell, caged by the alphabet. A toilet flushed in the Bone House.
Oh, Richard, didn’t I tell you? How forgetful of me. Well, you know how it is when you have a thousand lifetimes’ worth of thoughts.
I wondered which black night, which stolen moment, which part of my life had been sliced away from me so the Insider could write the letter. Or letters. What else had it told her?
When you sleep, I’m awake.
Mother squeezed my knee with her graybriar fingers. “It can be just like old times,” she said, spraying spittle and liquor mist into the air. Her head swiveled as she studied the towering mountains that were such a contrast to Iowa’s sweeping flatness. She pointed to a store on the side of the highway.
“Anything your heart desires, Mother,” Mister Milktoast said. “Your lush is my command.”
He pulled the car up to the glass front of the ABC store. I could see our reflections in the plate glass, my mouth smiling dotingly at Mother, her eyes bright in their nest of crow’s feet. If I looked closely, I could see myself writhing in agony in the pools of my pupils. But that must have been my imagination, because I didn’t look closely. I blinked and I was behind the steering wheel, myself again thanks to the wicked beneficence of the Insider.
Mother bought four bottles of Jim Beam, a fifth of gin, and a bottle of Glenlivet “just for a special celebration.” We drove to my house and Mother oohed and aahed in appreciation in the living room as I took her bags to the spare bedroom. I looked around for ghosts of Shelley, bits of clothing or stains, any trophies Little Hitler might have accumulated without my knowledge. You know how roommates are.
When I came back downstairs, Mother was sitting on the couch nursing a six-ounce glass of straight bourbon between drags of her cigarette.
I moved as if through a dream, and then I realized it was a dream. The Insider’s dream, come true through psychic manipulation. My nightmare, made flesh and given shape by a vengeful visionary. I was just a bit actor in a grainy movie. The Insider was star, writer, producer, and director, the Orson Welles of spiritual possession.
I sat on the chair, my limbs as stiff as wood, bracing for whatever atrocity the Insider might have in mind.
Relax, Richard. Why do you always expect the worst of me? I’ve gone to all this trouble to reunite a loving mother with her only son. See how much I care for you.
Mother had taken off her parka and hugged her arms against her chest. I tried not to look at the lumps her shriveled breasts made under the fabric of her sweater, but Loverboy gawked anyway. “Frostbit peaches” was his assessment.
“Thought it would be warmer here,” she said. “But I guess this is pretty high up, what with all the mountains and all.”
I nodded, the dutiful ventriloquist’s dummy.
“We’re going to be happy together, Richard,” she said. She was halfway through the drink. Her words already sounded thicker on her tongue. “Just like the good old days.”
She looked at me the way she had done from the witness stand at her court hearing those long years ago. The virgin whore, diva of denial, a mother load, spearing me with guilt and gratitude at the same time. Driving her words like nails into flesh, the same way she did while telling the prosecutors that Father had beaten the both of us for years.
“We’re all we got left,” she said with a watery sneer. “Us, and memories.”
She drank to that. Then she drank to the previous drink. And the one to come.
Precious memories, how they finger. I was a prisoner of my own life, never more so than at that moment. An inmate of the Bone House, but also the warden. But even before that, I was the architect.
“I would do it all over again,” she said, “even if I had gone to jail.”
“Mother, please. Let’s not talk about it.”
She sipped the bourbon and smiled down into the brown liquid. She had already settled in, her thin hips parting the sofa cushion as if she’d been sitting there a hundred years. She picked at a loose thread on the sleeve of her sweater.
“You’ve never wanted to talk about it,” she said, not accusing, just cold, empty, windswept. “Or about us.”
Anger boiled inside me, a hot bubbling tar pit erupting, the red lava of rage flowing down my brain. This wasn’t one of Little Hitler’s petulant tantrums. It was honest, rightful indignation. The realization was frightening, yet liberating. I could feel.
Richard Allen Coldiron could have emotions that weren’t gifts bestowed by Little People or psychic circus masters or calculating narrators. I tensed and sat forward, ready to rise and cross the room and...
And do what?
Its laughter rattled down the alleys of my mind, the sound of vermin scurrying in rubbish. I sat down and slumped in the chair, defeated before the battle even began.
“That wasn’t us,” I said. “That couldn’t have been us.”
“It was us, Richard. B
ut we got through it all together. That’s what people who love each other do. They get through things.”
She lifted her arms with a sudden spasm and spilled bourbon on her polyester pants. She didn’t notice. The blotch looked like Nietzche’s profile or maybe a spatter pattern.
“Just surviving isn’t enough,” I said. “Sometimes, you have to live.”
Mother finished what was left of her drink and sent the pale slug of her tongue over her lips. “Sometimes, you have to love,” she said, her voice catching. “It’s what makes us...human.”
No. The Insider couldn’t be working her strings, too. Feeding her lines straight from the mind of Mister Milktoast. The Insider couldn’t be working her mouth and mind and heart just to get to me, could it? Could it? Bookworm flitted in with his line about “unwilling suspension of disbelief” and hustled back to his nook or cranny or wherever he hid.
“Comes a time to forgive and forget,” Mother said. “Now, be a good boy and go refill my glass.”
I was in the kitchen when she said to my back, “Besides, it was all my fault.”
“No, it was nobody’s fault,” I yelled over my shoulder. The liquor I was pouring was momentarily tempting, its sharp sweet odor both a threat and a promise. The Coldiron Curse was relentless. It was as if Father’s ghost hovered somewhere behind me, laughing gleefully and whispering “Taste it, Shit For Brains. We’re bottomless.”
Ghosts. Memories. Curses. Richard, you’re starting to lose it, my dear human host. You’re starting to see things my way. You’re starting to become me.
Clink of glass.
And tonight, who will we be? Hmm, Richard? How about Mister Milktoast, giving Mother a sponge bath? Maybe Bookworm, opening his heart and spilling the pages of his pathetic diary? Little Hitler, swapping war stories about dear old Daddy? Or Loverboy. What about HIM?
With shaking hands, I poured an extra drink. It burned like hellfire in my throat.
Like Father, like son.
In every way.
I went back to the living room on legs of hot rubber.
Mother took her drink and smirked at the one I held in my hand. “You hold it just like your father,” she said.
Scott Nicholson Library Vol 1 Page 86
