All You Get Is Me

by Yvonne Prinz

  The glass doors hiss open and a man in an expensive suit and important-looking shoes strides into the waiting room and makes a beeline for the receptionist. She looks up again with a face that says “Don’t mess with me.” She has a name tag that says “Candy” pinned to her enormous bosom. A kid who looks about a year older than me trails behind Mr. Slick. He’s wearing the opposite outfit: a torn Misfits T-shirt, baggy jeans, and worn-out Converse sneakers. His thick black hair hangs in his eyes and I suspect he may hate everyone, especially Mr. Slick, who is now speaking to Candy in a very loud voice as though she might be hearing-impaired.

  “My wife was brought in here, Connie Gilwood. She was in a car accident. I need to see her immediately. Where is she?”

  Candy seems not to appreciate his tone. “Let me just locate her, sir,” she says tersely. She types efficiently on a keyboard and clicks a mouse.

  “Just tell me where she is, damn it!” He clutches a cell phone in his hand and he seems to be thinking about hurling it at her.

  The kid, who I now know is the son of the woman who was driving the SUV, shuffles his feet and looks at the floor.

  “Sir,” says Candy, “I’m here to help but that kind of talk generally doesn’t inspire me to move any faster.”

  “Well, there must be someone else I can talk to—a doctor, a manager?”

  Candy points to her name tag. Underneath her name it says “Emergency Room Supervisor.”

  “I’m it, darling,” she says, smirking at him.

  The kid’s eyes meet mine and he looks away, embarrassed.

  “Okay, here she is, Connie Gilwood.” She reads from a computer monitor. “She’s doing just fine. I’m assuming you’re Mr. Gilwood?” She looks over her reading glasses at him.

  Just as she says the name, the double doors that separate the waiting room from the drama swing wide and my dad appears.

  “You’re Mr. Gilwood?” he asks Mr. Slick.

  “Yeah. You know about my wife?”

  “I sure do.” My dad’s voice is shaking a bit. “Your wife is fine. The woman she hit was just pronounced dead. There’s a baby back there without a mother.” He points behind him with his thumb.

  “Who the hell are you?” Mr. Slick takes in my dad’s ponytail and his dirty jeans and his flannel shirt.

  “You’ll know soon enough.” He heads for the exit. “C’mon, Roar,” he says, but I’m already there. I look back over my shoulder at the son. He’s watching my dad with something in his eyes that I can’t quite read. It definitely isn’t shock, though.

  The sliding glass doors hiss open again and we walk out into the midmorning sunlight.

  Chapter 2

  My mother started to slip away from us when I was ten. We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house on Church Street in Noe Valley, a quiet neighborhood in San Francisco. If you go to the corner of Church and Twenty-fourth streets and turn right, you can walk down a long, steep hill that leads to the Mission District. I wasn’t allowed to go there on my own but my dad and I would walk down the hill together. We wandered through the fragrant produce stalls and bought weird stuff like plantains and jicama and sweet mangoes. Sometimes we’d walk all the way down Twenty-fourth to the Roosevelt Tamale Parlor for the best tamales in town. I would drink lemonade and my dad would drink dark Mexican beer. If it was summer, we’d walk up San Jose Avenue to Mitchell’s Ice Cream and try to outweird each other with our flavor choices. Mitchell’s is about a thousand years old and features exotic flavors like avocado and purple yam.

  Our house was a lively place back then. My mom was a painter and she hosted dinners for all her artist friends and they brought their friends and then my dad would show up with all his left-wing activist friends. The parties went late into the night and no one ever thought to send me to bed. I usually fell asleep on the sofa with music and dancing and strange accents swirling around me. Eventually my dad would throw me over his shoulder and carry me off to my bedroom, where I would sleep through the noise. My mom would come in later and kiss me, smelling of wine and her spicy perfume.

  My mom painted most days in a light-filled room at the front of the house, overlooking our street. She could look out the bay window and watch the Church Street trolley roll by. For a while she was happy all the time. There was lots of laughter in our house back then as she told stories about her day and then eagerly wanted to hear about ours as she moved about the kitchen, making dinner. Eventually it became clear that her art was never going to sell. The people she went to art school with were getting their own gallery shows and selling their work but no one seemed too keen on my mom’s paintings of flying pigs and Dalmatians and cows. Eventually, even my mom seemed to lose interest in her own work and most afternoons I would come home from school at three to find her passed out on the big burgundy velvet sofa in her studio with an empty wine bottle on the table next to her.

  My dad had his hands full defending people who couldn’t defend themselves. Most of those people couldn’t afford to pay much either, but he never put pressure on my mom to get a real job. He was crazy about her and he would come home dead tired at night and sit next to her on the sofa, rubbing her arm and kissing her, trying to breathe some life into her, but she would just lie there like a rag doll or tell him to go away. My dad, who was never much of a cook, learned to make simple dishes like lentil soup and stew. Usually it was just the two of us at the table.

  The parties at our house stopped and invitations to parties at other artists’ houses stopped too. My mother, once the life of the party, had become an embarrassment. She drank too much and spewed bitterness about the politics of the art world. She often ended up in tears and my dad would have to apologize to everyone and then help her out to the car. I could hear him on the phone, late at night, talking to Jacob, his best friend from college, trying to figure out how to help her, how to get her back. Jacob is a psychiatrist and he prescribed antidepressants, but my mom wasn’t supposed to take them if she was drinking so she didn’t take them at all.

  My mom started to lose weight. Bit by bit, her curvy figure and her Black Irish features disappeared. Her shiny black hair grew dull and thin and her bright blue eyes turned gray and empty. My dad and I started treating her like a piece of furniture, passing her on our way out somewhere with barely a glance in her direction. I raided her closet and started wearing her clothes to school. I safety-pinned the waistbands of her colorful gypsy skirts to fit me and I wore a bunch of beaded necklaces at once around my neck and wrapped her silk shawls around me. At school, no one seemed to notice. I went to the kind of school that encourages free expression. There was no such thing as a red flag when it came to a kid’s wardrobe choices.

  Some mornings, my mom would stagger out of bed and make pancakes for us. She seemed almost like her old self again, chattering away or humming happily to gypsy guitar music on the stereo. My dad and I played along, complimenting her cooking even though the pancakes were either burnt or gooey and raw in the middle. On those days, I would come home to find my mom back in her spot, the sink full of the breakfast dishes and the milk going sour on the counter next to an open box of eggs and a bag of pancake mix.

  Even in this condition, my mom tried really hard to be the kind of mom she thought I needed. She would show up for parent-teacher meetings with smeared makeup and rumpled clothes and alcohol on her breath until I started hiding the letters from school.

  One afternoon I came home from school to find her gone. The sofa was empty except for the indentation of my now-petite mother’s body on the burgundy velvet. I called around to all her old friends but no one had seen her in months. When my dad got home, we drove around the neighborhood, checking in bars and coffeehouses and bookstores, but we came home hours later, exhausted, without her.

  At three a.m. the police called. They’d found her slumped over on a bus bench on Castro Street and taken her to the hospital. We went to pick her up. She was drunk and dehydrated and she had a few bruises on her but otherwise she was okay. My dad
signed the release form and helped her into the car. No one said anything on the ride home. My mom looked out the window.

  The next morning my mom was up and dressed in jeans, which now hung on her. She had blue-green bags under her eyes, and a bruise on her cheek had swelled into a bump. She buzzed around the kitchen like she’d been slapped awake and told she had to play the part of the mother in a production of We’re a Normal Family. When I emerged from my bedroom in my pajamas she kissed me like she hadn’t seen me in months.

  “Roar, honey,” she said, placing her hands on my shoulders and looking me in the eyes, “things are going to be different from now on. I promise. I’m better now. I really am.”

  Mom never told us what happened out there that night but it must have given her a jolt because she kept up the perfect mom/loving wife act for a couple of weeks. She even agreed to enter a rehab program. My dad and I held our breath. A week later she was back on the sofa and a week after that she started disappearing again. At first it was overnight, then it was a few days at a time. Sometimes she would show up on her own and sometimes the police would bring her home or the hospital would call. One day she disappeared for good. My dad filed a missing-persons report and he drove all over the city every night, looking for her in neighborhoods and places he’d never even been before. He hired a private investigator who came up empty. He told us that some people just don’t want to be found. My dad wouldn’t give up. He searched on the internet for my mom’s mother and finally found her in Vermont. Shortly after they met, my mom had told my dad that she’d had a falling-out with her mother and hadn’t spoken to her in years, and that her dad was dead. Her mom, my grandmother, told us that no such falling-out had happened and that my mom’s dad was very much alive. She said that my mom had just up and disappeared one day, never contacting them to tell them where she’d gone. My dad put me on the phone. They didn’t even know they had a grandchild. Her voice reminded me a bit of my mom’s. We had an awkward conversation and then I put my dad back on. He cried when he said good-bye to them and promised to keep them posted.

  Through all of this I never hated my mom. I couldn’t very well hate someone who’d taught me how to polka, someone who’d taught me how to read tea leaves, give butterfly kisses, and make butterscotch brownies. When I was six, she gave me a Pentax point-and-shoot camera and taught me how to take a picture. I took photos of everything. Those photos are in a box in my bedroom closet now except for the best ones of my mom. Those I framed. They sit on my desk, pictures of her laughing at the beach, in the kitchen, walking up the street, painting. I got a better camera for my tenth birthday, with a zoom lens. I became a more accomplished photographer but I never got a great photo of my mom. She’d started slipping away by then. Now I never go anywhere without my camera.

  After my mom disappeared for the last time, we left everything just the way it was for a whole year, even the paints, brushes, and canvases. We didn’t touch anything. We couldn’t. During that year I saw my mom everywhere: in bookstores, coffee shop windows, standing in line for movie tickets. But it was my old mom, back when she was happy and beautiful. I would even walk toward her, ready for her to smile at me and take me into her arms, but it was never her. Every afternoon when I came home from school, I half expected to find her there in the studio, painting or watching the world go by on Church Street. But eventually we realized we were waiting for something that was never going to happen. My dad packed up all her art supplies and her paintings into boxes and put them in our storage closet downstairs. One afternoon, not long after that, he picked me up at school and told me that we were moving on with our lives.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means we’re moving.”

  “Moving? Where to?”

  “A farm. We’re moving to a farm.”

  “We’re going to live with farmers?”

  “No. We are the farmers.”

  Chapter 3

  Thirteen black-and-white photos of the accident hang across the clothesline in my darkroom like crime-scene laundry. The last one is still in the developing solution. I push it around with rubber-tipped bamboo tongs as the image comes into focus. It’s the overturned SUV resting in the middle of the asphalt road. In the upper right-hand corner is an unintentional piece of the ambulance with its back doors open. I must have taken it right after the paramedics loaded the stretchers. Sylvia Hernandez’s bare foot is clearly visible. You can also see part of her other foot, which somehow still has a pristine white sneaker on it. I remove the print from the developer and drop it in the stop bath. I can’t take my eyes off Sylvia’s foot. Next to the accident photos are the rest of the photos from the roll: a Buddhist monk with a shaved head eating a wedge of melon, a young, smiling monk holding a puppy, Steve trying to hypnotize a chicken, a three-legged dog. I took them the day Steve and I drove over to the monastery not far from here. We had fun that day.

  Sylvia is in a box on a plane right now. She’s flying home to her family in a small village in Mexico where she’ll be buried in a tiny graveyard full of flowers. If the Mexicans are right about what happens after you die, she’s already in heaven. I hope they know what they’re talking about for Sylvia’s sake. Tomás, her husband, won’t be attending the funeral. It’s far too risky for Tomás to cross the border into Mexico. Who knows if he’d ever make it back? My dad talked to Tomás’s employer, a factory farmer near here who plants genetically modified seeds from Monsanto. He grows corn, only corn, as far as the eye can see. He gets his laborers from a contractor who brings them in on horrible, crowded trucks like cattle. All of them, like Tomás and Sylvia, are part of an illegal workforce that people around here don’t like to think about too much. They work cheap and they don’t expect benefits. My dad asked the farmer if Tomás could have a few days off to deal with his affairs. Tomás is a good worker so he said he’ll probably take him back but he couldn’t promise anything. Why should his production suffer just because someone’s wife died? he reasoned. Besides, according to his records, Tomás doesn’t even exist. Rosa, the baby, is being sent to her grandparents in Mexico now because Tomás could never manage to take care of her if she stayed. He has no home here to speak of. Sylvia has a sister in the area, Wanda, but she’s also a farm laborer with two kids back at home in Mexico. I’m not sure who’s taking care of them but I sure hope someone is.

  Sylvia was a housekeeper and a nanny for the Thompsons, who live in a development called Orchard Hill. It used to be a fruit orchard but pretty much all the trees had to be cut down to build the houses. There doesn’t seem to be a hill anywhere either. When the accident happened, Sylvia had just dropped off two of the Thompson kids at a summer day camp and she was on her way home to clean the house before it was time to pick them up. People around here who knew her say she was a happy person and a good, honest worker. You would think that they’d be able to come up with something better than that. Does anyone really want to be remembered as a good, honest worker? I seriously doubt it. I’m sure she would prefer something like: Sylvia loved to dance and had a wonderful singing voice. She loved her baby, Rosa, and hoped to send her to school in America one day. The smell of corn tortillas made her terribly homesick and the sound of mariachi music on the radio made her cry. She looked great in red and owned three red skirts. When she smiled at you her face lit up and it was impossible not to smile back. Something like that.

  From inside my darkroom I can hear Steve or Miguel starting up the tractor, drowning out Bruce, our highly dysfunctional rooster who crows almost all day long. He has a determined look on his face as though he’s misplaced something important like his keys, and he’ll spend entire days scratching in the dry dirt looking for them. When he stops crowing for a while I find myself waiting for it. Aah, farm life.

  My darkroom is an old supply shed, with blankets nailed over the windows, that my dad converted for me to fulfill a contractual agreement we arrived at on the day we left the Noe Valley house for good. He told me that if I let go of
the banister and got in the car, he would build me a darkroom on the farm. Of course I needed that in writing. Parents are often full of empty promises when they want to motivate you and I needed a completion date for this alleged darkroom. I am, after all, the daughter of a lawyer. Before I got in the car I went up and down the street and delivered an index card with our new address and phone number to each of our neighbors just in case my mom came looking for us. They all looked at me like I was a sad orphan, which made me feel slightly better about the fact that I was getting away from this place where everyone knew at least part of my story.

  My dad stuck to the contract. He insulated the shed and put in an old sink. He bought some used kitchen cabinets for storage and Formica countertops at a salvage yard to set a used Beseler enlarger on. It’s pretty rustic but it’s my first darkroom so I can’t complain too much.

  My dad has been on the phone all morning with the police and his lawyer friend Ned. He’s hell-bent on making sure the woman who killed Sylvia (and walked away with a few scratches and a concussion) is charged. Miguel and Steve keep shaking their heads doubtfully. Steve told me that a rich white woman who hits an illegal Mexican immigrant with her car is likely never even going to hear about it again. If the roles were reversed, it would be a different story entirely. Sylvia would already be in prison. Well, my dad says that if the driver isn’t charged he’ll file a civil suit on behalf of her family, but Miguel isn’t even hopeful about that. He says that the family won’t want to stir up trouble and risk losing their jobs.