by Lynne Hugo
8
I WOKE COLD AND STIFF ON THE FLOOR of our hotel room in Riddle. I had no memory of getting out of the bed, but realized I must have taken my pillow and lain on the area rug to avoid provoking Mother by moving about. At least that’s what I told her—and doubtless myself—when she asked, but I suspect nothing could have been more uncomfortable than being in that bed with her while she awaited the ghost.
Mother was grim. “You scared him off. First it was her, now it’s you, too. Damn you both,” she said.
I began an answer in spite of the danger of protest; if she really got started categorizing me with Grandmother, I didn’t know what she might do. Maybe she could get more of those blue capsules.
But she held up a hand to silence me. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said flatly. “I know you didn’t mean to scream. That’s not the point. He sensed your Lack of Faith, that’s why he couldn’t enter this room.” Her voice capitalized the condemning words.
“I’m sorry, Mother.”
She did not answer, only looked wounded and withdrawn and went on about folding her nightgown back into her suitcase.
“I’m not hungry,” she said. “If you want something, go on and get it yourself, and come back when you’re satisfied.” I was, indeed, starving because we’d had only apples from the car the night before, but I knew from the way she’d phrased it that if I ate, it would be evidence that I wasn’t upset about how I’d prevented her reunion with her father.
“No, thank you. I’m not hungry this morning. But maybe it would be better if I run and get you something light.”
“No.” Her voice was flat. Then she didn’t let me carry her suitcase for her as I usually did, and I knew there would be no softening for at least a while.
MOTHER WOULDN’T LET me drive, and I didn’t dare escape into even a pretend sleep. She needed to see that I was suffering for what I’d done. And, in fact, I was, but not necessarily for the reason she wanted me to suffer.
We drove steadily south in California, stopping for a quick lunch and to stretch our legs. We wouldn’t even turn east until we got a little below Bakersfield, almost another day’s drive after we got to Sacramento. Mother announced that she had decided against a motel for the night; we could save some money, and then have more leeway when we got to the Grand Canyon. She pressed on. Finally she asked me to drive, and from then on we took two-hour stints. I was beginning to realize the magnitude of our side trip to the Grand Canyon before heading back northeast to Boulder; it was hundreds and hundreds of miles out of the way. Donny Osmond crooned “The Twelfth of Never,” like a foretelling as the distance on the map translated into stiff hours, a slick of oily grit on my face and a ferocious mix of anxiety and boredom. I didn’t protest. If Mother said something, I responded with automatic deference, as I had well learned. But, when we lapsed into silence and my mind turned on itself, the word came to me: murderer. Grandmother’s remains were in the nondescript cardboard box on the shelf above the backseat of our car, like an accusation.
We stopped, an hour beyond Sacramento, in early evening. We used the bathroom in the diner in a small town where we stopped for tuna sandwiches, and then she drove around in the darkness looking for a parking lot that was unlikely to be patrolled, yet lit enough to be safe. During the day, there’d been only the slightest thaw when she spoke to ask me to drive.
We were in a light commercial district, I remember that much, because it seemed we’d passed small houses, stores, a gas station and an elementary school all within a couple of blocks. Suddenly Mother slammed on the brakes and our tires screeched at the same time I was thrown forward against the dash and then beneath it on the floor, where my body stuck in a tangle of arms and legs. Something thudded within the car and Mother yelped in shock or pain. A loud squeal of tires seemed to come from another car, and I thought we were doomed, that we were about to be hit. Our car fishtailed into the start of a skid, but then as quickly, I felt a sudden acceleration and our car lurched forward without an impact. Mother drove on. Gasping, I struggled to get up off the car floor where I’d been wedged.
“Are you all right? What happened?” I stumbled over the words, frantically scanning out the windows. Behind us, a white sedan was turned sideways on the road, eerily lit by a streetlight just overhead, but it didn’t appear to have hit anything. Slowly the driver righted it and proceeded to drive, but much more slowly than we. The car diminished and then we turned a corner and it was gone.
“Something hit my head, but I’m okay.” She sounded too calm.
“What happened?”
“That’ll teach the bastard a lesson.”
“Huh?” I must have sounded like a cartoon character, dumb and expendable.
“He was right on my tail. It’s dangerous and he was driving me crazy. I showed him.”
I sat in silence, trying to absorb what she’d said. I wasn’t sure exactly what had saved me from going headfirst through the windshield, other than the slumped angle my body happened to be in at that moment.
“Some damn thing hit me in the head,” she complained. “Look back there and see what’s not secure.”
I looked. Things were jumbled around some, but I couldn’t discern what could have flown up to hit Mother. Then I noticed: the box of ashes was not on the shelf above the backseat. When I twisted my body and neck to see the floor of the backseat, I spotted it behind the driver’s seat, one corner smashed, little ripples circling the dent in the cardboard.
“Things look okay,” I said, and turned to face the windshield.
We drove on. Still dazed by the logic of what she’d done to “teach” a dangerous driver, I tried to quell something near outrage which came and went like a whale breaching into moonlight, remaining quiet and pretending sleep as soon as Mother found a place she deemed suitable to park for the night. I had this to ponder: when we stopped and she claimed the backseat to sleep on, Mother had seen the box where it had landed, and figured out that it had been Grandmother who had, literally, slapped her upside the head.
“Damn her. Even dead, she finds a way to hurt me. This has got to stop.”
IN THE MORNING, I woke with an all-over ache that radiated from my right shoulder. After a quick and meager breakfast of juice and toast at a diner, we were on the road again. The terrain had changed from the lush, moist new green of Oregon and northern California as we’d traveled south. Beyond Sacramento, it increasingly dried and reddened, and more and more buildings popped up pastel stucco with tile roofs, until, by Bakersfield, it seemed that was all anyone had ever thought of.
We turned east there, toward Barstow, edging the Mojave Desert. It was unusually hot for May, someone said to me in a gas station restroom, seeing me soak the scratchy brown paper towel in tepid water and run it around my face and neck. It evaporated instantly. Sweatless, I baked, my lips cracking, chapped from repeated licking until my tongue couldn’t summon saliva. By the time we picked up Route 40, my head was cottony, coherent thought gone, the last moisture sucked from the seabeds of my eyes. Cactus and brush were random as life in the distance, isolated and empty as I. Once, when Mother shook me to take the wheel, I pretended to be in such a deep sleep that I didn’t feel her. My head lolled of its own accord. I have no idea where we stopped that night, only that for a while, I welcomed being cold. Mother was disgusted with me. She’d loved the desert, saying it did her arthritis good, and she grew chatty as the moving sand smothered whatever words I’d ever known.
Looking back, I think it might have been best had my mind never returned to itself. But that night, I slept dreamlessly and long and adapted better the next day. We went steadily east until turning sharply north, where the Grand Canyon waited to diminish and swallow whatever we’d brought. The air, still utterly dry, was cooler. Humphrey’s Peak beckoned like a respite, but I did not mention it. Between Flagstaff and the Canyon, the earth undulated like a red sea. Junipers and desert shrubs were already anchored into the sunset.
We arrived before dark
, but made no attempt to see the Canyon. A small, cheap, one-story motel with parking right outside each door, fourteen or fifteen miles from the south rim, provided a hot shower in which I lingered as long as I dared. I was coming to. Mother had a preoccupied, charged air about her. She emerged from the steamy bathroom with a towel around her and playfully flicked her wet hand in my direction. I noticed the flesh of her bare arms, more dimpled, and how her breasts almost folded an extra layer between them and where the towel pulled taut across them. I was sure I’d lost weight since we left home. Sometimes it was hard to believe I was hers, our bodies were so different. I thought of a thin, red-haired man and wondered if he freckled in the sun, if he had green eyes, if he was smart, if he was sane. My birth certificate said unknown in the blank for name of father, which Mother had once explained by saying she had written Holy Spirit but it had been changed by hospital personnel.
“Well, I’ve decided,” she said.
“Decided what?”
“You’ll just have to see,” she said. “But it’s exactly right.” The words were innocuous, but I felt danger in her improved spirits. Normally I wouldn’t have looked such a gift horse in the mouth. I was changing.
The aura was present again in the morning, and there was a kind of foreboding, a tightness in my chest, which I tried to mask.
“I can’t wait to see the Canyon,” I tried cheerily. “Are we getting breakfast first, or shall we go right there?”
“I think we’ll go look around first. I want to find the best spot. The highest spot.”
“I hope we have a nice clear day. I didn’t think to pick up a paper last night. What’s it supposed to be like?”
“We’ll have to see,” she answered. So far so good, I thought. Maybe I can pull this off.
We repacked the Rambler, as we did every morning, though daily the jumble seemed less manageable. It wasn’t that we were buying things. We weren’t. It was that it became more and more laborious to manage the “tight ship” that Mother generally insisted on, with everything arranged just so in the trunk and backseat. We had a cooler, a couple of thermoses, pillows, blankets, shoes, rubbers (her absolute requirement for wet weather), some books, suitcases, a jacket each for cool weather and other seeming necessities for a trip of indeterminate length, across the country and back. Even Mother was growing tired of trying to keep order. I noticed this morning that the jigsaw puzzle of the trunk was off, as though someone had done it in the dark and forced pieces where they didn’t really fit. Like my life with her, I thought, a jigsaw puzzle done in the dark, and then I glimpsed how close to chaos we really were.
WE PAID THE ADMISSION, about which Mother complained, and headed for Mather Point. There the Canyon took me by surprise, as the forest shuddered and gave way to the abyss, from which emanated a vast and lonely silence. An enormous hole in the ground. I never did adjust, then, to really seeing it: the subtlety of the strata in the rock, the variations and harmonies in the colors, how early and late light raise and move unspeakable scarlet, rust, magenta, violet, blue. Years later I went back and discovered royal purple. I hadn’t wanted to go back, I admit, but I’d finally learned not to give up on a place—or a person—when the inevitable disappointment waved a handkerchief and called yoo-hoo at me, like a garrulous neighbor always stopping by. But the reason I wasn’t stirred by that first sight was more than my character flaw of easily drained hope. What I saw were scrubby junipers growing out of rock, dwarfed, pathetic and clinging, while ravens rode thermals, their wings unmoving as death, watching for what they might scavenge. The desolation repelled and mirrored me.
WE WENT ON TO THE PARK headquarters, where I gathered literature, thinking we were going to explore the Canyon area, then to Bright Angel Lodge, where the terrace was crammed with cameras attached to faces. There, Mother was impatient, not even looking at the Canyon. I wanted to take the mule trip to the bottom, and risked a mention, but Mother brushed it away like a gnat. Finally she said, “Wait here a minute.” She approached a uniformed employee, who gestured briefly in each direction. “Come on,” was all she said when she returned and briskly set off in the direction of our car.
Now, it seems inevitable and obvious. How could it have taken me so long to catch on? Even after she unlocked the car and took the box of Grandmother’s ashes into her short-nailed hands, I didn’t see it coming. “Come on,” she barked again and, of course, I did. She set out to the west, where there seemed to be the lesser concentration of people. I was wearing penny loafers, and she her regular beat-up brown shoes with a one-inch stacked heel. We both could have changed into shoes much better suited for the mile walk on which she led me. The number of people thinned out as we went, and then there were stretches in which we’d actually see no one. She kept going until there were neither people nor guardrail. Nausea stirred my stomach when I looked down so I tried not to, but Mother seemed elated.
“This is it,” she announced. “Right here, right now, I declare myself free.” With that, she began fumbling with the string around the box, which put up a brief fight and then let go. She opened the box and stared into it as she said, “It’s over, Mother. Dad and I are both free of you forever now.” With that, she looked at me. “Come closer. Help me, here. Stand back a little and hang on to me.” She extended her hand, which I grasped, and leaned, perhaps a foot over the edge, holding the box with her other hand. “Free,” she shouted, and turned the box over, not all at once, but slowly, so that the grayish powder and uneven pieces of matter formed a river on the air. If she’d just done it, I think it would have worked, but she had to milk the height of her revenge. A raven floated up, out in front of us like a herald of the shifting upcurrent, and Grandmother’s ashy body rose, suddenly and silently flying into Mother’s face and then mine. Her scream mixed in a spasm of coughing, as I tried to jerk her back from the edge. For a moment her weight pulled like something determined to kill us both, and my scream mixed into hers. I planted my feet, deciding in an instant that if I couldn’t keep her from falling, I would have to fall, too. I wasn’t going to let go. There was just long enough for that split-second test which I either passed or failed according to how you see it, and then I fell back onto the trail and she fell on top of me, both of us choking on the ashes we’d breathed, the remains of history in and all over ourselves.
9
MOTHER STRUGGLED TO RIGHT herself from her position—like an overturned bug—on top of me. It was another of those situations in which I had no idea what response from me was expected. Her face was red, and I thought I glimpsed fury, but then her face seemed to contort toward a smile, and I thought she was casting for how she could declare herself the winner. I tried to get up quickly once her weight was off me, and I gasped, “Are you all right?” The drama continued to play across her features. Unsuccessfully I fought to suppress a spasm of coughing. My hands flew to my mouth to hide the impulse to wipe my tongue with my fingers. Ashes were on my sleeves and, chalky, on my eyelashes like snow. A shudder went through me and I wanted desperately to brush myself off, but I had no idea how Mother would receive that action. I swallowed, and tasting the residue in my mouth, gagged. It was the best thing I could have done.
“Lean over,” Mother instructed me. “Come here, I’ll hold you. Just get it all out over the edge.” She coughed herself, then, and brushed her hands against one another. She took my arm and pulled me closer to the edge.
“I’m okay,” I managed to get out, not daring to fight her grip, but unable to approach the precipice, even though there were some rocks that formed a low natural ledge between it and me.
“Don’t you trust me? Come on, hang your head over and get rid of it.”
Of course, what finally made me throw up was revulsion and terror, more than the ashes. Not that many were in my mouth and nose, just enough to know that they would be inside me forever. She held on to my shirt to anchor me, and blinded with dizziness and horror, I retched over the precipice a couple of times. It was enough.
“I guess we showed her. She’ll not hurt us again,” Mother concluded, holding my chin in her grip and cleaning my mouth with a handkerchief moistened with her spit. And then it was over. Indicating that I was to follow, she marched back toward Bright Angel, the thrust of her bosom and chin leading us both.
AS FAR AS MOTHER WAS concerned, the Grand Canyon had suited its purpose and it was time for us to push on toward Boulder, toward Roger. The lifelong desire she’d mentioned to see the Canyon disappeared. She had worked the irony right out of what had happened, and was in a good mood which I wanted to appreciate but couldn’t. I’d begun to accumulate the guilt that sticks to you if you just stay alive long enough, without even killing someone, the guilt of what you do to live.
With the new baggage inside me and the residue of vomit still in my mouth, within the hour we were on the road. My head felt stuffed with cotton, that fuzziness and unreality, and I must have moved on autopilot when we stopped. Mother drove that whole day, while during each leg of the trip, from stop to stop, I lapsed into a sleep that felt drugged. Perhaps it was the heat again—it seemed to collect and magnify itself in the car—perhaps not. I barely noticed the steady progression east into New Mexico, and I barely cared. When I glimpsed it, the land felt vast and dusty, offering no place to hide except within myself, and that’s where I went with no desire to return.
I think she’d been pressing to make Albuquerque, but stopped well short of it. Once, she asked me to drive, but the words came to me as though from a great underwater distance and I couldn’t rouse myself to respond. She didn’t ask again. It was after eight at night when she pulled into another rest area and parked off in a corner. I’d not eaten that day, but even my stomach seemed stuffed and muffled.
