by Lisa Howorth
The guest bed looked prissy and crisp and so inviting. She started to undress, but she caught the smell of cigarette smoke, exhaust, greasy food, dirty hair, and sharp, anxiety sweat coming off her and realized she’d have to take a shower. She could never sleep when she smelled bad or felt gross, even with a pill.
After scalding herself, washing her hair, and breathing deep breaths of clean, steamy air, she felt somewhat better. How had women ever endured life without hot running water? Imagine the chronic funk. She knew the pill would kick in any minute and neutralize the adrenaline her mother had stirred up, so she allowed herself to think about her. Had she made her disturbing confession to her brothers as well? She doubted it. Those special hollow-tipped bullets were saved for Mary Byrd alone, and her mother liked to fire them when Mary Byrd was least expecting them, or least needed to hear them. Was it possible her mom was nuts, and maybe had hardening of the arteries or something? No, it couldn’t be that—she was whip-smart in all kinds of ways—it must just be that she was old enough that some of the filters had rusted or loosened, or fallen away. Old people flaunting their vast superior life experience and not giving a shit about saying or doing whatever; they’d be dead soon and they’d earned the right to terrorize, and to exercise their last chances to set the world straight.
There was a list Mary Byrd had kept over the years, for fun, really; she’d intended to show it to her brothers someday and they’d all have a good laugh. It was a list of all the stuff her mother had said, mostly while visiting Mary Byrd and Charles and the children. As Eliza once had complained, “Nana walks around the house and tries to control stuff.” And Mary Byrd had seen her mom and Evagreen conferring disdainfully about laundry, shower curtains, cat and dog hair, et cetera, et cetera. There was no choice but to laugh about it.
If you don’t get that ivy off that dogwood it’ll die.
It smells too much like feet in here.
If you don’t hurry up the ice cream will be all melted.
Why do you let them do that?
You have to prepare the soil.
It doesn’t look like you had many daffodils this year.
I think that happened to me, too, when I was taking Lipitor.
The grits are a little bland.
If you get tan enough those age spots won’t show.
You get that from me.
You get that from your father.
Are the shrimp and grits spicy? I don’t like spicy things.
I’ve got a stiff neck, too.
Why do you let him do that?
You’d better get that ivy off the house.
This pillow has slobber stains. Guests don’t like that.
Go to the bathroom before we drive home.
You should clean off your grocery cart with the wipey things.
This is not fresh.
You boiled the eggs too long; they’re gray.
That stove.
Don’t eat regular mayo, eat fat-free.
Was he drunk?
Don’t use whole wheat bread crumbs in the stuffing; it gives it an ugly taste.
You need to mulch.
She must have been drunk.
These need water.
You’re turning her into a princess.
You probably pruned too late.
It’s freezing, can you turn down the AC?
We need some air back here!
I can see your butt in that skirt.
He’s gay, isn’t he?
Wow. At home these are only five dollars.
That shower.
They must be gay.
This pillow smells like men’s heads.
Why do you let them just run off like that?
This thing is so rusty it can’t be operated properly.
Your skirt is hanging down too low.
That’s because you won’t take calcium.
That’s because you don’t know anything about investing.
You’ve parked way out in the street.
That light is yellow, not green.
You love animal prints.
Water this. It’s going to die.
You’re not supposed to put olive oil in the pasta water, you know.
Her mother terrified her sometimes—the power she wielded over them all. Her potent ability to wound or frustrate. But her mother was a good person. Mary Byrd loved her and knew that so much of who or what she herself was—good and bad—she’d taken from her mom. Meanness? Jeez. She hoped not. Mary Byrd could be plenty mean, but with small, furry animals or helpless stepchildren? Was Eliza going to inherit that? From her mother she’d also learned tons of stuff about plants and flowers and cooking and fossils; a love for cats and antiques and reading; her sense of humor; and, in spite of her mother’s occasional politically incorrect remarks, the importance of rooting for the underdog. Unless the underdog was a squirrel.
She guessed everybody pretty much felt this confusion about their mothers, more or less. But why was the relationship women had with their mothers so often the most complicated relationship they ever had? With your mother and your mother only, you shared the strongest, simplest, and most intimate bonds that two human beings can share. You’ve shared blood, you’ve shared flesh, you’ve been as much a part of your mother’s body as her liver or her heart. You’ve shared the awful abattoir scenario of birth, and after that her fluids sustain you. But with a girl and her mother, the tension and competitiveness. Of course she knew that that was exactly why it was so complicated: it was a lifelong struggle for both of you to separate and become two distinct women, and to gain male attention in the family. Duh, duh, duh. She could see it with Eliza already: Eliza desperately needed her mother but often wished her dead, Mary Byrd knew, and she remembered having the same feeling. With Charles, Eliza was relaxed and happy, even a little flirtatious. Charles could do no wrong in Eliza’s eyes. Well, almost, she thought, thinking of the Mann-kiss joke. And if he did do something wrong, it was going to be Mary Byrd’s fault. Why are so many little cruelties built into us?
Mary Byrd wanted to believe that her mother hadn’t really been glad that Stevie had died. Surely she had just felt more intensely what Mary Byrd and Nick also had felt: a certain relief that the friction and fights between their mother and stepfather had stopped. They’d stopped all right. But there was no possible way that any of them could have been relieved about why they’d stopped.
She sneezed again. She wished she were back at home, at the birthday party. The loud drone of Foote’s truck was still in her head and she tuned to that frequency and fell asleep quickly and slept, as they say, the sleep of the dead.
Eliot Nelson had brought Mary Byrd home in a rain shower that was brief but came down heavily; the bottom seemed to have fallen out of the night sky. She felt a twinge of melancholy as she often did on Sunday evenings. Undone homework. School in the morning, and for four more mornings. And Sunday was tense; a family day. But it would only be another month before school was out for the summer and she’d be free from the stupid junior high, and algebra, forever. There would be end-of-the-year dances and parties. She and Eliot would have more nights like this one and they would have them all summer long. She hoped.
They cruised slowly in the convertible through the cherry tree–lined neighborhood. The blossoms lay thick on Cherry Glen Lane, like snow. It seemed a shame to be driving over them, crushing them into a gray mess.
Mary Byrd could see a lot of cars parked in the middle of the block in front of her family’s white brick house. The Nicholsons, the big family that lived across the street, must be having a Mother’s Day party, she thought before realizing that the cars were Richmond police cars, and her grandparents’ pale pink Cadillac, and her aunt and uncle’s woody station wagon. A large rescue truck, what her cousins Kath and Susan called a “glamour truck” because of all the lights and loudspeakers and crap they had on them, was parked farther down the street, and now she heard loud static and walkie-talkie conversations. A few neighbors stood a
round in their yards and a policeman was talking to Big Nana, the scary next-door neighbor. Mary Byrd looked at her boyfriend, who looked horrified. She wanted to say “Go!” and keep driving and driving and pretend she hadn’t seen anything, but instead, without a word, she jumped out of the car and ran up the driveway, running a hand down her dress to be sure all her buttons were done, and into the open front door. The small living room was full of standing men. Her mother sat on the sofa between her own sister and mother. Had she been crying? Mary Byrd couldn’t tell; the only time she’d seen her mother cry was when Kennedy died. Her mother wore the dumb turquoise housedress that she’d gotten when she married Pop. Her housewife costume.
“Stevie’s gone,” her mother said. “We can’t find him.” She turned to her sister, Marie, who wrapped her arms around Marisa and looked up at Mary Byrd with wide, blank eyes.
“Where are the babies?” asked Mary Byrd, looking around the room. “Is Kath here?” She desperately wanted her to be. She was glad she didn’t have any sisters; her cousin was her closest friend.
“The babies are asleep,” said her aunt. “The girls didn’t come.”
Nonna, Mary Byrd’s grandmother, solemnly smoked a Viceroy with the usual long, drooping ash. If only it were one of those afternoons when her mother and aunt and grandmother sat at the kitchen table, smoking, sipping Cutty, and laughing at the new Frederick’s catalog. “Daddy Sam and Angelo and the big boys and Nicky are out looking,” she said.
The warm evening and the making out had made Mary Byrd hot and sweaty but now she shook.
“I’m going, too,” she said, but before she could move, a man stepped in front of her. He introduced himself as detective somebody, Richmond police, and in a low, quiet voice said that he needed to ask her some questions. He wanted to know if there were secret hideouts or forts or gathering places in the neighborhood where kids liked to go. Had Stevie mentioned any plans he had that day? When had Mary Byrd last seen him? Where had she been since dinner? What was the boyfriend’s name? Where was the boyfriend now? Mary Byrd blushed. She wasn’t telling this guy she’d been parking, not in front of her family. She just said, “Riding around. He dropped me off and went home.” She said his name. The detective took notes and, without raising his head, looked her up and down. She shivered again, the wet spot in her underwear cold as ice.
“On Mother’s Day?” he asked.
She ran down the street toward the woods and the creek, calling Stevie’s name, which seemed so dumb. He had to be somewhere. He was somewhere, but where? Accidentally locked in a shed or a basement. Dopey kid. Rode his bicycle too far away and was lost. At the worst, maybe was hurt, had been knocked out and couldn’t yell back. A logical dumb-kid explanation for which he would get his butt beaten by Pop when they found him.
When she got to the end of the road and crossed to the woods, she was stunned to see, in the streetlight, her grandfather’s small, shadowed figure dragging the deep part of the creek with a rake—the rake he used when he came to get their leaves up in the fall. He painted all his tool handles acid green, and the rake seemed to glow. They looked at each other but said nothing. Her grandfather’s pants were rolled up and he wore his goofy summer straw hat to keep the rain off. He looked like he looked when they went crabbing at the bay every summer. Mary Byrd stifled an abrupt urge to laugh and the laugh stuck in her throat and burned. She watched her grandfather, wondering why the sight seemed dreamlike but familiar—not the crabbing, but something else—and she remembered a painting they’d talked about at school. Charon, rowing his boat across the River Styx into the unknown dark. How could she possibly be watching her grandfather dragging the creek, looking for her brother’s body?
Daddy Sam said to her, “Go look in the creek on the other side of Willow Lawn.”
“But he’s not allowed to cross Willow Lawn,” Mary Byrd replied stupidly.
Daddy Sam looked at her like she was an idiot and said, “Go look. Look every single place you can think of, or that he might think of, even if he wasn’t allowed, chooch.” He wouldn’t be calling her a dumbass if he was really worried, would he? She was heartened that her grandfather would say something so ordinary, one of his Sicilian epithets, as if she’d left a door open or water running.
She crossed Willow Lawn to their school bus stop on the bridge and looked down into the black water. The creek was rocky and shallow. Someone lying there would be easy to see. Stevie wouldn’t have gone any farther up the creek because he was afraid of the dark culvert. They had always told him that a thing like the Loch Ness monster from the World Beyond had been sighted there. She wasn’t going in that slimy thing by herself, either. She was wearing her new Villager dress with pink and green flowers. But it wasn’t that; she was afraid of the culvert, too. The red-headed twin hoods from the Horseshoe Apartments had covered the culvert walls with alarming sex graffiti and drawings. She took a deep breath and smelled the rain and the light sewage funk of the creek, and she smelled the boyfriend’s dried saliva around her mouth. In the morning she would be standing in this same spot, waiting for the school bus, talking excitedly with the other kids about what had happened the night before, how Stevie had gotten lost but had been found safe and sound, dumb kid, man, was he in trouble, my stepfather almost killed him! It would be that way. It had to be. For now, all she could do was keep looking and calling, like it was just one of the games they all played on summer nights, Sardines or Pushy-in-the-Bushy, or Freeze Tag.
She turned from the creek and looked around the big, wide intersection. Deserted late on a rainy Sunday night, the usually busy streets seemed sinister and forbidding. When they were younger, it had been a fun spot on the predawn mornings she had helped Nick do his paper route. A bunch of them would get up in the dark and meet here where the paper bundles of the Sunday Times-Dispatch were dropped. It had been exciting; they were being allowed out in the dark—practically the middle of the night. They’d serve the papers but they’d also make the traffic lights—they seemed like party lights—change by jumping on the sensor plates. They’d lie in the road, they’d yell cuss words, they’d moon each other. Now the lights were warnings, like something to do with the emergency, signaling on and off, on and off, and reflecting their colors in an eerie way on the wet, empty street, revealing nothing.
She found Nick, who was searching with their older cousins. They went around the elementary school, and behind the Horseshoe. They searched King Stalks, the big bamboo forest that stretched from the Nicholsons’ backyard to the Fleshmans’. They spread out, calling and walking, and then they’d go somewhere else. Off and on it rained and they were soaked and cold. They’d straggle back to the house, sure they would be greeted by happy shouting and police cars driving off. Then, stunned more deeply that nothing had changed, they’d go back out into the night.
Mary Byrd did not see her mother or her stepfather. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to know what they were doing, either. Finally, one of the detectives said that everyone should stop for now and start looking again at first light, which was only a few hours off. Then, he said, they’d have to notify the media and widen the search. Everyone would need some rest.
Mary Byrd knew she’d need to help with the babies, who’d be getting up before long, so she went to her room and lay on her bed. Never had she wanted anything more in her life than to wake up to a Monday morning as usual, babies crying, chaos in the bathroom and the kitchen, she and Nick and Stevie bumbling and flailing around, rushing to make their buses and avoid their mother’s wrath if they missed them. She’d go to school and have a good excuse for not having her homework, and then the boyfriend would pick her up after school and put the top down and maybe they’d go out to Kentdale Road or even farther, and just drive and drive and drive and drive. Mary Byrd opened her eyes suddenly and from the slow movements and murmuring downstairs she knew they were all still in the nightmare. Something inside her, her heart or her stomach, seized up, her mouth watered, and she thought she was going to
throw up.
At her window she saw that two TV trucks blocked the driveway. What little light there was outside was gray with fog. The rain had stopped, though. She supposed that was good, but she wasn’t sure what anything meant anymore. The ordinary touchstones of daily life seemed to mean nothing. Yesterday’s pair of spotted underwear was balled up in an old potato chip bag at the bottom of her trashcan. She pulled on clean cutoffs and a sweatshirt and went downstairs, realizing she’d again forgotten her glasses when she saw all the people who’d assembled in the living room. Relatives, some police and other official people, she guessed. She was glad she couldn’t really make them all out, she was so blind.
Her mother seemed almost normal and was in the kitchen feeding the babies. Nick had gone back out with Pop and the searchers and Mary Byrd was relieved not to see him. There wasn’t anything to say. She stood watching the babies and eating a Pop Tart while her mother did the dishes. Only she and Stevie liked Pop Tarts. There were two in the box and she left one.
James, who wasn’t really a baby anymore, struggled off his chair at the table and took his juice beebah to the bedroom to watch cartoons. He was old enough to be ashamed to have a bottle and would hide it if someone came into the room. The real baby, Pete, banged loudly on his high chair to alert everyone that he was finished pincering up his Cheerios one by one. Mary Byrd freed him from the high chair and set him down. He had recently started walking and wore blue corduroy overalls that were almost white from many washings and handing-downs. They hadn’t been snapped up the legs, so it looked as if he were wearing a tiny evening gown. He staggered around like Frankenstein, going to the drawer where he had his own set of miniature pots and pans to play with. Mary Byrd took a deep breath with the rush of love she felt for him, and also envy. For him nothing had changed. The world was still a good place.
While she and her mother cleaned up after the babies and dealt with all the doughnuts and coffee and cigarette butts in the kitchen, Mary Byrd heard her stepfather’s familiar, heavy tread, a sound she never liked hearing, in the hall. She and her mother turned and there he was, his bulky body filling the doorway. He stood there with his head to one side, hands hanging down, smiling a big smile, she thought—she still wasn’t wearing her glasses—the identical pose he’d strike when he came home from work and spied the babies eating dinner and he’d laugh and say, “I see monkeys!,” making them squeal and chuckle. She held her breath, but he didn’t do that, and instead he brayed loudly, “He’s dead.” Her mother leapt to him and they sobbed, and Mary Byrd scooped up Pete and ran out of the kitchen—where was James?—and flew up the stairs, taking them by twos even with the big, fat baby in her arms.
