by Dana Spiotta
“Who is ‘we’? And what happens if I don’t sign it? I mean, what is the petition for, exactly?” Sam said.
“So we know who is on what side. Where you stand. It is not okay to be on the sidelines, talking of complexity and hem-hawing. This is Gen X bullshit,” Laci said.
Laci was approximately the same age as Sam. So also “Gen X,” for what it was worth, which wasn’t much.
“There is nothing miraculous about making things more complicated,” Laci said. “Overly complicated. You think it makes you virtuous, honest, compassionate. But it just makes you weak and unable to take a stand.”
“No,” Sam said. Or not just that, but she didn’t say it aloud.
“Maybe all your nuances, your ‘on the other hand’s, are just a way of letting yourself off the hook.”
“But—I have to talk to MH first.”
Laci shook her head.
“Don’t be fooled by her charisma. MH is full of shit. Do you know she has a house on the lake in Skaneateles?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, the hobo with the five-hundred-dollar motorcycle boots. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed. All of it is lies.”
“But you’re close friends. You introduced her to me.”
Laci nodded. “Which shows you, doesn’t it, how fucked up this is.”
“Let me think about the petition.”
Laci frowned at her.
Sam sighed. She glanced at Tugg, who was swiping and tapping her screen. “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I have to go home. I hardly slept last night. I’m wrecked.”
“All right,” Laci said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Okay, yeah.”
When Sam got in her car, she texted MH.
Is it true?
Three moving “typing” dots for almost a minute. Then:
Nah.
No.
Sam didn’t know what it was, even if it seemed that MH knew. All she knew was that MH was guilty of something, and everyone was shunning her. When she got home, she decided to investigate. She reread the petition, looked at the signees. Then she signed into Facebook for the first time in months. Twitter too. Laci/Earl had posted links to the Medium petition. There were lots of cryptic comments, some defending MH but most condemning. No specifics. (As Sam dug in, she saw that even as she had done what Laci and MH said to do and gone “off-book, off-grid,” as she had opted out and unplugged, Laci and MH had never stopped posting and commenting and tweeting.) MH’s last statement was from a day ago, a cross-posted tweet/status update/Instagram share: “I’m turning this down for a while. DM me if you want to talk IRL.” Right next to her crucified Saint Wilgefortis profile picture. Comments on her Facebook wall had been disabled.
* * *
—
Sam was not surprised when neither MH nor Laci showed up at open mic at the Smiley Face the next night. But she decided to go through with it anyway.
She would discharge some of her anxieties. Inner life would spill out and become outer life. Almost a public confession, it would be out of her body and into the air.
“I promise you—after you stand up at that place, after you endure their contempt, you will still be there, standing. You will feel invincible,” MH had claimed. But that turned out not to be true. It was a disaster.
17
“I am bad at being a person sometimes,” Sam whispered, gripping the microphone with both hands. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was nearly kissing the mic. Titters, barely, from the sparse audience. A bright surge of electricity rose up her body. Her shoulders twitched; she focused. Sam opened her eyes and looked out. “I am,” she said, almost angry. She looked out at the eleven p.m. yawning open-mic crowd. A chain stand-up joint in a mall in Central New York. What did she expect? “But I guess no one cares about being a bad person,” she said. “Okay. I’m a bad mother. Yeah, you should be good at that, you shouldn’t fuck that up.” One single nervous giggle from a woman to her left. She didn’t care. She didn’t want them to laugh. They wanted comedy, and she was way past wanting to give people what they wanted.
“I don’t mean bad like neglect, no, the opposite really. And I don’t mean abuse, but that’s a tricky word, right? I mean we can find someone’s behavior abusive, and that person might not see it that way, or it might not have seemed that way at the time, you know?” Now there was no laughter, even some head shaking. “It’s complicated. We don’t know, actually, or we don’t want to know.” Good, she thought. Good. “Maybe I am a bad mother.” An audible groan. “I am a bad mother. I am. Isn’t repetition a bitch? It’s so boring, like give us something: a joke. Or if not a joke, a story. If not a joke or a story, some self-deprecating comment and/or a charmingly apologetic admission, amirite?” A male voice, barely audible, to her right. Hard to see with the light in her face. She turned, shielded her eyes from the spot, and peered down at her heckler. “What’s that?” she said to the young man drinking what was clearly not his first beer.
“Boring!” he yelled. “Shut up.”
“I’m boring you?”
He nodded, grinning. Gave her the finger.
“Well, you bore me,” she said. “Everything about you.” Not a witty comeback, but charm was not on the agenda tonight. Now there were boos, and lots of them. There were hardly any people there, and yet the boos were loud. It was an easy sound to make, it vibrated from deep in the throat, and it made a few people sound like a lot. The booing made the back of her neck tingle, gave her another little surge of energy.
She hadn’t planned this direction, but she had tried not to plan anything. Yet she had something in mind that she wanted to get to. The kicker: she would let them titter about “bad” mothering, and then they would expect some kooky sweet story, something faux confessional about being too good of a mother, a sort of ultra-humblebrag about CARING TOO MUCH. And the story they were expecting would make it clear that she was not a bad mother at all; it would be clear that she was actually THE BEST MOTHER EVER, or at least a very bumbly-but-well-meaning nincompoop of a mother, someone harmless and nonthreatening. And she would string them along, because that light self-loathing was so reassuring coming from a middle-aged woman. But instead Sam smiled and said, “Yeah, about my relationship to my daughter, Ally. It wasn’t exactly neglect or abuse, but try telling that to Child Protective Services, right?” And she said it in the tone of a joke, but they did not laugh, and the room started to feel very uncomfortable. That was what she was shooting for: discomfort, uneasiness, a sense that this was veering somewhere skin-crawly. But when she actually said these words, when they spilled out, it was all wrong. There was a pause, and for a moment, Sam stood silent in the spotlight. Then anger and yelling all over her, at her. Her face turned red. More boos. She said nothing, just glared back at the audience and the lights.
Then the boos, legion and angry, turned into instructions, audience wishes hurled at her. Shut up, go home, fuck off.
“Shut up, dumb bitch.”
Laughter. Then.
“Go home, ugly old cunt.”
There it was. So easily surfaced, all that hate for her. It wasn’t only what she said or didn’t say but who she was while she said it. Anger was easy, easy, easy to get. Easy to find. It was the dullest thing ever, the default of every moment these days. She had blown it.
People scowled at her as she turned to walk off. There was something in that scowling, she had to admit. Getting it was too easy, but at least she was visible. She felt a weird high from the face-to-face of it, the human, emoji-free faces, the raw in-real-life moment of it. But right as she reached the edge of the stage, the door to her escape, Sam looked back at the audience. And there she was. Ally. She had come. Ally had actually been reading her texts, even if she didn’t respond. Sam stopped, suppressing her urge to stage-dive toward her daughter, to throw herself at Ally’s feet. Sam smiled, waved at
her, but also instantly saw herself through Ally’s eyes. Sam was foolish, her monologue embarrassing. Poor Ally had to listen to her mother talk about her, say her name, drag her into Sam’s own weird need for humiliation. Sam felt herself flush hot. What have I done. Ally stared back. Her perfect oval of a face brought an instant wave of love from Sam, but Ally’s mouth was a hard, tense line. Ally shook her head, shook Sam off, looked down and got up to leave. Sam shouted, “Ally! Wait!” but Ally disappeared. Sam wanted to cry. All of her bravado, all of her juicy defiance, undone and replaced with this shame. (And beyond the shame was the shock: Ally looked so old, so like an adult. And next to the shock, the familiar concerns rushed in: Ally probably had fake ID but didn’t get carded. Ally acted, carried herself, like an adult, but she was only sixteen—so young, so insanely young that Ally had no idea how young she was or what that word actually meant.)
* * *
—
After she got home, Sam paced her living room, smoking. (Her two-a-day habit was now more like five.) Good luck sleeping tonight. Adrenaline and various other stress and counterregulatory hormones from the performance and its aftermath fired through her body still. Shaky, a little nauseous, she ground down on how she’d managed to blow her chance for reconciliation.
Impulsively, improbably, Sam called Ally. Straight to voicemail with no ring. Then she sent two desperate texts:
Where did you go?
I’m so sorry—please talk to me, Ally, please
18
Sam knew she must have finally fallen asleep because she woke with a jerk at three a.m. She pulled on her clothes, drank a coffee, and glanced at her phone. Nothing, of course. She was blocked. She left her phone on her table (she refused to take that instrument of pain with her) and went out into the street for a walk. The late August night air was already chilly, already inching toward the fall. She walked past the cemetery and kept going toward Park Street. The streetlights gave her bright splashes of visibility, and when she came to a block with few lights, her skin pricked slightly with fear, but then she just walked a little faster. No one was out, not even the pale opioid ghosts.
When she reached Park Street, she saw lights flashing. She turned right and looked in the direction of the lights. Halfway down the block, she saw a police cruiser, the source of the flashing. And two figures, a woman and a man, guns drawn, rushed toward a streetlight, and someone shouted, “Get down, get down!”
Sam stopped where she was, looked where they looked.
“Stop! Don’t move!”
Sam saw a smaller figure move from shadow into the light holding a plastic soda bottle. He looked in the direction of the shouts. She could see his face in the light, confused, terrified. He wheeled abruptly to his left. Sam heard crack, echo, then crack, crack, echo. The wheeling figure yelped and dropped to the pavement, spilling his liter of soda. His leg bent oddly. The two cops rushed to him with guns still out and pointing at him. Then they bent over his body. Sam could see his face clearly as he lay there. He was a teenager, a boy with a boy’s face. He was not moving.
One of the cops called into his radio, “Shots fired. Subject down. Alert Medical.” The female cop holstered her gun and then seemed to put her ear to the boy’s chest. The two cops’ faces were in shadows, but the uniforms were clearly identifiable. The female cop stood up and shook her head at the male cop. Sam could see her face now, red, breathing heavily.
“Why did you fire?” he said, his voice loud and shaken.
She looked back down. “He was charging us; he had a weapon.”
He directed his flashlight around the boy. It lighted on something, the spilled soda. He kept flashing, looking for something that lay next to the body on the ground. (It was a body, Sam knew this somehow, could see that he didn’t move, the boy. And that’s called a body.) The cop shook his head. Sam carefully moved a step back, putting herself out of the light as she watched, but they didn’t notice her. She could hear distant sirens.
She turned back toward the corner, away from them, and stepped quietly into the darkness of the unlit street. No one had seen her, but she had seen them. And then she ran as fast as she could down Highland.
It was bound to happen. She had inserted herself, she had willed herself into this world. (Into the world.) She had bought the house in this direly poor neighborhood. She roamed at three a.m., when only bad things happened. She in her restless, hypervigilant state.
When she was well out of sight, she stopped running. She sat down on the curb, and she tried to breathe. Her heart was loud and fast in her body: the pumping, she could feel and hear it. She was alive. The boy was no longer alive.
They must be thinking about it now. What they did, just as she was thinking about what she saw. Her body was shaking. She felt ill. She will throw up soon, but she had nothing in her stomach. Her gut ached and churned. It was so cold, she felt cold. A wind had picked up, and it blew little drops of rain against her. She shivered and stood up. Cold from her lips to her fingertips, cold pushing up through the soles of her sneakers and whistling through the seams of her jeans, the same jeans she had worn every day for the past week. They were stretched from use, and they felt baggy, as if the cold lurked in the spaces between her thighs and the fabric. The cold penetrated when the wind whipped across the cemetery park, then barely retreated until the next awful gust. But the wind focused her, and she needed to focus. (Reflexively, she thought about the fall, how late in August it was, how betrayed she was by the sudden drop in temperature.) She could go inside, get warm, make some coffee. She could even sit back down on the curb, hug her knees, make a cocoon of warmth. Instead she continued to stand and shiver.
My God!
A boy is dead. A boy is dead. A boy is dead.
Four
Ally
1
It was Joe’s idea that she should go to the horrendous comedy club to see her ridiculous mother. He couldn’t go with Ally, of course, but he thought it would be a way for her to repair things. Her grandma had also told her to forgive her mother. Even her father had told her that the breakup was his fault. So when her mother texted her the night of the open mic, Ally decided to show up. She sat in the back, drank a Coke, and ate some disgusting rubbery “Caprese” salad to make the minimum. She endured several terrible stand-up performances before her mother came on.
Ally barely recognized her: thin, old, her hair spiky short. She smiled, but there was something twitchy in her face, as if she were animated by an odd and destructive force that at the same time pleased her. Her mother didn’t see her. Ally was in the back, in shadows, and the stage lights made it hard for her mother to see. She held her hand to her forehead and squinted out. Ally felt a little sorry for her; she looked weirdly fragile despite her muscles. Her silly mother, making a fool of herself. It was almost funny, just how much the audience hated her, but mostly it was the cringefest Ally had expected. Then her mother ranted about being a bad mother and brought up Child Protective Services and Ally by name. Ally was stunned. How could her mother drag her in as if everything were a big joke? As if that time, that scrutiny, was not horrible and traumatic and totally not anyone’s fucking business.
2
“She has no sense of limit, no restraint. My personal life. MY personal life. And to bring up that incident. She has no shame.”
“What happened? Tell me.”
Joe wanted to hear, and why shouldn’t Ally tell him.
“I was fifteen. I had fainted during a test at school. It was the first quarter of tenth grade, and I was obsessed with getting perfect grades. I knew it was nuts, but I was secretly proud of how driven I was. It was a way to be—I’m still like that. It’s who I am. But I had overdone it with an all-nighter. I drank some cold coffee left over in the pot from the morning. I mixed it with almond milk and a ton of sugar and decided to power through. By the time I had to go to school, I started to feel a little strange. I d
idn’t say anything to anyone—AP World History was first period, that’s all I had to hold it together for. Mom didn’t notice I was off, but I’m pretty good at hiding. She could see I was studying my notes. Already I was sweating.
“The test had some multiple choice and an essay question. The information was all there, in my head. I just needed to calm down and execute. But I felt clammy, light-headed. Nauseous too. My heartbeat sped up. I knew it wasn’t an asthma attack—I’ve had those. I got up to splash water on my face or just to do something besides vomit. And down I went: I blacked out. I just managed to put my hands out and cushion my trip to the floor of the room. Turned out I had suffered a vasovagal syncope. ‘Vaso’—that’s blood. ‘Vagal’—that’s your stomach, your vagus nerve. And ‘syncope.’ That means a blackout: ‘syn’ is ‘together’—and ‘cope’ is ‘koptein,’ to cut out. So basically I had a stress-induced body fail. But no one knew that. I could have had a brain tumor or a heart arrhythmia. So they called my parents and sent me to the ER.
“I was in the back seat, looking sick as hell. My dad was driving, and my mom was doing her primary job, flipping out. When we got to the ER, I threw up in the parking lot. They made us wait for an hour, which spun my parents out, but especially Mom. And then when we did get a room, we waited another hour. At this point, I felt so exhausted that I could barely stay awake, and my parents didn’t know if that was bad or not. Should they keep me awake until I was checked for concussions and so on? There were no nurses or aides that could answer our questions.
“Finally, I was seen by someone. He looked at my eyes with a penlight, and I could tell he thought I was on drugs or something. Let’s just say he lacked a great bedside manner. Maybe because my mother kept talking, insisting that I was healthy and such a thing had never happened before.
