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4

 

 

No matter how clearly I see it all in my mind, I’m not always sure how true what my mother tells me really is. How bad it was, I mean. Memories have a way of getting uglier when they’re of someone or something we don’t like. It’s not like my mother starved to death, or lost her teeth from malnutrition when she was carrying me, or died giving birth to me, so she must’ve had some kind of help. That Man must’ve been doing something for her. For us. Or, someone had to.

The way she talks, the way she changes… I don’t always know what to believe.

“Well, there was your Auntie Clem, of course,” Momma says. “When I first found out I was pregnant… You can’t imagine how I felt. I was very young, and very alone. A stupid kid about to have a kid. I understood enough to be scared of you. You were this major thing about to happen to me, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do about you. I wanted to kill myself just to get out of it all. I even mixed up a bottle of bleach and traded a neighbor for a bunch of sleeping pills, but I knew if I went through with it, it would mean killing you, too. Without Auntie Clem…” and she smiles the kind of smile that hurts. “Without her, I might’ve done it anyway.”

I do remember this conversation—in fact, this one always comes back sharp and clear—because it’s not often we get to talk about Auntie Clem. We were sitting at a rest stop while the coach we’d been riding ambled off around the corner. We were halfway between one place and another, but I don’t recall what we were leaving or where we were headed. Some city, some town. They tend to blur together. We sat at one of the picnic tables—one furthest from the roadside, one with the wider view. Shock-blue sky and crickets buzzing down the banks. We unwrapped our tuna rolls; the cheap kind you buy on-board if you’ve forgotten to bring something yourself. They come in plastic wrap so thin it’s always ripped with holes. Inside, it’s stale crust and inside that the bread is soggy. The filling has more mayonnaise than fish.

“You know how big tuna are?” she said through a mouthful, inspecting the bite mark she’d made. Soft center all torn up. “They’re really huge, and really shiny. Pretty. It’s a shame to turn such a big, beautiful fish into something gross like this.”

I stared at mine. A mess of wet whiteness.

“Go on. Eat.”

I took a mouthful. Dry bread, fishy-sweet. “But what exactly did Auntie Clem do? I mean, how did she—?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, babe,” she said.

I swallowed, and stared past her. A boy sat at the table behind her, reading a book while he ate his roll. Dark eyes, dark hair, olive skin. Solo traveler. Older than me, though not by much. He was listening to an old Walkman, the headphones half-hidden by sharp spikes of gelled hair, the silver band crossing his crown like a metal hinge. Something about this, and the way the light hit his skin in its smooth glow, made him seem unreal. Like he really was made of plastic and metal, the headphones really were a clasp and his head really could open up. And if I opened it I’d see a million tiny cogs and wheels working away in there, forming all his thoughts.

Automaton boy reads book. Automaton boy does not look up at human girl.

He smiled at something on the page.

My mother turned, following my gaze over her shoulder. She looked back at me and raised an eyebrow. I stared down at the roll in my hands, my stomach twisting.

“Auntie Clem got me out of there,” she said after a moment. “She got us out of there. She didn’t have to, but she did. She brought us to her place in Carris, and she gave us a home when we had nowhere left to go.” She sighed. “I thought she was an angel for that. For the longest time. I thought. A true-blue fucking angel.”

In my head, I picked at the word thought. How vile it sounded in her mouth. I echoed the word angel. Said like something she had to spit to get rid of.

“But she did still help, didn’t she?”

My mother stared. Almost a glare, but not for me. Something inside her, biting, showing its teeth in her eyes. “However it happened, however it turned out, your Auntie Clem put us on the track to finding something far better than the life we would’ve had otherwise. It didn’t happen the way she would’ve thought, or even wanted, but it still happened. Take the good with the bad, babe.”

Automaton Boy looked across at me then, hair throwing a shadow over his eyes. Dark throwing dark over darkness. He stared at me, staring back.

“For all we’ve done and all we have,” my mother said, “this is a pretty good life we’ve got going here. We’re free this way, babe. It’s you and me.”

Automaton Boy smiled at me then; a slow shifting that stretched the edges of his mouth. A million tiny muscles twitched up and down my back.

***

“We are citizens of this earth,” my mother says. “We are Earthlings. That means there’s no corner of the planet where we shouldn’t be allowed. There isn’t a place on the face of it we don’t have the right to call home.”

Momma says when I was younger, in those first months of just her and me, I made her cry sometimes. The way I wouldn’t stop talking about Auntie Clem and our home in Carris. Not even trying to fight my dumb little-kid rages, my stubborn child mind. Momma says kids don’t realize how much they hurt their parents. She says being a parent is always about being hurt by your kids or hurting for your kids. She says this side of it never stops.

I know I wasn’t born in Carris, but I don’t remember much of anything about where we lived before Auntie Clem took us in. Mom says before Auntie Clem got us out of there, we stayed in her hometown until I was almost three. She won’t give me the exact name. Sometimes she says it’s New Richmond, sometimes Gully Ridge, sometimes Harrow. Once she even told me it was ‘a town called Despair’, but I think she must’ve been kidding. Her eyes were bright and sharp as she said it, the way they are when she’s trying to joke about something that makes her sad. Shards of ice lost in warm water.

When we left Carris, I was still too small to understand. I hadn’t learned yet that where you go to sleep isn’t always where you wake up, and the people you let yourself love won’t always be there again tomorrow. Little kids choose what they want to hear, though they aren’t great at listening anyway. I guess I was at that age. Hands over ears, screams. Thrashing at answers like the truth is some kind of attack. Some sort of outrage.

Can we go back? When are we going back?

Wanting Auntie Clem to do my hair for me. Make French toast for me. Wanting her to choose my clothes or tie a shoe or take me to the bathroom.

I don’t wanna go with you.

I said that. On a day I don’t remember, when momma tells me I kicked and screamed and tried to punch her, my face bunched tight and darkened red like ‘a dried-up tomato’.

A dried-up tomato.

What a hideous face. My face? I don’t want to picture it. Little girls should never be terrors, no matter how afraid they are, or how angry they feel. Tantrums, rages, screams. It doesn’t fit right—so much ugliness blasting out from a blonde-haired thing in pretty clothes. If this is what being spoiled can turn a child into, then I’m glad we’ve never stayed anywhere too long since. I’m glad Auntie Clem’s house was the last place I thought we’d be forever.

There isn’t anywhere on the face of the Earth that we don’t have the right to call home.

Each new landscape and all its characters temporary to us. Like touring a souvenir shop, like flicking through a set of Polaroids. Fascinating things, beautiful things, and all shuffled in with the things you can’t wait to forget. Because not all the places we pass through are fascinating, beautiful. Sometimes we leave with the metal-panic taste of blood and adrenalin thick in our saliva, lights in our eyes that set to spinning in flares of crazy, urgent red. Everything screaming so loud it feels like violence, those pulses, those bursts.

This isn’t real, I know, but it’s how it feels.

My momma has a way of knowing when it’s time for us to go. The older I get, the more I feel it too. A sense of tension tightens in, starts to swell in the air. It’s like slow suffocation. For days something unnamable skims all the surfaces, sets fire to our nerves.

That man has been following us.

That woman keeps looking at us.

Who is he calling?

What is she writing down?

Everything, the smallest thing, feels like a warning, some kind of sign. A sudden cloudburst. A late train. A broken zipper. Malicious. Vicious. Cruel. Our guts churn while we sleep so we wake in sick panic every morning.

Get up. Get up!

All the times this has happened before. My mother’s hurried whisper close to my ear, raking me out of sleep. Her cool hands trembling as she brushes the hair out of my face, opens her palms and pats my cheeks.

Wake up honey. Please. Let’s go.

And it’s the paranoia that makes us rush, move. Grab what we can and be gone before the sun splits the dark lines of the horizon and the sky.

We are citizens of this earth.

Which is another way to say, there’s no one place where my momma and me really belong.