When the second girl’s body is found, your mother calls. Not that you live close to the corn fields, not that you drive through the gravel dust so long it gives you highway vision; the humid air and pollen nose giving way to black ice and ditched cars that pepper the fields belonging to century farms, and the hay fever, and the stench of dog food and pig shit that makes it hard to breathe no matter the season. None of that means anything to you anymore, so far away from the dead bodies, but still your mother calls to see if you are safe. More than to see if you are safe, she wants to remind you of the danger.
“Do you have any mace?” she asks. “Do you bring it with you?”
You want to say no, because fuck that. Instead you say yes, of course I carry the mace. Of course, I’m safe.
Once, after a grizzly man kissed you in a gravel lot, the backyard parking lot of a bar in Nashville, just the side of your mouth, not the whole thing, not both of your lips because you moved too fast for his old body; after the old man said, “Sorry babe, don’t get all offended! That’s just how we did it back in my day,” you carried the mace at the bottom of your bag, afraid he’d find you again, just bump into you, you know, then follow you to the car. Once, you pulled it out in front of a group of men who didn’t seem dangerous, no, not at the time. They seemed like friends, so you pulled out the little pink tube with the grooves meant to hold manicured nails so delicately, and said, “Look at this, look at this shit I have to carry around,” and they all backed away so fast, ducking for cover, outside your aim of fire. Once, you felt the power of a woman with a weapon.
But you don’t carry the mace around anymore. Actually, you threw it away, before the move that brought you West. Threw it deep into the plastic trashcan underneath coffee filters and moldy fridge leftovers, deep enough you wouldn’t dig it out, because you shouldn’t have to. Instead you walk with headphones in, music off. You give fake names. Say yes, happily married, five years. See this wedding ring?
The first girl is found in the cornfields. A week later, the second on a golf course. There are no cornfields, no golf courses where you live. That should be safe enough for you, for your mother, but instead she says, “I want to come visit. I need to use my time off,” so you say sure, why not. Here is an empty promise, you think. Away from the cornfields, three homes came and went, and you were sure that the farther you got, the safer you kept yourself from the chaos of the central time zone. The easier it would be for family to say, we’ll just wait for you to come home, but don’t forget to come home soon. With all that distance, the easier it was to decline phone calls, to answer with a text: don’t forget you’re two hours ahead — I’m still sleeping. Midwest then south, and now here, perched on the country’s edge, where your kitchen windows look out on California hills that turn gold come June.
But you were wrong. The chaos finds you anyway.
First, your father visits. He flies in and complains about the traffic, even though he made it from airport to hotel in record time. He only visits for three days, and you think this is a good amount of time, because what can possibly go wrong in three days? You take him out for sandwiches where he asks for no onions and gets onions anyway. When you’re leaving the deli, he stumbles, falls, smashes his head into a car and you think he’s having a heart attack. That’s what the man who helps you says, as he’s holding your father by the arms, lowering him onto the bench: “Maybe it’s a heart attack?” And it shoots through you, this is it, he’s having a heart attack, the Widow Maker; this is it and he’s going to die, visiting you, his first visit since you moved from the cornfields. But he doesn’t die. His heart rate shot up, blood pressure shot down. He stumbled. The doctor said so, after four hours in the emergency room. The doctor said near syncope due to hypotension due to polypharmacy.
Here is what you know:
When your mother left, your father became so depressed you thought he’d kill himself
When your mother left, you had no choice but to become your father’s caretaker
In the emergency room, the doctor asked for a list of your father’s medications. When he can’t remember them all, you open your notebook, find the page where you’ve written down the list for emergencies, for occasions just like this. When you finish reciting the names of muscle relaxants, pain prescriptions, laxatives, blood pressure and cholesterol and anxiety and depression medications, the doctor raises his eyebrows. He says, “You know that’s a lot, right?” And you hope your father is listening, that maybe he will listen, finally, to someone who isn’t you.
In the emergency room, your father curled up on the bed like a child, you’re starting to get it. You think you know a little more of how your mother felt, the frustration that lived in her body, that particular kind of exhaustion. Love is passed on in your family by taking care. Love is being needed. What happens when you don’t want to be needed any longer?
At the end of the third day, after you have rehydrated your father, after he’s slept and said I think I’m feeling a little bit better, but maybe still just a little wobbly; after you’ve lifted his suitcase into the trunk of the rental, he kisses your cheek, gives you a hug. He says, I’m not going to be able to make this trip again, it’s just too hard on my body, and in that, there’s relief.
Two months later, your mother is ready to visit. On the phone, buying flights, she says, you're sure this is really okay? Tell me if it’s not. You can hear desperation in her voice, though you can’t be sure if she’s desperate to see you or if she’s just desperate to get out of her house. After the divorce, she moved to a house you will not go to, not until the man she lives with is gone. Instead she sends pictures to show you it’s yellow. She sends you pictures of men cutting down a sick tree in the front yard. When you call your brother, you say Remember how the man said he had cancer? Remember how he said he’d be dead by Christmas? That was three years ago. That man is a liar.
Your brother gives people the benefit of the doubt. He says that maybe the man got better, but when you say you think he’s abusive, he asks what kind? He says, if he ever lays a hand on her and then stops, says he has to hold his tongue because he’s found God on his way to finding forgiveness.
Here is what you know:
Your mother had an affair with a bad man
Your mother was always going to leave, it was just a matter of when, with whom
Your mother will stay for five days. She’ll stay in your house, in your bed while you sleep on an air mattress below her, even though you know the checks she gets from your father every month are more than enough for her own hotel. A week before her arrival, you sit down with pen and paper and write down a schedule. Lunch by the ocean, a movie in the theatre with reclining seats, a trip to Ikea. Your mother was always easy to please, until she wasn’t. When you tell her you have the whole week planned, she says Whatever we do is fine with me. I just want to spend time with you.
So now it’s your turn to hold your tongue. For four days you walk on eggshells, careful not to bring up the man she lives with, cautious when speaking about your father. You give her a tour of your house, the street you take to the grocery, the bench you sit on while waiting for the bus. You say see how safe this town is? You want to convince her that you are living in a world without danger, before you talk about the danger living in her own house. You’re waiting until the last day to bring it up, for the right time to let yourself talk about the things that matter. In the meantime, you watch her face. You wait for her to slip up, for her to admit all the ways she’s failed to put her life back together. Instead, it’s you who slips.
Walking home, when you pass the deli, it spills out. You tell her about your father’s fall, the emergency room, how you thought it was a heart attack. She asks did you tell them about his low heart rate? Of course you didn’t, because you didn’t know. She says, when I get back home, I’ll send you his records. That way, next time, you’ll know. It all comes pouring out: how afraid you were, how afraid you are now, with his last will and testament and Power of Attorney papers shoved in their manilla envelope, stuffed into the back of your kitchen cupboard. She tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, says it’ll be okay. Maybe find a lawyer though, just to have them check everything over.
You drive through the hills you love so much, and make sure to tell her to look out the window.
“Look how beautiful they are,” you say. “They go from green to gold and back again.”
“That’s not gold,” she says. “That’s dead grass. You’ll have to send me pictures in the spring, when the hills are green again.”
You don’t bother correcting her. You don’t tell her that here, at the edge of the country, green comes in the fall. That when the new tree she planted in her front yard is budding its baby growth, your hills will be getting ready to dry back up again, finding their way back to gold. You don’t bother correcting her because in the back of your mind, there is still a part of you that believes you won’t even have to send a picture. Next year, your mother will be the woman you always thought she could be. The one who left your father not for another man, but her own apartment. The one who’s always wanted to see the Colorado Rockies, so she boards a plane and goes there. Next year, this version of your mother can return to California, to see the hills turning green herself.
The day before your mother leaves, you take her to a coffee shop in the city. You order a beer, an English Breakfast tea, iced, for her. You say let’s sit outside, because if people are walking by every three minutes, she won’t be able to completely lose it. You’ll have her trapped in plain view. The easiest way to get into it is to ask about your dog, and so you take two big breaths, and begin.
“How’s Otis?” you ask. “Is he still peeing in the house?” She responds just as you thought she would. Her shoulders shake, and she lowers her head.
“I fucked up again,” she says. She’s already given away one dog, you think, it was just a matter of time until the second was gone, too. You almost reach out, rub your palm against her arm, but you don’t want her to think it’s okay. You don’t want to forgive her before she admits there’s anything to forgive.
She tells you the man said that if she didn’t give Otis away, he’d have to go to a homeless shelter, and you’re slamming your hands down on the table. Beer sloshes out of your glass.
“That’s manipulative,” you say. “You know that, right?”
“I know,” she says. And then she tells you she has a therapist. Maybe for the first time in her whole life.
“I talk about these things with my therapist,” is what she says, and you know she’s trying to shut you down. You can tell by the way she turns and turns the ring around her finger, the same way you do when you’d rather focus on fidgeting than telling the truth.
“I knew he was this kind of man from the very start,” you say.
“How?” she asks. “How could you possibly know?”
How are you supposed to tell your mother that girls like you were born with this kind of knowing? You were born into a generation of girls who, three months old, cry when men try to hold them, and this is somehow a good thing — that’s what everybody says: Isn’t it good she knows to be cautious? What a smart girl, they say, that she’s already learned to be scared of men.
“Stop me when I get something wrong,” you say.
Your mother nods along as you recite the history of this most recent relationship. She winces when you remind her that three years ago, walking around your college neighborhood, she told you we never even fight, and he says we never will. You say that lasted for what, six months? And she’s back to nodding.
“He knew what kind of person you are,” you say. “You’re the kind of woman who wants to help people. I know that. He knew how to use that to his advantage.”
Now your mother is gulping down tea. The glass is almost gone.
“You deserve better than that,” you say, but you have to take a break, a breath, because you can feel a knot growing in your throat, and now that you’re speaking the truth, it’s hard not to let it spill out of your eyes. “That’s what hurts me,” you finally say. “I know what you could be, and you’re settling for so much less.”
Your mother needs a break, too, and so she says,
“Let me get you another beer. I’ll have another tea, anyway,” and so you let her take your glasses inside to be refilled. While she’s gone, you text your boyfriend and tell him you’re finally having the talk you’ve been waiting for, the one he’s told you to have every time you end up drinking too much gin and crying about your mother.
“Don’t let yourself off the hook,” he texts back, and your mother is back at the table before you can respond.
“Everything you’ve said,” she says, sitting down, “my therapist’s already told me. You’re saying the same thing.”
“Just because your therapist says it doesn’t mean I’ll stop,” you say. You finally have her in front of you, and you want her to know how much you care. “You know he has to leave, right? Does he even help you with the mortgage? Does he even work?”
“I know,” she says.
“And what about the cancer?” you ask. “Wasn’t he supposed to die?”
She shrugs.
“He won’t let me go to his doctor appointments,” she says, and you wonder if his story makes as much sense to her as it does to you. You wonder why she’s letting herself be so blind. You remember the way your father put his arm around her, the last time you saw them together, still married. How quickly her eyes darted across the yard to find where her dogs had run off to, how desperately she wanted out of his grasp. You wonder if this is why she lets herself go along with Mike, if she thinks this is all the love she can get in the world. You reach across the table, slide your fingers into her hand.
“I don’t have the courage to kick him out,” she says. “I’m working on it in therapy.”
“Say it with me,” you say. “Practice it every day. Say it to the bathroom mirror: get the fuck out of my house.”
You ignore your mother’s tiny laughs, because you don’t want her to think this is a joke. How easy it was for those three years to pass between the two of you; how easily, on the days you did not miss her, the relief found its way into your body that there was no mother left for you to worry about. And yet, she flew across the country. And yet, she’s been sleeping in your bed. Here she is, across from you, looking a little smaller than you remember, and you are, once again, filled with worry.
“Say it,” you repeat. “I want to hear you say it.”
You cannot help but be afraid that she is lying. That months from now, you will call and ask is he gone? And she will say things are much better now, you won’t believe how much he’s changed for me. You are afraid you’re not strong enough for her to lie to you. You are afraid that if you cannot trust your mother, you won’t know how to love her, and you are trying so hard to let love in. You see her lips part.
“Get out,” she whispers.
For a moment you are still. She is so quiet, you can’t be sure she’s said anything at all. So quiet that perhaps, you think, you’ve imagined those ghost words of grace spilling out from her mouth.
She parts her lips again and repeats the words. This time, you know she’s said them. You are as sure of this as you are of her shaking, bony hand in yours.
“Get out of my house,” you say back to her. She repeats you, a little louder this time, and then the both of you are chanting together. Get out of my house get out of my house get out of my fucking house. You don’t even care that the passersby are nearly gawking, because even if she is lying to you, even if she lies when you call her months from now and ask if it’s safe for you to visit her inside her yellow house, this is a memory you get to keep for yourself. In your chanting, you and your mother have created a space where the danger cannot get you. You have created a space where you no longer have to be afraid.
To get home, you take BART. It doesn’t cross your mind that this is another first for your mother until you’re fifteen minutes into the hour long trip, and her face is as white as your bedsheets. You tell her to look out the window, but she says that’s worse than a carnival ride.
“Try shutting your eyes then,” you say. Even with them closed, her face is tight. Without her watching you, you take in her face, mapping out the wrinkles between her eyebrows, the lines that scrunch and release with every jolt of the train on its tracks. You wonder how much of your mother you’ll become, how much of it is actually choice. She shifts as the hills disappear and the train enters another tunnel. In the darkness, your bodies rest against each other.
“Are we there yet?” she asks. Her head is heavy in the crevice between your neck and shoulder, and her breath warm on your skin.
“Just take a few deep breaths,” you say. “It’s just a while longer.”