I’m writing about your mother and the brief time that I knew her. This was in the spring of 2003. We met at a motel just off the highway in western Kansas. I was running away from a number of different things, but mainly from the fact that I’d managed to get clean for real this time and suddenly didn’t know what to do with myself. I was twenty-six, old enough to know better, which I did, but pretended I didn’t. It was all mixed up that way. Your mom said she had been staying there with her boyfriend, some guy named Roy. I got the impression Roy was older than me, that he was running from something as well, but that his something was looking for him. She didn’t seem terribly surprised that he hadn’t come back. He’d gone to pick up sandwiches for lunch and disappeared. She told me all this the first night we met. We were open like that from the beginning. We were both drug addicts. I wish that did a better job at explaining things.
“You look like you could use a rest,” was the first thing she ever said to me. This was on the sidewalk outside the motel. The door to her room was propped open and I could hear the TV like I was standing in front of it. Your mother had on a yellow windbreaker that was way too big for her. She stood smoking a cigarette with her arms crossed. I smiled and asked her if she had another one of those. She shifted her weight and looked me up and down. “Sure,” she said, and ran to the room for the pack. I’d first seen her from the back of a van, the one I was planning on sleeping in before I saw her, the one I had intended on driving west the next morning. I’d stolen it from a man who had tried to help me. I mean with drugs, with getting clean, a generous man who tried to do what he could for me. I had his guitar as well, and the hundred-and-fifty bucks I’d stolen from him. I thought I could get there on that, then busk around, maybe find a couch to crash on. But I had imagined that happening in California, or Oregon, not Kansas.
“Here you go,” she said, coming back with cigarettes. “What’s your name?” We stood facing the parking lot, watching the traffic up and down the highway on the other side. I told her my name was Wes. I also told her I was on my way to play some gigs, that I was a musician, and that I had a group I was planning to meet up with. As I said it I wanted it to be true. She was young, definitely younger than me, but it was hard to tell in the dim light. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she said, nodding towards the highway. “That faint, breezy sound.” She leaned in like she was listening. “The sound of somewhere else.”
She didn’t ask me where I was from or what I was doing in the parking lot. There seemed to be an understanding that way. After we were done smoking we went back to the room, where she had pain pills, some already crushed, on the fake marble countertop. We got high and watched cartoons. “Didn’t you say you play guitar?” she said on her way from the bed to the sink. I said yeah, that I had one in the van. The room hadn’t changed since the seventies. The carpet was green and the blankets were orange. The mirror above the sink had gold veins running through it. “You should go get it,” she said playfully. I started looking for my shoes. She snorted what was left on the countertop. “It’ll be fun,” she said, pulling at the front of her nose.
When I came back with the guitar she was in the bathroom, leaned over the open toilet. “A little too much,” she said and smiled. I grabbed a mug and filled it with water from the sink. She thanked me when I handed it to her. Then she took a long sip, sloshed it around in her mouth, spit it into the toilet. “Will you play me something?” she said, scooting herself back to lean against the bathtub. I knocked some clothes off the room’s single chair and sat just outside the doorway, strumming through the major and minor chords. I played “Waterloo Sunset” and told her I’d written it.
She was pretty, your mother, with wispy blond hair that she was always pulling away from her eyes. I remember her sitting cross-legged on the bed, dropping her finished cigarettes into empty soda cans. She laughed a lot, a nervous giggly laugh that warmed the room around her. She told me about you that first night, leaned back against the side of the tub, told me she had a daughter back home that her mother was taking care of. She said that’s where she and Roy were headed before he took off. I had no way of knowing if this was true or not. I wasn’t there to question her or try to fix her problems. We were actively trying to forget our problems. It doesn’t work that way of course, but damned if we didn’t try. I didn’t know how long she had been using, but she seemed comfortable with the habit. I mean with knowing she had one, but also knowing it couldn’t go on like this forever. I’m sorry about what happened. I want to say that now, before I go any further. I want you to know that I’m sorry about what happened to your mother.
* * *
“Play me another song,” she said. This was still the first night. I asked her if she wanted more water. She reached for the mug, saying there were sodas in the fridge, that she’d rather have one of those. She said they calmed her stomach. When I came back with a grape soda she poured it into the coffee mug. “Whatever you want,” she said. “Just keep playing.” I told her I’d written all kinds of great songs. I was high and she didn’t seem to know the difference, and for a few hours it felt good to pretend I’d written “Ripple” and “Buckets of Rain.” I sang with my eyes closed and imagined still faces in a shadowy audience. We smoked cigarettes between songs, the exhaust fan screeching above us like an angry bird. She stayed leaned against the side of the tub with her knees pulled up to her chest. She knocked her ashes into the open toilet and smiled when I looked up at her.
“I think it’s him,” she said the next morning. I was across the room, rinsing my toothbrush under the faucet. “I think it’s him,” she said again, peeking between the curtains. She was wearing a long white shirt and pink underwear. “Come here,” she said in a new kind of whisper. She waved me to come closer, held the curtains for me to check myself. “The guy beside the green Pontiac?” I said. She put her face next to mine, both of us looking out between the curtains. It was hard to tell if she was scared or excited. She stepped back and crossed her arms, tapped her fingers against the front of her teeth. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think so.”
The guy standing outside the Pontiac was middle-aged, with a gray jacket and tan slacks. He was looking around the parking lot, shading his eyes with the palm of his hand. It was strange for sure, but he didn’t seem interested in us or the room. He looked like he was waiting for someone. “What’s he doing?” she said, nudging up next to me. She put her hand around my waist. “Is it him?” I stepped back, gave her a confused look. “How should I know?” I said. “I’ve never seen him before.” I nodded for her to take another look. We traded places, and she peeked out again. I went across the room for my pack of cigarettes. “Nope,” she said, laughing. “That’s definitely not Roy.” She pulled open the curtains. Whoever he was, he was busy making out with some woman in a red blouse, hands in her hair and the whole deal. Then they got into the guy’s car and drove away. Your mother turned back to me with a smile. “What if it had been him?” she said, finally. “What would you have done?”
Time in that room seemed to pass at another speed. It felt isolated that way. The rest of the world seemed held at a new kind of distance. I had done this before, when I was younger, with a girl who played bass in a band with me. She had an aunt who liked to travel on the weekends, and so we would have the apartment to ourselves. I started to think like I was that person again. Your mother told me that Roy had paid the week in advance. I thought it was strange, but I also thought it was good news. She was still worried he would come back. Every time she brought his name up she would scold herself for saying it out loud, like saying it would invite him, or jinx it in some way. I knew enough not to ask. I remember those first days as being blanketed by a soft light. The sun filtered through the thin curtains and heated the foot of the bed.
“I’ve never seen the ocean,” she said. We were on top of the covers, leaned back against the headboard. The TV was on some soap opera that was set in California. I told her I hadn’t either, which was true. “I wonder what it looks like,” she said, sitting forward and crossing her legs. “I mean, I wonder if it’s disappointing.” We hadn’t left the room at all that morning. I said something about how it probably looks a lot like Kansas, except blue instead of brown. I got up to change the channel. “Hold on,” she said when I hit the button. “I was watching that.” It had been raining most of the morning. It was early spring, and still cold. The room was starting to show our laziness. Pop cans were piled around the small plastic trash bin, pizza boxes and burger wrappers on the table, towels and shirts, socks, underwear, jackets, all piled around the floor in loose configurations. Stray ashes like snow on the nightstands. The housekeeper had already knocked once that morning. We were going to have to figure something out. With the room, and with the fact that we had a limited number of pills. “Play me one about the ocean,” she said from across the bed. “Something warm and sunny.”
“Whatever,” she said the next afternoon. “It’s not like it’s our first time.” This was out on the sidewalk, smoking and watching the traffic. We were talking about kicking, about trying to ride it out there in the room. We were high as we were talking about it, like we needed to talk ourselves into it, not that it was a matter of necessity. I’d just come off six months clean and knew how much harder it would get if I kept going. The image that comes to mind is a person swimming away from shore. With every stroke, there’s going to have to be another one to get you back. Everything becomes measured that way. “We’ve both done it before,” she said, stepping out her cigarette. “Like riding a bike.”
“You shouldn’t have thrown those fucking keys,” she said with tears in her eyes, leaned over the open toilet. This was the first morning without any pills. She was right. I’d thrown them the night before, thrown them across the highway in a moment of desperate conviction. In that moment it seemed perfect. Imagine a shirtless man running into the night with a set of keys clenched in his fist like a grenade. “That was so fucking stupid,” she said, coughing quietly. I’d gone to the gas station and bought two cases of light beer before we finished off the pills. It was an old strategy of mine. But for some reason kicking didn’t bother my stomach the way it did for most people. I could keep the beer down without much problem. Your mother wasn’t having the same luck. The towels looked bruised from soaking up all the soda she couldn’t keep down. “Just leave me alone,” she said, waving me away. “Just get the fuck out of here.”
The trucks blew by like bad dreams, roaring and spitting in both directions. The water was up above my ankles. It was cold and it was impossible to judge depth. Every couple steps I would stumble and then fall and end up cursing the sky. The grass was thick under the water and knotted towards the bottom. The air smelled like gasoline. My mind started to second guess where I’d thrown them from. Then I started to second guess everything I’d done up to this moment. But I didn’t want to go back into that room. Not without those keys. I was convinced there was some force keeping me away from finding them. I mean a force other than my own stupidity. The traffic held steady in both directions. All around me the world seemed to be flashing and screaming. There were moments when it felt like I’d disconnected from my body and hovered over the interstate. I could see myself standing in the dark median. I could see my pale shoulders. Then I was back down again, slapping at the grass like an angry child.
“Fucking impossible,” I said an hour or so later with the warm trickle of the shower running down my face. Your mother was on the other side of the curtain. “We’ll go again tomorrow,” she said. “When the sun comes back out.”
It rained all that night and into the next morning. I stood there watching it from the window, smoking a cigarette and wishing I’d never pulled into the parking lot. She was in the bathroom with the door shut. I could hear her crying from time to time. I knew there was nothing I could do. You just have to ride it out. Or get high again, which is what we both wanted to do. “I’m going after this next beer,” I said when she came back out and laid on the bed. I’d been trying to amp myself up, imagining myself crushing the can and jogging out across the parking lot, waiting for a clear moment and then crossing the road. I tried to imagine the keys in my hand, like I just needed to want it bad enough, needed to focus and see it to make it real. I was convinced the reason I hadn’t found them was because I hadn’t been focused. “I’m going to find them,” I said like I needed to hear myself say it. “I don’t care about the rain.” She curled her knees up against her chest and gave me a look like I wasn’t moving fast enough.
“She’s really sick,” I said to the cleaning lady the next morning. “That bad stomach bug that’s been going around. Better to wait a couple days.”
Your mother had said she could get more pills if we could drive into town. She said she knew a friend that would be able to spot her, that we might have to make a few stops for this friend, which was fine with me. We couldn’t stay in that room forever. My logic with throwing the keys had been that if we couldn’t drive we couldn’t get high. Simple as that. And it was true. But of course at some point we would have to leave. This had occurred to me before I hurled them across the interstate, but I thought for some reason that they wouldn’t be hard to find. I was thinking in terms of traffic, in the sense that I thought that would be the deterrent, like a barrier, and that the keys would be easy enough to find once we were feeling better. I hadn’t anticipated the height of the grass, the swamp in the middle. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“Any luck?” she yelled from the shoulder. I was down in the grass. It had just stopped raining a few minutes ago. I shook my head, said no, I hadn’t had any luck. She was wearing the same yellow windbreaker I’d seen her wearing the first night. She had her arms crossed. Her hair was tied up, but strands of it had fallen into the wind. “Let me help you look,” she said and started walking with her arms out to balance herself. I wished we were different people in a different time. “They have to be here somewhere,” she said, bending down and brushing at the grass. There was a glimmer of light through the clouds back towards the motel. We’re going to have to hitch, I thought. I’m going to have to sit on a bucket and strum that guitar, and she’s going to have to wear a skirt and hold a sign. I could see it as clearly as I could see the traffic coming and going on either side of us now. “Found them,” she said, jumping with the keys in her hand. “They’re covered in mud.” She shook them off to the side. “But here they are.”
Her friend lived in a brick duplex on a street lined with other brick duplexes. It looked like some kind of rural housing project. On the drive over she’d said to play along, like she was going to have to lay a story on this friend. I knew something about that, and so I told her no problem. I’d suggested cleaning up before we drove, but we went straight from the highway to the van. My jeans had mud up to the knees. The friend’s name was Jody and she was in a wheelchair, like one of those mechanical things with three wheels and a joystick on the arm. She had a plastic bag hanging off one side. The house was dark and smelled like a cat box. There was one of those carpeted towers in the corner of the living room, but I hadn’t seen any cats. “It’s really bad today,” your mother said, rubbing at her temples. She was talking about migraines. The funny thing was Jody didn’t look like the kind you had to lie to. She didn’t even ask us what we were there for, didn’t even bother with any of that, just wheeled herself across the living room to the kitchen table. “These here are for tomorrow,” Jody said, pointing to a piece of paper that had addresses listed on it. “They’ll be expecting you.” I never had to say a word. We were back in the van in fifteen minutes with a bag of scripts.
By the time we got back to the motel the sun was out. Everything was still wet, but now it had a sheen to it. After leaving Jody’s place, we’d pulled into an empty stall at the carwash and crushed the pills on the back of a CD case. By the time we got back to the motel the world felt warm and accommodating. I put the van in park and then reached into the console for cigarettes. “Shit,” she said and ducked in her seat. “Shit, shit, shit.” I thought she had hurt herself, like burned or cut herself somehow. “Roy,” she said before I could ask. I looked out across the hood. He stood facing our room like he was trying to look through the space between the curtains.
He was older than me, probably in his mid-thirties, had on a white shirt rolled up at the sleeves and faded tattoos up and down his arms. “Did he see?” she said in a whisper. “Is he looking at us?” I shook my head slowly, told her not to move. I said I was going to get out and check the tires and then get back in. I could’ve just driven off, but I thought somehow that would be too obvious. That seems insane now, but that’s what I thought. She nodded that she understood, and I opened the door and stepped out. Roy glanced back at me but he didn’t turn all the way around. I checked the pressure on both front tires and then got back in. She was kneeling on the floorboard with her arms propped against the seat. Her eyes were wide and locked on me. She wasn’t shaking, but she was frightened. After we pulled out she climbed back up and lit a cigarette. “I’m tired of this shit,” she said, reaching to knock her ashes out the open window.
We ended up at the Sonic not far from the motel. I pulled into the last spot next to the dumpster. “We should get something,” she said. We hadn’t said much. I think we were both still catching our breath. The weather had cleared up nicely and the rainy morning felt like a long time ago. “A limeade or whatever,” she said, and then looked away. There was something about seeing Roy outside the room that had broken our spirit. I rolled down the window and hit the red button. “You want anything weird in it?” I said, meaning the limeade. She said just cherry, a small one was fine. The girl brought it out a couple minutes later. The parking lot backed up against a patch of grass that became the backyard for an apartment complex. It was one of those spaces that had just been left there between two other buildings. “They put too much ice in these things,” she said, moving the straw up and down. There was a silence where I should have started the van and just driven off in any direction, but I didn’t. “He won’t be back tonight,” she said. “He’ll start drinking soon. He doesn’t leave when he drinks.”
When we got back to the room the sun was almost down. I parked the van on the other side of the lot and sat there a minute to make sure nobody was waiting for us. The room was exactly how we had left it, meaning cans and napkins and cigarette packs and whatever else piled on the table and over and around the trash bin. The white sheets were wadded on the floor like a pile of melting snow. We were back to the beginning. We didn’t talk about that of course. We tried to just be excited about the pills. But there was a new edge to things, a quiet irritation, or maybe an acknowledgment that we were going to have to do it all over again. Your mother tossed her yellow windbreaker on the unmade bed and went to get a drink of water from the sink. We crushed a few pills on the counter and snorted them with a piece of straw cut from the Sonic cup.
“Kicking is the worst,” she said, lighting a cigarette and stepping into the bathroom. She faced me through the doorway, smoke curling up towards the exhaust fan. “I thought I was going to lose it there for a while.” She smiled and ashed into the toilet. “I’m glad we found those keys.” She looked up at me and laughed. “That was fucking crazy out there,” she said. I heard a car cruise by outside and my head snapped towards the door. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “He won’t be back tonight.”
An hour later we were in the shower together, letting the steam clear our heads. I was on the edge with my elbows on my knees. She was cross-legged in the tub by the drain. We had the water angled up against the tile. It had been her idea to take a hot shower. We’d been sitting in silence for the last few minutes, letting our hair hang wet over our faces. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get out of this room without going through Roy. Maybe not tonight, but sometime. When we had pulled up, he was staring into the room. I had a feeling the reason he hadn’t turned around was because he’d been watching us in the reflection. I thought he’d seen us for sure. In the moment I’d been high and surprised and thought we’d just gotten lucky, but now, thinking about it in the shower, I was sure that he’d been watching. “Do you ever wish you were someone else?” she asked in a way that was hard to read. She leaned against the side of the tub and pulled her knees up against her chest. I said of course, all the time. “Me too,” she said, and then ran her finger absently along the wet tile. “I wish I could try again. Start over from the beginning.” I agreed, said that would be nice. I made a joke about how if I could go back I wouldn’t have thrown the keys. “But then you wouldn’t be here now,” she said in a way that was supposed to make me feel better.
She sat on the edge of the bed and I leaned against the headboard with the guitar across my lap. The only light was the one above the sink. I remember playing “Thirteen” and my own jumbled version of “Sweet Thing.” In between songs we would smoke another cigarette and crush another pill. I noticed her eyes kept moving towards the window. I wondered if she really thought Roy wasn’t coming back, or if she hoped that maybe he would, that she had wanted him to see me, had wanted him to see her with another guy. But of course it could’ve been the other way around. She could’ve been imagining her and I leaving, getting out of there and driving wherever she wanted to go. She could’ve imagined any number of things.
“We need to tidy this place tomorrow,” she said, leaning over the side of the bed for something on the floor. She was wearing one of my flannel shirts that hung almost to her knees. I had on a pair of Roy’s jeans and an old t-shirt. Everything else was scattered around in piles on the floor. She stood up on the bed, balanced herself a second, and then pretended to survey the room. “It’s out there somewhere,” she said. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but she said it like it was supposed to be funny. “We’ve just got to keep searching.” Then she hopped off the edge of the bed and turned on the TV. I asked her for a cigarette and she went to grab our pack off the sink. “Let’s do another one,” she said. “Just a quick one.”
I woke with a jolt in the night. The TV was still on, but I was sure I’d heard something outside. A car door, a footstep, something. I stayed quiet, as quiet as I could, listening. Your mother was beside me, wrapped under the covers. I kept my eyes on the window. There was a faint light through the edges of the curtains, and I imagined Roy standing just outside the door with a flashlight at his side. I could hear the highway like a breeze. I ran both of my palms the length of my face. Then thought I heard something else. Shoes, I thought. Feet turning against the concrete, but it was faint and the TV was still on. I started to doubt myself, to tell myself I had imagined the sound. I slid off the bed and stepped carefully over to the window. I took a breath and peeked slowly around the curtains. I couldn’t see much, but if Roy had been standing there with a flashlight I would’ve seen him. The concrete looked shiny in the dim light. Then I thought I heard your mother rustle under the covers. I asked quietly if she’d heard anything strange. She didn’t answer. I turned the TV down. I asked again if she had heard anything. There was an orange script bottle open on the nightstand that I didn’t remember from the night before. The silence was impossible. I knew what I was looking at, but I didn’t want to believe it. I just stood there motionless beside the bed for what felt like an hour. I said her name again. I said it a few more times. Then I touched her neck gently to make sure.
I thought about cops and paramedics and forms and questions. I thought about the cool metal around my wrists, glass with wire caging between the panes. I thought about that and I thought about Roy and Jody and everything I didn’t know how to answer. I told myself it wasn’t my responsibility. I told myself it wasn’t my fault, and grabbed my flannel off the back of the chair, the bag of scripts off the sink. I found my jeans at the foot of the bed, my shoes, my cigarettes, and I walked out into the cold. There wasn’t anyone else in sight. I told myself it was fate that I’d woken up when I did, that it all meant something that I didn’t understand. I told myself this all the way across the parking lot. I told myself there wasn’t anything more I could do, that it was out of my hands, but when I got in the van I didn’t believe any of it.
I started with the towels, the white ones piled under the sink. I grabbed those and tucked them under my arm. I stood there a second, looking around at the room, then I went and tossed them in the shower. I went back and grabbed the ashtrays and emptied them into the toilet. After that, I grabbed the trash bin. When I dumped it into the shower the cans echoed like rocks in a canyon. Then I took one of Roy’s dirty shirts and rinsed it in the sink. I used the wet shirt to wipe ashes and spilled soda off the end tables. I rinsed it again and got down on my hands and knees and started scrubbing at the carpet. I scrubbed with balled fists. I tried to shove the mud out of the carpet. After a few minutes, I grabbed the empty trash bin and took it to the sink, propped it under the faucet and turned it on. Then I went to the bathroom and grabbed one of the little bottles of shampoo and dumped that under the running water. There wasn’t a shortage of things to use as rags, and I grabbed a bath towel and soaked it in the soapy water before starting back on the carpet. I could hear my heartbeat in my throat. A couple times I went to the window and checked to make sure no one was outside. My mind had gone back to thinking maybe I’d just missed him, but every time I looked out it was the same empty sidewalk, the same vacant cars around the parking lot. The only sound was the hum of the traffic. I straightened the lone picture on the wall. I pushed the chairs back under the single table. Before I left, I pulled the sheets across your mother’s shoulders. I tucked in both sides and then grabbed the orange blanket, which I shook out near the sink before laying it across the bed. I straightened my pillow and brushed the wrinkles out of the cover. I told her then that I was sorry. I said it out loud to her there in the room.
When I left it was cool and the sun was stuck behind a thin wall of clouds. The parking lot was damp and quiet. The highway whistled in the dim light of morning. I wanted a cup of coffee. I wanted to be far away from where I was, with a different mind full of different memories. I wanted to sneak into another world where no one knew me. I wanted there to be another explanation.
“Can I get anything else for you?” the waitress said after she refilled my coffee. The morning sun fell across the table like a streak of paint. This was on my way back. I’d driven an hour east before stopping. I had a stomach full of pills. What was left of the bag was sitting under the seat in the parking lot. “You want some eggs?” She brushed at the front of her apron. “Toast maybe?” When she brought the toast a few minutes later I was leaned over the table with my head in my hands. When I’d first left the motel room I still had the adrenaline kicking through my system. I had the sunrise and the van and the idea that I was still alive for a reason. “Is it about a girl?” the waitress said now, nudging the plate of toast towards me. She looked around a second and then slid in to sit across from me. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. There was a silence where I sat back and crossed my arms. “But it will pass,” she said. The door chimed twice and she got up slowly to greet the customers. “You’ll forget about her,” she said, turning back to me. She tapped her fingernails on the table. “Pretty soon it will be like you never even knew her.”
That didn’t happen. I wanted it to. I wanted a lot of things. I wanted it all to be Roy’s fault. I wanted him to be the villain. I wanted to think he was the reason she was there in the first place, the reason she had that bottle sitting beside the bed. He was the reason she didn’t wake up. I wanted to believe it was that simple, and so I did. I believed it because I didn’t forget. There are times when I think about it now, and I think it was all beyond my control. I imagine all kinds of scenarios where I did everything I could. I imagine different versions of Roy, all of them terrible, all of them to blame for everything. But if she had never met me then Roy would have come back, and most likely they would have left together. In these moments, I think maybe I have it all backwards. I think maybe he was supposed to save her from me. I think about that parking lot outside the motel, about the two of them walking with their bags over their shoulders. I think about her hair blowing in the wind, the sunset hanging on the horizon. I think maybe I was the problem. I think maybe I was the worst thing to ever happen to her.
Scott Ditzler is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his fiction has previously appeared in Story, New Letters, december, and Crazyhorse, among other journals. He lives in Duluth, MN with his wife and cat.
Photo by: Thomas Martinsen