Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories Read online

  Interviewer: Were you friends with DC?

  Emma: I knew DC, but we never really talked, but Lindsey had been seeing him for a couple of months so she knew him better than Denise and me.

  Lindsey thought DC and Kamar were really friends. I thought Kamar just hung around with DC because he had money. Kamar was something like three years older than DC. But Lindsey said Kamar was just using Terry, but he and DC were really close.

  I don't know what was true.

  After a while Terry showed up. I didn't know what we should do, if we should tell him or not, but finally I thought I should. Terry was sitting with his car door open, talking to some people.

  I told him Kamar got arrested for possession.

  He wanted to know what happened, and I didn't know anything but what Lindsey had told me.

  Terry wanted to know if he had a lawyer?

  I never thought about a lawyer. Like I said before, mostly it was easy to forget that Terry wasn't just a kid like everyone else.

  Terry called the police station on his cellphone. Just punched up the information and called. He said he was a friend of Kamar Wilson's. They wouldn't tell him anything on the phone, so he hung up and said he was going to go down.

  I felt really weird suddenly talking to him, because he sounded so much like an adult. But I told him DC was looking for him.

  "Fuck DC," Terry said.

  I thought Terry would take off right then and there to go to the police station. But he kept talking to people about Kamar and about what might have happened, so I gave up and I went back to sit on the steps with Denise and Lindsey. We were working on our tans because it would make us look more Egyptian and Indian. Not that I would even think of doing that now, even though skin cancer isn't one of the types of cancer.

  So finally DC came walking from over towards the hardware store and Denise saw him and said, "Oh shit."

  I just sat there because Terry was an adult and he could just deal with it, I figured. I'd tried to tell him. And I was kind of pissed at him, too, I don't know why.

  DC started shouting that Terry was a loser.

  I don't remember if anybody said anything, but Terry didn't get out of the car. So DC came up and kicked the car, really hard. That didn't do anything so he jumped up on the hood.

  Terry told him to get off the car, but DC wanted him to get out of the car and talk to him. After awhile Terry got out of the car and DC said something like, "I'm going to kill you, man."

  DC had a knife.

  Denise wanted its to go inside the CVS. But we were pretty far away. And the people inside the CVS are creeps anyway. They were calling the police, right then. Terry stood right by the door of his car, kind of half in and half out.

  Lindsey was going, "Oh my God. Oh my God." She was really getting on my nerves. I didn't think anything was really going to happen. Terry kept saying stuff like, "Calm down man."

  DC was ranting and raving that Terry thought that just because he was older he could do anything he wanted.

  Terry finally got in his car and closed the door. But DC didn't get off the hood. He jumped up and down on it and the hood made this funny kind of splintery noise. Terry must have gotten mad, he drove the car forward, like, gunned it, and DC fell off, really hard.

  Terry stopped to see if DC was okay. He got out of his car and DC was lying there on his side, kind of curled up. Terry bent over DC and DC said something . . . I couldn't see because Terry was between me and DC, Matt was one of the kids up there and he said that Terry pulled open his jacket and he had a gun. He took the gun out in his hand, and showed it to DC and said to fuck off. A bunch of kids saw it. Matt said that Terry called DC a fucking rich kid.

  Interviewer: Have you ever seen a gun?

  Emma: I saw one at a party once. This kid I didn't know had it. He was showing it to everyone. I thought he was a creep.

  Interviewer: When did you see Terry next?

  Emma: I never saw Terry after that, although I told the clinic about him, so I'm sure they contacted him. He was where the disease came from.

  I wasn't the only one to have sex with him. Brenda had sex with him, and this girl I don't know very well, JaneAnne. JaneAnne had sex with some other people, and I had sex with my boyfriend after that. I don't know about Brenda.

  JaneAnne and Brenda's interviews. JaneAnne was interviewed from her home in Georgetown, MD, where her family moved six months ago. Brenda is still living in Charlotte, with her mother.

  It taught me something. Adults are different. I don't know if I want to be one.

  Interviewer: Why not?

  Emma: Because DC was acting stupid, you know? But DC was a kid. And Terry really wasn't, no matter how hard he wanted to be. So why would he do that to a kid?

  Interviewer: So it was Terry's fault?

  Emma: Not his fault, not exactly. But he was putting himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Interviewer: Should he have known better?

  Emma: Yeah. No, I mean, he couldn't know better. It was my fault in a way. Because most of the time if, like, we're at the bowling alley and a couple of geezers come in trying to he young, we just ignore them and they just ignore us. It's just instinct or something. If I hadn't talked to Tern, none of this would have happened.

  Terry has different rules than us. I'm not saying kids don't hurt each other. But Terry was always thinking, you know?

  Interviewer: What do you mean?

  Emma: I don't know. Just that he was always thinking. Even when he wasn't supposed to be, even when he was mad, he was always thinking.

  (Music-"Solitude" by Duke Ellington.)

  Emma: When my parents found out they were really shocked. It's like they were in complete denial. My dad cried. It was scary.

  We're closer now. We still don't talk about a lot of things, though. We're just not that kind of family.

  Interviewer: Do you still go to parties? Still drink?

  Emma: No, I don't party like I used to. When I was getting the antivirals, I was so sick I just stopped hanging out. My parents got me a PDA with a minder, like Denise's. But I wasn't doing anything anymore. Lindsey still sees everyone. She tells me what's going on. But it feels different now. I don't want to be an adult. That must have been what Terry felt like. Funny, to think I'm like him.

  (Music-"My Old School" by Steely Dan.)

  Oversite

  t doesn't hurt, Gram," Renata says. My sixteen-year-old daughter pulls up her T-shirt sleeve to show her bare arm, the skin summer .brown and the muscle swelling slightly into smooth biceps, flawless. "I had it done when I was little and see, you can't even tell."

  My mother is sitting in the little examining room at the assisted living. Everything is white and hospital-like but there's no examining couch. There's just a desk, a little white table with two chairs and a scale. The doctor, a woman I don't know, is sitting in the other chair. My mother is bewildered, her face turned up towards me. She's got Alzheimer's.

  "It's okay, Mom," I say.

  She wants to understand, I can see that. So I explain again. "It's an implant that will let them know where you are, and how you are. It won't hurt,"

  Her eyes water constantly, now. In the time it takes me to explain she grasps and loses the words, grasps and loses phrases as they go past.

  She looks at me and then at Renata, who is smiling, and finally submits uncomprehendingly. We have worn her down. The doctor bares my mother's arm, where the crepey flesh hangs loosely on the bones. The doctor swabs her upper arm with antiseptic and says, "I'm going to give you something to numb it, okay?" To me the doctor says in her normal voice, "It's just a little lidocaine." I don't like the doctor, but I don't know why. She is no-nonsense. She has professional hair, lightly streaked. This is no reason to dislike her.

  My mother winces at the injection and is surprised again. She looks up at me, at Renata. We are smiling, both of its.

  "Okay," my mother says. What is okay? I have no idea.

  We wait for a few
minutes.

  My mother says, "Is it time to go?"

  "Not yet," I say. "They're going to give you an injection."

  "What?" my mother says.

  "They're going to implant a chip. It will help them take care of you."

  I try to say it every time as if it was the first time I said it. I don't want to embarrass her. Her head swings around, from Renata to me to the doctor and then back to Renata.

  "It's okay, Gram," Renata says.

  "Renata," my mother says.

  The doctor has an injection gun and while my mother is focused on my daughter, she puts it firmly against my mother's arm and puts the chip in.

  "Oh!" says my mother.

  It's another low-grade moment of horror, but I think about that particular time with my mother because Renata was there and we were united, she and I. So that's a good memory. I come back to it a lot. In the background, shining, is Renata, who is young and healthy and good, raising her arm to show her grandmother that the chip is nothing, nothing at all.

  The last two nights I have dreamed of dogs in trouble. I don't dream about Renata, although when the dreams wake me up, it's thinking about Renata that keeps me awake. The first night I dreamed of seeing a stray dog and not stopping to pick it up although it was wandering in an empty parking lot near a busy road. That was the first night Renata didn't come home and it doesn't take Freud to figure out what that meant. Seventeen year olds sleep on friends' couches, I know. Or Renata might be sleeping in her car.

  The second night I dreamed that I was on a desert island and Sonia, our golden retriever, was with me. There was some horrible fate impending for Sonia and I had to kill her before something worse happened. I laid her down on some sticks. She trusts me, she's more my dog than anyone's, and she didn't like it but for me she lay there. In my dream I told her, "Stay, Sonia. Stay."

  She stayed because I held her there by looking at her, the way you can sometimes will a dog into submission. She stayed while I lit the fire. And then the horror of it all hit me and I said, "Sonia, up!"

  And I woke up.

  That was last night, the second night Renata didn't come home.

  Today is Tuesday and on Tuesdays I drive from work to the nursing home where my mother is. I go to see her Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday and even though she doesn't know what day it is or what days I visit, I think maintaining the pattern is important.

  It's a nice place. The hallways are carpeted, and there is none of the clatter and echo, the institutionalization I associate with nursing homes. It's more like a hotel near the freeway, the kind that includes breakfast in the lobby. My mom's room has her own furniture from her condo- her gold couch, her bed, her little dinette table, the white ceramic angel that sat on an end table. She got the angel in a Christmas gift swap with her bridge club, but she thinks it's something inherited, antique.

  "Clara," she says when she sees me. "What are you doing here?"

  For a moment, everything seems normal.

  "Hi, Mom," I say. "I came to see you."

  She leans forward and whispers, "Take me home."

  "Okay," I say. My mother wanders. She tries to get away. That's why they implanted the chip. Its called a Digital Angel and it monitors her blood pressure and temperature and has a GPS so that at the reception desk they can track her. When she was living at her condo, the police found her in her nightgown and a pair of black high-heeled shoes, carrying an empty pocketbook, walking down Ashleigh Drive. It was five in the morning. When I picked her up at the police station, her bare ankles almost broke my heart.

  "Where's Renata?" she asks. She thinks Renata is still eight.

  "She's at home," I say.

  My mother frowns. She has an inkling she's missing something. She doesn't really know anymore that she has Alzheimer's, but sometimes she knows something is wrong. That she is disappearing. Plaque filling up the interstitial spaces between her neurons, her brain like Swiss cheese filled with fibrous mold. "She's with the babysitter," she says.

  "Renata is seventeen now," I say brightly, as if it were utterly normal that nine years had been absorbed into the fungus. And of course, Renata isn't home. I don't know where Renata is.

  My mother purses her lips. She senses I'm lying. Sometimes she makes the connections, and sometimes she is fiercely there, fully firing. She looks at me, her pale eyes bright, her Einstein hair flaring around her head. She leans forward. My smile is fixed on my face.

  "Take me home," she whispers.

  We got a Digital Angel for Renata when she was nine. There had been it rash of abductions, another summer of disappearing girls. Matt and I knew that statistically she was in more danger in our car. But while I was getting ready for work in the morning, I got into the habit of switching on Court TV and there was a trial going on of a man who had abducted it girl. He lived in a camper. He was fiftyish, balding and had a handlebar moustache like some character actor in a realistic Western. I would get into the shower and when I got out, I would dry off and come back into the bedroom, and absently pat Sonia the golden retriever, lying on the foot of the bed hoping not to be thrown off. On the television, they would be talking about there being no body. About how hard that would make it to convict him. About the girl's palm print found on the wall above his bed. I would picture her, leaning her weight for a moment to steady herself.

  So I told Matt I was going to do it, and he agreed. Matt is such a softy. I told him on the phone, and I heard him sigh softly, relieved. Relieved that I had made the decision that we both wanted, but both knew was a little foolish. We agreed it was foolish, but it wasn't expensive, only about a hundred dollars, so why not?

  I could track her on the computer on DigitalAngelMap.com. It's a street map, zoom in, zoom out, like the ones for driving directions, only Renata shows up on it as a yellow triangle. While I was at work, I could plug in her number and my password and see the yellow triangle that was Renata at 2216 Gary -the house of Kerry, her best friend. I left it up on my computer, running in the background, while I talked on the phone or did columns in spreadsheets. I'm a planner. I order parts for manufacture. Planning is an inexact science, a kind of art. If I have too many parts ordered, then money is sitting around as inventory-costing us space. If I order the parts too slow, and we run out, then the assembly line shuts down, and that's even worse.

  When I took Renata to the doctors to get the chip implanted, she sat on the examining table, frightened, while the doctor swabbed her arm to give her the lidocaine. I held her there with my eyes, the way I could sometimes hold Sonia, the golden retriever.

  Renata did not cry out. She only flinched.

  There is no trace of Renata on DigitalAngelMap.com. We were arguing. I told her to be in by eleven and she said she'd try and I said trying wasn't good enough. It escalated from there. She told me, You watch! You watch your computer! One minute I'll be there and the next I won't! You won't know where I am and that will kill you!"

  The kids wrap metal tape around their arms to cut off the signal. I knew that. I didn't know she did it.

  Matt says, "Should we call the police? Report her as missing? As a runaway?"

  I say, "She'll he eighteen in five months. What would we do then?"

  "Don't we want to send a message?" he asks. "Let her know we take this seriously?"

  "I think she has to come back herself." I say.

  "I think we should get the police," he says.

  "But won't they arrest her? She could end up in some sort of juvenile detention place. Or have a record. What if Keith has something in the car?" We think they smoke pot. We've discussed it.

  "I'm going to make some calls," he says. "I'm going to call Kerry, and then Keith's aunt."

  "Okay," I say, although I don't expect anything. Kerry and Renata have been drifting apart- Kerry on track for college, Renata going ... wherever it is that Renata is going.

  Matt gets in the car and drives around. He calls me from the park to tell me she's not there.

  R
enata has a boyfriend, Keith. Keith is short and skinny and has three lines branded beneath his lower lip, radiating like the rays of a sun. We won't let Renata get branded, tattooed, or pierced. Keith shaved his head for a while, but now he's letting his hair grow. Matt remarked one time, "Have you ever noticed how Keith always needs something?"

  That was the evening Keith needed a jump for his car. Matt stood out on the driveway, dressed in his business casual (Matt is an engineer) and hooked up the jumper cables, talking amiably with Keith, while Renata sat on the front steps with her arms crossed over her knees and her chin on her forearms, staring at nothing. Renata had dyed her hair black a week before. She was wearing a pair of men's pants, suit pants, charcoal gray. As far as I could tell she had stopped wearing underwear.

  I don't think there's a day in my life when I haven't worn underwear.

  When she dyed her hair black, she challenged me, "Are you going to tell me I can't dye my hair?"

  "No," I said. "You can dye your hair any color you want. You can shave it off if you want." I hoped that by telling her she could shave it off, she wouldn't. But Matt and I had decided she could do anything temporary- just nothing permanent- no tattoos, piercings or brands.

  It is a phase, adolescent rebellion, the process of separation. I want to blame Keith, of course. Renata got all As and B's all the way through middle school. Now she's getting an A in art and C's and D's in everything else.

  Renata is getting an A in art, despite the fact that she doesn't even bother to do some of the projects. Mr. Vennemeyer, her young art teacher, just shrugs his shoulders and says, "Of all the people I've taught, Renata is a real artist." When she was fifteen, he started an Art Club where he taught her to stretch canvas, prime it, and choose colors for the ground. Other kids do sculpture and collage and work with the kiln. Renata paints. Every so often she gets interested in something he assigns, and does a maze or a collage, but mostly she paints.

  She paints in our basement. I buy her oils and canvas and stretchers. Matt doesn't know how much I've spent on tubes of Windsor and Newton oils. "How can you paint in the basement?" I ask. "Don't you need more light?"