“Wow,” Cindy said, and paused a long time. She was thinking with her plastic glass raised in one hand. It was the color of her hair, and I remembered seeing, once, a mosquito drowned in a glass of my mother’s burgundy at a picnic, an end-of-season party for my father’s losing golf league. My mother had reached into the glass, fished the limp, winged thing out with her fingernails, and flicked it in my father’s direction when he wasn’t looking.
I imagined, in all that liquid red, that the mosquito had died of joy, thinking it had finally found the heart of God itself, and stung it.
“Where is she?” Cindy asked.
“Who knows?” I said. “I don’t.”
“She has to be somewhere,” Cindy said.
“Does she?” I said, spilling wine on my flannel nightgown. “Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she’s nowhere.” I smiled.
But Cindy looked serious, and sad.
THIS YEAR THE GRANDMOTHERS DIDN’T COME FOR Christmas. Zeena hadn’t called for months, and when she called on Christmas Eve, she didn’t bother to ask about my mother. When I told her my father had a girlfriend, she sighed and said, “Life goes on, Kat. You can be sure your mother has gone on with hers,” and there was an edge of prejudice in it like the blunter side of a knife—the kind of knife you’d use to pare an apple, nothing too sharp, but a knife nonetheless.
She said the weather in Las Vegas was bright and dry.
Marilyn sent a basket of fruit that must have weighed fifty pounds. The UPS man left it on the front steps—oranges and grapefruit and a fan of green bananas wrapped in red cellophane. When I opened the front door and saw it waiting, I thought some woman’s elaborate hat must have blown off and landed there.
That basket was exactly the kind of hat one of my grandmothers might have worn—ferocious but feminine, shimmering fruit and rubies—a hat like a minor explosion, maybe an IRA bomb left in a trash can at the train station, no one killed, just a warning, just one innocent man, a bystander, left standing near it, waving his bloody hands. A slightly violent, semi-edible hat.
In the center, there was a coconut, as hard and hairy as a shrunken head. “I LOVE YOU!!!!! LOVE, MARILYN!!!!” the gift card said in an unfamiliar, feminine, florist’s hand.
I weighed the coconut in my palm. When I shook it, the watery milk inside it sloshed.
May and I made Christmas dinner for my father, Phil, and Mrs. Hillman—the usual seared hunk of rare roast beef surrounded by carrots and potatoes. Rice pudding. Flour-dusted rolls that left everyone’s upper lip smudged with chalk. May even molded green Jell-O into the shape of a cornucopia with little squares of canned peach and pear floating eerily in the green, like goldfish in suspended animation in a scummed and weedy bowl—dormant and adrift at the same time.
I felt bored.
I missed Cindy, and our dorm room, and the happy routine of class, study, cafeteria—all of it washed with strong coffee and diet Coke. Phil cut Mrs. Hillman’s beef for her, and she chased the pieces with her fork around and around her plate, where they’d suddenly become animated as soon as she tried to catch one. My father complimented May profusely on everything she’d made before he ate it, and she batted her eyes at him like a cartoon Tweetie bird. A few times, I tried to catch Phil’s gaze, but it was locked on his greasy knife.
“Merry Christmas!” May ejaculated, and we all raised my parents’ wedding crystal into thin air to toast.
Toasting, I imagined us smashing that crystal so hard between us that it would explode in a shrapnel of champagne and flying glass, opening little eyes all over our faces and hands.
After dinner, Phil and his mother went home, and May and I cleared the table. She was wearing a sweater with a Christmas tree on it. There was so much yarn involved in that sweater, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if it snagged. Would she be spun around like a spool, some kind of battery-operated ornament, as that sweater unraveled around her? Would her spinning make a sort of wind-up music—play a version of “Jingle Bells,” or “Onward, Christian Soldiers?”
“Kat,” May said shyly, her arms loaded down with dirty dishes. “Thank you so much for including me in your family gathering.”
“Sure,” I said, too fast, and shrugged.
She put the dishes down on the kitchen counter, looking serious—as serious as a woman with a corkscrew perm and dimples, wearing a Christmas tree on her chest, can look. She said, “I want to ask you a question,” lowering her voice—though my father, by now, in his post-dinner ritual, had moved from the toilet upstairs to the bed, where he was dead asleep and couldn’t hear us.
“Go ahead,” I said. I picked up a sponge just to have something in my hand.
“Well, Kat.” May cleared her throat. “You and I have never talked about your mother.”
I squeezed the sponge. It felt like the sea creature it used to be—animal, and rank, dyed plastic orange to disguise it. “Not much to talk about there, I guess,” I said.
May thought about that, then she said, “Your father doesn’t say much either, but I can’t help but have questions. Kat, do you have, you know, any theories at all about what happened?”
I pretended to think, sucking in the side of my cheek and chewing on that. “Midlife crisis,” I said. “Or a boyfriend.”
May nodded slowly, pensively, then asked, “But where is she?”
I said, “I do not know,” pronouncing the words carefully, emphatically, as if May had already asked me this a hundred times.
“WHERE DID SHE GO?” MAY WANTS TO KNOW. SHE’S balanced a stack of white plates precariously at the edge of the kitchen counter. Outside, the wind howls. The windows rattle in their frames like loose teeth.
“I don’t know,” I say, watching those dishes, waiting for them to fall. I have my hands in the kitchen sink, which is filled with soapy water, and I can see something eel-like swimming in it, near the tips of my fingers. Suddenly, its tail licks out of the suds, orange and twitching, and then it’s in my hands—a live thing, tentacled. I hold on to it as tightly as I can, and push it back under the soapy water, press it down to the bottom of the sink. I don’t want May to see it, but she’s watching me closely with a worried look on her face.
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, I WAKE UP DRENCHED—THE salty heat beneath my sheets and blankets like a fire that’s been doused with sweat. Physical. Sexual. Oceanic. My legs are tangled in those sheets and in my flannel nightgown. Everything is wet.
I get out of bed, rocking, as if I’ve just stepped off a ship, and I feel my way in the dark to the bathroom for aspirin. From his bedroom, I can hear my father snoring, a human foghorn, a warning snoring across an ocean. I remember how my mother hated that snoring. How, over breakfast nearly every morning, she’d complain. How once she’d even said, a serious look on her face, as if she’d been thinking about it a long, long time, for two decades maybe, “I just want to put the pillow over your father’s mouth some nights, and let him suffocate.”
I flip the light switch, and the row of bright round bulbs above the medicine chest glows all at once, blinding me. My eyes ache with fever, too wide and dry for their sockets, as if they might bulge right out of my head like those small bulbs themselves.
The bathroom still smells like my mother, disinfected. Her perfume, too.