A tatter of color.
A sharp triangle.
A glimpse of smudged light shining off the coffee table on a summer afternoon.
A leaf, a wing, a swaying branch, a fragment of black trunk, a brushstroke of bird’s nest before the whole tree’s illuminated—shrill, and undisguised, filling your empty eye with its dazzling razors and knives, an explosion of edges and circles and straight lines shivering.
Green.
Brief.
Movement.
Screaming.
You’d have to be ready for that.
THE SNOW HAS MELTED, AND THE MUD HAS COME TO LIFE: Trees and tulips, muskrats and possum are sucking up out of it with a sluggish sound, like some beast giving birth to a whole world—the sound of lactation, phlegm, and swimming, while in the muck something swampy and furred licks its blind young with a long sloppy tongue.
In the garden, there are hundreds—thousands—of baby snakes, sexual and twisting, stickling at wet nests of broken eggs and the fresh shoots of new leaves in the branches over my head, still damp and curled into fetal fists. I’m barefoot, looking up at the sky, which has begun to shed a fleshy, gray rain, then down at those snakes, eating their own tails now, when suddenly I notice my mother.
She’s under me, clawing herself slowly out of the thawing ground. Naked, writhing, she’s being born, sitting up, and it’s her hair I notice first, strung with the sludge of January, melting. Then she wipes the mud from her eyes, looks up at me, and says, “I’m glad to be alive.”
When I wake up, May, wearing a white nightgown, is standing in the dark of my bedroom doorway. I realize I’m drenched in sweat, and naked. In my sleep, I’ve pulled my flannel nightgown up over my head and thrown it to the floor. The sheets and blankets have been stomped down to the end of the bed—shed. May’s mouth is open wide, looking at me, and I am screaming and screaming and screaming.
IN THE MORNING I HEAR MAY TALKING TO MY FATHER IN the kitchen. She says, “Something’s terribly wrong.”
My father grumbles, guffaws. “She has a nightmare,” he says sarcastically, “and there’s ‘something terribly wrong.’ Haven’t you ever had a nightmare before?”
“Not like that,” May says, hushed and serious. “Not like that.”
“Well, I have,” he says, dismissing her. “Plenty.”
I hear something slam. Maybe he’s pounded his fist on the kitchen table. “I told you not to sleep over with Kat here. I told you.”
May starts to whine. “I don’t see why you’re so upset. I’m just expressing concern about your daughter.”
He’s shouting now. “My daughter does not need your concern. You are not Kat’s mother.”
“You’re right,” May says, resigned. I hear hangers in the coat closet. She’s getting her coat. She says, “I have to go to work. Call me tonight if you still want me to drive Kat to Ann Arbor with you tomorrow. Otherwise, I won’t bother you.”
“Good,” my father grunts.
“Oh,” May says.
“What?” he says.
“Nothing,” she says, and I hear the front door slam behind her.
“DID YOU ASK YOUR DAD WHAT THE FREAK-OUT WAS all about the other night?” Beth asks over the phone. She’s leaving for Bloomington this afternoon. Mickey left for Madison yesterday without calling to say goodbye.
“This morning he said, I kid you not, ‘I won’t have girls smoking in my basement,’” I tell her.
“What?” Beth laughs. “We’ve been smoking in that basement for five fucking years, and he knows it.”
“I know,” I say. “I told him that, but he just walked out the front door, got in the car, and drove off to work.”
“Weird,” Beth says, drawing the word out.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ll be back at school tomorrow. I can smoke myself into a stupor if I want to. I can smoke my way to oblivion and back.”
“Yeah,” Beth says. “But not with me and Mickey. Not in your very own basement. Not in Garden Heights, Ohio.” She sounds sad, like someone who doesn’t want to be where she is, but knows she’ll never be back.
“Well, all third-rate things must come to an end.”
“Or,” she says, sounding cheerful again, “as Phil would say, ‘All’s swell that ends swell.’”
When she hangs up, I keep the receiver at my ear for a long time, listening to the dial tone until the recorded voice of the operator comes on and says, “Please hang up and try your call again.”
That voice sounds far away, echoing across the miles, like a woman who has been living at the end of a tunnel for a long time.
Then there’s silence.
“Beth?” I say into the phone, but she’s gone.
I PACK MY CLOTHES AND SHOES AND BOOKS. IT’S AFTERNOON. I leave for Ann Arbor in the morning.
This time, I’m taking more things back with me than I brought home. I’m taking things I thought I’d leave: my photo albums, my jewelry box, my summer shorts, a straw hat I bought long ago with a big plastic sunflower on the brim—a hat I wouldn’t be caught dead in now.
I’m taking the pink dress, three sizes too large, that I wore to the winter formal with Phil. I’ve been saving it for years, like a memory, and I don’t want to leave it here.
When the suitcase is full, I get another out of the guest room, then I go to my parents’ room and open my mother’s closet.
It is entirely empty.
I look at the emptiness a long time, and try to see into it. I try to see past it. The way Mrs. Hillman looks into the vast whiteness in front of her all day, stepping carefully into the snow on the other side of herself, sniffing the air as she goes.
But the longer I stare, the more empty the emptiness becomes, and brighter. It’s as if I’ve opened a closet into pure space—flat, but cavernous, and shiny—as if, if I stepped into it, I could fall into the future forever. I stare, and don’t breathe, and step closer, looking harder, until I think I recognize a face in there. A woman emerging. A grown woman with her mouth open, wearing a white scarf, a halo of light in her hair.
I gasp, leaning in. “Mom?” I say before I realize she is only my reflection. There’s a mirror in the back of my mother’s closet, and nothing else.
When I hear my father behind me, I turn around—
I had no idea he was home. He’s wearing a suit. His eyes are dark and narrow. Why isn’t he at work?
“What are you looking for?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Well,” he says, “you found it.”
He goes back down the stairs, and the door closes behind him with a dry, sucking sound.
WHEN MY FATHER COMES HOME AGAIN, IT’S FIVE P.M. HE doesn’t say hello. I stay upstairs. We don’t have dinner together. May doesn’t come over. My father falls asleep in one of the green chairs in the living room, and I come downstairs to find him in it. He looks as stiff as a crossing guard, snoring. I go back upstairs.
It was a gray afternoon, but as the sun goes down tonight it lights up the horizon, dipping below the sky’s steel wool in an angry frown. From my bedroom window I watch it sink into the earth, making a black silhouette of Phil and Mrs. Hillman’s house. I think of them inside it, seeing and unseeing, sitting down to dinner.
A boyfriend. I remember. She told Detective Scieziesciez that my mother had a boyfriend.
And I remember calling them the Saturday after my mother disappeared, how Mrs. Hillman said, “I’m sorry to hear your mother left, but, no, I didn’t see anything unusual at your house yesterday.”