The house hums around us, excited at the prospect of a new visitor. You can’t have him, I tell it silently. I know he’s special, but you can’t have Judah.
I fiddle with the buttons on my shirt. “I’ll drag down my mattress,” I say. “You can have the couch. I mean, if that’s okay?”
He nods. “Do you want me to heat you something to eat?” he asks. “My mom sent over shepherd’s pie.”
“I’m not really hungry.” I shrug. He offers up the casserole dish on his lap, and I carry it to the kitchen. I stand at the fridge, out of sight, wishing I hadn’t let him come here. This was what the kids called weird. Like taking a modern piece of furniture into an old crypt, weird; fried chicken in a vegetarian restaurant, weird.
Oh God, oh God.
“Margo?”
“Yes?”
Oh God…
“There’s a man at the door…”
The casserole dish clatters to the counter. I march past Judah to the front door, where Howard Delafonte stands, just over the threshold, slipping off his raincoat like he belongs here. It’s Tuesday, I think. His regular day to come. The eating house groans. It doesn’t like him.
My angle is to hurt him.
“The baby,” I say. “Yours?”
He says nothing. He doesn’t have to; I already know. Whatever she took to rid herself of the pregnancy, he brought her.
“How do you know it was yours and not one of the other men’s?” I ask. I mention the other men because I want to hurt him. Let him know he isn’t the only one paying her for sex.
“She didn’t make me use anything,” he says.
I draw back, shocked. His confession is disarming. Intimate. I shouldn’t know something that personal about my mother, but it tells me so much more about her than her words ever did. Did she want to get pregnant with his baby? Maybe she thought that she could have him all the time if she did? That he would leave his life to raise a human with her? My mother wasn’t really into raising humans. Perhaps the eating house just made her crazy, and she didn’t care if she got pregnant.
“The baby was a girl,” I say quietly.
His face blanches.
“Where is she?” he says, heading for the stairs. By her I suppose he is referring to my mother, not his bastard baby. I allow him to run up the stairs. I trace the heavy whomp whomp whomp of his shoes across the floor. When he comes back down, there is a look of terror on his face.
“Where is she? What hospital?”
“What hospital,” I repeat, laughing. I look at Judah, who is watching us cautiously, like he’s wondering how to break up a fight if it starts.
“She’s dead.”
My father, by blood alone, stumbles—grabs onto the wall to support himself, and misses. It’s like the eating house moves, shies away from his hands, contracting into itself. He falls, his face contorted and red like he’s run a very long race. I watch impassively, the big hulk of a man on the floor, crying. He loved her. I am surprised. He doesn’t love me, and I am from her. She did not love me either. As I watch him, I wonder if someone like me, who has never been loved, is capable of it—would recognize it if it came along? And then I think that I would rather not be loved than to be loved by a man like Howard Delafonte.
“Get out,” I say. “Get out of my house, you murdering pig.”
And, when he doesn’t move fast enough, I scream it louder and louder until I am sure the entire Bone can hear me. Get out! Get out! Get out!
He crawls like a dog. Pathetic. I turn away, turn my back on him until I hear his car door slam, and the rev of his engine.
“You okay?” Judah asks.
“That was my father,” I say.
Judah is quiet for a long time. I don’t look at his face to gauge his reaction, though his emotions are so even, so fair and balanced that I hardly need to see him to know that he is frowning. Fathers should be fathers by Judah’s account. Even if they don’t want you, they should still provide for you. Like his did. Like mine didn’t. Never would. Do I have a daddy complex? I think, as I watch Judah watch me. No. I have a complex, sure. But it’s more of an I hate humans thing. Disappointed. I am so disappointed in people. It’s like they live without souls.
I feel it then—my mother’s death. I start to cry. Great, big, gulping sobs. My knight rides his chair over to where I am bent in half by my grief. Folded like a piece of paper. He grabs me before I can blow away. Around the waist, pulling me into his chair until I am half sitting on his lap, hiding my face in my hands.
“Shhhh,” he says. “You are worth loving. They just don’t have any love to give. Forgive them, Margo.”
I TAKE THE MONEY from the floorboards and lay it out in rows. There are piles of hundreds and twenties. I separate them and begin counting. My mother was a rich woman. Rich by anyone’s standards in the Bone. Seventy thousand dollars. Her whole life amounted to a rickety old house, a daughter she never spoke to, and seventy thousand dollars.
“Bravo Mama,” I say. I lean against my bedroom wall and stare at the money for a long time. Then I gather it all up and wrap it in her red bathrobe before stuffing it back under the floorboards.
Two gentlemen callers come that night. I send them away. Tell them my mama’s dead, and unless they have a taste for necrophilia, they need to get the fuck off my porch. The news haunts them. I see it in the whites of their eyes. They’ll be in a stupor tonight, going home to their wives with the knowledge that their whore is dead. Their wives will ask them if they’re okay, and they’ll make up some excuse about not feeling well, retreating to their offices or their bedrooms to ponder over my mother’s death.
The next morning I dress in one of her old flannel shirts. I’m shorter than she was, so it hangs mid-thigh like a dress. I pull on her Docs and catch the bus to the funeral home to pay for her cremation. I pay with a wad of twenties, and the lady behind the desk looks at me like I stole it.
“What?” I say. “Haven’t you seen a working girl’s money before?”
Her eyes get big, but she reaches for the money with her age-spotted hands and stashes it somewhere I can’t see. I can hear the clicks of disapproval she makes in the back of her throat.
“You get to choose her urn,” she says, motioning to a shelf behind her. There are prices printed on paper and taped beneath each jar.
“I don’t want her ashes,” I say quickly. The thought of being in charge of her burned remains alarms me. Too great a responsibility.
“Well, neither do we,” says the lady. “You’re the next of kin. Unless you want to pay monthly for a storage cubby, you have to take the ashes with you.” I sigh, glance at the urns again. I can’t just leave her here.
“The green one,” I say. It reminds me of the leaves she used to touch, before she became someone else.
The leaves and their varicose veins…
I squeeze her voice out of my brain.
“$78.21,” she says. I hand her all dollar bills this time. I wander around after that, searching the eyes of the people I pass, looking for answers.
When it starts to rain, I catch the bus that Nevaeh and I used to ride together, and sit in the back staring out the window. I’m not ready to go back to the eating house and all of her ghosts—the bodies of babies and mothers filling her mouth. The bus driver asks me to leave or pay more fare when it gets dark. I haven’t brought any more money, so I reluctantly climb off. I walk slowly, dread building.
When I get back, it’s dark. Judah is waiting on the sidewalk in front of the house, his chair angled so he can see me walking down the scythe of Wessex.
“Nice legs,” he says. I look down at my legs—so white they’re practically glowing in the dark. I don’t usually show them. Suddenly I’m self-conscious.
“You know…” he says, sensing my discomfort. “Because they work and all…”
I shake my head. “So inappropriate,” I say.
“Yeah, I guess…” He rubs the back of his head, his mouth cocked up on one side. It looks l
ike he’s getting ready to say something that’s going to make both of us uncomfortable.
“So, your mom—” he begins.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I start walking past him, up the sidewalk to the front door.
“First Neveah, now your mom,” he calls after me. I stop, but don’t turn around.
‘Yeah?”
“It’s just strange,” he says. “Like death is everywhere.”
I don’t know what he’s getting at. I don’t like the tone of his voice, the way I can feel his eyes on my spine.
“Night, Margo.” I hear the wheels of his chair rolling over the sidewalk, back up the scythe.
Damn the Bone, damn my mother, damn Judah.
Three hundred dollars a night, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. She never left the house, never bought anything. Had she purposefully left the seventy thousand under my floor for me? Fuck her for not leaving a letter. You’d think if you ignored your kid for half her life, then overdosed, knowing she was the only one who would find you, you’d at least have the decency to leave her a note. I go to her room, find stationery in her nightstand, with birds of paradise in the margins. It is so old, the paper brittle and yellowing, water stained in some parts, like she’d been crying over the pages. I sit down at the kitchen table to write her suicide note.
Dear Margo,
I’m sorry. First, for just ceasing to be your mom when you were eight and needed me most.
I saw you desperately trying to get my attention, and I just didn’t know how to come out of the fog I was in … for ten years. I don’t know if you’ve ever kissed a boy, been in love, or what GPA you graduated high school with. I guess I don’t even know if you graduated.
I’m a prostitute and a drug addict. My heart broke, first when my dad left, then your dad left, then when everything in life kept leaving. I should have fought harder for you.
You were worth the fight. I left you some money. Do something with it. Get out of the Bone!
Don’t look back, Margo. GO!
Mom
In reality, my mother would never have written such an encouraging note. Even before she changed, she was a pessimist. Back then she would have told me to pray, but now she would have told me that there was no God, and we were doomed. Might as well strap in for the long haul of a miserable life.
I go to her room. It smells thickly of blood and flowers, and it makes me dizzy. There are dark stains on the wood where their bodies lay. They’ll never come out, no matter how hard I scrub them; they’ve simply been absorbed into the eating house. I shiver. She was so hungry; she took two lives this time.
There is a box in the corner, the one the mailman delivered just a few days ago. It feels like more time has passed between then and now. I open it and look inside, but it’s empty. I start putting her things inside of it. Bottles, books, slippers. I strip her bed and take down the pictures from the walls. Then I carry her things to the attic. The place where she stored her own mother’s things when she died. The Irony. An attic full of dead mother things. I laugh, but it gets stuck in my throat, and I end up crying instead. It’s just me and the eating house now.
I PICK UP THE ASHES OF MY MOTHER AND MY SISTER on a day so dark it feels like the sun forgot to rise. The clouds are thick and heavy, charcoal-colored. I walk to the bus stop and wait with my hands pressed between my knees, the balls of my feet bobbing, ebbing out my nerves. In a few hours I will carry two urns filled with body—hearts and lungs and funny bones—all burned to a fine dust.
Today we are here, and tomorrow we are gone, amounted to a handful of memories. It’s freaking depressing. I don’t feel my grief anymore, not really. It was sopped up the night Judah pulled me into his arms and told me I was worth loving. I am only numb now, doing what I ought: walk, talk, eat, pick up ashes. Check! Check! Check! Check!
On my way home from the funeral home, I stare at the urns—one small, like a bottle of perfume, and one large, like a bottle of milk—both sitting in an unmarked paper bag on the seat beside me. I consider putting them on the floor, but then think it disrespectful. I wonder if when I die someone will put my ashes into a jar or bury me in the dirt.
The rain doesn’t come; it seems the sky will be all threats today. I carry my sister’s urn to the garden. I can hear music pounding through the open windows of the crack house—something angry and fast paced. Looking around, I see that the trees are mostly bare—nowhere pretty to put my sister. I am wearing short sleeves, and I shiver as I search the yard for somewhere nice. There is a bush near the back of the garden, close enough to the woods to be considered wild. There are some blackberries and bright, bell-shaped leaves still clinging to the branches. I lean closer to examine it. Is that…? Judah calls to me from the sidewalk. I look back over my shoulder, and he waves. He’s wearing a red shirt; it’s bright against the gray of the day.
“Let me be with you when you do this,” he says when I walk over to him. I press my lips tight and nod. Sure. Yeah. Who wants to say goodbye alone?
I wheel him over the rough patches in the yard; we hit a ditch that almost rocks him out of his chair. He is quiet when I crouch down and empty the smaller of the urns around a tree whose leaves bloom red in the summer.
There is still a body in my oven. I want to bury that one, but before I do, I want some answers. I want to search the house to see if there are more. Maybe it was the first of us—my mother’s unwanted babies—but why had she put in in the oven? Why not bury it, or ask the father to bury it? The baby in the urn would have grown into a sister. We could have been friends. I do not empty my mother’s urn near the baby’s. She does not deserve to be put to rest.
“What are you going to do with her?” Judah asks.
“What would you do with her?”
He frowns scratching the back of his head, and then looking up at the rain clouds. A raindrop has landed on his mouth and he licks it away.
“I like my mom,” he says. “I’d want her to be somewhere nice.”
“And if you didn’t like your mom?”
He thinks for a minute. “Leave her somewhere in the house. Seems like punishment enough, right?”
I laugh. “Yeah...”
“Hey, Margo,” says Judah. “You’re pretty tough you know that?”
“Tough?” I repeat. “No. If I were tough I’d be a normal girl. I turned out all crazy and shit.”
“And shit,” he smiles. “Well, whatever. I like you anyway.”
“Go home,” I say, standing up and dusting off the back of my pants. “It’s starting to rain.”
He blows me a kiss and wheels himself back on home.
I like that kid.
I bathe, and eat a little of what Judah’s mother brought me. I am still thinking about the berries I saw when I climb into bed. I have dreams filled with corpses and hollow-eyed humans stuffing blackberries into their mouths ‘til they choke. When I wake up … I know.
I am in the kitchen when I find my mother’s last correspondence. On the last Tuesday of every month, she’d leave four envelopes on the kitchen counter; three of them were for me to take to the post box: the power bill, the water bill, her cellphone bill. The last envelope was blank. Inside was always a list, written in her near-perfect handwriting, of the things she wanted for the month. Sometimes the list would have things like: shampoo, Advil (large bottle), crackers, bananas. Other times it would say: New Stephen King novel, tweezers, mascara (brown/black). She’d tuck a fifty in the envelope, and that would be that. I finger the envelope. What had she wanted this month? Did I even care? I rip a thin strip off of the top of the envelope and pull out the notebook paper inside.
There are only three things on her list this month. I look at the first: laxatives. Not an unusual request, but there were girls in my school who used laxatives early in pregnancy. The rush of wet bowels flushed out the barely fertilized egg, or that’s what they believed anyway. You could often see a bottle of MiraLAX being passed from hands, shoved in a backpack. A
home remedy that never worked. Also on her list is a request for a birthday card—(something masculine) she writes next to it. I wonder if it’s my father’s birthday, or one of the others. Who would she feel is special enough to receive a paper acknowledgment? My bitterness causes me to temporarily fold the paper. No birthday card for me. No acknowledgment. When my bad feelings subside, I unfold it to see what her last wish was. Written in different color ink than the first two items is something that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Tell Margo. That’s it.
Why would my mother write this on her shopping list she’d know I’d see? What does it mean? Had she meant to write more and forgotten? Tell Margo about…the baby? Maybe she thought I didn’t know about the money underneath the floorboards. I bury my face in the crook of my arm.
Howard Delafonte had his offices on Main Street. And when I say offices, I mean both the law firm and the wine bar five doors down that he’d opened a year earlier. Someone else ran the wine bar for him, and he had partners at the firm, but the ex-mayor was keeping himself busy. “Busy, busy like a bee,” I say under my breath as I watch him walk into the bar, a paper latte cup in his hand.
It is amazing what you can find out on the internet. A little trip to the Harbor Bone Public Library, and bam, more information than you know what to do with. There is no such thing as not airing your dirty laundry anymore. Anyone’s shit-stained knickers are just a web search away nowadays. Howard Delafonte’s knickers had a divorce smeared across them. I guess the Missus finally left him. And, according to the internet, his oldest son is addicted to heroin, while his youngest has an arrest record for battery. Between my mother and Howard, I was part of a pretty nasty genetic cesspool.
He’s in the wine bar for a good thirty minutes before he comes out—a paper bag in his hand. He’s whistling, though I can’t hear the tune from my bench across the busy street. I wait until he’s almost to his car before I stand up and follow him. He hits the electronic button to open his car—not the Mustang, I notice, but a shiny, white Mercedes. He puts the paper bag in the backseat, then opens the door to the driver side. That’s when I make my move. I sprint across the street and grab onto the passenger side door, sliding into the car at the same time he does.