A Blue So Dark (20 page)

I'm already running for the kitchen trash can as I crumple up the page. But this whole situation is so screwed up, once I've tossed my poem in with the old soggy coffee grounds and yesterday's newspaper, I need a crutch more than I ever have before. So I snatch up my last cigarette and the box of matches I hid behind the only cereal box in the cabinet. As I light the cigarette and take what should be the first sweet drag, I think about the mermaids. My ears ring with the echo of that awful smoke detector. And the smoke that fills my mouth doesn't taste comforting at all-it tastes like fury, like illness.

Like poetry.

Suddenly, I'm back at the trash can, fishing out my poem. I'm tossing it into the bowl and lighting the edges of the paper with my cigarette. Because it's not enough just to throw it away. I've got to obliterate it. I don't want my poem to exist anywhere in the world-even a landfill. Watching the flame engulf the page, I get it-Mom's need to destroy those mermaids. Sick as it was, I understand.

But once my poem turns to a wad of black char, I don't feel satisfied. It's not enough.

I suddenly know for certain I've got to get rid of it, this thing, this art addiction that's holding the two of us down. They-all the experts-THEYsay a drunk is always a drunk because the desire never goes away. But if boozers like the Pilkingtons would just stay away from the sauce, then voila! No more blackouts, no more projectile vomiting, no more delirium tremens, right? So if I got rid of the art, all the supplies, if I took away our ability to get wasted on our own imagination, our own creativity, couldn't I cure us both? Especially Mom?

I mean, they're the same, right? Creative and crazy. And it won't be easy, because it's the one thing Mom and I love more than any other, that makes us whole-but isn't that how a druggie feels about her needles? Doesn't she think it's the thing that makes her complete? The thing that allows her to function? And if all those people in A.A. and N.A. can walk away from the bottle, the pills, the powder, then Mom and I could walk away, too, right? Mom could tie her hair up on her head and get some job doing taxes, right? And never look back, and be the most straight-andnarrow gal on the block?

I race down the hallway. In my bedroom, I grab up all my new journals, every single stupid one. But these are still blank, I remind myself. So I'm racing to the basement, little whelps escaping my lips like I'm running from a maniac in a ski mask who's just broken into the house. I kick, I throw, I dig through the remnants of a life that had only seemed happy, once, to a little girl who didn't completely understand everything that was really happening. I pluck the journals from the floor, the old couch, the stairs. These books seethe with drawings and poetry-some completed, some only shards. Pages and pages of danger, carcinogens, poison.

Pages tossed at me by a dad I can't turn to. Pagesthat's all I have. Goddamned empty pages. Because people leave. And here I am, a dark hole that everyone avoidsWatch out, you don't want to fall, you don't want to end up down there. You just may never get out again ...

I'm so worked up, I don't even have a heart anymore, but a hot, pulsing fist of rage. I'm practically growling as I rush outside to the burn pile in the center of our yard-the chicken wire circle where I'd piled all Mom's torn-up rose bushes. (Joey was right, the garbage man really won't take yard waste. Besides, after finding those damned whiskey bottles, trash cans had become way too heavy, too serious. Wasn't it enough that I had to bear my own family's darkest truths?)

I toss my journals on top, then race back inside. Dart down the hall, into Mom's room, where I start to gather up all of the half-finished canvases she's tossed behind her shoulder, like a superstitious person tossing salt to avoid bad luck.

"I'm doing what you wanted, Mom," I tell her as I tuck a canvas under my arm. "I'm finishing it, okay? I thinkmaybe I just shouldn't have stopped you. Maybe, if I'd let you burn those stupid mermaids, maybe you wouldn't be here like this now. So-breathe deep, Mom. Because I'm doing it for you, okay? I'm getting rid of all of it, right? I'm taking care of it," I swear, desperation making my voice sound electric.

I'm all Hunchback of Notre Dame as I'm trying to keep from dropping the canvases. I pause in the middle of the kitchen to stare at the skateboard in the back corner. I know I should grab it, too-it's the same as any canvas, the way I've been aching to paint it-but it's not mine to destroy, really, so I dart past it, lugging only Mom's artwork out to the burn pile.

Back inside, I snatch up the morning's newspaper. I'm still frantically twisting pages into ropes as I seize the remaining matches from the counter. I push the glass door open, expecting the mermaids to start thunking against each other, just like they always do. It's like a fall down a dark mineshaft, remembering that the mermaids aren't on the ceiling anymore.

I light match after match, just like Mom-God, dare I think it? just like Mom. Only not-I'm not hallucinating. I don't think mermaids are trying to kill me. I know what's what. This isn't an act of crazy, it's an act to get rid of it. Right?

"Come on," I snarl, igniting the paper ropes. "Come on." The bushes have all dried, become kindling. Flames spread faster than disease. Soon, the entire bin is engulfed. Paint chemicals fuel the blaze, causing the flames to swallow each other, explode. The tower of heat grows and multiplies, gains strength, until it isn't a tower at all. Isn't something stationary, something cemented into one spot. It's a cyclone, spinning, twirling, threatening to break out from the pitiful chicken wire that encircles it.

I keep the fire inside the bin by wetting the grass around it with the hose. I aim the nozzle at a nearby tree anytime the flames get the bright idea of licking the autumn-dry branches. Eventually, the blaze starts to die, but my emotions don't. I've got millions of fire ants under my skin, eating me from the inside-out. Actually, once the backyard inferno is reduced to a smoking pile of ash, I feel even more desperate. Woman-at-the-scene-of-a-natural-disaster desperate. The earth has folded in on top of me.

I need to try something. God. Anything. No way am I going to torch Mom's old paintings, those she finished before she frayed like a shoelace (they're just too beautiful-it'd break my heart), but I'm suddenly racing back into the house and into Mom's room. It reeks of paint fumesprobably from her fresh mural-and my body heaves with tears, because I know, with absolute certainty, not a shred of doubt about it, that it's also the smell of her madness.

The mural is the painting I'd really like to incinerate. But it's not as if I can tear the wall off like the top sheet of a sketchbook, crumple it, and toss it into the burn bin. So I rip the lid off a can of white, and pour it sloppily into a tray. I grab a matted roller, dunk it in. Paint dripping, I carry the roller to the wall where I start to paint right over Mom's Bedroom in Arles. Where I erase it, like I want to erase her madness. Paint right over it, like a scab over a wound.

"Look," I say when I'm done. I race to the bed, try to prop Mom's head up. But her eyes roll in her head like olives on a plate.

I pace her room nervously, drop the needle on the record that's still on her turntable, and finally head into the kitchen to make Mom a V8 with a straw. As I'm coming back down the hall, I'm hoping, like an idiot, that the music will have perked Mom up a little. But when I get to her room, she's still in the same position I left her, curlicue that she is.

I crawl onto her bed. "Mom, here, this will make you feel better. Mom? Mom?" I put the straw in her mouth, but her lips don't tighten around it.

"Please, Mom," I say. "You've got to drink. If you won't eat, you've got to drink." I put the straw in her mouth again, but she won't take it. It's like I'm putting a straw through the mouth hole of a rubber Halloween mask.

And of all things, I realize that the record on Mom's turntable is still that damned Pink Floyd-the same album that was playing the day I came home from school to find Mom working, insisting she wasn't broken, wasn't sick. A day when I still had time, when I could think Mom only seemed as far as another universe ... now, she is gone. She's in another dimension. Like a comatose patient. Like the fucking dead.

A lonely acoustic guitar fills the room as "Wish You Were Here" begins to ooze through the speakers. But it's just too close to how I feel-I'm so exposed; my skin isn't just raw, but turned inside-out. I slam the V8 onto the nightstand and race to Mom's record player. I throw the arm to the side, dragging the needle across the vinyl with a screech that sounds like an angry cat.

"Enough!" I shriek. I cry and wail like I'm really all alone, like there's no one in the room to even hear me. Because there isn't. There's just me and this corpse who used to be someone I recognized.

Yeah, a corpse. Standing on the word makes me seasick, at first. But then, instead of making me feel rotten, it gives me an idea. Maybe not a great idea, but I'm grasping at the broken-off remnants of straws here.

"Okay, Mom," I say, pulling the crystals from her drawer and arranging them in a semi-circle around her bed. "You know what we're going to do?" I ask her. "We're going to have a seance. That's exactly right. Just like in all your new-age, metaphysics books, right? Like the time we tried to contact your father all those years ago. Remember that? You, me, and Dad calling out to your father. And maybe it didn't work then, Mom, maybe you didn't get to talk to him, but it will work this time-I promise. I won't giggle and screw it all up like I did when I was little. A seance. We're going to pull you back, Mom. We're going to get you out of no-man's land. We're bringing you straight back into the land of the living. Do you hear me, Mom? Just believe in it, okay? Believe in me, and these crystals. These powerful, healing, vibrating crystals. These crystals work, okay? You were right all along. Believe in every single word I'm telling you, because I'm going to pull you back."

There's no one else's hand to hold, so I just take Mom's hands. Mom's pale, limp fingers.

"Oh, great powers that be," I say. "Oh, otherworld, oh-give us the power," I say, my voice shaking like a bowl of Jell-O because I don't know what I'm doing, I'm winging it, and it all feels like bull. "Give us the power to return Grace Ambrose. Grace Ambrose, born April 3, 1970. Grace Ambrose, lover of peanut butter and bacon sandwiches, art, and Aura-lover-" My voice quivers- "of Aura Ambrose. We beg of you, please allow her safe return. She belongs in the real world. Her name is Grace Ambrose, and she's not dead yet."

But just looking at her, you'd never know that was actually true. The tears that have made silver stripes down my cheeks start dripping right off the edge of my jaw. And I can't even talk anymore.

When you are caring Jr oa schizo, it is vitally important not to neglect the other relationships in your family.

alf an hour later, I'm standing on the sidewalk in front of Zellers Photography. I stare through the front window until Nell steps into view. Comes into the front room to answer the phone. Says a few words into the receiver and shuffles some papers on a desk. Looks up for just a second, and gives me a double take. Says something else into her phone-maybe, "Let me call you back"?

I'm shaking. I want to run, but I can't; my feet are like gnarly tree roots that have worked their way through the sidewalk. I've torn up all the gray concrete, just like a tree that tears a headstone in two in an ancient cemetery. I've ruined everything, no surprise there-Aura Ambrose, World's Biggest Fuck-Up. Can't even take care of my mother, can't help her, what a joke I am. What a pathetic excuse. I'm nothing special. Nothing, nothing special.

Nell opens the front door of her photography studio and glares at me.

I try to open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I'm dirty, because who can bother with shampoo at a time like this? And I'm wearing the same unwashed hoodie I've had on for three days, and I wonder-who wants to be the grandmother of a girl like me? But I don't exactly have many choices here, in the corner I've backed myself into. I ache to tell this woman standing in front of me that we're like rungs on a ladder with only one step between us. I try to form the word-grandmother-but all that comes out is a pitiful, "Guh-"

I wish I had been transparent during those weekends I'd spent with Nell, working not so much out of a need for pocket money as a need to see her, to know what her voice sounds like. I wish she'd known all along that I'd wanted to get close to something that Dad had snatched away family. Wanted to know, again, what that gorgeous nest of a word really felt like.

This is a bad idea, I tell myself. A really bad idea ... How can I explain all this? And why would Nell want to help? No one else does. Nobody-not Dad, or Janny.

And besides, Never contact your grandmother. She put someone away once. I turn on my heel and start to head back for the Tempo.

"Aura," Nell calls. And the sound of my own nameit's like electricity, you know? Like I'm standing there on a downed power line.

When I turn, we stare at each other a minute, three squares of sidewalk and sixteen years between us. A lifetime ago, I could've been a granddaughter. Today, I'm a nuisance.

But Nell, her eyes get wide and fearful behind those enormous glasses. Like she knows. Does she? "How's-your mom-how's-Grace?" she finally asks.

I'm just so desperate-my face is wrinkling and I stinkI stink-and I can't take it anymore, so I'm crying and everything is wrong and I thought I could fix it but I can't I can't I can't.

"I think-I think she might be dying," I say.