Milk (29 page)

“I think I'll stand.”

She perches on the edge of her bed, crossing a leg, one sandal clacking pertly against the bottom of her foot. “Do you want to take off your sunglasses, Theo?”

“Oh.” I remove them, squinting. I wait another moment before speaking. “You see what I have here.” I slap the folder against my leg a couple of times.

“What is it?”

“Aunt Lyla, they're letters my mother wrote. I found them in her recipe box.”

“The letters she wrote before she died.”

I'm so stunned I nearly sink to the floor.

“You knew about these letters?” I say.

“I knew about their existence. She told me about them. I didn't know where they were or whether they'd been destroyed. I assumed they
had
been destroyed.”

“She told you about them? Wait. I have to make sure we're talking about the same letters.” I open the folder and flip through, to find the letter about her, Aunt Lyla. “‘I was the dutiful daughter, so that she wouldn't have to be. To spare her. He didn't spare her.' She means you, Aunt Lyla.”

I skip ahead. “‘Lyla planned her own escape (more successful than mine, it turns out)—who needed college? She scratched herself to pieces to cover up the bruises, the scratching then diagnosed as eczema.'”

“Yes,” she says, “my allergies.”

“But bruises, Aunt Lyla?”

She shrugs, unperturbed. I read from another letter, at random, rapidly, “‘I know all your secrets—I share them, I am the cause of them, I have the wrists to prove it. Ragged scars disguised by tinkling bracelets, a gold watch. I have the throat as well, made sore from all the pills and the lies I've had to swallow.'”

Aunt Lyla interrupts. “Those sound like the letters. The ones explaining why she … killed herself, basically.”

I try to draw a breath, compose myself. “What exactly did my mother say to you about these letters?”

“She called me up one day and told me.”

My face flushes, followed by a wash of perspiration, almost pleasurable. An actual story about my mother, my mother picking up a real phone and speaking into it, words that someone remembers—a story truer, it seems, than the letters themselves. “Go on,” I say.

“I was in the middle of something, a luncheon or a meeting, ladies in the house and children running everywhere, so I might've seemed a little impatient. I never knew what she wanted from me, Theo. What I should do.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she was on her way to the hospital. I asked her if this was her idea or Hal's. She said it was her wish. She was checking herself in that day. I asked her if Hal knew and she said yes, he was taking her over there in a few minutes. Her voice was—breathless, strange, and I wondered if she were drunk or had taken something, were they going to have to pump her stomach again.

“You have to understand the times, Theo. Nobody talked about such things then. Maybe it was a fear that word would leak out, that it might make things worse for you children. Everybody in town would know then, so it was better not to talk about it. It was ‘Marian's going to the hospital.' That was all. We never said the words ‘suicide attempt,' or ‘breakdown.' And when she died, we didn't say she killed herself. When Mother called me to tell me the news she said, ‘Marian is gone.'”

She tilts her head to look at me unceremoniously, one eyebrow raised. No tears. It occurs to me I've never seen Aunt Lyla cry, not about this, not about anything.

“But about the letters,” I say. “What did she tell you?”

“She told Hal to put her bag in the car, she'd be out in a moment. She seemed awfully lucid for somebody having a breakdown, but she always seemed that way, around me at least. She never let her guard down, not even when we were girls. Anyway, Hal went out to the car, I guess—which, if it had been me, I would've never done, who knows what she was capable of? She might slit her wrists again or cut her throat.… But he knew her better than I did, I guess, in that way. So she told me, ‘Lyla, I've written some letters. They're for Theo. For Corb too, if he's interested some day.' I said, ‘Fine, fine. You'd better go along now, Marian. Go to the hospital, please. Hal is waiting.' I rushed her along because I was scared she was going to kill herself right then and there. Her voice was so strange, like a part of her had died already. I kept picturing a gun in her lap.”

“There was a gun,” I say.

Aunt Lyla turns her head sharply, taken aback, but not as shocked as I would think.

I still can't tell her what happened to Charlotte, so I go about it backwards, sideways. “My mother did know how to shoot,” I continue. “Her father taught her, and you, she said. He did teach you how to shoot, didn't he, Aunt Lyla?”

“When we were younger, yes. That was years ago.” She's threading her scarf in and out of her fingers, an eel swimming to and fro.

“He raped her, apparently.” How to talk about this? “My grandfather raped my mother, his daughter. Did he rape you, too, Aunt Lyla?”

Her mouth is just—open.

Sitting on my grandfather's lap. My mother sees me there, but I don't see myself. I'm four, shouldn't I remember? I don't remember sitting there or his hand beneath my dress. I don't remember his hand. His face. Nothing. Just evil. Just fear
.

“Anyway,” I continue. I can hardly breathe. “My mother was afraid. Afraid he'd harm her children. That's why she bought the gun, that and the fact she was crazy. That's why she killed Charlotte. She meant to kill me and herself too.”

Aunt Lyla stands up so quickly, she knocks the phone off the bedside table. “What are you talking about?
What in the world are you talking about?”

My hands shaking, I flip through the letters. I pull out that one. “She says so. Right here.”

I hold up the letter but she waves me away, placing the phone back in its cradle.

“She put a pillow over Charlotte's head because she couldn't bear to shoot her with the gun.”

Aunt Lyla just stares, at me, as though
I'm
the one who committed murder. “Please, please, stop. Why do we have to talk about this?” She opens a drawer, takes out a pack of Carltons, tamps one out. Click, click with the lighter.

“Didn't you ever wonder how Charlotte died?” I say. “Last night I—”

“Never mind, dear. You'd best get some counseling. If that's truly what happened, your mother …”

“But you don't deny that she killed Charlotte.”

“I'm saying I don't know.”

“Did your father rape my mother?”

“I said
I don't know.”

She rushes from the bedroom, sandals clacking, scarf trailing. By the time I lumber downstairs, there is a roast on the counter and she's peeling off foil. “Will you hand me the baster, please?”

I'm bumbling around in various drawers but before I can find it, she's gotten it herself. She squirts drippings all over the meat and rewraps it in foil.

“I heard what you said up there and I just have one question,” Aunt Lyla says.

“Yes?”

“It doesn't matter what I think. You know I spent my whole life going against my father, and Mother too, when she was alive. But the question is, what do you think, do
you
believe he did that to us? To Marian and me? Do
you
believe your mother killed your sister? That she meant to kill you?” She's taken my hands in hers, and I'm a child again with an ache in my throat, my heart, needing her.

It's like talking to my mother in my fantasies last night. Evasions, but of a different sort.

“Oh, why don't you let it go, dear? Get on with your life? Your mother and sister are dead. You are alive.” On her tiptoes, she stretches up and over my belly to kiss my cheek. I incline my head to receive her kiss, my head remaining bowed afterward as though I'm asking for forgiveness.

“And you're going to have a baby,” she says. “Isn't that what you ought to be concentrating on? On the new life inside you?” I'm nodding in agreement, exhausted suddenly. “Theo, where are you going?”

I've broken away from her and I'm hurrying, waddling, back upstairs to get my purse and my mother's letters so I can leave.

“Theo?” I hear her muttering to herself as I lug myself up step after step, my fingers laced under my belly like a sling. “Theo?” I hear the faint click-click of her lighter.

In her bedroom, panting, I pick up the folder of letters from the bureau where I left it. Uncle Morgan's bureau, I know, from various snooping excursions when I was a child. I snooped here as much as at home, in search of something having to do with my mother.

I close my eyes tight, then open them again. Everything looks cockeyed and bulging, cartoon colors. That breathing sound in my ears again, relentless now, and the snake feeling in my belly. I open Uncle Morgan's narrow top drawer, left exactly the same; Aunt Lyla hasn't disturbed it since his death, apparently. Shoelaces, spare change, cufflinks, a few nuts and bolts, an envelope of paper money from other countries. In the center of this drawer, in the midst of all the clutter, is what I'm really looking for—a small silver ivory-handled pistol. It fits in the palm of my hand, like a toy, the silver tarnished, the ivory yellowed.

The first time I saw it, probably when I was about ten, fright made me slam the drawer shut. What was it doing here? Was it loaded? Then each time I snooped after that, it was the gun I most wanted to see. Would it still be there?
Why
was it there? It didn't seem big enough to hurt anyone, perhaps it really was a toy. Did bullets even come that size?

I hurl the folder with my mother's letters across the room, scattering them everywhere so Lyla will be forced to see them in order to pick them up.

“Theo, are you all right?” She's in the doorway. “Theo! My God! What are you doing!”

I aim the gun at my head.

T
WENTY
-S
EVEN

Paper bag rustling. Something black, hard. Click click. A sound like when my mother works at her desk and puts new staples into the stapler. Click click. My eyes shut, I can't open them. Click click. I open them, wait. Outside green branches catch each other's arms and they sway back and forth, but what I see is brown. The nubby brown folds of my curtains, closed to the sun. I sit and don't move. Feet propped on the bed frame, hands in my lap, knees pointed out into the room, my scalp tingling click click numb. Sometimes by the side of my eye the black hard thing, then it's gone. Click click. Click click. My mother or the person who looks like her drinks from a bottle. She jams it in my mouth burning until I cough
.

Driving up San Gabriel Boulevard, I'm going sixty, seventy, eighty, cars swerving out of my way; I almost hope for a cop. To stop me, chase me down. Shoot me. The ivory-handled pistol rests on the seat beside me, so slender and tiny it might be a joke, but judging from Aunt Lyla's reaction, it must be real enough.

She had walked toward me carefully, talking gently. “Theo, honey, think of the baby. Theo, put the gun down now. Theo—”

I started to do as she asked, then at high speed I rushed toward her; instinctively she jumped aside. I ran past her downstairs and out the back door, clumsily, like a duck. In the pocket of my maternity dress was the pistol. Absurdly, I worried it would go off, shoot me in the foot, if it was even loaded.

I'm flying down the 605, radio playing, baby kicking dully. Every time there's a commercial, it seems, I feel a twinge. A contraction? Can't be, I'm three-and-a-half-weeks early, but at the next commercial I step on the gas, my hand tightens on the wheel, and I moan—just a little, I'll save the screaming for later, as the Chevy Cavalier eats up the miles between Aunt Lyla's and Newport Beach, where I'm headed. To Jackson's, though I haven't the foggiest notion where he lives, the address back at the pool house. He lives off the main drag, he wrote, on a street called—what?—in a two-story building, stuccoed and sparkly.

Great. Only a few hundred of those in Newport Beach.

In homage to Maggie, whom I have yet to call, I'm sipping from a bottle of Evian I found rolling around in the back seat, bought several days ago. Plenty of time, I tell myself as what must be another contraction starts: women giving birth in cars and taxi cabs are rare once-every-three-year occurrences, aren't they? Myths to boost the morales of taxi cab drivers, bus drivers, husbands. I mean, how many people has this
really
happened to? Instead, I think of every story I've ever heard of about women going to the hospital too early, their labors halting the minute they hit the maternity ward, their pacing the corridors, sitting in the hot tub, nothing. Their membranes being stripped, punctured, still nothing. Nothing for hours, days, Pitocin finally being administered.

Of all the drugs and interventions, Pitocin scares me the most, being trapped in a terrorizing, chemically-induced labor, a needle in my arm. Like the abuse itself. Already I'm thinking of it that way, whatever it was that happened to me as a child: “the abuse,” an ugly friend I have to take with me everywhere. The doll with no hair, humiliated and wet between the legs. Which reminds me. I am. A slick feeling between my legs. The plug, I'm losing my plug. Or else it's sweat. I'm sweating buckets, after all; it's over a hundred degrees today.

“All the time in the world,” I say out loud, to the din of the freeway, my eyes burning, lungs bursting from smog. Very carefully, I place the gun into the glove compartment, then concentrate on positive imagery: streams gushing down a mountain—no, wait, no gushing, no water. A dry hot desert. No, too hot. Fevers, infections. No, no. A big bowl of ice cream, frozen and inert—yes. I tell myself it's just nerves, I'm not really in labor. Everybody knows you don't have your first baby early. First babies are
always
late. I picture Jackson's face when he sees me at his door: joy, then panic. Me giving birth in the hallway, no time to make it inside even. Or what if he's not home? Giving birth with strangers on a litter of dishtowels, people speaking foreign languages.