Notes from Ghost Town (12 page)

The hot air plasters our skin as we weave through the spill of kids on the front deck—Raina’s not out here, either—down to my humble little Schwinn, still sitting at the bottom of the driveway. I fumble for my keys and jiggle them in the slightly rusty u-lock, throwing it in my bike basket when I get it free.

“Cool ride,” he says, putting one tan hand on my bike seat and the other on the left handlebar before I can hop on and ride away. He’s looking at me like I’m some new, secret species he’s discovered. “We’re still on for that date, right?”

“Sure.”

“Awesome.” His eyes go soft as he leans toward me over the bike seat. He tilts his head slightly to one side.

He’s going to kiss me. I let my face angle toward his, but when I look up—it’s
Stern’s
face I see, not Austin’s. Terrified, I pull back before our lips meet. “Text me,” I call out, hopping quickly on my bike—his face just beginning to register my rejection—peddling quickly out of Parker Rosen’s driveway and onto the side streets that lead onto Fourty-second Avenue.

I keep hearing Stern’s words, echoing through my head:
Why don’t you just go visit her?

Talk to her
.

You know who
.

S
ix days
.

I’ve only made the half-hour journey to visit Mom at Broadwaithe one, single, nightmare-inducing time before—six months ago—that made me never want to return again. Dad was with me. We didn’t talk much as the roads curved beyond us, lush with color, transitioning to wide, flat swaths of farmland and then the monotonous tedium of highway that brought us to her.

It feels different today, on a musty white shuttle that blinks
BROADWAITHE
from the little window above the windshield. I’m playing hooky from work even though Saturdays are prime park-going days. I didn’t even bother to call George and fake sick.

I stare out the filmy window as the Miami skyline—a trembling city in the scorching sunlight—disappears behind us. I peel my thighs off the sticky seat and pull my cotton dress further down to cover the backs of them. There’s no air-conditioning. I close my eyes and try to think hard about Stern—I could use the shiver of
him right now, the bone-chill he brings when he comes.

We’re getting closer and closer now, and my stomach is all knots. All I want is to rush up to the bus driver and fake sick and make him pull over, but I know I can’t—I have to see her, even if it terrifies me. I have to understand.

The shuttle veers off the highway and down a long gravel road. Then I see it, looming in the distance: Broadwaithe—the jail that’s held her for the past ten months, as she’s waited for her official sentence.

Everyone seems to go silent as we approach, as though sucked into the awful vortex of the place. I squeeze my eyes shut and I see Mom in the light-impression of a blink: long wavy hair streaming down her slender back, long legs as she ran with me into the surf, long fingers as she searched with me for seashells, the calcified bodies of starfish in the sand.

I don’t want that Mom to be replaced by the Mom I find inside, the accused-killer Mom, peeling skin and dirty sweat suits, with no ocean in her hair.

“Oh, honey. Livie. It’s you. You’re here.” Mom’s voice is raw, cracked. Her sweat suit is way too big and her hair is short. Choppy. Like it was cut by someone trained to make her look as alien and crazy as possible. She looks tired, and old, and loopy.

Mom turns to the guard for the okay to hug me, and
when she gets it, she reaches for me and pulls me into her chest. I don’t know why, but I go stiff in her arms. “Hi, Mom,” I mumble—it’s all I can manage to say before I surrender, let myself fall into her mom arms and hug her back, hug her so fiercely I’m afraid I might break her. My mom.

The guard watches every move we make from narrowed eyes. She’s trained to be suspicious. Mom has to get permission for everything now—to go to the bathroom, to take a shower, to listen to music—in the three letters she’s written me, she told me that every time; she also told me that her hands had started seizing up pretty badly sometimes and that it was hard for her to write and that there was no piano here so she couldn’t even
dream
of playing. It would be too painful.

She smells different, too, as we stand, squeezing the air out of each other—not like sweet plumeria and ginger and ocean but like something stale and acidic and overly sanitized, like a hospital hallway.

The guard nods to her from near the door. “Why don’t you two sit down now, Miss Tithe?”

“Come on, sweetheart,” she says. Tears rim her eyes as she pulls away, taking my hand in hers—her skin still feels soft. “We’d better sit. Tisha doesn’t mess around.” She laughs a little at this.

“No, ma’am, I don’t,” Tisha responds, matter-of-factly. I can tell she likes Mom, though; I could never imagine anyone not liking Mom—even in jail, where prisoners are
likened more to wild animals, or rotting garbage, than to actual living, breathing human beings.

Mom leads me to a wide, bland table, and we sit beside each other in cold plastic fold-out chairs in the cold white windowless room, empty of all decoration—a room devoid of color and music and light. In many ways, we are trapped in the same place.

She holds her hands over mine on top of the table. I still don’t know what to say—how to start.

Mom speaks first. “How old are you now, Olivia? Are you still in high school?” she asks, her eyes still watery as she tries to focus them. She clears her throat, seems embarrassed. “They’ve got me on so many … so many medicines … I—I forget things so quickly….” She forces a little laugh, examines my palm in hers.

“I’m going to be a senior next year,” I tell her. My voice is wispy, lost in the broad drabness of the room. “A senior in high school,” I add, just to clarify. “I flunked out of art school, Mom. Remember when I was in art school?”

“Oh, art school! Liv, I’m so excited for you. That’s so, so … exciting.” She struggles to get the words out.

“No, Mom, it’s not exciting. I flunked out. They told me to leave.”

She thinks about this for a moment, confused. “Well, I don’t like that one bit, Olivia. Not one bit. How could they kick you out—you’re so good at playing.”

“Painting, Mom,” I say, my frustration mounting. She was the one who made me a painter in the first place, who
told me I was special, and good, and that making art was the most important thing in the world. “Not music.
You
play music.” I stare at her hands. “You play really beautiful music. You won so many awards, Mom. Remember?”

She looks up at me, lips starting to quiver. “My hands—they cramp so badly. They won’t give me medicine for it, either. Not even tiger balm. The stuff in that little glass jar that smells like menthol …”

“Maybe I can bring you some.”

She shakes her head. “No. No, they wouldn’t allow that.” There’re more lines on her face than before—around her lips, her eyes, her forehead—a slight droop around the corners of her mouth. “I just can’t believe you’re finally here. I miss you so badly.” Her voice cracks, and she starts to cry. She was almost always on meds; they kept her even. When she wasn’t on them, she was in her studio, composing. If she’d cried or sobbed or wailed in there, it would have been drowned out by the constant music. I wouldn’t have known. “It’s the worst part,” she says, “and my hands.” She holds them up to me and I watch them shake. “I can’t even play, Livie. I can’t do anything.”

I want to tell her how much I’ve craved this, missed her voice, her music dancing up to me from the living room, her hand pressed to my forehead to check for fever, her mischievous smile in the middle of the night when we’d sneak out to the ocean to watch the waves crash huge on the shore. I want to tell her how little of all this I even understand.

“It’ll be okay, Mom,” I tell her, even though, of course, it won’t. “We can work on it. We can make them better. I know we can. You always know how to make things better, Mommy.” I scoot my chair around the table so it’s next to hers, and wrap my arms tight around her neck. I miss her so bad, from the curled-up center of me. My mother.

Tisha clears her throat behind me, taps my shoulder. I raise my face to look at her and she shakes her head. “Sorry, miss, but I’m going to have to ask you to return to the other side of the table. It’s for your own safety.”

“But she’s my mother,” I protest, “I’m fine. What kind of a rule is that? She’s my
mom
.” Tisha glares at Mom and, obediently, Mom moves her chair away from mine.

“Miriam knows the rules around here,” Tisha says, resuming her post by the door, still staring meaningfully at Mom. “And she knows what happens when she breaks them.”

I take a deep breath and turn back to Mom. Time is running out. “Mom—I need to—I need to ask you something.” I take her hands in mine and squeezes.

She clutches back, but shakes her head, confused. “What’s wrong, honey?”

“Mom. Listen—the night you were found with Stern’s body … you didn’t take your medication that day, did you? Mom?”

“I don’t—I don’t know what you’re asking me, Livie. I don’t understand what my medication has to do with anything.”

“When they found you, with Stern,” I say, my voice low. “You were out of it, Mom. I don’t think you remember what happened.”

“Livie,” she says, almost laughing. “Why are you whispering right now? What’s the big secret?”

“Jesus, Mom.” I pull my hands away from hers. “I’m talking about the boy they say you killed. My best friend. Your piano student.”

“I don’t know—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She glances around, seems to curl into herself a little, like a confused animal. “Do you need to use the bathroom?”

“What? No. Mom, look at me. You said you didn’t remember what happened right before, right? Right? Mom?”

“No—I didn’t. I don’t,” she says, her chin trembling.

“
Look
at me.” She doesn’t, she won’t. I lean in closer. “Do you have any enemies? Anyone who would want to hurt you on purpose?”

“Enemies? Why would I have enemies? Why are you asking such strange—”

“Someone set you up, Mom.” As soon as I blurt it out, I’m convinced it must be true. “You shouldn’t be here,” I go on, gripping her hands in mine, as I look around the cold, smelly, empty, blank-walled room, devoid of anything human, anything truly alive. She doesn’t get it. Something isn’t connecting. “You didn’t kill someone—you couldn’t have. You don’t even kill bugs. Remember? Don’t you remember anything at all? About anything?” My voice is starting to get shrill. Because as the words pour out of
me, I know I’m right. I’ve got to be. “You wouldn’t even let me kill spiders when they’d crawl across the walls even though I was so scared. You always taught me how everything has a soul, remember that? You believe that. You
couldn’t
have killed someone. You couldn’t have.”

She pulls her hands away, stares at them hard. She starts to shake. “There was blood … there was blood on my hands—blood. Blood. There was blood. Blood on my hands,” she says, softly at first and then louder, and louder, not even words any more, nothing I understand—rocking back and forth in her chair, covering her ears, pulling at her hair.

“Mom. Please stop. Look at me, just look at me.” I try to pull her attention to me, to pull her out of her hole, her delusion.

She quiets for a minute, staring down with a faraway, hollow gaze before she rips her hands out from under mine again to grip at the edge of the table. She leans toward me and whispers: “biscaynebiscaynefiftysecondbiscaynefiftysecond,” spitting as she does.

I shake my head and pull back. Her nonsense is freaking me out—and the way she’s saying it with such importance. She keeps muttering her latest line of crazy—it’s growing into a howl now, a scream, as her hands flail around her like giant twin moths—“BISCA​YNEBI​SCAYN​EBISC​AYNEF​IFTYS​ECOND​BISCA​YNEFI​FTY​SECOND—”

“Mom. What do you want? What do you need?” I cry, desperate, as Tisha rushes over from her guard post, pulls
Mom’s hands from her ears, holding them roughly behind her back. “Miss Tithe. It’s alright. It’s going to be alright.” She removes something like a baby monitor from the breast pocket of her uniform and speaks into it as I recoil in my chair.

Mom writhes and kicks, still screaming like an infant; Tisha tightens her hold.

I want to look away but I can’t. Can’t take my eyes off of her.

“You’ve got to calm down, Miss Tithe.”

But Mom keeps at it, eyes wildly bugged as she fights, greasy hair sticking to the wet on her face, streaming from her eyes and her nostrils and her open mouth.

Two guards rush in. I watch as one helps Tisha restrain her, and the other flicks at a syringe, rolls up mom’s sleeve, and jabs the needle into the flesh of her upper arm. I watch as her head lolls to one side, eyes rolling back, a string of saliva—like a spider’s silk—rolling from her lips all the way down the front of her sweater.

And then, I bolt. Out of the waiting room. Down the cold dank halls that smell of urine and antiseptic. Through the metal detectors. Past the small army of armed guards at the front door. Through the heavy iron barbed-wire gates. To the empty lot where the bus waits to bear us all away from this place.

I
sleep—a lonely, heartsick sleep—the whole musty shuttle ride back to the city. Mom’s in every black-and-white frame of my nightmare: her head lolled back, needles poking out of every inch of her face and arms, hands gone.

And then a memory creeps into my sleep: I’m a little kid, and she’s beside me in bed, a glass of red wine in one hand, telling me the bedtime story I demanded she tell me almost every night. I can hear her in my dreams, just as it was. Just as we were then.

“Tell me again, Momma. Tell me how you used to live inside the ocean.”

“Before I met your father, I was a mermaid. I floated along and I wished I could sing, but nothing came out of my mouth—”

“—nothing at all?”

“Nothing at all. Now close your eyes if you want me to finish,” she’d tell me. “But I had a beautiful tail, fins the color of the bluest sky, and I slept on the pillowy parts
of waves and waited for something good to happen. And then, one day, a god came to visit and said he had something important to give me.”