Today my mother picks me up from school. She has a suitcase in the back seat. I ask her where we are going and she says we’re going to see the world.
She hands the map to me and I spread it open. We’ve seen the world before. She needs to feel the ground moving beneath her, needs to see the place she is disappear behind us. She’s happy on the road.
At home when she cries, her hair smells like rosemary and her skin tastes like salt. She says she cries because she’s lucky and happy and sad, because she doesn’t know what else to do. When I ask if there is anything I can do, she holds me tight, so tight that I know there are things in her world that aren’t about me, things that break her down and make her sob.
No, sweetie, she tells me, you don’t need to do anything. There is nothing you can do. I ask if I should cry too and she tells me, no, that is the last thing you should do. She smiles, caught off guard, when I ask her, what is the first thing I should do. I love the way she looks when she smiles. The lines at her mouth and the corner of her eyes, the way the sun pales and the stars recede in comparison. There is nothing better than her smile. I live my whole life for it.
So that’s why I don’t minding when we see the world. Out on the road, even when we get lost, she laughs. She sings along with the radio. We stop and buy boiled peanuts from a guy by the side of the highway. Then a little tiny pumpkin from a vegetable stand. She sits it on the dashboard and asks me if I think it will roll off.
She likes the parts of the year where the seasons change. Right now everything has turned to fall. She rolls down the window and sighs. The wind puffs in and lifts her dark hair out around her face. Something new is happening, she says, something old is floating away.
She seems hopeful but still a bit sad. I see her for a second the way she must look to people who aren’t me. I think I almost see her before she knew to know me. But then it’s gone. There’s a picture I stole from her photo album. It’s her at a football game. She looks older than I am now. She must be in college. She’s smiling and her hair is much longer. She looks like a girl who looks like my mother. But in her eyes, there is someone else. In those eyes now, there’s me.
When she smiles at me, the sun breaks through the clouds and lights the road ahead. I hope we never go home.
* * *
When we get back home, I’m behind in school. I missed a test and two assignments in Mrs. Powell’s language arts class. I have to make it up by the end of the month, I say, or I don’t get credit.
She says, that I learned much more out there than they did in that classroom. I agree. I tell her, I learned that I can eat more shrimp than you can. I learned that ‘the pier closes at dusk’ means that you have to climb over the railing to get on.
She nods and says, we had fun didn’t we. I can almost see what she’s thinking. Of the night sky and sea blending black into each other—the stars like silver glitter flung up into the sky. And that wind, lifting her hair up and out, something new happening, something old—floating away.
I ask if she will help me with my papers. Are they about the most wonderful girl in the world, she asks. I like when she does that. One is about Farewell to Arms, I say, and the other is about The Old Man and the Sea.
She shakes her head, my goodness, doesn’t Mrs. Powell know they wrote some new books in the last fifty years? What else are you reading this year, she asks. Next month, I say, we’re reading The Scarlet Letter. She laughs in that way that people do when something is less funny and more true. She says, now there’s one I can get behind.
We catch me up and she tells me that my language arts class is boring. I agree. She tells me to wait until I’m in college and then I can read the good stuff. Although, she says, I do like a man who loves cats. The next day we go to the animal shelter. We get a little gray cat and name him Ernie.
* * *
My mother doesn’t have any friends. Sometimes ladies nod at her in the grocery store, but then when we’re past them they smirk and whisper to each other. My mother knows they will do this and that’s why she doesn’t nod back to them. I have you, she tells me, and that’s enough. In four years I will go to college. My mother will have only the ladies in the grocery store.
There’s a man in town who I think is my father. I don’t have proof of this except that he watches me pass by on my bike with a look on his face that I don’t know how to calculate. He’s either my father or a pervert. Once, at the gas station we pulled up to the pump on the other side of him. He peeked at us around the tanks. My mother looked straight ahead as if there was nothing there but sky. He looked like he wanted to say something. He looked like he was sick on his stomach.
People make their choices, my mother said when we were back in the car with sodas and pretzels. I rolled down my window to let in some air.
I think when I see him again, I will wave.
* * *
Ernie likes graham crackers in milk. He does not like olives. He also does not like to be dressed in his Halloween costume. He doesn’t want to greet the trick-or-treaters and put candy in their bag. He wants to be out of his cowboy outfit and under the porch. Not very many people come to our house though. I’m used to this. A lot of people drive by, but they don’t stop. It’s like we’re famous or something. But in the wrong way.
A ballerina and Batman come up the walkway. And Brian from my geometry class. Here, he says and pushes a piece of paper in my hand. The ballerina and Batman hold their bags open for candy. Brian stands on the porch waiting for me to read the note. It says “I’m sorry.” I ask Brian if this is for me and he says that his dad just told him to bring it to my house. He’s a good-for-nothing, Brian says. What did he do, he asks, hit on your mom or something? I shrug my shoulders. Well you can have him, Brian says and tugs the ballerina and Batman back out into the road.
I wonder if I can.
I put the paper in my underwear drawer. I think the letter may be for my mother, but I hope that it’s for me, so I don’t tell her about it.
* * *
The day after Halloween I ride my bike past his house on the way home from school. He’s out on the porch. I stop by the mailbox.
“What are you sorry about?”
He stands up quick like he’s going to run inside. Instead, he walks out toward me and stops by the handlebars.
“Did you show your mother that note?”
His voice is soft and deep and sad. I shake my head.
“Good, it was for you.”
I pick at the place that’s wearing off on the handgrips. I don’t know what to say and I guess neither does he. He digs around in his pocket and pulls out a twenty. He reaches it out to me. I take it.
“Do you know who I am?”
I nod my head and he nods back.
“I thought so.”
* * *
At home, the kitchen is full of gutted pumpkins. My mother is carving a jack-o-lantern. They’re all on sale, she says. Let’s carve them all up and put the faces all around the yard. We’ll have séance and call up the spirits of Hemingway and Hawthorne. Can Ernie come, I ask. He must, she says.
* * *
When it’s dark we set the jack-o-lanterns around the yard. Dozens of them. Their orange faces flickering from within. My mother laughs out loud. This is the greatest thing we’ve ever done, she says. Don’t you think?
We spread a blanket down in the midst and lay flat on our backs.
Look around, she says, it’s eerie.
We’re eye to eye with all the grins and grimaces. Any moment I know that something magic will happen. It must. The brown leaves rattle on the trees and there’s that wind. Rolling over the pumpkin faces, kissing our foreheads, making things new. I reach in my pocket and pull out the paper. I hand it over to her. She unfolds it and holds it out in front her face. We lay there a while. She wads the paper and squeazes it tight in her hand.
Let’s call out the spirits she says and we sit up. She sits beside me and slides the nearest jack-o-lantern onto the blanket in front of us.
Put your hands up like this, she says and lifts her arms out in front of her. Like this, I ask and do the same. She clears her throat and lowers her voice. Oh stodgy spirits of language arts class, she says, show us you’re here.
We giggle and she nudges me to play along. I put on my best, fake séance voice. Give us a sign. Will I get an A on my paper?
Ernie comes racing around the side of the house and stops in his tracks. He creeps up on the fat pumpkin under the tree, sticks his nose inside the mouth and jumps back away from the flame. He runs off through the jack-o-lantern maze and disappears under the fence. My mother looks at me. Hemingway, she says and nods knowingly.
We giggle and call up the ghosts some more. After a while she opens her hand and holds out the ball of paper.
“Do you know who he is?”
I nod.
“I thought so.”
She gives the paper to me.
“You can talk to him if you want.”
I nod and fold the paper in a neat square. I reach it out toward the glowing mouth in front of me. I slip the paper into the smile. Smoke lifts from the eyes and the cut around the stem, then drifts off into the breeze.
Something new is happening. Something old is floating away.
Inkwell
Into the Burn
