Three: Visiting Mom
***
Keltie would never be sure of her sanity again.
That was a given, no matter what the school psychiatrist said, or the councilors (who spoke to her for the rest of that summer as if to a newborn baby, all coos and compassion), or the girls in her gymnastics class. Thoughts and feelings could no longer be trusted. Her eyes had become fabulists. Every shadowy corner held a secret, every empty staircase, a phantom. At night, strange noises came from the hallway outside her room. During the day, giggles from the other girls became lunatic laughter. And the storage area in the basement, where councilors sometimes sent the kids to fetch decorations for the holidays? Forget it.
Keltieeee, her mind whispered in a raspy voice when she tried to go to sleep. Keltieeee, it whispered some more as she read a book, or washed dishes in the cafeteria.
It was enough to drive a girl insane.
“You’re not going insane,” the psychiatrist assured one hot afternoon. “It doesn’t work that way. The mind doesn’t just break. It takes years, Keltie. Assuming of course you weren’t born wacko to begin with.”
“I think maybe I was,” she said. The vinyl couch felt sticky on her back, even with the fan going. And it didn’t help that the shrink’s office was on the fourth floor, which in August sweltered like a jungle.
“Now now,” the shrink said. He always said that when he couldn’t think of a more proper response. Now now, don’t be that way. Now now, we mustn’t think such things.
“I saw something once,” she went on, hoping to gain some spark of genius from the man.
But he refused to take the bait. “Everyone sees things, Keltie. Every day.”
“Yeah, but this one time in the woods, when I was a little girl—“
“Now now. You’re not going to tell me the story of Little Red Riding Hood, are you?” The doctor leaned back in his chair, puffing a pipe as if this were the most brilliant witticism in all the world.”
“I hadn’t intended to.”
“Not that it would necessarily be a bad thing. You saw your friend murdered by a lunatic. A madman. Escapism to a bit of fantasy may be just the right medicine you need.”
Keltie rolled her eyes. Where the hell had the DC found this guy? The Price Is Right? Nodding, she thanked him for his input and promised to get started on Peter Pan as soon as she got back to her room.
August became September. Classes started up again. Science, math, history. Keltie held no interest in any. On the first day of school she made certain to get a desk in the very back row, though this was a decision that soon gave cause for regret. Here, the girls were every bit as crazy or maybe even crazier than she. A chief indicator came from Sadie, who showed up wearing a black sleeveless shirt that said GOTH BITCHES RULE on the front. Sadie’s hair was orange. She had a nose ring. Sadie looked really fucked up.
“SCIENCE!” the teacher bellowed, causing several of the girls to scream.
“Jesus Christ,” Keltie let out.
“Science is the basis for all things in the universe. Without science we are idiots. Morons. Pooping cavemen cowering in fear of the dinosaurs.”
Keltie slumped in her seat. Cavemen and dinosaurs, sure, why not? And maybe a flying saucer or two. The earth was flat; the moon was made of blue cheese. Tell it like it is, fella, she thought, tell it like it is.
***
In October the DC agreed to turn her loose on the streets.
Sort of.
It was connect with family month, an affair that meant zero to most of the kids, whose relatives either wanted nothing to do with them or were already dead. An acquaintance of Keltie’s, Angel Reece, had a father in prison and a mother eloping with a crystal meth addict. Melissa Manfredjenson’s dad was in hiding from the FBI. Polly Eberle’s mom had killed herself with pills.
This wasn’t to say the parking lot out front was always empty. A few beat up cars would occasionally roll in, driven by men with beards, blue jeans, and leather jackets, or women who looked too tired to even lift their eyes from their shoes. Grandparents were also a common sight. Kindly old men, sweet little old ladies. People from another era who had tried their best to cultivate the crops they’d laid, and failed. Keltie watched them all come and go, most of the time from her worn curtain on the third floor. The room behind her, once musical with Penelope’s upbeat chatter, had become a haunted place—a branch where dead, headless memories came to roost. It all felt rather insane, whether the psychiatrist thought so or not. Keltie wanted none of it.
But they let her outside anyway. The school’s less troublesome students (i.e. the ones who had never been caught breaking the rules) were given the opportunity to visit relatives at home addresses within the city. Both of Keltie’s parents were still in Norwalk, though she’d not laid eyes on them for two years. The idea of putting an end to this drought didn’t excite her much but going outside on her own certainly did; thus, she accepted the school’s rare willingness to take a risk with a student, and under a symphony of autumn leaves one windy Saturday morning, struck off down Benedict Avenue to visit her mother.
The address turned out to be a Jefferson Street trailer park. The neighborhood was not one Keltie felt comfortable visiting. Tucked away near the rail yards on the south end of town, the journey took nearly an hour to complete. Empty tracks stretched across a road dotted with shabby, two-story houses. An old general store, its windows boarded, slept on one corner like a dead cockroach. On another was a bar—TJ’s—pumping with loud music.
Keltie kept walking. Her boots scuffed candy wrappers and broken glass. A smelly breeze swept under her skirt, making her feel molested. Where the hell was the trailer park? The address given by the DC, Sunset Lane, didn’t seem to exist.
“Hey, baby,” somebody called.
Keltie turned to see a man leering from a flaked porch. A bottle of beer rested in his hand. Three more were on the railing.
“Anytime, anywhere, beautiful.”
Her boot slipped on the remains of a squashed pumpkin and she almost fell. The man cackled. Another pumpkin, this one carved, grinned from the steps of a rusty trailer home.
Trailer home!
Shutting the beer drinker out of her mind, Keltie took a gravel drive that let on a circle of perhaps ten more rusty, sagging trailers. This had to be the illustrious Sunset Lane, though there was no welcome sign. Trailer number six—Mom’s—looked somehow worse than all the others. It had once been white but today settled for mostly orange. A set of crooked iron steps led to a broken door handle. Keltie knocked, waited, knocked again.
The door came open. What it revealed almost made Keltie turn around and go back to the detention center. The woman opposite had long stalks of gray straw for hair. Her eyes were two jagged rocks thrown into a cloudy puddle. A splash of cheap, fake blood made up her lips, with a veined lily pad of a nose floating above.
“Who are you?” Keltie asked, all disbelief.
The jagged rocks bulged to the surface. “I’m your mom, you silly bitch. Now get in here.”
***
They sat at a checkered kitchen table and talked for awhile over coffee and stale cake. By evening the coffee had turned to beer—cheap beer that Keltie swigged under the kitchen’s yellow light as her mom heated a pot of goulash for supper. A smell of tomatoes and macaroni wafted from the stove, awakening an appetite Keltie had not felt since the previous spring. Drunk or no, Chloe Burke knew how to cook. The beer would not sit alone in anyone’s stomach tonight.
“Not bad,” Keltie said, breathing in deep the warm aroma.
“What are you babbling about?” her mom called.
“The trailer. It looks terrible from the outside, I can’t lie about that, but you’re doing what you can with the inside.”
“Have another beer, girl. I’ll get you drunk enough to see the Taj Mahal yet.”
Not feeling the least bit objectionable to this command, Keltie popped the top on a fresh can. But she wasn’t far gone enough yet for the compliment to be anything less than genuine. Chloe had the trailer looking neat as a pin. The counters were clean, the floors polished. Ceramic figures—elephants, dogs—sat atop a tea chest organized on the inside with meticulous care. The living room looked cultivated in much the same way, with its vacuumed carpet and pretty throw pillows.
“Better than not bad,” Keltie nodded.
A plate of goulash that smelled damned near perfect was placed in front of her.
“I was always good at keeping house,” Chloe said, taking the chair opposite. “Not much good at anything else, but at least that.”
“Cooking, Mom. Don’t forget cooking.”
As if to prove her point, Keltie forked a helping into her mouth and began to chew. “Oh wow. Great as I remember.”
“I’m glad you came by. You can help me give out candy to the kids tonight.”
She swallowed. “Is it trick-or-treat already?”
“It is. Happy Halloween, Keltie.”
“Boy, is that ever a good lead-in for the story I want to tell you.”
The older woman stared at her. “Is it about your friend? Penelope?”
“Yes.”
***
The story did not come out well. Like everyone else, Keltie’s mom believed what she read in the papers: A homeless lunatic had been bedding down in the Showboat, had come across two girls who were in a storage room to fetch extra napkins, and attacked them. Just like her trailer, it looked neat as a pin.
So why hasn’t it worked for me? Keltie kept wondering, though the answer was simple enough. Homeless lunatics, no matter how desperate, were incapable of biting off human heads from their necks. That kind of shit was for Amazonian pythons.
“You were in shock,” Chloe said, pouring a fourth beer into her glass. “You saw your best friend get murdered and now your memory is playing parlor tricks.”
“That’s what my shrink keeps saying,” Keltie replied.
“Well he’s right. I once woke up on the floor after an all night drinking binge convinced a dog had been outside my window, talking to me in English.”
“Uh…wow. That’s heavy, Mom. Do you remember what it said?”
“Let me in.”
“Let me in? For real?”
The older woman made a face. “No, not for real. I just told you, the mind is a magician. A trickster.”
“If that’s true, then mine’s right up there on the ladder with David Copperfield. Because this memory I have is…crystal clear. Every time I close my eyes, I watch Penelope die.”
“She was your best friend,” Chloe reiterated.
They continued to drink steadily until dark…and then well after dark. At six-thirty the trick-or-treaters started to knock. That, for Keltie, was something of an oddity, for she had no memory later on of inviting them over. Colorful pictures of other incidents were unfortunately not as reluctant to expose themselves. She and her mom had answered the door drunk off their asses. Cries of Merry Christmas and Happy Thanksgiving spilled from their lips as they tossed chocolates in the general direction of whatever loot bag seemed close enough. Some of the kids swore at them. Others just shook their heads. Keltie dropped an empty beer can into one little vampire’s bag and got told to fuck off. Not long after that, she threw up on the front step.
“Oh, what a fucking night!” Chloe howled, sprawled on the living room floor near a puddle of her own vomit. “This is just a colossal fucking night!”
“I feel better,” Keltie said. “Is there any more beer?”
A cackle came from the old woman’s throat. “Shit yeah! With me there’s always more beer!”
At some point in the middle of the night, Keltie woke up under the kitchen table. With pounding head and aching back, she managed to crawl out. Ceiling lights and desk lamps, all of which had been left on, stabbed her eyes, making it hard to search for the nearest toilet. She needed to pee; she needed to puke. Then she needed to pass out again for maybe the next twenty years.
Daylight found her lying face down inside the shower, naked as a Playboy centerfold. Shivering, she hauled herself up to a seated position. Seconds later the curtain was dragged back. There stood Chloe, holding a glass of water in one hand and four aspirin in the other.
“Breakfast’s on the table,” she said. “Make sure you eat it right away after taking these.”
“My head,” Keltie moaned.
“Take the aspirin. Then eat. You’ll be fine.”
Fine was probably not the right word, but by twelve noon her headache had gone, and all the empty cans had been swept from the floor.
“Congratulations,” Chloe told her with a twinkling smile. “You survived.”
Keltie tossed one final can into the garbage bag and smiled back. “You say that like I’ve never been drunk before.”
“That’s because you haven’t.”
“Please,” Keltie said, trying to sound exasperated. “How would you know?”
“Because I’ve been dancing with the devil since I was your age. I know.”
Her mother’s smooth composure lasted exactly two more hours. By that time, Keltie needed to leave. The detention center expected her back in her room before dark. Chloe did not react to this news right away. She waited until the soap opera they were watching went to commercial, then stood up to pour them each a third cup of coffee.
“You could stay,” she said casually from the steaming decanter. “I wouldn’t mind.”
“I have classes.”
“You’ve never worn glasses.”
Keltie’s mug was placed on the table by a woman whose face had gone empty as the ruins of an old church.
“Classes, Mom,” Keltie told her. “I have classes. School.”
“Yes.”
“Plus a room I’m supposed to sleep in every night. The sentencing—“
Chloe waved the words off. “Yes, yes. You stole a car. You got arrested. Your parents were deemed unworthy. I’ve got the whole sordid tale memorized.”
“Then you know I can’t stay. And I didn’t steal that car,” she added, keeping her tone delicate.
On the TV, two men were arguing over whether not to expose their homosexual relationship. “Everyone knows we’re gay already,” one of them pointed out. “Yeah, but not flaming,” the other said, “we’re just sort of having a bromance.” “Okay,” the first man said, “now I’m hurt. I mean really hurt.” “I’m sorry.”
Chloe sat down. Her eyes were not on the soap opera, or anything else in particular. Keltie thought it more likely they were seeing something that never was, and never would be.
“What we did last night,” she began, then stopped. Keltie gave her time to sort it all out. She sipped her coffee, waited. “It was fun. I had a good time.”
“I don’t really remember if it was fun,” Keltie had to admit.
“I do.” Suddenly Chloe looked at her, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “But when I’m alone, it’s different. I drink until I fall down. And when I wake up my head hurts and my stomach hurts. And there’s nobody here. I’m alone. Always alone, until this morning.”
“Don’t drink anymore, Mom. Give it up.”
A laugh came from the other side of the table. “It isn’t a light switch, dear.”
“I know that. But you could get help.”
“I got help last night. From my daughter.”
“Bruce,” the man on TV said, “we slept together once. Once. Everyone experiments.” “You’re breaking my heart,” Bruce said.
“That isn’t something I could turn into a habit,” Keltie came out with, feeling bemused. “Anyway, I don’t think it helped you at all.”
Chloe shook her head. “You’re wrong. It made me happy. For the first time since I don’t know when.”
“Come visit me at the DC, Mom. They allow for that every week.”
“But they don’t let you out.”
“Not very often.”
“Bruce?” the TV man said. “Look at me. Look.” Wiping away tears, Bruce looked. “Good boy. There are repercussions for who we are. What we are. But that doesn’t mean we’ll never be happy.”
Within the hour Keltie was ready to leave. Not a word came from Chloe while she put on some makeup and found her shoes. Feeling let off the hook, Keltie made several cheery comments about seeing her mother again on visitors day.
They went to the front door. Through the window Keltie saw rusty cars parked beneath dead trees. Crumpled flowers. A bicycle with a broken chain. She opened the door, stepped outside.
“Keltie?”
Her mom stood just inside the trailer, a woman with dry, gray hair and sunken stones for eyes. It was yesterday all over again, or almost.
“Twelve hours from now I’m going to wake up in the dark,” Chloe said. “And I’m going to look for you, and you’re not going to be here.”
“Mom.”
“And I’m going to be so sad.”
“Mom, stop.”
Chloe stopped. Or rather, her mouth did, while her eyes continued to plead for more time, time that Keltie, even if she wanted to, could not spare. All she could do was remind her mother about visitors day and then keep her fingers crossed the old woman wouldn’t show up drunk on the DC’s front porch.
To judge by what happened next, she would need to cross her toes, too. Chloe burst into the most wretched tears the world had ever seen. She came onto the step and hugged Keltie, begging her not to go. Keltie took a step back, which did no good whatsoever. The railing bent with their combined weight, almost pitching them onto the gravel.
“Mom, you’re making a scene!” Keltie hissed.
“This is Sunset Lane!” the other sobbed. “There’s no such thing as a scene!”
Keltie glanced once again at the mess behind her and thought that this was probably true. A fat guy in boxer shorts had come out of trailer number eight, scratching his balls, but he wasn’t looking back.
“Nobody cares, Keltie! Nobody cares about anything!”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Please stay with me!”
It took an hour to calm her down. They had to go back inside, sit down, drink more coffee. At four o’clock a woman from the DC’s office called, wanting to know where the hell their girl was at. Keltie explained her situation as best she could. The woman gave her until dark to have her butt back where it belonged; otherwise, she would make another phone call, direct to the Norwalk