Mother woke up, finally, and that freed me from the stinky Catfish, who’d scared me silly with all that talk about the orphanage. I couldn’t take it anymore; if I was going to be stuck in the car all night, I wanted Mother awake. One of her lovely arms stretched straight up. She put a flattened palm on the ceiling of the car and pressed. “Yow—ohhhhh,” she yawned, then sighed and looked around. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere,” Catfish answered.
“Anybody hungry?” she asked.
We mentioned my birthday cake and the box of doughnuts. “Bleh!” Mother said, and reached for a doughnut.
While I daydreamed about hitchhiking home, Mother pinched off bites of her doughnut and offered them to Bunny. The little pig nibbled the sweet off her fingers. It’s funny how dainty pigs can be. And polite too. When Bunny chewed his sugar doughnut, he blinked his little round eyes at me and smiled.
We settled in for a long stretch of driving. The green trees gave way to dry rock and the sunset turned the sky blood orange. That was the first full day I had ever spent driving in a car, and it is odd, being on top of each other like that for so long. You talk and talk and talk, then you stop talking and think and think and think. After a while you go back to talking.
To pass the time I reached forward and brushed Mother’s hair. There was nothing quite like the smell of my mother’s hair. It was floral but human—like what babies would smell like if they came out of the earth on stalks, wrapped in fresh spring leaves. I brushed all of her hair, from the scalp down to the tips. She enjoyed it so much she purred.
“Carl!” Suddenly Mother leaned forward and read a road sign. “Is this the right road?”
“I’m always on the right road,” he said, as if that were the stone-cold truth.
“But…” Mother wanted to agree with him but she knew something was wrong.
He interrupted her and said, “This is the absolutely correcto road because I am taking a detour to Austin.”
Mother slammed back against the seat and raised both hands to her face.
“What’s wrong with you, Babe? Gus Luna said Austin is a great place to make a little money. Besides which, you have that sister there. Can’t we invite ourselves to stay?”
What was he blabbing about? Mother didn’t have a sister. I gathered her hair into a thick ponytail, trying to brush it again. Mother kept silent.
“Earth to Babe,” Catfish said, never one to be sensitive. “You going to answer me, or what?”
Mother said carefully, “Yes, Carl. I have a sister near Austin. A little town in the Hill Country, called Cypress Mill.”
That was news to me; Mother had a sister. News isn’t a big enough word. It was a bomb in my skull.
Mother lowered her voice, making it harder for me to hear her. I stretched my eardrums, trying to learn more about Mother’s secret. When she said the words I have a sister it sounded like she was out of her mind, like she was saying I have a Martian.
“What’s her name?” Catfish asked.
“Eleanor,” she whispered.
“Eleanor Henderson?” Catfish asked.
“No, Carl. Henderson is my married name, not hers. She is Eleanor Rose.”
“Rose! Is that your maiden name? Bed of Roses.” Catfish laughed at himself because nobody else ever did.
“Hardly.” Mother reached one hand back and pulled her hair out of my hands. She brought it in front of her shoulder where I couldn’t reach it. “Excuse me, Carl. Why are we talking about my sister?”
“I told you once already, we’re driving right through Austin. Be a free place to stay. Don’t you want a free place to stay?”
“Not really,” Mother said. “And she probably wouldn’t have me.”
“Aww, come on, Babe, she’s your own flesh and blood.”
“She’s more than that,” Mother said. “She’s my twin.”
I dropped the brush. Sister was one thing; twin was another. I tried hard to remember if my mean grandmother had ever hinted at this, or if she had kept photographs in the house, or anything to remind her of her daughter. Nothing.
Twins, I kept thinking and suddenly I asked, “Identical?” I’d seen identical twins in movies, and who doesn’t daydream about having a long-lost identical twin? Ruby Clyde One and Ruby Clyde Two.
“Why yes, identical,” Mother said, as if she had forgotten.
Identical! I sat back hard, bouncing my head against the seat. Imagine that. Another person on this earth who looked exactly like my mother.
“You never told me any of this,” I said, wondering what all else she hadn’t told me.
Mother pursed her lips, then rolled her eyes and said, “Well, she didn’t wish to have me in her life. Besides, she’s a nun.”
“You Catholic?!” the Catfish yelled.
“No,” I said, but they both ignored me. My mean grandmother didn’t trust Catholics, I never knew why, but we weren’t Catholics, that much was sure. Grandmother’s church argued about everything and splintered about ten times, always moving down the road to be the new church of something—adding words like truth, light, and holy—all good words, but they seemed tacked on and wrong.
Mother watched the last bit of sun drop below the horizon with an orange pop. She sighed and said, “I’m not much of anything, churchwise. Eleanor is Episcopalian. They’re a pretty loosey-goosey, do-whatever-you-want kind of church.”
I’d never heard the word Episcopalian and didn’t even care to look it up I was so flummoxed by having a mystery aunt. (To tell the truth, I did look it up later. See, Henry VIII had to get out of the Catholic Church so he could divorce one wife and cut off the head of another. He called his church Anglican, which means Church of England, and it couldn’t have been much of a church if you ask me. Episcopal is the American version of that church; they allow divorce but not beheadings and they aren’t really bad at all.)
“Oh well,” huffed Catfish and stuck his nose up in the air. “Never mind. Old Carl’s got nun use for a nun, want nun of that, nun-thing worse than a nun. Whoo-hoo mercy! Thanks a lot, Babe. As usual, good old Carl will have to come up with a better plan.”
“Honestly, Carl. Enough, already,” Mother said.
An identical twin and a nun! My mind was spinning with the image: a person who looked just like my mother, dressed like a nun. A nun. They looked like witches to me.
My hand wandered down and stroked the little pig, which was asleep on the seat beside me. He squirmed a bit, opened his little eyes, and looked up at me, like I was his mother. Then he rolled back into sleep with a twitch of his nose.
* * *
We rode for the longest time in silence, which was so very unusual for the Catfish. But it happened. We had more driving to do and I hoped we weren’t all talked out, because I certainly wanted to hear more about Eleanor Rose.
Finally, out of nowhere, Mother began to speak with a soft, storytelling tone in her voice. There is something about being surrounded by night that makes everybody want to tell scary stories or secrets. Mother’s story was both.
“We were like night and day. Eleanor was always angry, fighting with our mother. I’d do anything to keep Mother happy. I don’t know why we were different that way. Then Eleanor got herself pregnant. She went away to a secret place to give the baby up for adoption. It broke her heart.”
Mother kept on, “So when I got pregnant with Ruby and decided to marry Walter, Eleanor went into a dark place. She left town and never looked back. I called her when Ruby Clyde was about three, hoping she had softened, but she said she never wanted to see me or my child. It hurt me, but giving that baby up for adoption had blackened her life. Before she left, Eleanor said not a day passed she didn’t wonder where that boy-child was, and if he had gotten into a good home or a bad one. It left a black hole in her heart. Since Walter died, I understand having a black hole in your heart, and if I were to ever lose Ruby Clyde, well, there would not be blackness enough.”
She took a deep breath and so did I. What would you do if there wasn’t enough blackness in the world to describe your feelings? Invent a new color? Not that blackness is a color, I knew that. Blackness is black. It didn’t matter anyway because Mother was never going to lose me, not while I was alive.
The tires hit the highway cracks in a regular rhythm. We listened to the road song until Catfish said, “So, okay, as I said before—we won’t look up the nun.”
Mother hadn’t told him the half of it. My grandmother was harsh times a hundred. She took my mother in after my father was killed. Raised me with a Bible in one hand and a stick in the other. I’m not saying I hated her, I’m just saying I spent half my life under our bed. Grandmother taught me how to get by in the real world. Mean people have an edge and it’s good to learn their techniques. She’s the reason I could take care of my mother as well as I did. I was nine, almost ten, when Grandmother died and I’d taken care of us ever since—that is until the Catfish came along and messed everything up.
I wanted to find her, Eleanor Rose, the nun who lived in Cypress Mill, and not for a free place to stay, like what the Catfish wanted, although I did have a selfish motive. I thought maybe she could talk some sense into my mother, help us get back home. Also I was more than a little curious about seeing her—her being identical to my mother and all. It didn’t seem possible, no matter how hard I tried, to imagine another person looking exactly like my mother. But they were strange from each other, and they seemed to like it like that.
One thing was clear though: I had been the cause of their strangeness, and that made me a burden and probably not the one to get them to be friends again. What a rotten pregnancy Mother had with me—lost her sister at the beginning and her husband at the end. And she still loved me.
Oncoming headlights bore down upon us, then slid by, one after another. The quiet pulse of late-night travel lulled me to sleep, and I dreamed I was a little pink piglet scampering across an open field. A horrible witch chased me with a butcher’s knife, trying to cut off my corkscrew tail.