TWENTY-FIVE

SHARING IS CARING

“This is one for the record books,” Miriam says, coming out through the patio door and stepping onto a small verandah. Mother sits on a small bench, a long cigarette in her small fingers. Rupert the Yorkie starts yapping.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Evelyn Black says, sucking on the cigarette like she’s a mosquito hungry for blood. She blows a jet of smoke out toward the small eighth-of-an-acre yard with the tall privacy fence and the climbing pink flowers.

“I’m talking about you. Smoking a cigarette.”

“I used to smoke before you were born.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Don’t use that kind of language. Please.”

“It doesn’t sound the same if I say, You’re pooping me.”

“So don’t say it at all.”

“I’m just saying,” Miriam says, hovering next to the bench, “I have a very hard time picturing you smoking back then. Or ever. I have a hard time picturing it even though you’re sitting right there, smoking like you can’t get the cancer in you fast enough.”

It’s then she thinks, Touch her. Find out how she’s going to die. Part of her aches to know. A kind of revenge. But it terrifies her, too. She’s afraid to see what waits in the darkness, afraid to reach into the hole and see what poisonous thing lies in wait. She hates this woman, or so she tells herself—but there’s a real difference between thinking it and acting on it.

She hears the Trespasser’s voice in the back of her mind—

She’s your mommy. Poor widdle Miriam doesn’t want to know how her mean old momsy-womsy meets the grave.

“I don’t have cancer,” her mother snaps.

“Give me one.”

“What?”

“A cigarette.” Miriam snaps her fingers. “C’mon.”

“I’m not giving my daughter a cigarette. Especially a daughter who doesn’t know how to say the word ‘please.’ ” Inhale. Exhale. “I raised you better than that, young lady.”

Did you really?

“Fine. Please give me a cigarette.”

“No.” That word, said so bitchily. Like it gives her pleasure.

“I will smoke my own, then,” Miriam says, plucking the crumpled pack from her back pocket. “But just know that you’re contravening Smoker’s Code established in the late 1800s by Sir Smokey von Smokington and his wife, Esmerelda Cancerface, who decreed that smokers smoking together shall share their cigarettes like good little tobacco monkeys.”

Miriam sparks her lighter. Lights the cigarette. Pleasure blooms in the back of her brain— a surge that shoulders past all the fear and frustration she’s feeling in the bend of her belly.

“You’re very crass and very strange,” Mother says. “You’re not the daughter I raised.”

“And you’re not the mother who raised me.”

“You’re rude.”

“Crass, strange, rude. You know what else I am? Gone. This was a mistake. Obviously. Enjoy your cigarette.”

She turns and throws open the patio door.

“Wait,” her mother says.

She waits.

A pause. Then: “I’m sorry.”

“Now I know you really are an alien.”

“Don’t be mean. Please.” Miriam hears no anger hiding in those words. They’re soft and sad. An honest plea.

All Miriam can say is, “Okay.”

“Will you sit with me?”

“Yeah.” She feels smacked around. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t like this woman. She doesn’t even know this woman. Miriam tells herself she stays just because she’s curious. As if she’s reading a book and wants to find out how it all turns out.

She goes. She sits. They smoke.

The dog jumps up in Mother’s lap. It licks a liver spot on the woman’s arm as if it tastes like ice cream. Slurp slurp slurp. It’s kind of gross and Miriam wants to say something, but in a rare moment of restraint, mentally duct-tapes her mouth shut.

Her mother finally speaks. “You’ve been gone a long time.”

“I know.”

“That boy . . .”

“Ben.”

“I don’t know what happened between you two—”

“You do too know. He—” She almost says fucked me up against a tree but is able to catch those words before they go flying out of her mouth. “We had sex, and I got pregnant.”

“But he killed himself.”

“He . . . did.”

“I don’t understand why.”

“Because . . . because because because,” and suddenly she growls and bites the knuckle on her thumb and thinks, I don’t want to sit here and talk about this. It’s much easier to be snarky and mean and stab her mother with sharp pointy words but this is real talk and she’s never done it with her mother, not ever, not that she can remember. But here it comes, the gusher, the geyser, the can’t-stop-it-if-she-wanted-to. “Because he was a fucked-up kid who had a fucked-up family and because I was horrible to him and because we were both teenagers with crazy hormones and immature brains and romantic ideas about life and death and all the things that fall between them—” And now she’s trying to stuff emotional gauze in the sucking chest wound she’s feeling right now but oh no, the blood keeps coming. “It was my fault, I was a jerk, and that word doesn’t even cover it. I wasn’t a jerk, I was a monster, a monster in a way that only a spurned, bitter teenage girl can be, and next thing I know, he’s dead and I’m pregnant. And then . . .” But the words die in her mouth because if she says more she’ll cry and she can’t cry in front of this woman. So instead she smokes. And stares. And trembles. “You know what happened then.”

“I wanted to kill her,” Evelyn says. “I wanted to kill that horrible woman.”

Whoa.

Miriam sits up straight. “I . . . I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“I thought about it, you know.” Mother stares up in the shuddering palm leaves above their heads. “I thought I would go over there and . . . beat her the way she beat you. I had a shovel in the shed out back I used for gardening. I’d take it to her house. I’d knock on the door. Then I’d beat her to death. Because she took something from you and that took something from me, too.”

“Jesus,” Miriam says, and then realizes that above all else, Mother will be stung by blasphemy, and she quickly mutters an apology but her mother seems to have not heard. Evelyn Black just sits, the cigarette between the V of her fingers burning down. The ash growing long, like a witch’s bent finger. “What, ah, happened to Ben’s mother after I left?”

“She went to jail. They took your testimony in the hospital.”

“I remember. Sort of.” She also remembers the morphine.

“They let her out not long ago. Overcrowded prisons.”

“Oh.”

“I hope she takes a lesson from her son. I hope they still have that shotgun, and I hope she’s willing to take her own life just as she took the life of the child inside you.”

Miriam almost cries out at a small uterine twinge inside her—like a corkscrew poking through skin and twisting. She doesn’t even know what to say to that. Hearing something like that come from her mother’s lips . . .

“It is what it is,” Mother says suddenly. “Onward and upward. Hold on one second. We need something.”

She goes inside.

Miriam sits, heart pounding, gut churning. Lips dry. She hears the distant cry of a child somewhere, several houses over, and it damn near kills her.

Evelyn Black returns with two glasses.

And a bottle of crème de menthe.

The woman’s drink of choice.

That’s what Miriam stole from her mother that night when she went out into the woods and met Ben. They drank it. They coupled, clumsy and unaware, mouths tasting of too-sweet mint.

Her mother can’t remember that. It would be too cruel. A vicious commemoration. When handed a glass, Miriam takes it and stares into it as Mother pours a few fingers of the liqueur—­ a draught of leprechaun blood, dark and impossibly green. Her mother clinks a glass against hers and Miriam takes a sip. Her mouth puckers at the too-sweet mint, and nausea flops around inside of her like a clubbed fish on the deck of a boat but she keeps drinking it because she doesn’t know when she’ll ever get the chance to drink with her mother again.

And then her mother touches her.

Hand on her sleeve. Not skin. Just touching fabric.

Miriam wants for the fingers to dip—maybe on accident, or maybe Evelyn will reach for her daughter’s hand as a matronly gesture. Then the death vision will come fast as lightning and Miriam will ride it to whatever sad end the woman meets—

But then Mother withdraws her hand.

“We look forward,” her mother says. “We move forward. Eight years isn’t that long. A blink of an eye. You have your whole future ahead of you. You can . . . meet a good man. You can . . . still have a child—”

“Mother—”

“Because I want grandchildren—”

“Mom.”

Her mother looks at her.

“They told me I can’t have children.”

Her mother stares. “What do you mean? That’s not . . . I don’t understand. They told me there was damage, but, but . . .”

“They told you. They had to have told you. Were you just not listening?”

“That was a hard time, Miriam, a very hard time—”

Miriam’s teeth bite down on the rim of the glass. She really doesn’t want to talk about this. She wants to throw up. Her tongue wets her lips and she holds the cigarette and glass between both hands, palms clasped around these two vices as if in prayer. “It died inside of me.” And with it, something else gained life. “When they pulled it out there were . . . problems. Infection. I . . . I don’t know, it was a long time ago. I came out of a fugue and the doctor was there and he held my hand and told me, he said I’d never have kids. The scarring . . . it was . . .” She unclasps her hands and holds them up as if in defense. “I’m not having children. Okay?”

“There’s always adoption—”

“I don’t . . . I can’t.”

“You have options.”

“And I don’t want them!” Miriam says. “I don’t want children. At no point do I think I’d be a good mother. I’d be a fucking horrible mother. My luck, I’d have a daughter and I’d ruin that kid like a dress on prom night. She’d hate me. I’d hate her. The cycle continues.”

“If only you hadn’t . . .” Mother lets a sigh swallow the words, and she picks the dog back up and puts Rupert in her lap.

“If only what? Say it.”

“If only you hadn’t . . . been the way you were. To the boy.”

“To Ben.”

Her mother makes a small nod.

Miriam stands. “Goddamnit. Goddamnit goddamnit shit.” She takes the glass of crème de menthe and tosses it and the ice onto the lawn, then chucks the glass after it.

“Miriam!” Her mother looks on, horrified.

“I should’ve known we’d get here.”

“You can’t just . . . act like this.”

“You blame me. You blame me for all of it.”

“If you had been nicer to him—”

“Oh, that’s some perfectly polished horseshit, isn’t it? How convenient that you don’t see yourself in this—you with a fucking bag over your head. Let me rip off that bag and tell you what I see: I see a shitty mother who kept me feeling bad about myself for the better part of my life.”

Evelyn stands, eyes wet and shining, shaking a finger. “I did my best with you, Miriam, I tried to teach you values—”

“Values. Values! Values? Oh fuck you. You had me pray to a god that didn’t seem to give a damn about any of us. You wouldn’t tell me anything about my father. You burned up anything that gave me any pleasure at all. And you act all shocked that the first chance I got I’d run into the woods and fuck some dude and get knocked up. What values did you think you were teaching me? Because I learned ignorance. And anger. And self-hatred. And anger on top of anger! Don’t act surprised that I have this cyanide cocktail in my heart. Like they say on that old dumb-ass drug commercial: I learned it by watching you.”

She flicks her cigarette into a nearby birdbath. Ssssss.

Then she turns to leave.

Her mother stands. “Miriam, don’t you walk away—”

“Let’s just agree that I disappoint you and you disappoint me. Okay? And you want to know why I’m glad I can’t have kids? Because I’m afraid I’d turn into you and my kid would turn into me. Good night.”

The castle razed, the earth salted, she storms back inside.

A tempest shattering its teacup.