NOVEMBER 28, 2011
She is at the big house with Deb, sitting by Hazel’s bedside, when she gets the call. It’s nine in the morning; the police officer says they’ve found some footage a neighbor brought in months ago. Vale takes the phone out onto the porch.
“I’m sorry,” the officer says. “It somehow got lost in the shuffle here. Do you want to come in to see?”
“Motherfuckers,” Vale whispers, pulling the phone away from her face. She looks out across the field at her small blue camper, the line of trees above it. Her heart rattles in her chest. How can they be that incompetent?
“Sure,” Vale says. “I’ll come see.”
She hangs up and stares out at the bare trees, at the overcast sky, at crows on the horizon.
Does Vale want to come in to see? Vale hasn’t seen Bonnie for eight years. What kind of a mother does she want to remember? In the last month Bonnie has become something other in Vale’s mind. Has transformed into the mother in the photograph plastered all over town: thick hair, laughter—her cheek on Vale’s cheek. Does Vale want to see the one who put a needle packed with heroin and fentanyl in her arm and walked out into a hurricane?
Vale stands still for a long time before climbing into Hazel’s fifteen-year-old maroon Ford Taurus, the car Hazel will never drive again. “It’s yours,” Deb said yesterday, waving her hand in the air. “All yours. Take it. Be free.”
It’s been a long time since Vale has had a car of her own to drive. She could drive it to New Orleans. She could drive it to New York and join the protests. She could start driving west with Neko, lock the doors and not stop until they run out of gas somewhere, start anew in some abandoned farmhouse in North Dakota. Burn his credit cards, passport, camera. She hasn’t called him or seen him since slipping out that night. He hasn’t called her, either.
Vale pictures cracking open that farmhouse door. Flicker of swallows. And standing in the center of the kitchen in a blue housedress: Bonnie.
“I don’t want to be here,” Vale says, slamming her fist into the steering wheel as she pulls into the police station parking lot.
She looks the woman working at the front desk in the eye: “I’ve heard there is some footage.”
THE VIDEO IS GRAINY, BLOWN UP ON THE COMPUTER screen. The sound: rain and howling wind. The screen covered in droplets that smear and stretch like veins. The woman who held the phone was standing on her rooftop, filming the creek and the rising water, a plastic toy, car tires, crashing by.
Bonnie appears in the left-hand side of the screen. A drift of white—white sweatshirt, white shoes—stepping off the back stairs of the apartment building, standing still for a moment, looking upward, crossing the street. She’s tiny in the footage—Vale can’t make out the details of her face, just the outline of her body: bent shoulders, too thin. She walks with a spring in her step. The phone shakes and the woman holding it calls out, “Careful! Dangerous!” and the Bonnie in the screen, small as a child, getting soaked by rain, turns and waves—ghost-face, a blank patch of white—turns again and continues walking toward the bridge. She walks onto the center of it, lifts her arms, holds them out on either side of her, head tipped back—her body shaking—laughter?—and then the screen turns to black.
Vale can’t breathe.
“Do you want to keep the footage?” the policeman standing behind her asks.
Does she want the footage? Her mother, a ghost woman, walking into the rain?
“No. Thank you,” Vale says, heading for the door.
VALE DRIVES UNTIL IT’S NEARLY DARK. SHE DRIVES TO the river. At the cornfields, an entrance spot to that deep pool in the river where that photo was taken nearly twenty years ago, Vale hits the brakes and pulls over onto the gravel edge.
She gets out of the car and walks across the stubbled field, cornstalks ankle high. She stands in the middle of that clearing, facing the river on the far side. She gets down on her knees. She digs her fingers into the damp and cold earth between the frozen stalks. She opens her mouth to scream, but no sound comes out. Headlights from cars on the highway shoot past on the bridge overhead. “Damn you, Bonnie!” Vale says, her voice coming out at last. Choosing that drug over Vale. Choosing Dean over Vale. “Damn you,” Vale whispers, putting her head against the damp earth.
“Oh, honey,” her mother says in her ear.
Vale is seven years old. She is in this field with Bonnie, leaping across green corn plants, thigh high. The air crackling with heat—July or August. “Come!” Bonnie yells, in cutoff shorts and blue cotton, running toward the water. Vale races to keep up. When she does, at the river’s bank, she reaches out for her mother’s hand and her mother reaches back. She pulls Bonnie’s hand to her face and holds it there. Squints up into the sun. Her hand smells like cigarettes and lemon. Someone takes a photograph. Someone sends that photograph to Bonnie—she tacks it to the wall. Vale takes that photo with her when she leaves: her mother’s hand, her mother’s laugh: spikes of gold. And then Bonnie pulls away, throws off her clothes, and leaps into the cold water.