That November, for my ninth birthday, Marilyn gave me a picture of Michele. She had spent days looking for it in the garage and my grandfather’s closet and had put it in a red-lacquered frame. When I first unwrapped it, I didn’t understand.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“It’s Michele,” she said.
It was the first time I’d ever seen my mother’s face. I didn’t know what to say. I spent a long time looking at the picture before I moved on to my next present.
Michele sat in a straight-backed chair by an empty fireplace, holding her hands out as if she were talking. Even though she was the only person in the photograph, she was far off to its right. A red-and-blue cloisonné plate hung above the mantel; there was a fluffy, white rug by her feet. My mother looked straight into the camera, her tired eyes narrowed a little from the flash. She wasn’t pretty, exactly, but sturdy, clean. Her flared jeans seemed new and were held up by a thick, leather belt; her shirt was navy blue and snug. She had long, brown hair, thick arms, and thick eyebrows, like mine. She wore a quiet half smile that said I don’t really want to have my picture taken. I knew because I smiled like that too.
I touched the side of her face, gently, my finger grazing the cool glass. I smiled a half smile too, but for different reasons.
“Thank you,” I said to Marilyn. I knew the present meant something to her as well as to me, and as she stood by my chair, I leaned into her, my arms circling her hips.
Later that day, we put Michele’s picture up on my dresser, along with an old snapshot of Spence, and her badge, the one Dee had given me. Marilyn found some lace to cover the dresser beneath the pictures. I found a dusty glass bud vase under the bathroom sink and an old sprig of artificial flowers in my closet. I rummaged through the junk drawer in the kitchen and found two candles: one was an emergency candle, white and unused; the other was the melted-down blue stub of a taper, its black wick broken off short against the wax. I propped them in two shot glasses and put them on top of my dresser. I lit them, one for my mother, Michele, and one for my grandmother, Spence.
It was raining on my birthday, a Southern California storm: dark clouds and a steady downpour that lasted all day. My room was dim; I sat on my bed, across from the dresser, and stared at the pictures behind the two bright flames. I watched their faces flicker in the candlelight and thought the shifting light made them beautiful. Long after I’d blown the candles out, when I closed my eyes for sleep, I could still see the flames on the back of my eyelids, as if they’d burnt themselves there.
The next day Marilyn took me to the grocery store to buy new candles. She bought me the big, Mexican kind—white pillar candles in glass vases painted with brightly colored saints that they sold in the ethnic-food aisle—because that was what I wanted.
Soon I added another picture to my dresser.
“What am I doing there?” Marilyn asked when she saw it. “I’m not dead.”
“I know,” I said. “But you’re my mother too.” I didn’t want her to feel left out. I thought, too, that having her picture there might keep her safe, as if she could somehow be protected by the candles’ glow.
• • •
That year, I became obsessed with the idea that the people I loved would die. It didn’t help that my grandfather kept talking about how he was going to “kick the bucket” soon, probably of a heart attack, he thought, but maybe a stroke or the “big C.” As long as they were with me, I figured they were safe; but whenever my grandfather or Marilyn left the house, I half expected them not to return. I hated going to sleepovers or parties. I couldn’t rest until I’d told them I loved them three times and made them promise to stay safe. I thought the promise was what kept them alive. Marilyn eventually got annoyed with me, but my grandfather seemed to understand. Perhaps it was because he, too, worried.
My grandfather almost always screamed at us for being late, screamed at us for all the horrible deaths he’d imagined for us while we were gone. Hours later, he’d apologize. “I’m sorry,” he’d say. “I was just worried about you.”
I suppose my grandfather had a reason to worry. The night my mother, Michele, was taken from the streets, murdered, and her body dumped in an empty lot, he was reading a book or watching TV or sleeping. He never called the police to report his daughter missing because he didn’t know she was missing. I now know that by the time she died, he’d stopped talking to her. She hadn’t called in months. I imagined he assumed his daughter would be all right because she always had been. He’d stopped worrying because he’d decided there was nothing he could do to make her go back home or stop taking drugs or change her ways. My grandfather never called the police to report his daughter missing, and then one awful day, the police called him to report that she had been found.
“You know, Little Toad,” he said one night when I was nine, the year I’d started being scared. “I’m getting older. I’ll probably die before you grow up. But if something should happen to me, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. I’ll come back and haunt you.”
“Just like The Ghost Goes West?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“You’ll shake your chains?”
“Yes. And anytime you miss me, if you’re lying in bed, all you have to say is ‘Daddy, come here, you old bastard!’ and I’ll shake your bed and rattle my chains.”
“And howl?”
“And howl.”
“And if anyone wants to hurt me, you’ll scare them away.”
“I’ll scare the motherfucking bastards shitless.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, I promise.”
I went to him and gave him a hug. My grandfather gave the best hugs—the kind that tall, fat people can give, that shelter your whole body and make you feel safe and loved. Every once in a while, I’d remind my grandfather of his promise, for years afterward, even after he’d long forgotten the conversation.