We got a ride all the way down to Eidon Mountain with a man in a blue station wagon. The man’s name was Wade Potts.
We stood on the main bypass outside the town the next morning after we had left the trucker, or I stood beside the road with my thumb out and Cal stayed back slightly but still close by, because we had found that people stopped more often when they saw a woman alone than when they saw a man and woman together.
And so the person who stopped for us was Wade Potts.
Wade Potts was going to the city of Eidon Mountain to stop the wedding of the woman he was in love with.
Wade had a black stretcher in his left earlobe and black hair and his skin was tanned and his teeth were very white. I thought probably he had had them whitened.
He wore a denim shirt and two gold rings on his fingers and he played heavy metal on the radio.
His hair was gelled in spikes.
He talked a lot. Soon after we got in he told us about the girl he loved who would be marrying someone else the next morning in Eidon Mountain at the Orchid Imperial Hotel with a reception at the Orchid Imperial Casino. The casino and the hotel were affiliated. One was run by the father and one was run by the son. She was marrying the son and he was very wealthy. His name was Peter Simms. The girl’s name was Luz Laney.
Luz Laney and Peter Simms had met at the San Padua branch of the Orchid Imperial Casino, where Luz went four nights a week because she had a gambling addiction.
Wade Potts had dumped her because of this addiction.
So Luz kept going to the casino and one night there she had met Peter who was handsome and rich and had paid for an expensive therapist who had helped her and together they had beaten back her addiction, which was an addiction to playing poker, and he had bought her a nice black dress and introduced her to his father and told the old man they were getting married, and Luz in a moment of impulse had sent a wedding invite—white and red with a dove on the top—to her ex Wade Potts, who had received it and remembered that he loved her and was now on his way steaming down the long highway between San Padua and Eidon Mountain, over the scrubby land, to go and tell her so.
And that was where he had picked us up.
He said, “It’s moments like that that show you what’s meaningful in life, you know? I got that envelope and it was just like a kick in the head.”
Cal said, “We know. We’re married.”
I said, “We were married.”
“We’re still married.”
I elbowed him in the ribs.
Wade Potts kept talking. He had barely noticed.
He was saying, “Luz, she’s got these dogs, fancy dogs, you know? Awful things cost a fortune. Cost a fortune. Just to buy one, you know? Then there’s all the shit they need. Combs, little jackets, dog treats, stuff like that—”
“Yeah.”
“You got dogs?”
“No.”
“Shit, man. You’re lucky. Horrible things. Horrible. They’re what-do-you-call-it, Pomeranian, that’s it—Pomeranian. Come with, like, certificates and a family tree and stuff because they’re purebreds. She’s got this one. Domino. Bites the shit out of my ankles every time it sees me.”
There was a small plastic woman in a bikini on the dashboard and the top half of her body was designed to wobble with the motion of the car. Her top half went one way and her bottom half the other. It was meant to look like she was dancing.
Her arms were in the air.
I watched her, hypnotized by the rhythm of her movements, while Wade Potts talked. Out of the car window we were passing under red cliffs which towered up above us, rough slabs running deep with a branched lacework of cracks, burnt amber and streaked brown and sand yellow, and here and there little shrubs clinging onto ledges in the rock, and along the top, high above us, a hanging fringe, just visible, of a few twisted branches growing up in the summit. The road wound along underneath it all, stretching ahead.
Wade said, “It gets like this now most of the way to Eidon. All cliff land like this, all crags. We’re out of the forests here. You know the area around the city much?”
Cal said, “I was there a little while a few years ago.”
I said, “My mother was from Eidon City. I was born there. We moved away when I was a year old.”
Cal looked at me quickly.
I said, “You’d forgotten that, hadn’t you?”
“No.”
“Yes you had.”
My mother and I had lived together until I was fifteen. She had told me stories about growing up in the city which was named after the mountain standing over it.
She had lived there with her father who had been an artist, because it was a place where lots of artists moved to go and paint the mountains and watch morning light on the cliffs.
He had not been a good artist, viewed from a point of view of financial success.
In fact, viewed from a point of view of financial success, he had been a mediocre to bad artist. He’d made a modicum of money and had been able to afford food for himself and my mother but nothing over and above that.
He had not achieved anything more or less than their survival.
He made art prints of images of different types of fruits and vegetables cut in half, in all kinds of colors. They were sold to people who wanted them for offices and hotel rooms and the foyers of library buildings, but he never managed to sell very many.
My mother had left when she was quite young. She had gone north to San Padua when she was eighteen and there she had worked first as a waitress and then as a barmaid and then one evening walking on the beach she had met my father.
His name was Jim Daws.
They never married. They told each other they didn’t want to. Secretly I think she had wanted to be married.
When she was twenty-four or so I was born and she named me after a song and then the year after that my father disappeared and was never seen or heard of by either of us again, although it was thought that he had run away with the girl who lived in the apartment below them at the time and who was called Sheena Spinks, at least it was thought by my mother and her friends.
She never talked to me about my father.
I never found it possible to work out whether or not she missed him.
There were a lot of things about her I never found it possible to work out.
At home she had sometimes been vague and at other times drifting and she would go about the house and off to work and look always a little lost, a little bemused.
Most of the time in the evenings she kept on the blue uniform she had worn in the office during the day. That uniform had a white collar and a little daisy stitched on the pocket and the daisy was also blue on a blue background.
She had a set of those uniforms, and once a week she sat up ironing them all for the week ahead and folding them and putting them into the cupboard in the hallway. And I used to sit on the sofa and watch her while she ironed, watch her face which became distant with concentration.
I remember one time she burned her hand on the iron. I heard it burn, a crisp sizzle.
And she didn’t do anything. She didn’t jerk her hand away, she didn’t yell.
She stood there and looked down at her hand and the long red mark starting to appear there, and she and I both watched it come up on her skin.
And I remember I said doesn’t it hurt?
And she said no.
She would put those classic guitar records on after I had gone to bed and play them in the living room. My bedroom was the next along and the two rooms shared a wall, and I would fall asleep to the faint sounds of the music, and to other sounds which were small and difficult to place, tiny quiet scuffs of movement, and I would imagine my mother, dancing alone in the dark room to the old sad music.
I never went in.
I have no idea if she was really dancing.
Some nights when I was lying in bed I’d hear the soft click of the bedroom door handle and quiet footsteps across the carpet of the floor and the sound of her breathing, and feel the sagging of the mattress beside my head as she sat down. She would stroke my hair, carefully, slowly, and I would lie in the fuzzed dark at the edge of sleep, a red-tinted dark behind my eyes, in a warm ball curled under the covers, eyes closed, her soft breath the rhythm of an ocean.
One day when I was fifteen she was walking on the beach promenade, and sometimes down on the beach there were these horses who gave rides for tourists, and they wore blankets on their backs and they had ribbons in their hair, and one of them in a red blanket and red ribbons had seen a kite on the beach which had just been released by a kid who was flying it and so this horse reared up in fright all of a sudden and bucked and kicked, and kicked my mother who was walking behind it to cross the road and who had been afraid of horses her whole life.
She lay in a hospital bed for a week.
Her heart was beating but her brain was gone.
I sat on this chair during visitors’ hours and stared at the wall and ate bad hospital food, and sometimes the nurses came around to check on me and said tell us if you need anything. Every evening my aunt and uncle came to pick me up and I slept in the spare bedroom of their house.
One night there was a phone call from the hospital and my aunt took it. She was in the front hallway of the house and I was sitting behind her on the stairs. After a moment she turned around and saw me sitting there.
Her face crumpled and she said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, oh God, I’m sorry.”
And that was when the emptiness started.
Afterward I remember standing alone in a small front room and there were piles of cardboard boxes in front of me with brown tape on them. My mother’s name was written on the top in marker pen. It had been written by the removal men and they had spelled it wrong the first few times and then crossed out the misspellings so that her name was now under stacked scribbles.
They were fumbling, awkward. They said sorry, sorry, and I said it’s all right.
I was there with Tricia and my aunt and uncle, which made up a lot of people in the small room, and it was the middle of summer and the curtains were drawn and so the room was horribly hot and red. After a while the others went outside. They said they would give me a moment and I was glad they had gone because I barely knew them and I wanted them out.
And so I stood alone and all around me were boxes with our things in them and they were all taped shut and stood there bland and meek and it somehow made me angry, the meekness, the stacked boxes waiting by the door, waiting in a row, and I wanted to break them and kick them and scream wordless.
Instead I went through to my mother’s bedroom and there was the dressing table which hadn’t been packed up yet and there was a bottle of perfume in the middle of it which was the perfume that she liked to wear. The bottle was made of clouded glass with roses on it, and the lid was in the shape of a dove.
I picked it up and threw it on the floor and it smashed. A pool of liquid soaked darkly into the edge of the rug and made the air acrid.
Anyway.
That was the last time I was in my mother’s house.
Once when I was still in school about a year after it happened someone said to me you never talk about her.
And I said I don’t know what to say.