2. Milk at Midnight

The scream is loud and low and scares me right out of bed.

I fumble in the darkness, trying to remember where I am, why it’s so cold, and why the ceiling is slanted and hitting my head as I stand.

I can see the cold moonlight reflecting off trees that wave to me through the window.

Another scream comes, and this time I wonder if it’s Mom. Yet it doesn’t sound like her.

It doesn’t sound human.

I race out the door and down the stairs and hear another scream, and this time I know it’s Mom.

The light in her bedroom blinds me. I find her in the corner of the room, shaking, her hands waving at something in the air, her eyes glaring.

She sees me and screams again.

I’ve never heard a bloodcurdling scream before in my life, but now I know where they got the name.

I hold her in my arms.

“Mom. It’s me. Mom. It’s Chris. Mom.”

I say this over and over again as I hold her. It feels strange, I think, that this person so much shorter and smaller than me is my mother.

Eventually she calms down. Then starts to cry.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

We sit at the small breakfast-dinner table. She’s drinking a glass of milk.

“I hope I didn’t scare you,” Mom says.

“It takes a lot to scare me.”

She knows this is true.

“What were you dreaming about?” I ask.

“The thing is … I don’t … I didn’t feel like I was dreaming. I know I was. It’s just … it felt so real.”

“What?”

Mom looks at me, then shakes her head.

“I don’t know. It’s nothing.”

But the look on her pale face says something else. Maybe she’s not lying. Maybe she just doesn’t want to say because she thinks it might scare me.

Or make me scared about her sanity.

 

My mom’s not crazy. In fact, she’s the sanest person I’ve met in this insane world.

My dad’s the crazy one. Crazy for not loving her, crazy for leaving her, crazy for letting the divorce happen.

I don’t want to talk about him or them. I want to talk about her.

Tara Buckley is a cool name if you ask me. I like Chris, but I love Tara. It sounds both classic Southern and also modern and hip. Buckley is my dad’s last name, but Mom is going to keep it. She lost enough in the divorce. She decided she’d stick with the name she’d carried around for eighteen years.

Mom is thirty-nine but looks ten years younger. If I had a dollar for every time someone has expressed disbelief that she is my mom … well, I’d be a rich kid. Which at this point in life would be nice. I think she’s beautiful.

She used to complain about her upcoming birthday—the big four-oh—until she had other, more pressing things to think about. Sitting across the table from her, I see dark lines under her eyes. They’re new. So is the lack of spark in her green eyes. And how thin she looks. And how faded her blonde hair seems.

I notice all these things now under the cold light above our little table. The first thing that I’d like to replace about this tiny little cabin are the lights. They seem like they’d be more appropriate in a dank prison than in a cabin nestled in the mountains of North Carolina.

The cabin is small. It doesn’t have the dining room over here and the family room over there and all that. Basically, when you enter the cabin, you have the living room and dining room and kitchen all to one side. It’s small. Cozy, my mother said. It had been large enough for Uncle Robert, but it was never meant to be a place a family lived in.

But it was the first, and only, place she thought of going after the divorce was final.

Mom grew up around Solitary, though she says she doesn’t really remember it much as a kid. I wonder why she would want to come back to a place this remote, especially if she doesn’t remember much about it. But she said that it’s the only place where she still has family.

If you can really call them that.

The only real family member is Robert, and he’s been missing for over a year. Sometimes I think she came back to find her brother and take him away from Solitary. Then again, I think a lot of things.

My mom is strong. At least, so far she’s been strong. I know that deep down, underneath it all, she’s sad. But sadness gets you nowhere in life. I think she would say that if forced to.

Sitting across from my mom, the lady known as Tara Buckley who has come to live in a cabin her brother abandoned for some unknown reason, I wonder if there will be more nightmares.

And I wonder what sort of visions brought out the screams.