The trouble did not come with Lucia’s burial, and it did not come with an attack on my house or car, and it did not come to Bertie’s Home for Funerals or to Carolina Memorial Gardens. It came to my mother and Estelle.
Estelle was driving Momma back from the uneventful burial in the old Mercedes with the HERITAGE, NOT HATE bumper sticker on it, and Momma was happy because she had liked the graveyard with its neatly mown grass. Their car was three blocks away from Dockside when someone fired a small-caliber bullet at them. The back window on the driver’s side shattered, and the bullet grazed my mother’s forehead just above her left eye. The car’s windshield began to crumble, and tiny fragments landed all over Estelle and Momma like diamonds. My mother was wounded slightly, but head wounds are bleeders and she fainted from fright. Estelle pulled the car to the curb. She was shaking visibly from adrenaline when Claudia and I got there. We’d only been a few blocks behind, and we reached them just after two police cars did. Maybe the shooter hadn’t recognized Momma’s car, or maybe he thought my mother would be easier to terrorize than me. In any case, I went berserk.
I stood on the street alternately screaming and swearing, then touching my mother’s cheek and whispering. When she awoke and saw all the blood, she fainted again, and I began to howl, literally, which thrust Estelle and Claudia into a preternatural calm. When the ambulances arrived, Estelle told the paramedics that she was a nurse practitioner, she’d been the one driving and she was fine, but they should take me with them now and they would probably have to sedate me. At some point someone gave me a shot.
Once my mother’s head had been cleansed of blood and a butterfly bandage had been laid across her shallow wound, she didn’t seem to mind keeping on her bloody clothes. She was quite cheerful in the ER, but I was stoned, droopy, furious, and bewildered. “Have I lost my sobriety? Goddamn it, Estelle, did you make me lose my sobriety with that shot? Don’t you dare write anything about this, Claudia. I was baying like a hound in the street, wasn’t I?”
“This was a medical decision,” Estelle said. “And, no, you have not lost your sobriety. You’ll be fine once you sleep it off.”
Estelle and Claudia took us both back to Dockside. Estelle cleaned Momma up with a soapy washcloth, then got her into her nightclothes and under the covers. I lay on top of the white bedspread in my boots and bloodied shirt, refusing to move, mumbling over and over, “What have I done?”
“Please,” Estelle said, “for everyone’s sake, just finally shut up.”
During the night I awoke dazed, lying facedown on the carpet beside my mother’s bed. Estelle had left the hall lights burning. My head felt stuffed and bursting. Watermelons burst when they are overripe. Something important had happened, and I didn’t know what it was. A groove. Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is. I’m not Mr. Jones, I’m Ellen Burns, and it’s raining. I’m Rain Burns, but Rain was a fugitive and I’m not a fugitive. When my girlfriend shot herself, I gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and tasted the blood.
I tipped to the right, stumbling around the apartment. Once I fell onto my butt. When I found my mother’s bedroom again, I tried to come back to the correct decade. Momma had a groove on her forehead. My girlfriend’s head was broken, and I touched the red jelly when she died. “Wake up, Momma. Wake up. Wake up.” Maybe I hadn’t spoken, because she didn’t stir. Once, in an AA meeting in California, I met a woman with a groove in the top of her head. She had tried to shoot herself, but the gun decided to point itself upward, so her skull was missing a piece, a channel that showed at the top of her forehead. Jordan had tried to fire into her temple, but the gun pointed itself farther back, so she blew off the base of her skull, where the fundamentals are.
The blood on my shirt was my mother’s blood, not Jordan’s, and someone had shot at my mother’s car. Holy mother of God, someone had shot at my mother’s car, and she was hurt and it was my fault. I had challenged the white supremacists, and my mother had been shot.
I lay back down on the carpet.
“Ellen?” my mother said, turning toward her side and gazing down at me. “What are you doing down there?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“My head hurts,” she said, touching the butterfly bandages.
“Mine does too.”
“Come back up here, honey. Take off that dirty shirt.”
I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t take off my shirt, but I did manage to crawl around the bed, up the side, and onto the white embossed spread.
“Get over here closer to me.”
The expanse of her king-size bed looked too grand, but I got across it.
She didn’t mention the shirt again.
Momma slept like a queen, raised on a wedge of pillows because of her acid reflux. I managed to get my head onto the pillows beside her. “I’m sorry, Momma,” I whispered.
“Oh, I know that,” she said.