Burying the Honeysuckle Girls (5 page)

You knew.

“I inspected all the empty vials in the box,” Dr. Duncan continued. “Only one of them was from the 1980s. That bottle was hers, obviously. The others are only approximately seventeen years old. So they’re yours, am I right?”

I was silent.

“You were obtaining drugs as far back as when you were thirteen years old, Althea? The same drug your mother had been abusing. It’s illegal, you know, to take Haldol without a prescription.”

I knew that. Haldol, Clozaril, Risperdal, all of them. After a while I’d discovered Xanax, Percocet, Vicodin, and OxyContin. Way easier to find and a more reliable high. I’d probably gone through a thousand bottles since I was thirteen. But I’d kept those few original Haldol bottles in the cigar box. More ties to my mother.

The doctor cleared his throat. “Let us help you, Althea. This is more than just a run-of-the-mill addiction. It’s a pathology, connected to the traumatic loss of your mother. There’s a strong chance you’re predisposed for schizophrenia, just like your mother was. Add it to your substance-abuse problems, and this . . . this unusual compulsion you have, mimicking your mother’s addiction—”

“You’ll have it by thirty,” my father shouted from the top of the stairs. “They all get it at thirty!”

We all stared at him. Stooped in his rumpled pajamas, his hair on end, he pointed a knobby finger in my direction. His face was red and mottled, the way he used to look when he’d caught me sneaking in late in high school.

“Dad,” I said and started up the stairs. I felt a hand grab the back of my shirt, pull me back. I stumbled, cried out, and flailed for the banister. I saw Wynn move past me, taking the steps two at a time.

“Every last one of them,” my father said. “They go crazy. Those mountain girls all go crazy the day they turn thirty.” Wynn put an arm around Dad and pivoted him toward the bedroom.

“Wynn!”

My brother stopped, looked down at me.

“It’s not true, is it?” I said. “Tell me it’s not true.”

My father bobbed his head, answering some unheard voices, and Wynn raised his eyes to the ceiling.

“Wynn. Please.”

“I’m sorry, Althea,” he said. “Mom knew what was going to happen to her. That’s why she was taking the Haldol. It happened to all of them. It’s probably going to happen to you too.”

“We’d like to keep you under observation,” Dr. Duncan said behind me. “In case we’re right. So you’re not a harm to yourself.”

I felt them pressing in on me, my family and the doctor, with concerned eyes and this outlandish story. But how could my father have been keeping this secret all this time? Why hadn’t he said anything? Nobody had said anything. My grandmother, Collirene, had died when my mother was young, I knew that. Nobody had ever mentioned a cause. My great-grandmother, named Jinn, was from somewhere up in north Alabama where the Appalachian Mountains dwindled to hills. One time I’d heard one of Dad’s relatives say she’d run off with some man who wasn’t her husband, but that was it. Nobody had ever spoken of her death.

So why now?

“This is about the campaign, isn’t it?” I said to Wynn. “You don’t want me messing it up for you.”

“I want you to get help. I’m doing this for you.”

“I’m not going back to any facility.”

“You have to,” Molly Robb said.

“Fuck you,” I shot at her. They all gaped at me. “I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to.” I was sounding like a child again. I hated myself for it.

Wynn looked down at me over the banister, his arm still protectively curved around our father. “That’s where you’re wrong. It’s in his will.” He flicked a glance at Molly Robb, then back at me. “We all appreciate the work you did in rehab. That was an excellent start, but you have more work to do. We”—at this, he swept his gaze over the others—“all of us feel you need continuous, intensive care, for your own safety. You have to check yourself into a psychiatric hospital before your thirtieth birthday if you want your inheritance. It’s the only way you’ll ever see a penny of it.”

And then, he and my father were gone.

Chapter Five

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Mobile, Alabama

I burst out of the house into the sticky darkness, cursing the spike-heeled boots and clutching the cigar box and my purse to my chest. When I got in the car and turned the key, I heard a couple of clicks, then everything fell ominously silent.

“No.” I tried again, pumping the gas this time, but there was no response, not even a click. I banged on the steering wheel. “No! Don’t do this to me!”

I heard the coo of a dove outside my window. The buzz of cicadas. The humidity enveloped me. I laid my head on the wheel. Closed my eyes. I didn’t care what the doctor said. Some things were valuable, just because they were. Even scraps of paper with prayers written on them in faded blue ink.

“Veni, Creator Spiritus,” I said. “Mentes tuorum visita, imple superna gratia, quae tu creasti pectora.”

I tried the key again. No response.

“Qui diceris Paraclitus, altissimi donum Dei . . . um . . . tu septiformus munere.” I was saying it fast now, the words rolling out of me unchecked, working the key forward and back desperately. The car remained stubbornly silent.

“Tu septiformus munere!” I smacked the wheel with both hands.

Nothing.

I grabbed my purse and the cigar box, and clambered out, getting my foot caught in the seat belt and nearly pitching headfirst to the shells. I twisted and kicked at a tire. “Piece of 1997 shit!”

I looked back at the house. Wynn and Molly Robb had probably forgotten about me by now. They’d gone about their regular evening routine: locking the doors, drawing the curtains, settling into their nail-lined coffins. They hadn’t even given me a second thought. I turned to the deserted road, seething.

I’d only gotten a few houses down when Jay pulled up beside me.

“Need a ride?”

I stopped, feeling my face go hot. I was glad it was dark.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

I hugged my bundle of pathetic possessions. “Away from here.” I stopped. “Where are you going?”

“To be honest, I was coming back to see you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Just wanted to make sure things were okay. C’mon.” He beckoned. “Get in the car.”

I didn’t move.

“Please.”

I relented. Once in the car, I didn’t speak. I just held the cigar box and stared out into the blackness. He drove us to his parents’ house, a couple of miles downriver. He said about three words total the whole way, but I didn’t mind. I sat, both hands clutching the cigar box, grateful for the silence.

In the house—which smelled achingly familiar, of his mom’s lavender-scented cleaner and his dad’s pipe tobacco—Jay led me back to his parents’ Zen-style master bath. He turned on the six-head shower and left me in the gathering steam. Forty-five minutes later, wrapped in his mom’s huge (also lavender-scented) terry robe, I padded into the dim kitchen. The cigar box sat in the center of the enormous island next to a pot of violets. He pushed a mug of coffee toward me.

“Drink.” He nodded at the mug and I obeyed, trying my best not to stare at my ratty, dirt-smudged cigar box. In reality it drew my gaze like a magnet, like always—the red and gold curlicues on each corner, a red bird with a jaunty crest perching on a tree branch suspended in midair, the lettering stamped below: “Red Raven Cigars.” I was dying open it, to go through each item and catalog and caress them. It’d been so long. I kept my hands wrapped around my coffee instead.

A curtain of wet hair fell into my face. Jay moved behind me, gathered the wet strands in both hands, twisted and clipped it to the back of my head. I reached a hand back; he’d stuck a clothespin in it.

“Inventive,” I said.

He cleared his throat. “My parents’ condo in Orange Beach is available. We could go there. Eat shrimp. Drink sweet tea. Binge-watch shitty TV.” He finished wiping up around the coffeemaker and followed my gaze to the cigar box. “Or not.” He pushed the box toward me. “What’s in it?”

“Just some things my mother left me,” I said.

“I’ll leave you alone,” he offered. “If you want me to.”

I hesitated, then nodded.

He smiled. “Better day tomorrow, Althea. I’d put a hundred on it.”

After he left, I drew the box to me and lifted the lid. Closed my eyes, then opened them again, hoping nothing else had been taken. It hadn’t. Everything was the same as the first time I’d opened the box all those years ago.

I pulled each item out, one by one: the prayer Dr. Duncan had held, the pill bottles (six total, all of them empty), an old wine-bottle label (“Jinn’s Juice—The Most Refreshing!”) with a name and address scratched on the back in pencil: Tom Stocker, Old Cemetery Road. An old brass-and-ivory hair barrette with a tiny bird, wings outstretched, in the middle of it. A postcard-size amateur watercolor painting, the paper folded into fourths, showing two women sitting under an arbor, deep in conversation. A few odds and ends like arrowheads, papery locust skins, and bottle caps.

I arranged the items in a row on the counter, the way I used to line them up across my comforter every night before I went to sleep. I touched each one now with reverent fingers, like they were holy relics.

And now that thing was happening, the way it had always happened when I opened the box. The memories were taking over, expanding inside me, suffocating me. Blotting out everything reasonable and sane. I saw the path that wound through the woods and to the clearing beside our house. It was an oasis, the clearing, cool and mossy, even in the south-Alabama humidity. Spanish moss hanging like curtains, making you feel like you were in a secret cave.

Nighttime, and my mother kneels in the clearing. She is shaking. She pushes the box with the red raven on the lid across the grass to me. I see what’s inside—the prayer, the wine label, the barrette, the painting, and the pill bottles—but I don’t understand what they mean. She tells me to hide the box from my father, and I promise I will.

I had kept my promise. I kept the cigar box out of sight, hidden in my closet, even when I went away to college. I hadn’t understood why I was doing it. But now, more than ever, I was convinced my mother had known what she was doing. For some reason, my father could not see what was inside this box. The same reason, no doubt, that my brother had taken it. The pill bottles, the prayer, the painting, the wine label, and the barrette—they weren’t just random reminders of my mother. They actually meant something. They were clues.

In the clearing, I heard my mother’s voice. Practically the last thing she’d said to me before she died, about the honeysuckle girl.

She’s very wise. She knows things.

Now the items—the clues—waited on Jay’s kitchen counter in their orderly row. Waited for me to make the next move. They were pulling me toward them but I held back, afraid to get too close, to let them infect me again. My mother’s words had been a fairy story. A lie.

No, worse than that. Her instructions had been the product of a disturbed mind.

No one had found me. No honeysuckle girl, no all-wise friend with words to save me. And it wasn’t good for me to obsess like this, that’s what all the doctors had said. I owed it to myself to stay strong and focused.

I am not my mother.

The honeysuckle girl isn’t real.

I do not have gold dust on my fingertips.

There is no such thing as a red raven.

I swept the neat row of items into the cigar box. I was glad Jay had left. I didn’t know if I would’ve been able to explain to him why I cared so much about its contents, in a way that didn’t make me sound completely, one hundred percent crazy.

Jay had turned down the sheets on his parents’ king-size bed, and I climbed in, robe and all. He took an old undershirt of his dad’s out of the drawer, tossed it to me, then reached around and took the clothespin out of my hair. He pinched it on his finger a couple of times, until the tip of his finger turned white.

“It’s so weird being here,” I said.

He smiled.

I smiled too. “It’s weird being in your parents’ bed.”

“You want to sleep in the guest room? My dad has his exercise equipment in there, but the bed is good.”

I shook my head, and he went quiet. He made a move to leave.

“Stay,” I said.

He lifted the covers and, fully clothed, climbed in beside me. Curled around me and buried his face in my damp hair. My heart began to race. “If you want to talk about it . . .” He stopped, waiting. But I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Not yet. I heard him exhale, then I did too, and, without intending to, I fell asleep.

I woke up sometime before dawn, enveloped in the lavender smell of the bedsheets and the undershirt I was wearing. I sat up and watched the stars that hung over the river and the purple glow of the coming morning from the wall of glass opposite the bed.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what my father had said.
Every last one of them
—my mother, Trix; grandmother, Collie; and great-grandmother, Jinn. Other than my suspicions about my mother, I had never heard anything about them having any kind of mental illness. Or it happening at age thirty. I’d never been told anything other than the few sentences my mother had whispered to me in the clearing that night.

The new knowledge, this thing I held inside me, was too big to comprehend. I could barely swallow. I could barely breathe. After a minute or two I turned to look down at Jay. He was lying on his back, awake, watching me. I stared back, unblinking, breaking contact only once to look down at his lips. By now, the air between us was crackling, and his face had transformed in understanding.

“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” he said.

“Nothing I do is a good idea.”

“You’re wrong.” His voice was soft but hoarse. “I wish you knew how wrong you are. I wish you could see how I see you, Althea.”

I felt tears flood my eyes. He had to stop saying things like this, these things that made me feel like my skin had been peeled back. But he’d been surrounded by so much care, so much love, he probably couldn’t imagine living in a world that wasn’t brimming over with it. I wanted to tell him to stop, but I was sick of conversation and scared where more of it would lead me.

Instead, I pulled off the shirt and then my underwear and moved to him. He held aside the covers, and I arranged my body over his. Chest to chest, arms and legs entwined, my head under his chin—we fit perfectly.

“We shouldn’t,” he said.

“Yeah.”

His arms went up and wrapped around me. And he exhaled again, like he’d been holding his breath for a really long time. After a couple of minutes, he shifted me to the side, peeled off his shirt and pants, and pressed himself against me once more.

I kissed him once, and it couldn’t have been any slower and sweeter. When I felt tears threaten—
oh please God, not that
—I rolled on my back and pulled him on top of me. I wanted to feel his weight, all of it, on me. I wrapped my legs around him, and we settled into each other.

“You feel cold,” he said. “In a good way. Like the river on a hot day.”

He was wrong, though. It wasn’t good, the way I was cold. It was bad. It was a little bit dangerous. I hurt people with my coldness.

When he finally moved inside me, I forced myself to stay detached for as long as I could, focusing on his shoulder, the way freckles dotted his skin, his smell. But I couldn’t stop myself, he felt too good. I closed my eyes, pressed up and into him. And felt myself slipping away to that place where I didn’t care anymore, not about anything. Only us and this.

I made a wish. Two wishes, actually: First, that Jay wouldn’t realize that I was doing this, using him, to numb my fear. And second, that in spite of our long history, our friendship and the pact we’d made, this tryst wouldn’t ultimately mean anything more than just two strangers doing what strangers sometimes did.

Then I let go.