While I'm Falling (16 page)

By three o’clock, all of Haylie’s clothes were hanging neatly in her closet. The sheets were washed and dried and stretched back over the bed. Every empty beer can and plastic cup had been located and contained in the plastic trash bag by the door. The floors were vacuumed and mopped. I’d dragged the wine rack, undamaged, back out into the kitchen, where the counters sparkled, suds-free. There was no evidence of the party at all, not even a trace of cigarette smoke in the air. The entire town house smelled like the lemons my mother had cut open and microwaved. And she’d been right about the meat tenderizer—the bloodstain had almost completely disappeared.

“Hey—it’s okay if I take a shower? My bag is right out in the van.”

I looked at her. I thought she was joking. She looked back, blank-faced, her hand raised like a hitchhiker’s, her thumb tilted toward the stairs.

“You want to take a shower here?”

She leaned on the vacuum, and it started to roll forward. She almost lost her balance. She caught herself without a smile. “Well. I’ve been cleaning for a few hours now. Helping you clean. And I feel icky. I’d like to take a shower before I drive back.” She paused to purse her lips in disapproval. “If that’s not too much trouble.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was an odd request and, under the circumstances, a slightly unreasonable one. “Mom. They’ll be back here in less than an hour.”

She didn’t say anything. She lowered her eyes to Bowzer, who was asleep in the corner of the entryway. My mother had made a little bed for him: Elise’s old eyelet white bedspread, which my mother had brought in from the van and folded into quarters, with an empty plastic trash bag underneath that.

“I’d really like to not be here when they get here.” I looked at my watch, then back up at her. “Can’t you just wait until you get home?”

“No.” Her voice, her expression, everything, made it clear she was not really asking. She turned the vacuum back in the direction of the front door. “I’ll get my bag. I’ll be fifteen minutes. Don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of time.”

She did not take a shower. She took a bath. And it took her thirty minutes, not fifteen. When she finally came back downstairs, I was reading by the door with my coat on, my purse and backpack under my knees. Bowzer, sensing my presence, had rolled over onto his back beside me. I rubbed his chest, using my nails, and he seemed very pleased about it. His fur felt gummy and old.

She looked like a completely different person. She looked clean. She was wearing nice clothes, a cream sweater and brown cords. It was the kind of thing she used to wear to volunteer at the shelter—presentable, but not showy. Her wet hair was slicked back, the ends just starting to curl.

“You’re ready?” I stood up. “You don’t need to dry your hair?”

She shook her head, pulling on her coat. “I have a hat.”

On my way out, I held the door open for my mother with my foot. She had her bag slung over her shoulder, Bowzer and his blanket balanced in her arms. As she passed, I smelled mint and rosemary. She’d also used Haylie’s shampoo.

We made our way down the front steps. The party, and the resulting cleanup, had resulted in two full bags of garbage. I walked behind my mother, carrying a bag on either side of me. We were at the end of the driveway when she turned around.

“Okay, honey. I parked far.” She leaned toward me, one arm out. “Let me kiss you good-bye.” Bowzer emerged from his blanket cocoon and tried to lick her cheek.

“I need a ride,” I said.

She bit her lip. She blinked. She looked even more rabbitlike, mute and anxious. All her hair was under her hat. “You don’t…” She glanced up and down the street.

“I need a ride, Mom. I don’t have a car.” I tilted my head and stared at her. This request could not possibly be a problem. But given the way she stared back at me, I had to consider that she was, at least, surprised by it. Maybe she’d forgotten that I didn’t have a car. Maybe she’d already forgotten I’d been in an accident on Friday. Maybe the details of my life were just details to her, not nearly as important as whatever drama was moving through hers and making her act like someone I didn’t even know.

“Veronica.” She appeared to exchange exasperated glances with Bowzer. “I know you don’t have a car. But how did you get yourself here?”

It was a profound question, metaphorically speaking. Non-metaphorically speaking, it was just annoying. I set the garbage bags down and crossed my arms. Bowzer whimpered, wondering, perhaps, what the holdup was. My mother looked down at him and said nothing. I lowered my head, breathing in the cold air around me. I had been wrong. She had been wrong. The incident at the Hardee’s, the hanging up, had not been an isolated incident. She really was different now. She was unreliable, distracted, preoccupied with something big that was not me.

I heard a door open on the other side of the driveway. My mother and I, aware that we were being watched, turned to see a tan, blond woman in a purple jogging suit. We smiled. The woman did not smile back. “Nice party,” she muttered. She let her gaze fall to the two bags of garbage before she turned around and slammed the door.

I closed my eyes. “Can I just have a ride to the dorm? Or do I need to call Highway Patrol again?”

When I opened my eyes, she was looking at me as if she wanted to hug me, but she was holding Bowzer, and the blanket, and the strap of her bag was sliding down her arm. She jerked her head forward and raised her hand, an invitation to follow.

We were still several feet from her van when I noticed the stained glass lampshade balanced against one of the back windows. It had been my grandmother’s. She’d had it in her house in New Hampshire, and then in her room in Kansas City, at the nursing home. A television screen faced out of the van’s other back window, an end table resting on top of it.

My mother shook her head. “Just don’t say anything, okay? Just don’t ask.” She sounded tired, and annoyed, as if I were pestering her about something we’d been over a million times. When she got close to the passenger door, she gestured for me to take Bowzer from her. I set down the bags and took him, watching her face as she fished in her coat pockets for her keys. She kept her chin tucked low, her jaw set, her eyes away from mine. When she opened the passenger door, she had to put her arms up quickly to keep two cardboard boxes from falling to the ground. Without a word, she set the boxes on top of the vacuum, which was lying on some blankets on the first long seat.

She opened the front passenger door for me and then walked around to the driver’s side. My seat was littered with empty Diet Pepsi cans and a half-empty box of Wheaties. On the floor mat sat Bowzer’s food bowl, alongside an old Cool Whip container full of water. I moved things around with my free hand and climbed in, still holding Bowzer. Once my mother was in her seat, he whimpered and tried to jump over the gearshift to her lap, but I held him back. He rested his chin on my arm, resigned. “It’s okay,” I said, stroking his chest. He still had the fat pocket, but everywhere else, he was so thin. I could feel his bones under his fur.

I was six when my father first brought him home in a plastic crate, with his tiny bark and big puppy claws, a red bow around his neck. My mother had been annoyed. She didn’t want a dog. She had told my father a cat, maybe a cat, but a dog would be too much. She was defeated, outnumbered, the moment Bowzer nosed his way out of the box with a red bow around his neck. Elise and I shrieked with delight and then took him outside to play. It was a sunny autumn afternoon, and the air smelled like burning leaves. My father carved a pumpkin on the back deck while Elise and I ran in circles, letting the still unnamed puppy chase us and yip at our heels.

At some point, my mother came out from the back door, a dishtowel in her hands. She smiled at my father and then at us. She put her elbows on the railing of the deck and watched us play for a long time, her nose tilted up to the crisp autumn air. Not much later, my father cut his hand with the carving knife, and there was screaming and a blood-soaked dishtowel and a frantic trip to the ER. But before all that, while she’d stood on the deck watching all of us, I remember thinking that she looked happy.

We drove for several minutes without speaking. The roads were dry, but my mother was as cautious as ever, taking corners slowly. Someone behind us honked, but she didn’t seem to hear.

The light changed, and we started moving again. She turned on the radio, country music. I reached past Bowzer and turned the radio off.

“Why is all this stuff in the van? Are you moving? Are you moving somewhere secret?”

“You’re not in charge of the radio.” She reached over and turned it back on. A commercial had started, and she moved the dial. It was the college station. Eminem. She did not seem concerned. “I’m driving. It’s my van. I decide about the radio.”

Bowzer was shivering a little. I rewrapped the blanket around him. The van’s heater still didn’t work.

“I’m just taking a few things to Goodwill,” she said. “It’s not a big deal.” She pulled into the dorm parking lot. A few people were standing outside the dorm. I held my breath, looking for Clyde.

“I’m just cleaning out, you know?” Her voice was flat. “Trying to live more simply.”

I turned around and surveyed the boxes and furniture crammed around the back seats. “You’re taking Nana’s lamp to Goodwill?”

She moved her tongue around her mouth. She was chewing gum again. She smacked it. She was not a person who should chew gum.

“Mom, that’s a beautiful lamp. And it was hers. You can’t give it to Goodwill.”

She fingered the keys in the ignition. “I can do what I want,” she said.

“I’ll take it. Don’t give it to Goodwill. I want it.”

“No.”

“What? Why?” Bowzer turned and gave me a pained look, his silver brows moving from side to side.

“Just drop it.” Her voice was low, authoritative. It was the voice she used when I was little, commanding me to take a Lego out of my mouth. “Okay, Veronica? Drop it.”

She faced forward, not looking at me. She was chewing the gum hard and fast, her mouth closed, her temples pulsing.

I handed Bowzer to her. He nestled himself right into her lap, his chin resting on her left arm.

“Bye honey,” she said. “I love you.” She didn’t look at me. We had never stopped at a Dumpster to get rid of the garbage, but something about her face made me know I should not mention this. I got out of the van, opened the sliding door, and pulled both garbage bags out. I carried them up the front steps to the dorm. It was not yet dark out; still, she waited at the curb, engine idling, until I was inside.

Just a few minutes later, despite myself, I started to have an inkling. By the time I was in the elevator, I at least understood that she had never been on probation with me. She was my mother, and always my mother. She could have pressed me about the town house, about Jimmy, if she’d wanted to. And she knew it. She was letting me keep my secrets, not out of guilt or respect or anything that had anything to do with me. She had simply set a precedent for the day, not asking for trouble, because she had secrets of her own.

T
HIRD
F
LOOR
C
LYDE
was waiting outside my door.

And yet, it didn’t matter.

I started explaining right there in the hall. No one was around anyway, and, given what I had to say, it seemed awkward to ask him inside. And it seemed pointless, even mean, to let him say anything at all first; because nothing he could say would make any difference. It wouldn’t matter if he turned out to be nice or smart or funny in addition to being the dorm’s Adonis. I wouldn’t care. I told him this, working to keep my eyes on his, to not be a coward and let myself look at the yellow cinder-block walls or the gray carpet. I clasped my hands in front of me and then behind me. I’d left the garbage bags in the first-floor trash room; my books were behind me in my backpack, and I wished I had something to hold. I told him that I had made a mistake the other night, and that I was embarrassed, but that my embarrassment had nothing to do with him. I told him that I had a boyfriend, and even though I had probably messed that up, I wasn’t sure I had messed it up completely, and I didn’t want to do anything to make my chances worse.

Marley’s door was open. I could see her shadow on the hallway carpet; she was right around the corner, taking everything in.

“Okay,” he said, his low voice steady. He was already turning away. “No problem. I understand.”

I watched him walk away, worried that he did not understand at all. It was almost an old joke to reject someone and say there was nothing wrong with him, that the problem was with you. But in this case, it was absolutely true. What I was feeling now had nothing to do with him. But what I had felt on Friday night had nothing to do with him, either—which didn’t say much for me. I used him, as if he weren’t really a person. Whether he was wounded or not didn’t matter. I was right to feel ashamed of myself.

“Hey, Veronica.” Marley was behind me. “How’re you doing?”

My first impulse was to ignore her. I didn’t want to be mean, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone just then. I wanted to turn around and move past her to my room and shut the door behind me. I wanted to stop saying and doing stupid things, and the only way to do that, it seemed, was to take a break from interactions in general. When I did turn around, however, she was standing closer than I’d expected, and she looked eager and desperate for conversation, even more so than usual. I glanced up and down the hallway. Every door but hers was closed. The dorm could be a lonely place on Sundays. In cold weather, especially, even the people who didn’t go home seemed to disappear.

I looked at my watch. “You want to go to dinner?” I wasn’t hungry—I’d eaten one of the chicken salads my mother had brought just a few hours ago.

She nodded. Of course she nodded. She’d probably been alone all day. I wasn’t sure what the course load was like for French horn majors, but it didn’t seem very demanding for Marley. She always had time on her hands.

“I have to put my bag down.” I unlocked my door and waved her in behind me. My blinds were still down from the previous night, and though it was still just late afternoon outside, I had to turn on the light to see.

“You need to decorate.” She wrinkled her nose at my blank walls.

“I’ve been busy,” I said. When I set my backpack on my desk, I heard the thud of my chemistry book. I still had to read, and try to understand, three more chapters before Tuesday.

“You need posters.” She sat on the spare bed, one pig slipper crossed over the other. She was wearing the sweatshirt that had been signed, in various colors of Magic Marker, by the other members of her high school graduating class. “Seniors Reach for the Stars! Go Bison!” was ironed on the back in bubbly, hollowed-out letters. “I’m lucky, because a lot of my mom’s friends are quilters, and they made me a quilt before I came to school. Have you seen it? It’s pretty. I sleep with it at night and then I hang it up on my wall during the day so I can see it.”

I nodded, feeling through my backpack for my meal card. I knew she had heard every word of my conversation with Clyde. At first, when she didn’t bring him up, I thought she was being tactful. But the more she talked, the more it seemed that she just wasn’t all that interested. She was still talking about the quilt, about its lace trim, and the way her mother’s quilting friends had used her baby clothes to spell out her name. I tried to focus on what she was saying; I tried not to hear the ticking of my watch. I was going to fail the chemistry test anyway. I might as well be kind. I looked down and saw that Tim’s note, with the little drawing of the rabbit, had fallen to the floor. I picked it up and set it back on my desk.

The phone rang just as we were walking out. It was the dorm-issued landline, which I never used. The receiver felt heavy in my hand.

“Veronica?” I recognized, almost right away, the voice of Gordon Goodman, residence hall director—though he usually sounded friendlier than he did just now.

“Did you forget our meeting? Your performance review?”

I looked at my calendar. There it was, two days before the chemistry test, both of them listed in red ink so I wouldn’t forget. I rested my forehead against the wall. I was still screwing up. I couldn’t stop. It was like a free fall.

He said he would be waiting downstairs.

Marley took the news in stride, but I still felt bad. Running down the hall, I called over my shoulder that I was sorry, and that if she wanted to wait, we could go to dinner when I came back.