We Lie Here: A Thriller, page 7
“Are you serious? Where is she?”
“Probably where she always goes when she leaves like this.”
Your mother’s favorite place. For a moment, I think about that address in Felicia’s note. I wish we had talked earlier. I rub my face to coax life back into my skin.
Dominique gasps, whispers, “She’s back. I hear her coming up the . . .” My sister clears her throat and says, louder now, “Because she doesn’t see you anymore. And I think it’s because she thinks that you didn’t like dinner.”
“I could’ve cooked more vegetables,” Mom says in the background. She sounds wounded.
I squeeze the bridge of my nose. “Dom, you know she’s trying to manipulate me. Trying to make me feel guilty, right? She knows that me staying here isn’t about her cooking.”
“How do you think it looks for you to be staying there and not with your family?” Mom shouts from wherever they are. “You’ll look disloyal, and I’ll look like I’ve failed—and I don’t fail.” Unlike her mother, Lolly, an alcoholic who drank herself to death just five years ago.
I groan. “Dom, I’m a freaking adult. I don’t have to do what she—”
“Yara, stop. I’m tired. You need to get over it and come home.” Dominique sounds scratchy and annoyed. As a child, anytime arguments broke out between our parents, my sister grabbed a loaf of bread from the kitchen and disappeared beneath the dining room table. She’d eat slice after slice, listening to our parents’ angry words but never interrupting, never crying.
One tumultuous summer, we never had enough bread to make bologna sandwiches. Tonight sounds like it’s been a “bread beneath the table” kind of night. Mom won’t take no for an answer, and she’ll make Dominique and Daddy miserable until she wins.
“Fine.” I turn on the lamp and kick away the comforter. My mother doesn’t care that I literally cannot breathe at that house. But whatever Queen Bee wants . . .
“She’s leaving the hotel,” Dominique tells Mom.
“Tell her don’t come if she thinks I’m trying to kill her with my smoking,” Mom says.
“Fuck you,” I mutter.
Dominique chuckles but doesn’t speak.
“What did she say?” Mom asks.
“I’ll try not to suffocate in her presence,” I shout, my mood like hot coals. “Don’t want my death to get in the way of her image.”
Dominique says to Mom: “She just said okay.” To me: “See you soon.”
It’ll be just like the good old days. Mom will sigh every time I use my inhaler, since that’s somehow a rebuke against her as a mother. That means I won’t use my inhaler as much as I should because I don’t want to annoy her. I no longer care about annoying her. Now, I will use my inhaler every time she lights up, and three days from now, she’ll want me out of her house. I’ll write—my version of therapy—and try to figure out how to survive a difficult mother.
And so, I will not surrender my hotel room. No. Hell no. When the week turns left—like it’s turning already—I’ll return to Room 303 and write the best pilot script of my life.
Nine days in Palmdale. Day Ten, I will take my ass back to LA and live happily ever after until Thanksgiving. Yes, for the next week, I will try my best to keep sweet and just swallow it. Then I’ll purge it all on the page and in the Caribbean and become whole again.
I type dream of spiders explanation into my phone’s search engine.
“. . . associated with manipulation, either the dreamer is manipulated, or the dreamer is being manipulated.”
A well-timed analysis. Another interpretation says that I may be feeling overwhelmed by a situation, that I’m feeling trapped by a lot of people or issues, that I’m feeling irritated. That I have an overbearing mother in my life. That I’m feeling like an outsider.
Yes, yes, and yes. Guess I’ll be dreaming about spiders for the next eight nights.
Yippee.
Just tell her no, Shane responds after I text that I’m driving to my parents.
I sigh, then type, I know she’s trying to handle her emotions better
That’s why she didn’t say anything when I left after dinner
But I can’t expect a turtle to fly
Fair enough but
Explain to her that you love her but you need space
It’s no knock against her or your love for her
She’ll get mad but she’s your mother
She wants the best for you
Does she? LOL
OF COURSE SHE DOES!!!
I shake my head as my fingers tap across the screen. I don’t want to fight
All fights aren’t harmful babe
It’s complicated
WE’RE complicated
It’s easier for me to bend
She doesn’t bend
I see where you’re coming from but
This isn’t healthy babe
Tell me about it.
I shove some of the clothes I unpacked back into one of my suitcases and dump some of my toiletries from the bathroom counter into the overnight bag. I stow the envelope with Felicia’s keys and the note in my purse. Then I text Dominique that I’m on my way.
An unread text from Felicia’s number came in while I slept and dreamed of spiders.
Help
Lix uz
I squint at the unfinished text.
Lix uz . . .
What are you talking about Felicia? I text.
No ellipsis bubble on the screen.
No response to my text message.
It’s nearly midnight. I should be asleep right now. I push out a breath and send my thumbs tapping across the keyboard.
DO NOT TEXT ME AGAIN!!
NO MORE!
Yes, I should be asleep by now. In my heart, I am asleep right now. Even as I stumble to the elevator bank, my mind spins, a rock tumbler polishing excuses for tomorrow night.
11.
Out here in Antelope Valley, the desert sky is big. Although there are now more than 155,000 people living in Palmdale alone, that big desert sky swallows the glare of the shopping mall’s lights as well as the neon burn of Applebee’s, Olive Garden, and McDonald’s. Right now, Jupiter and even Saturn burn bright up in that sky. During the Perseid meteor showers, I always feel like I’m at the planetarium instead of at home on a Friday night. Every week, there are weird, chopped-up lights that streak this sky. Space debris, UFOs, meteors . . . Since Edwards Air Force Base and Northrop Grumman are less than fifty miles away, anything can be up there.
You can’t find a sky like this in Los Angeles.
I shouldn’t be looking at this sky right now. I should be focused on finding my car in the parking lot and not running into desperate coyotes or horny, violent drunks. So hard to do since my eyelids are drooping, and my body wants to collapse into a bed.
But whatever Queen Bee wants . . .
Barbara McGuire Gibson, the mother of all spiders.
Not entirely her fault. After my grandparents Lolly and Ezekiel divorced, Poppa moved twenty miles south to Long Beach, and Nana spent her days with a heavy crystal glass of Scotch in one hand and a television remote control in the other. She’d sometimes forget to pick Mom up from school, often passing out before she’d finished cooking dinner.
Nana attended only three of Mom’s track meets and lost her driver’s license from too many DUIs. After that afternoon’s episode of General Hospital ended and Donahue (and then Oprah) began, she’d throw that glass at a wall, leaving behind dents and holes that Mom hid with her certificates and ribbons. My father was Mom’s rescuer (her word, not mine), and they had me before she could figure out all that she needed from this life without an alcoholic parent. She needed me with her at all times to control every move I made and to show the world that she was the anti-Lolly. My mother learned how to mother by watching the Quartermaines of Port Charles, TV talk shows—and now Hallmark movies. Today, she can point to the mostly positive results. I write for television. Dominique was a high school volleyball champion and is now a freshman in college. Look at my successful, beautiful family. I did that!
Mom’s love for me is like this big desert sky: sometimes cold, sometimes unreachable, but also overwhelming and weirdly streaked with the most random colors. Her love is perplexing. Her love, like this city, takes my breath away. Despite how she treats me sometimes, I want her to succeed. I really do.
And now, I climb behind the wheel and make it one hundred yards before swirling red lights from emergency vehicles glow in my rearview mirror.
On my lap, my phone buzzes with text messages from my sister.
U almost here?
I’m tired
I text Dominique. Almost there
One day, I will do as Shane suggests and push past my aversion to conflict. I’ll tell Mom, Look, I love you, but my health suffers in this house. I need you to understand that. I’ve done it before, but my face still numbs with just the thought of telling Barbara McGuire Gibson no about anything. She’s frozen me out the very few times I’ve done so, and there’s nothing more miserable than being shunned by your family.
The fire engine and ambulance are now just a light behind me.
The whirs of sirens push through the Jeep’s sound bubble, and I pull to the right side of the road along with the other idiots stupid enough to be driving in the desert at this time of night.
Like me, those first responders are traveling west, and although I may no longer hear those sirens, those swirling bright lights shine . . . and now, they’re swallowed by that desert sky.
Nothing is west. Just mountains, lakes, valleys, and . . . the Twilight Zone.
What could’ve possibly happened at midnight in that direction?
Before I pull back onto the road, I notice a sheet of paper flapping in the middle of my windshield. I turn on the wipers, but the motion doesn’t free it. After making sure I’m not about to be struck by a passing car, I climb out and grab the paper. The headlights of an approaching truck make me squint, and the lights illuminate this side of my—
In the truck’s light, I see long white scratches against the Jeep door’s paint. The gouges circle and spray, swerve and curlicue. Someone’s keyed my car. Gutted, I climb back behind the steering wheel. With tears in my eyes, I open the sheet of paper I plucked from my windshield.
I can’t wait to hug you and squeeze you to death.
HOME AGAIN
12.
Who did I piss off in the ten hours I’ve been in Palmdale?
My mind crunches . . . searches . . .
Can’t think of anyone.
Maybe whoever it is thought my Jeep was their lover’s. I see them now, swiping through pictures taken by their best friend, proof (finally!) of Joey’s cheating. Pissed-off Lover hops in their starter BMW and races into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. They spot the black Jeep, whip out their keys, and with tear-filled eyes, drag that metal across the black paint. Vindicated—oh, wait, this isn’t Joey’s Jeep . . . Makes sense. But the note—I can’t wait to hug you and squeeze you to death—makes no sense, and so I crumple it and toss it in the back seat.
I want to cry, but I’m too tired to cry, and it takes all my energy to shamble up the walkway to my childhood home.
The murmur of people talking drifts from our backyard—those voices must belong to the drivers of the black Range Rover, the blue Chevy Impala, and the yellow Dodge Charger.
Dominique has guests.
My eyeglass lenses steam as I step into the house. The first thing I notice: the nook in the foyer is empty.
Mom’s go bag is gone.
There are scrapes in the dust that surrounded it, and the single dried maple leaf that flew in during a 2018 dust storm has fallen from the nook and crumpled onto the floor. Tonight, Mom took the bag because she was leaving-leaving, and she needed whatever was in it. A fly-anywhere plane ticket? Bundles of cash? Sweatpants and running shoes?
I know Dad says it isn’t any of my business, but one day, I will work up the courage to peek inside. First, though, I’ll have to find it.
Cigarette between her fingers, my mother now smirks at me from the bottom of the staircase. “You didn’t have to come back.”
Dominique pushes out a breath, then gathers her phone and cup of tea from the living room coffee table. She rises from the couch. “I’m outside.”
“Someone keyed my car,” I blurt.
Dominique holds Mom’s gaze and says, “I can’t with the Yara drama tonight.”
I glare at her. “What does that mean?”
She rolls her eyes and smirks at our mother.
“You don’t believe me?” I shriek.
Dominique pivots and stomps to the kitchen.
Mom and I watch her disappear out the back door.
In the silence, the house clicks and groans as desert cold seeps into its joints and cracks.
“Why would I key my own car?” I ask.
Out in the backyard, the group laughs.
“Sounds like there’s a hundred people out there,” I say. “Did she tell them about my car? Are they laughing at me?”
Mom chuckles, then sighs. “I’ll never understand you.”
I wince—those words always shear pieces of my heart. “What am I missing now?”
Mom shrugs. “Nothing. Anyway . . . I made your room up nice.” She comes to take my suitcase. Ashes from her cigarette drift onto the bag’s handle.
I scowl at those wafting ashes and follow her up the stairs.
She natters about comforters and candles, tomorrow’s track meet and Pepsi’s hamstring as though this is all cool and she didn’t just force me to come back home.
Dad is lying atop the blue comforter in their bedroom. He’s yawning and rubbing the bridge of his nose as the theme music from Frasier plays on the television.
“G’night, Daddy,” I say from the hallway.
He says, “G’night, Yaya. Don’t worry about the scratches. I’ll get ’em buffed out.”
Mom whispers: “He’s mad at me.”
Right now, my anger burns like paper—I don’t knock Dad for his rage.
I smell the shortbread-scented candle before I even enter my bedroom. The Justin Bieber posters and fairy lights have been replaced by yellow and gray paint and a framed poster of Starry Night, a new change since my springtime visit.
I point to the jar candle burning on the dresser. “This was my favorite scent.”
Mom drops my bag at the foot of the bed. “I bought your first one the Christmas you were fifteen.”
That holiday, I’d felt so grown-up. I could keep matches in my bedroom and burn a candle without supervision.
A humidifier sits on the nightstand, along with a box of essential oils and a bottled water, courtesy of Superhero Bee.
“Mom,” I say, “you didn’t have to do this.”
“There’s eucalyptus oil,” she says. “When you were little, we used that and peppermint.”
My asthma attacks and respiratory infections were legendary all-night affairs. Steam sometimes billowed nonstop from my penguin humidifier and from the shower in the Jack and Jill bathroom between my bedroom and Dominique’s. Two inhalers—emergency and steroid—would sit on the nightstand, along with vials of prednisone and amoxicillin and a big box of tissues. Mom would climb in bed beside me, and together we’d watch SpongeBob SquarePants or My Neighbor Totoro until my breathing eased and the meds put me to sleep.
“And I bought the comforter set yesterday. Egyptian cotton.” Mom pulls her hand across the green-and-mustard-yellow duvet. Printed with pheasants, orioles, and white flowers, the linens are fancier than the bedding at the Holiday Inn.
I shake eucalyptus oil into the humidifier. “Thank you.” Still pissed, I try to smile, but it wrecks itself against my teeth and shambles into a grimace.
“I know,” Mom says. “Guess I shouldn’t have never let you go in the first place. Can’t say that I didn’t try.” She throws me a smile, then stubs out the cigarette in a rainbow crystal ashtray she’s carrying in her back pocket.
I pull back the comforter. “G’night. I’m exhausted.”
Best Friend Bee leaves me and closes the door.
I open the Ativan vial, pop two pills in honor of the past and the future, then twist the cap off the water bottle. As I drink, something thuds above me. Some creature in the attic? Or did a box or picture I found earlier tip over?
My nerves zigzag, and I wonder how long it will take for the drugs to kick in. I turn to the humidifier now sending a stream of scented air across the bedroom. Nothing, though, chokes the ghosts of burned tobacco. It lingers forever in the carpet and in the paint, and it has soaked into the cedar of the bureau and nightstand.
Doesn’t matter that I’ve kept my hotel room. Mom will not let me leave this house, no matter how valid or creative my excuse. And if I do confront her and tell her that I’m staying at the hotel, then she will make Daddy’s and Dominique’s lives miserable. I’d never hurt them like that just to stay at a freakin’ Holiday Inn. Which means . . .
I’m right where Mom wants me: at home.
And I’m here to stay.
Point: Barbara.
She always wins.
I unpack, stuffing the bureau with clothes as I also search for pajamas. In one drawer, I find composition books and diaries. A book report on Where the Red Fern Grows. A self-portrait done in eighth grade art class. My third grade handwriting journals—my tortured Q and squirrelly M. It’s just print letters holding hands, my teacher, Miss Karpinsky, had explained.
I place my cell phone and inhaler beside the humidifier. According to the dose counter, I have 130 puffs left. Enough to get me through the week. I search my closet for one of my old weighted blankets, just in case. No luck. Once I change into pajamas, I blow out the candle and settle beneath the sheets. Back in this room, I’m a child again.
In this scene of Queen of Palmdale, the moon glows past the bedroom’s gauzy gray curtains, and shadows on the ceiling resemble long, tall aliens. That shadow has tentacles . . . That shadow blows bubbles . . .
