“Oh, you’ve seen what’s wrong with her,” Wanda said. “It’s like she has trouble staying here.” She tapped at the side of her head. “Or here.” A vigorous thump on her breastbone. “When Tami died, Emily didn’t have anybody else. I let her come stay with me here. She’s just been sleeping more and more. Even when she’s awake, she’s not here. When your mother got in touch, I thought maybe she’d know how to help. I do my best, but—” She stopped.
“But?”
Wanda drew closer, even though we were alone. “One week, she was going on and on about the people coming through the glass. Jibber jabber. They have glass in their hair. But there was a bad storm that next weekend and a car ran the red light down near Cove Circle—” She gestured, as if I were familiar with the area. “Ugly pileup. Two people died. Went right through the windshield. I saw the photo in the paper, glass everywhere on the road.”
I was on edge in a way that wasn’t exactly unpleasant. It reminded me of the time my mother had taken me swimming in the lake and I’d ventured past the drop-off as I dog-paddled, my toes searching for land and finding only the deep, sudden cold. A thrill, a terror. “You—what? Think she was predicting the future?”
Wanda stiffened and stepped back, physically distancing herself from what she’d just said. “Emily, she says all sorts of things. You’ve heard her. Most of it is just noise. I’ve heard her talk about things that happened when she was a tiny girl. She talks about her mama all the time, and Lord knows that’s all in the past now.”
But it isn’t, I wanted to say. It didn’t matter if her mother was dead, vanished, estranged—she was there in Emily’s past, her future, her present. Always.
“Well,” Wanda said. “I should…” She gestured vaguely at the house around her, a signal that I understood meant, Get the hell out already.
“Right. Yeah. I’ll get going,” I said.
The Chevy was waiting for me against the curb. The alternator had been making an ominous, intermittent grinding noise for the last hundred miles; the air-conditioning had given out, so I’d been forced to roll down the only two windows that would still function. I thought about climbing back into the Chevy, heading out—to where? Back home to Chicago, already giving up on my mother, abandoning her to her fate?
At the door, I turned impulsively. “Do you know if my mom was on her way to see anybody else?”
“Let me see. She mentioned going to see … oh, you know. The famous ones. I don’t know if she ever made it.”
* * *
Back in the sun-warmed Chevy, I opened my mother’s notebook and flipped, with shaking fingers, to the list of Mothers and Girls. Deb and Bonnie Clarkson, Mother and Girl Seven, were the only ones who fit the glossy term famous. Like sunflowers, the Clarksons always turned in the direction of the nearest flashbulb. I sometimes spotted them on afternoon TV with their identical teased bangs, feverish streaks of blush.
It felt like I’d been gone from Chicago for weeks already but it had barely been twenty-four hours. I had time left on the clock. Minnesota was a day of driving. It didn’t sound unappealing. I wanted to keep moving. I wanted to go somewhere, talk to somebody else. I couldn’t return to Chicago and pretend nothing was wrong. I had questions for my mother: I wanted answers. There was a tilted symmetry to it. Maybe my curiosity could bring us back together, since it was responsible for pushing us apart.
I yanked the key in the ignition, waiting impatiently for the Chevy to struggle back to life. Him. That kept rolling around at the back of my head. This male pronoun that was supposed to help me track down my mother. The one who looks out for you. Only one man had ever looked out for me, and he’d been dead for years.
It wasn’t as if I had an overabundance of hims in my life right now, or ever. Growing up with the word virgin attached to me, I’d had an even rockier relationship with my hymen than most girls. I’d had sex for the first time at sixteen, a purposefully average age, selecting a boy from my class who was just unpopular enough not to brag. I’d only wanted to see how it would work. Was my vagina even functional, or was it really glued shut or lined with tiny razor-sharp fangs? My first time having sex turned out to be underwhelming, more a process of discovering that I could, in fact, have sex. Propped awkwardly on top of me, the boy had pulled back: “Do I even need to use—anything? You can’t get pregnant that way, right?” A fierce blush on the word pregnant.