“What kind of noises?” I glanced back up the stairs. I needed Junie to track down Dad right now, but I couldn’t risk leaving Mom, not when she was like this.
“You can’t hear them?” she asked, her face gone slack with relief. “Thank God I saved you from that. Thank God.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to get close to her even though I knew I was bigger than her now, that she wouldn’t be able to overpower me like she had last time. At least I didn’t think so. Sometimes, when she came near me, I became so pliable. It was like a spell, how she did it, dark and impossible, not the sweet giggle magic I’d done with Maureen and Claude playing Bewitched.
She pointed at the door to the tunnels. “The noises are coming from there. Scratching. A woman crying. Men yelling. I’m going to have your father put a lock on that door. It’s time. It’s past time. Why, anyone could sneak through and hurt us while we slept. Can you hear it?”
I padded toward her, no big movements, treating her like a wild creature that could bolt. A fleeting thought, that I should leave her down here, charge up the stairs, and call Dad at work, skittered across my mind. No. I couldn’t risk it. The ropy scars on her wrists, like some horrible creature had burrowed beneath her skin, were testimony to what she could do in this state of mind.
What she’d done.
“Mom?” I was surprised at how young, how scared I sounded. “Should we go upstairs? We can get away from the door. Away from those sounds.”
Confusion clouded her eyes. I reached for her. She watched my hand advance, flinched from it. “I can’t leave,” she said, shocked. “Not until your father gets home. Who will guard the door?”
She suddenly grabbed my hand and yanked me on the sofa next to her, wrapping me in an embrace. She was cold and trembling. “I’d die for you, Heather. That’s why I had to do it. I’m so sorry, baby. I couldn’t let you hear the voices. I didn’t want them to live in your brain like they do mine. You understand, don’t you?”
I nodded in her arms, my heart a bird beating against the cage of my chest. Her hand found my nub, cupped it. The first time she’d touched it since the accident.
The first time we’d been in the basement together since then.
That night, we’d just returned from a barbecue at the Taft house. It’d been a hot day, so we’d taken the tunnels. We’d brought the grill gear and a watermelon. Something happened at the party that upset Mom, something with Mrs. Hansen, and we left early, Mom snagging our lighter fluid and lighter as we left. I remembered that, and Dad tromping upstairs to put little Junie to bed once we got home, and Mom staying downstairs in our basement.
I’d come to check on Mom, maybe have her read me a story, or brush my hair. I’d found her in this spot, on different furniture but in the same mental state. She’d been so quick, me so small.
As soon as I’d gotten close enough, she’d grabbed the lighter fluid and then me, squirted my hair—the smell, the slick, sick kerosene smell—and then lit it, holding me tight. I shrieked and kicked, but she had the strength of a madwoman. Dad bounded downstairs within seconds, tossed a blanket over my head, but the damage was done.
My ear had melted.
Mom sacrificed some hair, her favorite sweater, the couch.
She also took her first “vacation.”
I knew now she visited the hospital’s psych ward, but it seemed easier to continue to call it a vacation. This smoothing over of reality, especially when it was something ugly, didn’t happen in only my home. It was that way in all of Pantown, maybe all of the Midwest. If we didn’t like something, we simply didn’t see it. That’s why I’d never spoken aloud the words I’d read on Mom’s chart （manic depressive illness）， why Dad hadn’t helped Mrs. Hansen, why Claude’s parents hadn’t told on Father Adolph. In our neighborhood, the problem wasn’t the person who made the mistake; it was the person who acknowledged the truth.
Those were the rules.
Everyone here followed them, including me. That’s how I kept me and Junie safe.
“Mom,” I tried one more time, twisting my neck so I could see her face, my voice hoarse. “Will you come upstairs?”
The clouds in her eyes cleared for a moment, long enough for me to glimpse her back there, trapped inside her own body.
“I would like to play with Junie,” she said tentatively, releasing me. “I would like to put makeup on her.”
My muscles relaxed so dramatically that I feared I’d fall off the couch. Mom’s favorite soothing behavior was treating pretty Junie like a doll. I latched on to it. “That sounds good. I bet she’d like that.”