As I Die Lying (33 page)

I hadn’t sent a letter to Mother in at least
six months. What did I have to say to her?

You haven’t dared write to Mommy dearest
since you found your true self. Or I should say, when IT found
YOU.

But did you send the letter?

Sometimes you sleep. And when you dream, I’m
awake. It’s not like you’re the only monkey that knows how to
type.

I nodded in miserable understanding. Mother,
of course, thought I was nodding at her. The animal eyes closed,
the cave momentarily empty. I opened my mouth to speak. With a
hiss, the bus backed away from the bay and pulled onto the
highway.

My tongue reconnected itself to my nervous
system. “What are you doing here?”

Mother looked down at the streaked tiles on
the depot floor. She pushed her parka hood back with an unsteady
hand. “I told you to call back if you changed your mind. And since
you didn’t...well. . .“

She looked up. The skin of her neck seemed to
follow with reluctance. Her once-proud chin had given up, accepted
its humble lot and sagged in defeat. Her skin was gray, creased,
but underneath the pallid flesh, broken blood vessels streaked
outward like red roots thirsting in barren soil. She smiled with
effort, as if the muscles of her mouth couldn’t stretch in an
upward direction. “Well, here I am,” she finally finished.

She dropped her overnight satchel and her
suitcase and they clattered on the floor. Then she looked away, her
spidery eyes almost girlish with delight.

I’m glad to finally meet you, my pretty.
Richard’s told me so much about you. And, believe me, the
pleasure’s all mine.

I stared at Mother, still petrified, holding
a chilled breath. Surely the Insider’s power couldn’t extend
halfway across the continent?

But at that moment, the Insider’s power was
nothing compared to Mother’s. With one shift of her eyes, she
dredged up the past, stirred a witch’s brew of memories, raised the
dead and flaunted the bones. With one heavy-lidded look, she made
me her little boy again, weak, guilty, vulnerable. With one
trembling step forward, she possessed me more completely than the
Insider ever could.

“
Richard,” she
half-whispered, half-whimpered, and then she shredded the last of
my resolve by letting one silver tear leak from the corner of her
eye. She fell into my helpless open arms.

Welcome home.

She was as light as a bird, bones all hollow.
Her hair stood up white and wild, Einstein tufts, Warhol with a
blow dryer.

“
Mother, I...”

Say it, Richard. You know you want to.

No.

Say it. Or are you going to force me to let
Loverboy say it?

Please. Not him.

I love it when you beg, Richard. Now say
it.

“
. . .I missed you,
Mother.”

Close enough for now. But you’ll get better.
Because you’re going to get a lot of practice.

“
Richard, it’s been so
long,” Mother said, in her cracked, smoke-saturated voice. She
hugged me with a strength that couldn’t have been hers alone. Her
spindly fingers gripped my coat like beggar’s lice. Her breath was
tomb dust and gin.

As I held her, as I fought with myself to
push her away, I felt the fluttering batwings of shadow at the
corners of my consciousness. Wafting cobwebs in the Bone House.

“
You haven’t changed a bit,”
Mister Milktoast said, thinking she was still a weak, pathetic
failure as a protector. Especially when compared to him. “Why, it
seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in your lap and you
were singing ‘Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’
bread.’”

Loverboy twitched at the mention of “bread”
but I shoved a loaf down his throat before he could speak.

“
So you’re really glad to
see me?” Mother said, and her expression was so eager, so
desperate, that Little Hitler had an urge to drive his fist into
her brittle jaw.

Oh, no, Little Hitler. There will be plenty
of time for all that later. Remember, mental pain is so much more
savory than physical pain. You can inflict your bruises and gouges,
but that’s too human. I feed on fruit at the top of the tree.

“
Yes, I’m glad to see you,”
hissed Little Hitler.

Patience, my mad little bootblack. I promise
you’ll like what I have in store for her. And don’t worry, you’ll
get your turn. Everyone will get their turn, even Richard.

Especially Richard.

Mother tried to laugh but a cough caught in
her throat and she made a strangled, hacking noise. She spat on the
depot floor and what landed and shivered on the tiles was red and
yellow, a cancerous slug. She bent and put a hand to her chest.

“
Are you okay?” said
Bookworm, touching her elbow. His tenderness was almost as
appalling as Little Hitler’s simmering hatred.

“
Yes,” she said, after
clearing her throat. “Just…I couldn’t smoke on the bus.”

“
You’ve logged some
mileage,” Mister Milktoast said.

She stretched and I heard her joints pop.
“Eighteen hours. Hard on an old woman’s back.”

“
Mother, don’t talk that
way. You’re not old.”

“
I’m on the downhill slide
and, to tell the truth, I don’t mind a bit. But I don’t want to
spend the rest of my life standing in a bus depot. Show me this
house you’ve been telling me about.”

Mister Milktoast collected her bags and led
her to the Subaru.

“
Moving up in the world,”
Mother said as she folded into the passenger’s seat like a crippled
crab. “Remember that old car you used to drive, back
home?”

Back home. She sent the first dagger into my
chest.

“
How could I forget?” said
Little Hitler.

She put a hand on my knee as I started the
car. “I can’t tell you how happy it made me when you wrote and
asked me to move in with you.”

I could only scream silently, killed by my
own quill, drowned by the juice of my own inkwell, caged by the
alphabet. A toilet flushed in the Bone House.

Oh, Richard, didn’t I tell you? How
forgetful of me. Well, you know how it is when you have a thousand
lifetimes’ worth of thoughts.

I wondered which black night, which stolen
moment, which part of my life had been sliced away from me so the
Insider could write the letter. Or letters. What else had it told
her?

When you sleep, I’m awake.

Mother squeezed my knee with her graybriar
fingers. “It can be just like old times,” she said, spraying
spittle and liquor mist into the air. Her head swiveled as she
studied the towering mountains that were such a contrast to Iowa’s
sweeping flatness. She pointed to a store on the side of the
highway.

“
Anything your heart
desires, Mother,” Mister Milktoast said. “Your lush is my
command.”

He pulled the car up to the glass front of
the ABC store. I could see our reflections in the plate glass, my
mouth smiling dotingly at Mother, her eyes bright in their nest of
crow’s feet. If I looked closely, I could see myself writhing in
agony in the pools of my pupils. But that must have been my
imagination, because I didn’t look closely. I blinked and I was
behind the steering wheel, myself again thanks to the wicked
beneficence of the Insider.

Mother bought four bottles of Jim Beam, a
fifth of gin, and a bottle of Glenlivet “just for a special
celebration.” We drove to my house and Mother oohed and aahed in
appreciation in the living room as I took her bags to the spare
bedroom. I looked around for ghosts of Shelley, bits of clothing or
stains, any trophies Little Hitler might have accumulated without
my knowledge. You know how roommates are.

When I came back downstairs, Mother was
sitting on the couch nursing a six-ounce glass of straight bourbon
between drags of her cigarette.

I moved as if through a
dream, and then I realized it
was
a dream. The Insider’s dream, come true through
psychic manipulation. My nightmare, made flesh and given shape by a
vengeful visionary. I was just a bit actor in a grainy movie. The
Insider was star, writer, producer, and director, the Orson Welles
of spiritual possession.

I sat on the chair, my limbs as stiff as
wood, bracing for whatever atrocity the Insider might have in
mind.

Relax, Richard. Why do you always expect the
worst of me? I’ve gone to all this trouble to reunite a loving
mother with her only son. See how much I care for you.

Mother had taken off her parka and hugged her
arms against her chest. I tried not to look at the lumps her
shriveled breasts made under the fabric of her sweater, but
Loverboy gawked anyway. “Frostbit peaches” was his assessment.

“
Thought it would be warmer
here,” she said. “But I guess this is pretty high up, what with all
the mountains and all.”

I nodded, the dutiful ventriloquist’s
dummy.

“
We’re going to be happy
together, Richard,” she said. She was halfway through the drink.
Her words already sounded thicker on her tongue. “Just like the
good old days.”

She looked at me the way she had done from
the witness stand at her court hearing those long years ago. The
virgin whore, diva of denial, a mother load, spearing me with guilt
and gratitude at the same time. Driving her words like nails into
flesh, the same way she did while telling the prosecutors that
Father had beaten the both of us for years.

“
We’re all we got left,” she
said with a watery sneer. “Us, and memories.”

She drank to that. Then she drank to the
previous drink. And the one to come.

Precious memories, how they finger. I was a
prisoner of my own life, never more so than at that moment. An
inmate of the Bone House, but also the warden. But even before
that, I was the architect.

“
I would do it all over
again,” she said, “even if I had gone to jail.”

“
Mother, please. Let’s not
talk about it.”

She sipped the bourbon and smiled down into
the brown liquid. She had already settled in, her thin hips parting
the sofa cushion as if she’d been sitting there a hundred years.
She picked at a loose thread on the sleeve of her sweater.

“
You’ve never wanted to talk
about it,” she said, not accusing, just cold, empty, windswept. “Or
about us.”

Anger boiled inside me, a
hot bubbling tar pit erupting, the red lava of rage flowing down my
brain. This wasn’t one of Little Hitler’s petulant tantrums. It was
honest, rightful indignation. The realization was frightening, yet
liberating. I could
feel
.

Richard Allen Coldiron could have emotions
that weren’t gifts bestowed by Little People or psychic circus
masters or calculating narrators. I tensed and sat forward, ready
to rise and cross the room and...

And do what?

Its laughter rattled down the alleys of my
mind, the sound of vermin scurrying in rubbish. I sat down and
slumped in the chair, defeated before the battle even began.

“
That wasn’t us,” I said.
“That couldn’t have been us.”

“
It was us, Richard. But we
got through it all together. That’s what people who love each other
do. They get through things.”

She lifted her arms with a sudden spasm and
spilled bourbon on her polyester pants. She didn’t notice. The
blotch looked like Nietzche’s profile or maybe a spatter
pattern.

“
Just surviving isn’t
enough,” I said. “Sometimes, you have to live.”

Mother finished what was left of her drink
and sent the pale slug of her tongue over her lips. “Sometimes, you
have to love,” she said, her voice catching. “It’s what makes
us...human.”

No. The Insider couldn’t be
working her strings, too. Feeding her lines straight from the mind
of Mister Milktoast. The Insider couldn’t be working her mouth and
mind and heart just to get to me, could it?
Could
it? Bookworm flitted in with
his line about “unwilling suspension of disbelief” and hustled back
to his nook or cranny or wherever he hid.

“
Comes a time to forgive and
forget,” Mother said. “Now, be a good boy and go refill my
glass.”

I was in the kitchen when she said to my
back, “Besides, it was all my fault.”

“
No, it was nobody’s fault,”
I yelled over my shoulder. The liquor I was pouring was momentarily
tempting, its sharp sweet odor both a threat and a promise. The
Coldiron Curse was relentless. It was as if Father’s ghost hovered
somewhere behind me, laughing gleefully and whispering “Taste it,
Shit For Brains. We’re bottomless.”

Ghosts. Memories. Curses. Richard, you’re
starting to lose it, my dear human host. You’re starting to see
things my way. You’re starting to become me.

Clink of glass.

And tonight, who will we be? Hmm, Richard?
How about Mister Milktoast, giving Mother a sponge bath? Maybe
Bookworm, opening his heart and spilling the pages of his pathetic
diary? Little Hitler, swapping war stories about dear old Daddy? Or
Loverboy. What about HIM?

With shaking hands, I poured an extra drink.
It burned like hellfire in my throat.

Like Father, like son.

In every way.

I went back to the living room on legs of hot
rubber.

Mother took her drink and smirked at the one
I held in my hand. “You hold it just like your father,” she
said.

Just wait until I put on my boots.

Her eyes crawled across the room like
fleshflies looking for a soft opening on a corpse. They lit on a
photograph of Beth on the mantel, a still-life Beth whose face was
trapped in innocence, cheer, and happiness.