We are Wormwood (3 page)

My mother finished her story with a flourished bow. The
children stared with unblinking eyes, not daring to speak. Not even to cough.
The teachers applauded with prim, quiet little claps as they herded the
children out of the auditorium and back to their classes. My mother stepped off
the stage.

The principal touched her on the shoulder.

“May I speak with you?” she said.

The principal was an older woman with collapsing cheeks and
a crisp floral dress, the kind of woman who’d never tear pages out of a
Wolf-Book, who would, in fact, never own such a thing as a Wolf-Book.

My momma’s eyes were dazed. She pressed her hands into the
hollow of her throat. The principal ushered her aside and they stood at the
corner of the hallway. The principal spoke in a hushed, racing voice. My mother
nodded and smiled. When Momma came to get me, she grinned wide enough to split
her head.

“I’m not allowed back anymore,” she said.

There was no caramel ice cream on the way back home, no
fortunes shared over milkshakes. No prophecies on my hair color or forbidden
loves.
Only the long silence and her long smile.

How quick, it seemed, that one moment she could be the
bright storyteller in front of an audience of rapt children, possessed by the
voices of her characters, and the next she was the dirty savior with the
bedraggled hair, dripping water across the kitchen floor after she tried to
drown herself in the pool.

How
quick that one moment Momma could be telling me my fortune, giving me dragons
to fight, feeding me caramel ice-cream; and the next, scratching her face off
as she perched, bird-like, on a wooden rocking chair. She could be stroking my
hair telling me that blue looks best on me because blue matches the color of my
eyes, then the next she’d speak in a hollow throated voice, “Do not call me
mother, I am The Exorcist. Do not cry. You must be strong to survive this
night.”

DADDY
TOOK HER TO
the hospital where they bleached all the color out of her. They
replaced her blood with antiseptic and took away her robe of stars, her magic
staff, and Wolf-Book.

"What happened to Momma?" I asked.

"She stopped taking her medicine," Daddy said.

What I meant was, where has Momma gone? They pumped her full
of sedatives until her eyes were UFOs. They gave her paper slippers and told
her they were glass, that when the medicine started working again, she would be
a queen. The first time I was allowed to visit her in the hospital, I watched
her shuffle down the hall toward me with her slippers crumpling. These delicate
steps, as if the hospital walls were made of paper, as if she too was made of
paper.

She sat down beside me while the nurses watched from the
doorway. She opened her mouth enough so that I could see the scar on her
tongue, in the place where she'd try to sever it, giving herself a forked
devil's tongue. We couldn’t speak. Words were fat and sluggish, too big to fit
in our mouths. I wanted to hold her, but maybe she would collapse. Maybe I'd
squeeze her shoulders and find that she'd transformed into a morphine drip.

With Daddy, on the car-ride home, I curled up in the back
seat and cried.

"She's never coming back home," I said. “They took
away the most important parts of her and she's never coming back home."

I don't remember much about Daddy. He was a businessman, I
think, someone important - because I never saw him except at the end of the day
or during the emergency times when Momma went insane. He always seemed to be
wearing a gray suit, crisp and uncomfortable, though his hair was always black
and wild. He had a dark laugh. He told me once he was too young to be a father,
told me to call him Lex instead of Daddy, though I never did. He refused to
discipline me for staying up too late, for screaming, for being stubborn.

“Little demon,” he called me, and laughed his dark laugh.

Momma came back from the hospital listless and thin. Her
skin was pale. Daddy fed her pills with a spoon and stroked her throat until
she swallowed. He stayed up with her at night as she sat in the rocking chair
in the corner of the room. He taped her hands when she tried to scratch her
wrists.

All of the color drained out of my Daddy’s face, just as it
went out of Momma’s. One night he bleached his hair in the bathroom and stood
in front of the mirror with his hands burning.

“I’m bad!” I said, desperate for him to laugh or pinch me.
“I’m a devil! I put black hair dye in the toothpaste!”

He shook his head and leaned close to the mirror. He prodded
the bottom of his eyes.

“You see those? Crow’s feet.”

“Daddy!”

“Lex, baby. Lex.”

He picked up his razor and shaved off all his hair. His
fried, bleached locks fell in the sink. The humming of the razor ached in the
back of my jaw. Momma appeared in the doorway beside me.

“Daddy?” she said.

"I'm not ready for this,” he said, and he set the razor
down and walked out.

I followed him outside into the garage as Momma cried in the
bathtub. He pulled his car keys out of his pocket and unlocked the driver’s
door.

“You can’t! I’m bad! I’m bad!” I called after him.

“Oh Lily,” he said, “I’m so sorry.”

He wrote the number of the psychologist on the inside of my
skirt. He picked me up as I cried and he kissed me.

He said, "Schizophrenia made your mother into a rabid
horse. Remember when she calls you a little monster that she still loves
you."

He left.

I sat on the cold concrete floor of the garage for a long
time after that, shivering, staring out down the driveway, across the
street.
 
Nobody ever told me this
could happen. Phaedra’s parents divorced, but that happened across the street,
not here. Nobody ever told me before, that I’d have to sit in moments like this
without noise or distraction, waiting with a big yawn in my stomach. I didn’t
know how.

My teeth ached. My hands ached. I waited for him to return.
I thought if he knew how cold I was, how I lay my bare legs on the concrete
until I couldn’t feel them anymore, then he’d come back for me. I could summon
him to me with my pain.

But he didn’t come, and then I only wanted Momma to come.
She would pick me up and tell me that my eyes were brushfire and that I needed
to drink my milk to get strong. But then Momma didn’t get me; I got too cold so
I went into the kitchen. I found cold macaroni in the refrigerator and I made
myself a bowl. I set the bowl on the counter and the spoon beside it.

I couldn’t eat it. There were needles in my stomach and if I
ate I knew they’d all spill out of me.

THE
NEXT MORNING MOMMA
came into my room to wake me. It wasn’t yet sunrise and
gray spots of light lay across the bed.
 
Her face was streaked and sad from crying.

“Get up, baby,” she said, “I’ve found Arachne and she’s
sick.”

I held out my arms and Momma lifted me out of bed. She threw
me my pink pullover, and whispered, “Hurry” when she handed me my shoes. They
were the ones without laces, because I had yet to learn how to tie my shoes.

Then she picked me up and we went out into the cold.

The bald-headed sun sat above the train tracks. We entered
the abandoned lot in front of the woods. This was back when its owners were
still trying to sell it, so the grass was clean and trim, quivering with dew.

She lifted me over the barbed wire, and then she climbed
after me. She shook when she grasped the barbed wire, and her legs, so thin and
splintered, quivered in her frost-tipped boots. I thought she’d disappear
inside of her parka.

She took me into the woods. And though it was cold, little
blue flowers, azaleas I think, grew underneath the trees forming a carpet.
Such pretty little blue flowers.

“There she is,” Momma said.

I stopped.

“I don’t see anything.”

She took my hand in her own, pointed it toward the flowers,
and said, “There. See her there?”

Something in the flowers stirred.

I saw her then, black and spindly limbed, as she emerged
from the rustling flowers. Someone wounded her. A black arrow stuck out of her
side, breaking the skin. And, though her body was that of a monstrous spider,
she had the face of a young girl.

Her expression was slack. A black viscous line of spit
dribbled down her chin.

“Momma,” I whispered.

She lifted me up in her arms. I buried my face in her
shoulder as she brought me toward the creature. I closed my eyes tight and
promised myself I wouldn’t look.

I wouldn’t look. I wouldn’t look. My heart squirmed. Oh God,
don’t let me look.

But I couldn’t stop myself. I lifted my head and looked as
the monstrous spider with the human face coughed and sighed. She stirred in the
grass and the downy ends of her legs squirmed. She had soft, black hair.

“She’s hurt. Who did this to her?” I asked Momma. “She’s
just a baby.”

Momma set me down in the flowers. I took several steps back,
tripped. I crushed the azaleas underneath me.

“A god did this to her,” Momma said.

Arachne opened her mouth to suck in air. In. Out.
Her bloodless lips dripping black.
When she moved she
stained the flowers black. A sticky web wrapped around her hair and
crystallized over her eyes.

“Why?” was all I could think to
say.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Momma tried to move Arachne, but the baby monster screamed
with pain. She shook and trembled. I sat in the flowers feeling my eyes drop
out. I couldn’t turn away again. I couldn’t close my eyes. Arachne quivered and
gasped, her mouth opening as if to speak but she was unable to.

Eventually Momma gave up trying to move Arachne. She wiped
the blood spilling from the spider’s mouth with her dress. Then she sat down in
the flowers beside me, huddled in her parka, and buried her head between her
knees. It’s the last time I remembered Momma crying.

Arachne reached for me.

Her bristly black spider limb touched my palm. Gently,
slowly, I closed my fist around it, so small in my hand, and it trembled.
Arachne looked at me, opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Her
eyes were the color of the azaleas.

Then she died.

For the longest time I wouldn’t let go of her, even when she
stopped trembling. Momma cried into her sleeves. I didn’t remember letting go,
but Arachne’s arm, limp and drying, slipped down into the flowers.

Momma took me home and I remembered opening and closing my
hands; they were black. They were black where Arachne touched me. Later I
searched for her, nothing left except the crushed flowers where I fell. Maybe I
was becoming schizophrenic like my mother. The disease’s acid had started to
eat its way into my brain.

But
I remembered my hands were black where she touched me. I remembered the black
on my mother’s dress that never washed out.

WHEN
I WAS FOURTEEN
years old the cats in the neighborhood started losing their
eyes. My friend Phaedra owned a cat named Miss Margot - a lean spitting thing
that’d writhe and scratch whenever I tried to pick her up. Miss Margot went
missing for a night and came back in the morning with her eyes gone, two soft
shelled-out places in her head. She never bit again after that.

We blamed Charlie for stealing the cat’s eyes.
Charlie because of his chubby body, pale quivering lips, black
glassy eyes, and hands too big for the rest of his body.
His parents
were behavioral scientists
who
thought John B. Watson
should’ve won the Nobel Prize for teaching his son to be afraid of rats. When
Charlie was an infant his parents rattled his crib so he couldn’t sleep. They
rang loud bells in his ears so he wouldn’t touch the flowers. When he got too
close to a stuffed teddy bear he called Little B, they set it on fire to study
his coping mechanisms.

That’s fucking science for you.

By the time he was fourteen years old, Charlie couldn’t
sleep for more than an hour without rolling out of his bed and sleepwalking out
of his house. Sometimes he rapped on windows and jiggled doorknobs, calling out
for Little B. Other times he sat in the middle of my lawn, reading an invisible
book, chain smoking his sister’s cigarettes, and laughing at text that no one
else could read.

“Everyone knows it was you,” Phaedra said to him.

She picked up Miss Margot who’d grown listless. Soft.
Phaedra fed her tuna from her open palm. Charlie jerked his head as if someone
startled him awake from a long sleep.

“How could you?” Phaedra asked.

“I don’t know why. How can I when I’m asleep?”

The eyeless cats wandered the neighborhood: the Calico with
silky fur and red leather collar, the pregnant brunette, and the pair of orange
colored twins with fat beige nails. One by one they came back from the woods,
meowing and panting. That is, all of them except for my black cat Pluto.

Pluto came to me because of Miss Catherine. Miss Catherine
called me a dirty little loveless thing; she didn’t like the mud crusted
underneath my fingernails, my urchin hair,
my
jacket
that smelled like weed. Once I skipped school to smoke with her gardener in her
backyard. He didn’t speak any English except for the words “hello” and “drugs”.
Miss Catherine came outside with a rose between her
teeth,
little puncture marks on her lip, uttering some incantation meant to revive her
dead husband.

“You used to be such a nice girl, before your father left,”
she said when she caught me.

I sneered and crushed the joint between my fingers.