180,000 miles on the engine. The two cars she’d owned before this had also been over-the-hill BMWs. Don’t ask me why.
She talked as she transferred her load to Hank. “Periodically while we’re in Canada I shall be mailing manifestos for you to release to the media. Don’t let those twits at
“I thought you were disappearing on the reservation.”
Lydia glared at Hank, who hung his head, shy dog-style. “Somebody’s got a big mouth,” she said, which may be the least true statement anyone ever made about Hank Elkrunner. “Tell the Secret Service we’re in Mexico. Don’t mention Canada until they break out the persuasion devices.”
“Persuasion devices?”
Hank fit the lamp and boots into the back end like pieces into a jigsaw puzzle. He said, “I’ll walk to Zion’s Grocery and pick up some food for the road. You two can finish loading.”
A look of dismay flitted across Lydia’s narrow face. “You’re leaving me alone with him on purpose, aren’t you?” Hank gave his near smile.
Lydia said, “Rat.”
Hank walked up the street, toward what passed for downtown GroVont. Lydia and I stood next to the truck, watching Hank’s back as an alternative to looking at each other.
I said, “Don’t you think making Hank into a fugitive is a lot to ask?”
Lydia turned, her hands on her hips, thumbs forward, fingers back. “Hank believes in loyalty—unlike other members of my immediate family.”
“What’s the chances of us having this discussion without snide sarcasm?”
Her hands dropped to her sides, and for one fleeting moment, Lydia looked profoundly depressed. “Slim. Or none.”
Her first unguarded statement since I don’t remember when—I took it as a good sign.
She looked at the truck and sighed. “Men have forced women to fall back on whatever weapons they have, and I’m afraid I’m down to sarcasm. Come on in and warm up. You may as well be of some use while you’re here.”
Whenever the television screen shows long lines of refugees running from a natural or manmade disaster, it’s always interesting to see what possessions they deem important enough to flee with on short notice. Cooking utensils and bedding seem to head the list, followed by edible animals. Lydia hadn’t packed any of that stuff. Instead, she went into hiding with her Oothoon Press files, most of her Ann Coe art collection, and a suitcase full of Danskins. A pile of political books. An exercise trampoline.
While Lydia finished packing, I wandered the house, taking in cracks in the logs and stains in the kitchen sink. When you grow up in a house, each square foot of wall and floor carries a memory, or not so much a memory as the emotion of one. I couldn’t recall what event caused my strange stirrings at standing in my former closet, but I felt the strange stirrings just the same, as if the past had turned into its own shadow.
Lydia found me standing in the closet and told me to disconnect the VCR in her bedroom and take it to the truck, but to leave the TV. I guess wherever she and Hank planned to hide out already had a television.
As I walked down the hall with the VCR in my hands, I passed the open bathroom door and looked in to see Lydia staring at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Maybe it was a dimple in the mirror, or maybe leaving home after twenty years got to her, but I thought I saw a tear hanging off her lower eyelid. I thought her lip trembled. When she saw me in the doorway behind her, she focused her eyes on mine. Finally we were eye to eye, even if her back was to me.
“Remember when we moved in here?” she said. “That doctor Caspar rented from had dead animals on every wall.”
“You slept on the couch for three months.”
“Until Hank got me into bed.”
“Why the lie, Lydia?”
She blinked once and whipped open the medicine cabinet. One hand held a paper bag while the other hand scooped in pill bottles, aspirin tins, and boxes of Q-Tips. “You’re not going to let it drop, are you?”
“I can’t.”
A plastic jar of Mary Kay night cream missed the bag and hit the floor, where it rolled under the club-footed bathtub. Lydia’s back rose and fell, then she turned to face me.
“Okay, shoot. Accuse me of child abuse.”
I sat on the side of the tub with the VCR in my lap. Lydia closed the toilet lid and sat on it. The deja vu element was amazing. We could have been mother and son in 1965, settling in for one of our sink-side bull sessions.
I repeated, “Why the lie?”
She blinked twice more. “I couldn’t very well tell the truth.”
“You didn’t have to tell me anything.”
She did the maneuver where she blew air straight up, lifting her bangs off her forehead. It translated as
“You kept hounding me for information, and then you found those pictures in my panty box. What were you doing in my panty box in the first place?”
Typical ploy—shift the defensiveness to me. “Don’t change the subject.”
“Times like this I would give anything to still smoke.”
The stall technique. I said, “Lydia.”
She crossed the right ankle over her left shin. “Sooner or later I had to come up with a story.”
“But gang rape?”
She dropped her eyes to the floor. Her voice was small. “That’s the story I told myself. After you tell yourself something a thousand times, you forget it’s not true.” She seemed to be drifting back in time, growing younger as I watched. “When you called to ask if their names matched Shannon’s list, I didn’t remember at first what really happened.” She looked up, willing me to believe her. “I was scared to death. I didn’t know what to do.”
“The truth might have worked.”
She uncrossed her legs. “I thought the truth would make you hate me. You may not believe it, but I don’t want you to hate me.”
I’d come prepared for anger and screams and gotten what I least expected—sincerity from my mother. Maybe. When you’ve grown up with the queen of manipulation, you learn to distrust anything that seems straightforward. My great fear was that someday Lydia would break down and speak the truth and I’d be too suspicious to listen.
She must have seen the doubt in my face. “What do you want from me, Sam?”
I stared at the VCR. “Remorse. Some indication that you’re sorry you screwed up my life.”
“One social blunder of mine did not screw up your life.”
“It’s not just the lie. You were never a mother. From the time we left your daddy’s house, I cooked all the meals, did the laundry, tucked you in at night.”
“You volunteered to cook and clean.”
“You never once told me to do my homework or pick up my socks. I was the only kid in seventh grade who could stay out all night without calling home.”
“Some boys would like that.”
“No, they wouldn’t.”
She snapped. “Okay. I’m sorry. Are you satisfied now?”
The vein in Lydia’s forehead beat a blue rhythm. She couldn’t help who she was. You can no more force your parents to change than you can teach a cat to stop killing songbirds.
I said, “There’s a big gap between apology and condescending glibness.”
Lydia almost fired off an angry retort, but something changed her mind, and she slipped back into sadness. She pouted. “I’m not the type for guilt.”
“I know.” My reflection in the VCR control panel was distorted by knobs and switches. If I moved my head a bit to the side, my nose looked like a pig’s snout. “I wonder why I’m nothing but a huge glob of guilt.”
“It must skip generations.”
