Diary of a Misfit, page 30
I’m sure I wasn’t brave enough to tell her any of that, but I don’t know what I did say. I don’t remember if we hugged goodbye or if I stormed out. I only remember that as I drove toward Monroe, I told Frankie that I didn’t want my mom to go to San Francisco with us.
Frankie seemed disappointed. She wanted to take the trip, and she wanted her mother to go. I wanted to have the kind of dependable mother Frankie had, but I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I suggested we lie to mine.
“We’ll tell her we canceled the trip, but then we’ll still go to San Francisco with your mom. We just can’t put any pictures on Facebook.”
Frankie was silent. She shook her head no. She didn’t want to lie to my mother, and she didn’t like how quickly I’d suggested it. I can’t remember the exact words Frankie used—my ears were ringing in anger—but I felt as if she were saying she didn’t want to marry the kind of person she’d suddenly realized I was, the kind of daughter who yells at her sick mother, the kind of person who lies.
“What choice do I have?” I asked. “You saw her. I cannot take that person on a trip.”
I deserved to go to San Francisco, I thought. I wasn’t going to let my mom take that away from me. But Frankie, I knew, might never understand. She didn’t have to lie to her parents because her parents wouldn’t disappoint her. They might even offer to help pay for the trip. My parents weren’t like that. My parents used my name to take out illegal credit cards. They cheated on each other and lied to me. How could I owe them an honesty they’d never given me?
Frankie and I didn’t talk about this conversation for another five years, but I thought she was judging me that day in the car. I often thought she was judging me when we expressed different ideas about family. We didn’t fight often, but family was the one subject that reliably turned our sweet words sour. Usually I ended conversations like that one by accusing Frankie of thinking she was better than I was. She usually told me that I was projecting, that she didn’t think of me as a bad person just because I was different, but I never allowed myself to believe her—not later, once we were married, and definitely not that day in the car.
* * *
—
I PRESSED ON TOWARD Monroe, mostly quiet and clenching my jaw. The highway was a long, repetitive stretch of brown. All the pine trees had dropped their needles, and I worried Frankie would think my home state was ugly. We’d spent Christmas at her parents’ house two months earlier, and I hadn’t been able to stop taking pictures of all the snowy mountains that rose in the distance at the end of their block. Boise was blue skies and desert sand and so many different shades of green. When the sun set, it spun the valley with shades of pink and purple I hadn’t known existed.
West Monroe appeared as a McDonald’s and a twenty-four-hour tobacco shop. I pushed past the Western-wear store that’s shaped like a barn, then I turned left down the street toward my grandma’s house. When we arrived, she was sitting in her usual spot, in front of the space heater in her plastic chair in the cluttered carport, but she looked much thinner than she had the last time I’d seen her. She told me she weighed eighty-five pounds. All the fat had gone off her arms, and her lavender nightgown hung loose and tented from her shoulders. We sat in the carport for an hour, talking about things I no longer remember, until my grandma reached for her walker and told us she needed a nap. Frankie and I were still on edge from our car conversation, plus, we were hungry, so I suggested we go out for a late lunch while my grandma slept. We’d only eaten a few slices of the king cake, so I left the rest of it on the kitchen table, the one my grandma and I had been sitting at when she first told me about Roy.
“You should have some,” I told her. “It’s good. It’ll help you gain weight.”
My grandma shook her head no. “That’s yours. I wouldn’t enjoy it.”
“Just try it,” I said, bending down to kiss the shock of her gray hair. She shook her head no again. She told me to “leave it alone.”
Crawfish season had opened a week or two earlier, and I was still hoping to show Frankie the version of Louisiana I’d idealized, so I took her to my favorite seafood restaurant, and we split three pounds and a round of beers. They were light beers, Bud Lights or maybe Coors, but they lifted my mood enough that I suggested I take Frankie on a tour of my old haunts. If we’re going to get married, I told her, you should see where I lived. The trailer was too far out of town, so I opted for some of the closer-in spots my family had rented.
I’d told Frankie that I grew up poor, but working-class poverty looks different in the South than it does in Portland, and I thought Frankie seemed unsettled as I drove her around. Most of the low-income housing in Portland looked indistinguishable from other homes. One subsidized complex was so beautiful I’d even googled it, thinking I might want to live there, before I realized it was income-restricted and my newspaper job paid me too much. In Monroe, some of the poor neighborhoods were just dirt roads dotted with dented trailers. A few were missing walls, and people had pushed sheets of aluminum up against the sides, makeshift barriers whose gaps revealed the insides of the homes. I drove down one street lined with squat two-bedrooms and abandoned car parts, and we passed burned-out homes where people still lived.
I took Frankie past the rotted wood-frames, then we wound along the Ouachita River levee toward the house I lived in for most of middle school. I slowed to a stop in front of it, but we didn’t get out. There was no shoulder to park along, no sidewalk to stand on, either, and anyway, I didn’t want to get too close to that house. It looked fine enough. It was airy and white, the nicest place my family ever lived. The roof was a bit buckled, and the foundation slanted, but someone had planted a few flowers along the front, and they’d decorated the concrete stoop with ceramic vases. I stared at those steps, and I felt something clamp, then cascade inside of me. It was just a house, I knew, a rental that dozens of other families had probably inhabited, but I looked at it and I felt twelve years old again. I remembered walking up the steps after the Point of Grace concert. I remembered the wild, unhinged look in my mother’s eyes, the way she rushed at me with her fists. I knew she’d been on the opioid nose spray long before we lived there, and maybe her problems started somewhere else—with Cam, in Delhi, perhaps—but I told myself that this house was to blame. This house was the reason I lost her.
The front window was my window, the hole I crawled out on the nights when my mom didn’t sleep. If I was gone, she couldn’t find me and force me to eat half-cooked meat. She couldn’t ask me to bleach the tub or kill one of the mice that ran across our kitchen counters. And she couldn’t crawl into bed and whisper the ways I’d disappointed her.
I turned back to Frankie. I’d never told her any of those stories. I didn’t plan to ever tell her those stories, in part because I barely ever let myself remember them. It was enough, I thought, for her to see the neighborhoods, for her to picture my Louisiana as something real.
A car pulled up behind me and honked, so I drove on. Frankie worked in river restoration, and I wanted her to see the Ouachita, but as soon as we pulled close to it, I felt embarrassed. The river was brown, and the bank around it was covered in trash. The sun was setting, and I tried to shoot a picture as pretty as the ones I’d snapped in Boise, but no matter how I adjusted the settings, everything came out brown.
We walked back to the car, and my phone buzzed in my pocket. My grandma’s voice on the other end sounded frantic.
“Casey? I need to tell you something.”
“What? What is it?”
My throat froze and felt thick. My grandmother must be calling to say my mom died, I thought. What if the last thing I said to my mother was something mean about those teacups?
“Just tell me, Grandma. What is it?”
She cleared her throat, lowered her voice to an apologetic whisper.
“I just took a small piece, okay? Naturally, I didn’t want you to know, but a baby fell out. I used my finger and tried to push the baby back inside, but it won’t go back.”
I laughed and leaned against the car in relief. She’d gotten into the king cake.
“Grandma, it’s fine. The baby just means you have to buy the cake next year. Frankie and I will come back, and we’ll eat one together.”
The line was quiet, then I heard my grandma spinning her thumb across a lighter. She inhaled. She let herself laugh a tiny bit.
“Ooh. That baby is an ugly little shit.”
I drove back to my grandma’s house, and the three of us stayed up late, talking and folding plastic grocery bags. My grandmother had been appalled to find out that Oregon had banned them, so she wanted to send us home with the two hundred she’d been saving from trips to Walmart and the commissary. She ironed each bag flat with her palm, then folded it like a T-shirt. I told her I didn’t need them—we used cloth bags—but I nestled them into my suitcase anyway.
I took Frankie to Delhi and Vicksburg. Then, on Sunday night, we drove back to Shreveport to catch our plane home the next morning. My mom was still asleep, but she’d moved from the recliner to my parents’ king-sized bed. She’d burned herself so badly on the heating pad, my dad told me, that the skin on her back had turned black. I looked into their bedroom. She was lying facedown and naked. The dark, burnt square around her spine reminded me of the pictures she used to send of her breast, and I wondered, again, what had led to her mastectomy.
I can’t remember how I forced myself to walk away. I really believed that would be the last time I saw my mother, and yet, I don’t think I lingered long. I handed my dad the car keys, then he drove me and Frankie to the airport. By the time we landed in Portland, I’d already willed myself into forgetting the weekend. The journal entry I wrote that night is about an immigration story I planned to start writing the next morning.
Once I returned to the West Coast, I forced myself to work on the documentary. I always fill my hours with work when I’m sad, and the trip home had left me anxious to put Roy’s story behind me, so I rented a cabin for a week and wrote a whole new script. I drew an arc of our journey, making little notches to note each development. I wrote “Mark says no” along the rising action and “Lou gives us the Bible” as we neared a climax I hadn’t yet found. By the end of the week, my script remained unfinished. I read somewhere that directors plot out films on index cards, so when I returned home to the house I shared with Frankie, I bought packs in different sizes and colors, and I taped them to the wall in our second bedroom. I spent weeks filling in the cards with potential scenes, but the structure still felt wrong in ways I couldn’t pin down. I left the index cards up, though, reminders of the work I needed to finish.
In late March, Frankie and I went to Boise for her brother’s wedding. My mom called, and I ignored it, but she called again as Frankie and I were driving toward the rehearsal dinner. When I answered, my mom’s voice came through clear.
“Casey. I know I’ve disappointed you. I know I’ve hurt you. I wish I had reacted better when you first told me you were gay. I wish I hadn’t slept through your visit, but baby, I am going to be different. I dumped all the pills down the toilet. I told your daddy to have them cancel my refills. I am going to come to your wedding, and I’ll even ride a bicycle if you want me to. I’m so sorry, baby, but I’m going to be the mother you deserve from now on. I promise, baby.”
I wish I had better documentation of how I felt, listening. I remember I cried. I know I wanted to believe her, but I was reluctant. I don’t remember anything else, and I didn’t record much about that conversation. By then, I’d stopped telling my friends about my life. All my emails from that week are about work, and most of my journal entries are, too. I wrote only a few sentences about the call, tiny ones in red ink.
My mother called saying all the things a person might want her to say, if only I could trust they weren’t the product of a manic lucidity. I want her to be a part of my life, but I’m scared. I don’t believe this clear-eyed promise will last.
Chapter Seventeen
MY MOM AND ALL her siblings have always told me I was reading full books by the time I was three. They may be exaggerating—in fact, I’m not sure any of them have ever told a story straight and true—but all my earliest good memories involve books. In elementary school, my mother left me at the public library for hours at a time, and I worked my way through the kids’ section into the young adult stacks. I loved the way the spines of The Baby-Sitters Club turned the shelves into a pastel rainbow, and I spent one summer reading every Choose Your Own Adventure book three or four times, always opting for a new path once I’d flipped back to the front. For a while, my favorite books were Hatchet and Island of the Blue Dolphins, stories about young people cast into solitude by tragedy. I suppose I was meant to feel sorry for the main characters, but I read those tales seething with jealousy. I didn’t know how to fish or hunt, but I longed to disappear. I wandered around the woods by my house, pretending I, too, had lost my family and every modern comfort. Back home, my parents were probably fighting or my mother was sleeping off a squirt of Stadol, and the daydream calmed me.
Maybe everyone who grew up in the 1980s was similarly obsessed with lost or abandoned children. Back then, missing kids seemed to appear on TV all the time. Baby Jessica fell down a well when I was four years old, and Home Alone came out when I was seven. All the parents I knew talked about the disappearance of Adam Walsh as a cautionary tale, and my mother never missed an episode of America’s Most Wanted. Still, as a kid, I felt that my obsession was unique. I thought I was the only person in the world who dreamed of slipping out of my life and into something else.
Because I couldn’t actually steal away to an island in the Pacific Ocean, I wrote stories, mostly cheap riffs on the narratives I loved, and my seventh-grade language arts teacher encouraged me by giving me books from her own collection. She sneaked all of S. E. Hinton’s novels to me, and she loaned me thick nonfiction collections about journalism. I kept writing “lost in the woods” fantasies until one day, after class, my teacher handed me a smooth paperback called The Face on the Milk Carton. The book was about a high school student who suddenly learns that her parents kidnapped her when she was three years old. I read it in an evening. Afterward, I decided that a kidnapping was an even better fate than disappearing, and I started searching my family members for proof that I, too, had been stolen. Yes, I had my mother’s nose and my father’s lips, and my brother and I were practically twins, but maybe, just maybe, I thought, I belonged somewhere else.
Of course, now I see that I wasn’t unique. My mother taught me how to yearn and disappear. Maybe she was cooking dinner, or maybe she was helping me with my homework, but most of the time, she seemed as if she were only half in my world. Her eyes had a far-off look, and she usually kept a novel propped open where she could see it. She’d answer any questions I asked, but she looked past me, and I knew she was somewhere else, as gone in the plots of her books as I often was in mine.
* * *
—
NO ONE ELSE IN our family read, but they did like to tell stories. The first time my grandma told me about Roy, I sat at her table practically fizzing with excitement. I had been waiting to write about a stolen child since I was twelve years old, and my grandma had handed me the most exciting kidnapping saga I could imagine. Later that week, I drove to the West Monroe public library and read The Face on the Milk Carton again. Janie Johnson, the book’s main character, makes sleuthing seem so easy. She stumbles onto her parents’ secret one day in the high school cafeteria after she recognizes a picture of herself on the back of a friend’s milk carton. The milk carton says the girl is missing. By the third chapter, Janie’s in full detective mode. She hits up a local library, scrolls through the microfiche, and finds a New York Times story that reveals almost everything. The book ends on a cliffhanger and drags on through a five-part series, but when I finished the first installment, I felt sure I could crack Roy’s case quicker than a fictional high school student had solved her own. Microfiche? I’d spent hours spinning the wheels of the archives in college. I could settle Roy’s tale in an afternoon, I thought. All I had to do was find one article, one faded headline.
Solving a mystery is not that easy, it turns out. I did go to the library, and I did load spools of old microfilm onto the machine, but no amount of spinning revealed the answers I sought. Most of the small-town papers only reported on the comings and goings of the rich. The Delhi paper had recorded all of Miss Mattie Smith’s visitors, but they’d never written about the plight of poor families. The only crimes the newspaper covered were allegations of Black residents drinking in public, racist dispatches that marked the only time Delhi’s Black residents appeared in print at all. I scrubbed through the 1920s, alternating between national and local newspapers, but I couldn’t find a single article about a stolen baby. A few hours in, I just felt dizzy.
