He stopped and waited in the usual place to see if someone was following him, picking up the bottle from where he kept it, ready to brain some motherfucker, but no one was behind him. He was too quick and too quiet for that. He peed and moved on, speaking the code words at the blue pipe and the orange pipe, disabling the booby traps that would have killed him dead. When he got home he ate a candy bar and looked through pictures. “That’s my shoe,” he said when he saw it, as if she had stolen it.
“Child, child,” said the lady in the walls. “Let me comfort you. Let me come to you. Just name me and all will be well. I will gather you up with a hundred arms.”
“Fuck off,” he said absently. He erased the picture of his foot and took a few furious pictures of his place, feeling like he was making it more his own with every shot. When he’d used up the memory he turned it off, then went around turning off all his flashlights until just the one by his bed was lit up. “Goodnight, God,” he said, turning it off, then wishing he hadn’t, because he started to make the noise almost as soon as it got dark, the little cough and gag that was like he was trying to throw up, but it was just stupid crying that came, as useless as ever, and though he had promised himself on every other night that he wouldn’t he called out for his mother. She might come, after all. That was all it used to take, and all sorts of things could happen, when it was absolutely and totally dark.
16
When Jemma was four her mother rescinded a ban on birthday parties, instituted just before she was born, when her brother was three. He’d choked on a penny hidden in a cupcake, and turned as blue as the beautiful birthday sky above him. He always had good weather on his birthday.
Worn down not by Jemma’s as-yet-unskilled nagging, but by the pressure of the first Severna Forest birthday season, her mother reversed herself. Birthday parties had always happened, but this year the party as adult social event had declared itself unbidden. No one knew where it came from, or who summoned it, exactly — no one could recall which parent was the first to serve daiquiris with the cake, or hire a clown who, after the sitters had come to take the children home, slipped out of her big red shoes and baggy blue overalls to belly dance on the dining-room table. Like other transient Forest institutions, it was as suddenly there as it suddenly would be gone, when people would look back at pictures that captured them trying to fellate the ride-pony and wonder, Have I ever been drunker in my life?
In the supermarket Jemma trailed behind her mother. Her brother rode the front of the cart, his back to their mother, hanging on with his fingers and his heels, his back arched and his chest thrust out, a ship’s figurehead, exhorting his captain to go faster and faster, the groceries were all getting away. Jemma followed the white hollows behind her mother’s knees, looking away only to watch when men, and some women, turned their heads to watch her mother step crisply down the aisle. That rainy season she often looked naked under her raincoat. She tended to wear short polyester dresses, hems falling at mid-thigh. Her shiny yellow raincoat fell just above her knees. She always wore heels in the rain.
Jemma cowered away from the shelves. Other children, her brother among them, liked to paw at the variety, and worship clutchingly in the candy aisle. Not Jemma; the tall rows of boxes seemed always about to fall on her, and chocolate packaged bigger than her head made her frightened. From within the glass door of the freezers her image beckoned to her, Come in Jemma, come into the cold. Come eat popsicles and be dead with me!
Also, no matter how hard she tried to keep her mother’s legs directly in front of her, she often became as lost as she’d been in the museum, an experience never any less traumatic for its frequency. It happened this trip, too. She looked away from the legs for a little longer than usual, at a man with a pointy beard who put out his tongue and waggled it at her mother. When he noticed Jemma waggling her tongue back at him, he made a deft motion, sliding a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn with his cart and hurried away, pushing at double speed. Jemma’s mother was nowhere to be found when Jemma turned around, no legs, no body, no shining yellow hat. She turned around again and saw the man’s fleet foot disappearing from the aisle, and then she was alone in the vast canyon of breakfast foods. She froze, tears welling in her eyes but not actually crying. She proceeded cautiously in the direction her mother must have gone, sure that a sudden movement would bring that leering cereal vampire leaping from out of the box to poke her with his sharp fingers.
Out of the canyon, she spotted a yellow hat in the produce section. She hurried that way, sighing at the fake thunder that sounded just as a cool mist began to fall on the vegetables. The hat belonged to a lady expressly not her mother. She was old, and without a raincoat, and wore a housedress that swept to her ankles. Her hairy feet were bunched into a pair of wooden sandals. Jemma, running the last few feet toward the hat, a beacon just above a small hill of peaches, almost collided with her. She caught her devouring a peach, gnawing with her two remaining teeth at the dripping flesh, a little puddle of juice between her feet. She saw Jemma looking and mistook her dashed-hope look for admonition. “I was going to pay for it,” she said, and stalked off, gnawing and sucking.
Jemma looked up to the hill of peaches and saw how all those in sight had been violated, two evenly spaced holes in each one, the flesh poking raggedly through the skin, and juices leaking all down the pile. She thought, I’ll never find my mother, and all the peaches have been murdered, and then she began to cry. Adults descended, as always, as soon as she sent up her signal. “Are you lost?” one asked, as if she could answer them, or needed to. The manager, a familiar face, and almost a friend though he called her Jemima, fetched her and walked her to the front of the store. He was going to let Jemma call for her mother on the public-address system, but just as he put the microphone to her lips she was overcome with her tears again, so it was only her hiccupy little sobs that were broadcast through the store, but that was enough. Her mother came, and Jemma spent the rest of the trip in the cart, among the pounds of flour and sugar and chocolate. Her mother, against the advice of the caterer, was going to make the cake.
They rode home, Jemma with her head against the window, listening to wet-tire noises. Jemma had only rainy birthdays. She’d had a storm as a guest, or a present, on every birthday she could recall, and there was a picture of her unremembered first birthday, Jemma conditioning her hair with cake while lightning flashes in the picture window behind her, a big National Geographic-style strike, forks leaping up from the river to a low belly of cloud. After they were home, as her mother mixed batter in a giant rented bowl, Jemma looked out the window, frowning at the gray sky. “Don’t fret the rain,” her mother told her. “It won’t spoil anything. Come and help me with the cake.”
Her mother gave her a wooden spoon and showed her how to attack the lumps, sweeping them against the side of the bowl and crushing them there. It was fun work, and it calmed her. Jemma forgot about the sky and the rain, captivated by the spiraling motion of her spoon, the furrows in the batter, and the dedicated pursuit of the lump. The great big bowl — the greatest and biggest, her mother said, ever to enter the neighborhood, fetched from a bakery in DC — was set in the middle of the dining-room table. The night previous they’d eaten their dinner around it, plate lips pushed off the table and hovering over their laps, because the bowl hogged so much space. They’d filled it over and over in a dinner game. It was big enough to hold: five hundred eggs, one hundred bottles of beer, a disassembled igloo, the extracted brains of the Senate, this year’s take for the East Coast tooth fairy, six months of poop from the average seven-year-old excreter — this last suggested by her brother, and then her mother declared the game (and dinner, already over anyway) effectively ruined. Jemma could reach to stir only by standing on a chair and leaning over. While her mother was greasing the cake tins, Jemma, chasing after lumps she could barely see in batter that was growing as smooth as cream, leaned too far, lost her balance and her chair, and fell in, hands, arms, shoulders, face, and head. She’d leaned so far that she fell in the center, and the heavy bowl did not tip. It was very quiet in the batter. Opening her mouth, she took a nip, and then another, pleased with the taste, then remembered to breathe, and finally started to cough and struggle. Then her mother pulled her out, Jemma’s hair whipping in a batter-spattering arc, clutching her to her and administering a few unnecessary abdominal thrusts.