Motherthing E-Book

Ainslie Hogarth

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 359

Beschreibung

'A gruesome, blackly funny, utterly original feminist horror story' New York Times, Notable Book of the Year 'A buzz-worthy and ferocious horror comedy from one of the genre's most promising voices' Buzzfeed Abby Lamb has done it. She's found the Great Good in her husband, Ralph, and together they will start a family and put all the darkness in her childhood to rest. But then the Lambs move in with Ralph's mother, Laura, whose depression has made it impossible for her to live on her own. She's venomous and cruel, especially to Abby, who has a complicated understanding of motherhood given the way her own, now-estranged, mother raised her. When Laura takes her own life, her ghost starts to haunt Abby and Ralph in very different ways. Ralph is plunged into depression, and Abby is being terrorized by a force intent on taking everything she loves away from her. With everything on the line, Abby must make the ultimate sacrifice in order to prove her adoration to Ralph and break Laura's hold on the family for good.

Leseprobe

First published in the United States of America in 2022 by

Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

First published in hardback and export and airside trade paperback in

Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Ainslie Hogarth, 2022

The moral right of Ainslie Hogarth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 777 3

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 778 0

EBook ISBN: 978 1 83895 779 7

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Pauly

1

THE NIGHT RALPH’S MOTHER flayed her forearms, a woman in a red dress handed him a business card. I know how woman in a red dress sounds because I thought the same thing at first. When I got back to the ICU waiting room with our sodas, I said, what do you mean woman in a red dress, a Jessica Rabbit type came va-va-vooming down the hall, pendulum hips pounding sound waves into the souls of dicks?

Christ, said Ralph. No. He cracked his soda and took half of it down. The dress was floor-length, thick cotton, a chaste cream turtleneck underneath. She would bring ambrosia salad to a church potluck, you know what I mean? Secretly hates her nephews, never swims in public. Would definitely take in and gaslight a feeble sister.

I frowned. What do you know about ambrosia salad?

I know it’s got marshmallows. Isn’t that enough? Then he paused, still hitched to the red-dressed woman’s memory: nice hair, he said, more to himself than to me. Very—he searched for the right word—muscly braid, hanging in front of her shoulder all the way down to her waist. White-blond, but not fine. Fuzzy around her face. And those eyes.

What about her eyes?

He started with how the woman had glided up to him, gently, as though he might spook. And he might have, absorbed the way he was: elbows on his knees, fingertips together, mesmerized by the slow jellyfish motion he made with his hands. The card appeared in front of his face, and with a whispered spell, Thank you, sir, it was in his hand. He looked up, seized so completely by her bottomless brown eyes that the waiting room’s relentless torments—flickering fluorescents, tacky surfaces, cast of swollen-eyed kin—evaporated completely.

Then I arrived with the sodas.

Soda because if either of us has more coffee, our colons are going to disintegrate. But we need caffeine, have to stay awake. Poor Ralph isn’t leaving this hospital until he knows for sure whether his mother is going to make it. There would be no go home and get some rest for Ralph; no we’ll call you when we have more information. Ralph just wasn’t that kind of son.

“Bottomless brown eyes,” I repeat, wincing as I open my can, a mysterious habit with an origin I’ve buried for good reason I’m sure.

“They were strange. Almost frothing.”

I sip my soda, slurp the rim. “Brown hot tubs.”

He frowns. “You’re thinking about diarrhea.”

“Well, obviously, Ralph. You’re thinking about diarrhea too.”

“Only because I know that you are.”

“Perfect body temperature, thick enough to hold you. Might actually be better than water.”

He admits with a shrug that it would be nice to sag nearly suspended, perfectly warm, in a pool of slack shit. “It would have to be ethically sourced, of course.”

“Of course. Completely voluntary.”

“Naturally. Oh, except . . . well, I don’t know.” He sinks in his seat, starts to bring his hand to his chin, then thinks better of it, reminded by the conversation, perhaps, of all the bodily fluids that’ve passed through these rooms. A sensible instinct that I’ll now try to keep in mind for myself.

“What?”

“I mean, do we want to lounge in the feces of someone who’s old enough to consent to it?”

I shift into the soothing articulation of mutinous AI: “Ethically extracted from exclusively breastfed infants, ORGANICA baths are available in three therapeutic densities, and—” I stop, struck with the realization that hot tubs are essentially artificial wombs: our bootleg attempt to revisit that safest, most perfect, capital-H Home, and therefore the worst imaginable thing to be describing to someone whose mother is currently dying. I set my soda down on the side table, drag my hands down my face.

“You really shouldn’t do that in here,” Ralph warns.

And of course he’s right, I’ve forgotten already. I rub my hands on my thighs instead, cleansing them against the exfoliating grain of the denim.

“Maybe we should get a hot tub,” I suggest, a gently used surrogate with deep, jetted seats and a marbled liner.

“I don’t know. Seems like a whole culture.” He whispers the word culture.

“Culture,” I mimic him.

“Pervert culture.”

“Plus they’re expensive. And where would we find all that human shit?”

He smiles, blows a little laugh from his nose, then glances warily at the mechanized double doors, which would, sooner or later, wheeze open with information about his mother. His genuine love for her is evident in his expression right now, the muscles of his mouth and forehead clenched, anticipating the loss already, all the luster leeched from his skin.

Her depression had become, it sounds awful to say, just so grating in the days leading up to this: cloying and relentless, with no end in sight as far as she was concerned, having refused all forms of medication and therapy, but now that she was quiet, now that she might be gone, Ralph was being pummeled by the full typhoon of his love for her, one of life’s cruelest tricks, that the extent of this love waits to reveal itself.

I burrow beneath his arm and he pulls me into him, my length along his, ear against his chest, the top of my head grazing his jaw. I draw his hand to my mouth, take a nip of his skin between my teeth, try to suck the sadness from his pores like venom. He shakes it free as he always does when he’s not in the mood for my biting and drinks more of his soda.

Humans like to put their mouths on the things they love. I remember seeing two mothers on the subway once, babies wrapped snug to their chests with their sleep-soft mouths gaping skyward. “Have you chewed on her feet yet?” one mother asked the other. “Oh, God, yes,” the other mother replied.

I imagine the gentle pressure I’ll apply to my own baby’s foot one day, practice longingly on my bottom lip, the bounce of her new flesh between my teeth. And how she’ll look at me without recoiling, letting me because she doesn’t know any better. She won’t even realize that we’re not the same person, not for a while.

I’ll encourage Ralph to have a bite, and he’ll be just delighted. Though he likes their necks best, protected by the pressed flesh of cheek and chest. He likes their translucent fingernails too; the indents of their knuckles and knees; how quickly their profound suspicion becomes puzzled amusement becomes wriggling joy.

I’d chew on Ralph’s feet if he’d let me; if it’d soften the razor-sharp edges of what he’d just seen: his own mother, still as seaweed, washed up on the basement carpet, which was so saturated in blood that it squished beneath his feet and wrung pale around his knees when he slid to her side. No, no, no, no, he muttered, fumbling for a pulse, relieved to find the gentlest vein still whimpering in her throat.

He screamed, CALL AN AMBULANCE! So I did, right away, without asking, without thinking. They said, Nine one one, what is your emergency? And I said, I don’t know! I hollered down to Ralph, Ralph, what happened? And he shouted back, Mom’s had an accident, there’s blood everywhere, so that’s what I told them: My mother-in-law’s had an accident. There’s blood everywhere! Maybe Ralph didn’t realize at first what’d happened, thought she’d accidentally snapped her veins against that kitchen knife’s cold blade.

A short while later a team of paramedics marched in and, with the orderly calm of ants, strapped her to a gurney and pulled her up the stairs. The ceaseless squeal of their bloody boots against the hardwood, the hymnal repetition of their internal communications, Ralph and I helpless as ghosts. We followed them out the front door, watched them slide her into the back of the ambulance. “We’re right behind you, Laura!” I shouted, and one of the paramedics nodded at me, as if to let me know that’d been the right thing to say.

And Ralph’s reactions to everything up until this point had been predictable because they were always predictable. Ralph Lamb had never contained a single surprise in his whole life. He was grief-stricken on the way to the hospital, as anyone would be, anxious while they worked on her in emergency, as I was—all the understandable and expected behaviors of a devastated anyone.

But then the doctors finally emerge to tell us that they haven’t managed to save her. They tell us that we need to make arrangements with a funeral home. That they’re very sorry and they did all they could, and do we want the clothes she was brought in? And Ralph, again quite predictably, nods, yes, please, and accepts a clear plastic bag containing her bloody housecoat and nightgown the way a child handles a goldfish won from a carnival, steeled by the magnitude of what’s been passed to him. He brings the bag to his face, evaluating its contents: fabric dense and red and wrinkled as placenta. And that’s when he, quite unpredictably, hands me the business card from the woman in the red dress. “Can you drive me here?” he asks.

I look down at the card. I don’t understand what he’s talking about at first. Cheap white stock, black writing you can feel beneath your thumb: Find out why.

I stretch my lungs with a gulp of overprocessed hospital air, hold it till I can figure out what to say, but nothing comes.

“Turn it over,” he says.

I exhale with emphasis. There’s an address on the back, not far from the hospital, along with a picture of a single, lashless eye: almond shaped with a circle and a dot in the middle. I realize that the woman in the red dress with the bottomless browns and the ambrosia salad recipe is a seer—a medium or a psychic or whatever they prefer to be called. I assume they must have a preference, in which case that should really be on the card too. What if we call her the wrong thing and she takes offense and blinds us both with a spell?

I blink at the card for a moment until a man coughs and I remember that it’s late, and there are other people in this ICU waiting room: swollen-eyed kin with their feet out, pinching blankets beneath their chins, trying to make their cumbersome bodies comfortable but also polite, aware that if they’re lucky, in a little while they’ll lose consciousness, sink, spread, off-gas like great snoring molds, beyond reproach.

Everyone is horizontal-ish except for one woman, maybe a hundred years old, peering so deep into nothing that it has to be something. Some thing. Every flap of the woman’s flesh—lips, ears, nostrils, eyelids—curls inward. One of her unblinking eyes is as cloudy as Ralph’s mother’s engagement ring, an oval opal, set in four diamond prongs and an elegant gold band, thin as a hair. She’d promised to give it to Ralph one day when he was ready to propose to someone, but when I came along, and he was ready to propose, she didn’t want to anymore, didn’t think it suited me and maybe Ralph should check out Kay Jewelers in the mall because Irena had told her they were having a pretty significant sale.

She’d been wearing it tonight when she died. I noticed a plump of blood had parted around it, connecting again at her cuticle, restored, dripped whole from her fingertip. The ring was still shimmering despite the mess, commanding the respect of so much blood.

Ralph and I, we were going to have a baby soon. Soon, soon, soon. Maybe a girl, who’d be proud to inherit her grandmother’s ring, or a boy, who might love someone so much one day that he’ll want to claim them with an heirloom. Selfish not to, Abby, think of the children, Abby. And an impulse, raw and manic as lightning, screamed through my nerves, sidled the ring up off Laura’s bloody finger, and thumbed it deep down into my pocket while Ralph continued to pace, to mutter no, no, no, no, no, no, nos, behind stiff hands, blinders, pressed against his temples.

Right away hot, frantic guilt snatched my chest. The impulse cackled, climaxed and drowsy, distracted enough for me to quickly pull the ring back out of my pocket, start to force it back onto Laura’s uncooperative hand. But then the front door banged open, the paramedics thundered down, Ralph stopped muttering and turned to me so I had to hide it again, first in my palm then back into my pocket, the mischievous impulse satisfied, cackling harder as it fluttered away.

Back in the ICU waiting room old Opal-eye blinks, turns her head, fixes her gaze on me, like she knows what I did, what’s hiding in my pocket, and a cruel thought violates the folds of my mind, residue left over from the evil impulse: I got the ring anyway, Laura, it’s mine now, isn’t it, now that you’re dead. I press my pocket, feel the ring’s undeniable there-ness. I need to close myself off to mischievous impulses and bad thoughts. But it’s hard because no one ever taught me how.

“Can you drive me?” Ralph repeats. I’m still transfixed by the card. Find out why. Find out why. No, I think, no, I can’t drive you to this quack who’s going to take all the cash in your wallet, lie to your face, and play with your pain. And in his right mind, Ralph wouldn’t want me to either. In his right mind, he wouldn’t have given this card a second thought; he’d have taken it to be nice of course, because that’s the kind of person he is, but then he’d have thrown it away or, more likely, slipped it into his wallet and forgotten about it until it was time to get a new wallet, find it again one day when he was emptying this one and feel low, drift back to this terrible night in the fluorescent ICU and into the bottomless browns of the woman who’d given it to him. I’d ask him what was wrong and he’d tell me what he’d found. I’d make him his favorite dinner from Secrets of a Famous Chef—chicken à la king—and give him a nice, enthusiastic blow job before bed.

“Oh, Ralphie,” I say, and pull him close and hold him and start to cry, my poor baby, feeling every bit a thirty-one-year-old orphan. But he’s not crying with me. He’s assumed the posture of a human cannonball: arms stiff and straight down his sides, chin tucked in like a braced nut sack.

I let go and look him over, sniff the sobs back into my head as though saving them for later. “Okay, listen, I just have to say for the record.” I look around at whatever invisible entity stirs to attention when somebody says that, careful, though, to avoid the old woman’s knowing opal eye, which may or may not still be fixed on me. “I don’t think this is a great idea. You have no idea who this woman is, Ralph, you have no idea what’s waiting for you here.” He stares at me, wide eyes battered, exhausted, definitely about to ask me again in the exact same way, I know, but can you drive me? And I can’t bear to hear it, honestly, if he asks me that way one more time, I’ll scream, I really will, scream and startle all the melting, gaseous molds in this waiting room so they sit up and blink at me and shake their heads. “But if this is what you want to do right now, then, yes, I can drive you.”

“Thank you.” He stands up, chugs the dregs of his soda, and heads for the exit. I quickly gather our things—jackets, garbage, Laura’s bloody clothes—and follow him, retracing our steps from earlier till we finally find the frosted revolving door we came in through.

We both shatter in the freezing cold, confused and isolated as Martians, just landed and groping for truth. I’d felt the same way once before, leaving the casino with Ralph’s mother in a daze, short an entire precious night and an upsetting amount of money. On the drive home she wrangled my wheezing anxiety by promising to just let me handle it, swearing on her good-luck charms not to say a word to Ralph, then as soon as we walked through the door, she plopped her plastic bag of troll dolls on the counter and told Ralph just how much I’d lost, a decent bite out of your savings, the poor thing, and halfheartedly begged him not to be mad at me: Go easy on her, Ralph, she’s so ashamed.

I’d never been to a casino before in my life and I haven’t been back since. I just got so carried away with the lights and the bells and everything so dreadful and cold and eternal. Ralph’s mother loved the slots. She loved her rituals and her charms and I was hoping that I would go with her and she’d win lots of money and she’d love me as much as one of her grinning, big-bellied troll dolls.

“Ralph.” He’s marching ahead of me, warm huffs caught and held by the cold. Winter never lets you forget you’re alive. Maybe that’s why it makes people sad. “Ralph!” Louder this time. “Slow down!”

He spins around. “Sorry. I just want to get away from there.”

“It’s okay.” I catch up to him, pass him his coat. “Do you have cash? We’re going to need cash I think.”

“Oh, good point.” Feeding his arms through the sleeves, ousting the hat I’d shoved there hours ago. He picks it up, smacks the snow from it. Keeps walking toward the car. “How much?” he yells over his shoulder.

“I don’t know.” I punch my arms through my own coat sleeves, catch my neck with my scarf. “But it can’t be cheap, can it? I mean if a massage is a hundred dollars, then surely talking to the dead is going to be more.”

“I know you’re making fun of me, but that makes sense.”

“I’m actually not even making fun of you, I think it makes sense too.” I dig my hand into my coat pocket, press the lock button on the car keys a few times. “There.” I point in the direction of the honks.

Ralph changes course accordingly. “Okay, so let’s just take out, I don’t know, two hundred bucks? Does that seem reasonable?”

“Sure.” I nod, ducking into the driver’s seat. Ralph ducks in after me. “Two hundred, just in case.”

Inside Ralph’s mother’s car it always smells like a refrigerator drawer. Another good-luck charm, a pair of fuzzy pink dice, sways from the rearview mirror. Ralph is nervous, hands clasped and pulsing between his knees, curly hair peeking from beneath his hat in boyish hooks that break my heart.

I drive us to the all-night ATM drive-through, which is new to the area, and usually very busy, but not at 1:30 a.m. on a Thursday night. The big yellow poles meant to guide your car along the side of the building are wrapped in garlands of plastic pine needles, a few in silver-and-red wrapping paper. Happy holidays from the bank, because why not? Though a full month into the new year it seems they should have taken all of this down by now. The charm of holidays preserved only by the fact of their passing, and the bank should know better than to toy with people’s emotions this way. Usually institutions are very respectful of these types of rules, and it gives the lingering garlands an ominous feel.

It’d been Ralph’s last Christmas with his mother. My first. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get out and get you anything,” she’d said on Christmas morning, rubbing her knees through her housecoat, every word a great, quivering labor.

“Oh, Mom, that’s okay.” Ralph reached over, squeezed her hand.

“It’s not okay, I should have gotten you something, even something little, everything you’ve done for me already, moving in here to take care of me and I can’t even be bothered to get you a card? I’m just so selfish, just so unbelievably selfish. It makes me sick. I make myself sick.”

I stood listening in the kitchen, sipping coffee and Baileys. So far Ralph had been good about not taking the bait, using the various methods he’d cultivated since moving out a decade ago to steel himself against her influence. It took Ralph a long time to become his own person, or at least something resembling his own person, freed from the responsibility of keeping his mother alive. She was always trying to extract compliments from him, forgiveness, reassurance that she was a good person, a good mother. It used to be that Ralph had to participate, had to rise to her needling, otherwise she might just go ahead and kill herself. I’d told him she’d never, ever do that—that it was a method, a manipulation, a lie.

“We’re going to have a great Christmas,” I’d heard Ralph say, but she’d been weeping too heavily to reply.

I spent the morning on Baileys, Bloody Marys in the afternoon, small amounts of controlled, intentional poisoning. “I’m facing my darkest period head-on,” Laura said when she’d wandered into the kitchen for her cigarettes, “no drugs, no alcohol.” At that point I was deep into the wine coolers, mashing cream cheese and mayonnaise and sharp cheddar together to form a cheese ball, which I ate half of all by myself, then couldn’t shit till New Year’s.

The ATM machine is beeping, it wants things from me: my approval, my particulars. It rewards my obedience with money, fresh and hot from the oven.

I put the money in my wallet, slide it into my back pocket. Its folded heat emanating into my butt cheek. “God,” I say, squirming into the heat a little. “No wonder this place is so busy all the time.”

The address on the card is just a few blocks away now. I try to drive as quietly as I can, crunching slow over delicate snow in this middle-of-the-night dark. Some houses are still done up with lights and wreaths and grinning reindeer, and some are not; all of them quiet and sleeping and trusting the world not to fuck with them. Long icicles drool from the snarling grills of parked cars, just in case.

We pull up to a Laundromat in a small brick plaza, unexpected on an otherwise residential street. It’s flanked by a dreamily lit florist on one side and an intimidatingly laid-back take-out restaurant on the other, offering only full hot chickens and radioactive slaw.

“This is it,” I whisper.

Ralph nods, careful not to make noise. It’s unwise to stand out from quiet, middle-of-the-night dark. Like how your body has to imitate water to stay alive in it, arms and legs undulating with the waves to keep your head up and breathing. This quiet, middle-of-the-night dark could drown you if you didn’t conform to it completely. Especially here, now, parked in front of this strange Laundromat in the hour after Laura’s death. If we’re too loud or bright, her spirit, sore and confused, might spot us, smash the car windows, pull us screaming and clawing into a glowing red crack in the pavement.

Then I notice it, wedged in the corner of the Laundromat’s big frosty window: the small, lashless eye from the business card. Red. Winking neon.

“Look,” I say.

“I see.”

We stare at it, huffing steam into the air together.

“So, what now?” I ask.

Ralph stares at it in silence for a long time until he finally closes his eyes, drops his head. “Let’s go home.”

I squeeze his hand. “Okay.”

And I start to drive.

Back to Ralph’s childhood home, where he first lived with a mother and a father, then just a mother, then a mother and a wife, and now just a wife.

The house is in a neighborhood of tall, proper homes that’d been erected tight as matches within walking distance of what had been an extremely successful gin distillery. Similar, but not identical, appointed with enough thoughtful detail to harvest boundless loyalty in the employees for whom they’d originally been built.

Now the century-old distillery is a popular event venue. Mostly weddings. On Sunday mornings Ralph’s mother would sniff around the alley for discarded centerpieces and flower arrangements, accompanied from time to time by Irena from next door, and Irena’s dog, Cud, a fourteen-year-old Pomeranian, which hung from her hip like a colostomy bag and always had a look on his face like you’d forgotten to wish him a happy birthday.

Ralph and I would roll our eyes at each other when Laura elbowed her way through the back door, arms in full bloom, obscuring her face like the poor disguise of a very inept spy.

“I know you think it’s crazy,” she’d say, “I can feel your looks”—slamming the vase on the table for emphasis, actually mad, not a joke—“but what’s crazy is letting a hundred-dollar centerpiece go to waste!” To Laura, collecting these centerpieces simply made good sense, consistent with the meticulous penny-pinching she’d employed without shame to buy this house, and feed her son, and put him through school.

This steady supply of $100 centerpieces, rotting through wedding season, gave the house a damp, jungle-ripe quality you could taste. I could taste it now, that same humid influence, but different. Like a river of gore had rerouted itself through the house on its way out of hell.

I’d half expected the house to absorb the blood, suck it into its bones and hold on to Laura forever. A little loyalty to its longtime master, not this sprawling, indifferent mess.

Ralph is staring at the paramedics’ bloody boot prints, fingers straight against his temples again, rubbing, as though trying to work an explanation from the chaos of dragged heels and clipped treads. It was one of the curses of Ralph’s brain, to always be looking for answers, Brain insisting that they existed, of course, they just had to be figured out, and then everything would be fine.

“Ralph.” I grab his arm, pull him from his trance. “Go to bed. When you wake up, all of this will be gone, okay? You’re not allowed to say no, you have to go.”

“Abby, it’s two in the morning. You’re exhausted.”

“You’re exhausted. Go upstairs or I’ll beat you up.” I make a fist and graze it against his chin, then quickly kiss where I’ve touched him, like, don’t make me hit you, baby, because I love you, but I will.

He smiles and hugs me. I seep through his arms like Play-Doh. There’s no greater feeling than being squished to death by Ralph. “Good night, my love,” I croak, lungs at half capacity. “You’re gonna feel better tomorrow.”

I feel him nod into my shoulder, then he releases me and goes up to bed.

I open the pantry, all of her cleaning products on the bottom shelf so they didn’t leak into anything else and poison us. Laura told me a story about that, a family who kept a leaky drain-clog remover above their potatoes and onions under the sink, slowly poisoned to death by it, the whole family, incremental symptoms like a plague: diarrhea, then vomiting, then motor function decay. Cleaning products are serious chemicals. If you drink them, you die.

I feel angry with Laura that she didn’t just quietly gulp some of these neon poisons: a few bundles of froth to clean from around her mouth, maybe, maybe some diarrhea, a nice lady-size amount, sub-spa-grade ORGANICA gracefully contained by her pants. A Virginia Slims suicide: Laura wearing a coral button-up shirt and white ankle-length chinos, sprawled peacefully on a spotless kitchen floor, limbs lean, bent ladylike, an empty tumbler glazed in electric blue rolling from her lifeless hand.

I fill a bucket with lemon-scented, biodegradable suds and kneel at the craze of bloody prints. Run my fingers along the stubborn ridges of her dried blood, let my sponge inhale a few rounds of soapy water, then empty it over the mess. The prints liquefy, invade one another before disappearing. Quickly they’re almost gone. Maybe with them, their memory: in the morning Ralph will have forgotten about his mother completely, forgot he ever even had a mother. Tomorrow Ralph will be a man born spontaneously, a miracle, appearing with a pop and falling sparkle next to a stream; a wayward water-lily boy, deep in one of the last magical forests on earth: glowing fresh skin speckled with sun, gummy mouth wide and crying from the shock of suddenly being alive, jerking his tight fists in the novel way babies do, curiously protective of their palms. Tomorrow Ralph will be a man raised by the wildflowers and critters of the forest, which will be alive forever as long as we buy biodegradable soap.

When the water in the bucket pinks to red, I empty it, refill the water, feed it more glugs of biodegradable soap. It works everywhere but in the basement, where I discover it’s worthless against so much blood-steeped carpet. I scrub and scrub and make everything worse.

One last thing to do before I go to sleep: put the opal ring in my tiny Kay Jewelers box, put that tiny box into a resealable plastic bag, boil a pot of water, and pour it slowly over a concentrated patch of frozen ground in the backyard. This way I’m able to penetrate the soil with a spade, dig a decent enough hole, bury the ring in the trembling shadow of a bare, brain-shaped bush where Ralph will never, ever, find it.

It’s nearly morning by the time I wash up and snuggle in next to Ralph, whose snore skips a beat to squeeze me in his sleep, then resumes as though nothing had happened. I fall asleep in an instant, knowing that downstairs the house is clean, the ring is hidden, and when Ralph wakes up, he’ll be a wayward water-lily boy, born from the earth, and Laura will never have existed at all.

2

IN THE BEDROOM that Ralph grew up in, there’s a galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. There are chips of paint where he’d replaced posters of superheroes with posters of bands and beautiful women, all gone now, rolled up and bundled together and leaning in one of the house’s many closets and crannies.

When we first moved in, we talked about peeling up the stars, softening the corners with vinegar, scraping them up with the edge of an old credit card. We use something similar at the Northern Star Seniors’ Complex, where I work, to free medical tape from the natural cling of formless flesh, a special tool that only works half as well as a credit card would. We staff commonly complain about all the special tools we don’t need but have to use, mock the imaginary men in suits testing things on overripe peaches and unfloured dough, and maybe they’ve got lots of money in their pockets, but we know that they’re morons who have no idea what they’re talking about.

Ralph and I also talked a lot about when we’d be moving out: right away, as soon as possible, the minute she’s well again. Because even though he’d been strong when we’d moved in, strong enough to move in—equipped with resources he’d downloaded from a website called the Borderline Parent, and a swear-on-your-life promise from me that I could handle this temporary uprooting—being near her stirred rotten, dangerous things inside him. And this house too, where her health and happiness had been his sole responsibility, where she’d only showed affection when he was sad, only gave attention to his tragedies; it soon began to feel again as though that were all that mattered.

But Ralph was quick and good about consulting his coping materials, practicing his mindfulness, deep breathing, and calming visualizations, reminding himself that he was a whole and separate person from her with a whole and separate life, and that he could love her and support her without turning to dust.

And now she’s dead. And the house, though ours, feels as rotten and dangerous as the things she triggered in Ralph. Crumbling tendons of tightly wound wires in the walls, some living, most dead. Sodden cupboards and feathery centipedes and malignant fissures in the foundation. Never loyal, never good, built to indenture servitude to a monstrous brick idol, poorly ventilated, belching effluent into the water supply, weakening resistance with flats of free gin.

Ralph is still asleep: even breathing, steady as a metronome, not even a flinch as I slide, limb by limb from the bed.

I pull my copy of Secrets of a Famous Chef from his beaten old bookshelf. My favorite and only cookbook. It’s from the year 1930, and everyone you see who’s covered in wrinkles and hunched over walkers and lipping bits of soup from a spoon ate stuff from that book and I want us both to be old like that.

I ease the door shut behind me and stand in the hallway, arms crossed over the book against my chest, confronted by Ralph’s mother’s closed bedroom door. She could still be sleeping in there. The way she could sleep all day long, emerging in the dead of night, her existence evidenced only by blooming ashtrays and vanishing produce and misplaced remote controls, the mischief of a miserable ghost.

I consider opening her bedroom door, a signal to the house that a new era is upon it, but I hate the idea of her empty room being the first thing Ralph sees this morning so instead I tiptoe down the stairs, avoid the creaks, drop my cookbook off in the kitchen, then head all the way to the basement. I dig a retractable knife from a toolbox Laura kept in the laundry room, kneel next to the bloodiest section of basement carpet, and begin to slice, layer after layer, inhaling the carpet’s death rattle spew of dust and hair and skin cells, until finally I feel the scrape of concrete vibrate up through my arm and into my teeth. Then the next side, then the next side, until that darkest, most destroyed square of carpet is free. Sweating, I yank it up with both hands, roll it, lean it against the wall. I’ll take it upstairs with me, take it right outside to the garbage.

Now there’s a gaping hole in the floor, a little pond of exposed concrete, which could maybe be nice if we pulled up the whole carpet and polished it, glazed, so it’s natural and shiny. Modern is what our Realtor will call it, fingers crossed. But for now I’ll just reorganize the furniture, drag Ralph’s mother’s old corduroy couch overtop to hide it.

I still need coffee and food and to brush my teeth but instead I fall onto the couch, head back, eyes closed, stroke its softness like a pet.

Corduroy couches must have been a big deal back when our moms were buying furniture because my mother had a couch just like this one. I called her Couchy. She was pushed up against a set of windows in our old den that looked out into the backyard. It was winter when we moved into that place, and whoever we rented it from had a set of patio furniture back there all covered in ice and snow. Sugarcoated. A sugarcoated table. Two lines scraped into the sugar snow from a sugarcoated chair on its side, dragged and slammed to the ground.

What happened was Mom’s latest boyfriend had got so angry with her he didn’t know what to do but scream and slam a chair over onto its side. He must not have been good with his words. None of them ever were, not my dad either, I’m sure. Grown men with no way to communicate anger but screaming and punching walls and capsizing chairs and it would have made you feel the slightest bit bad for them if you didn’t also hate their guts. I guess that’s what rage is: the point where your words fail the power of your emotions. Maybe there can be happiness rage and sadness rage. I am in love rage with Ralph and sometimes it hurts so bad I could knock a patio chair over like that sloppy, gaping fuckhole, that rotten fucking fuck-ass boyfriend did.

I remember it was nearly an ice storm out there, everything peaceful and tinkling like a lullaby, as though the furniture were actually nice, not used a thousand times over by decades of poor shitbags like us who’d rented this cold, dripping one-story where even the roaches, quite rightly, had no respect for humans. Wandering unafraid onto the counters, squeezing and selecting butter smears and toast leavings like produce at the grocery store, nodding neighborly to one another as they pass. I’d lift my feet, bullied, watching from the corduroy couch, stroking it like a pet, Good girl, good girl, good little Couchy. Cheek against her corduroy skin, eyes closed, dreamy dark, so soft it seemed I could slice through her velvet ridges, scatter gently into another universe.

When a lab monkey doesn’t have a mother, a cigarette-smoking man in a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses will give the monkey a rolled-up pair of socks and the socks become their mother. Or, more accurately, the monkey needs a mother so badly that it can project enough mother things onto the socks that they do the trick. Become a Motherthing. The socks become a Motherthing, scribbles the cigarette-smoking lab coat man, who tastes his pen and continues writing: They can hug it and stroke it and put their cheek against it and it calms them down, really calms them down. The way a mother would. A real remarkable effect. The baby monkey’s heart rate decreases, blood pressure lowers, all the magic medicine a mother is.

So that’s what I do. The same instinct as that little monkey. Find the soft couch, stroke the soft couch, nuzzle it, let it absorb my whispers, absorb my tears, dilute my squishy rhythmic sadness.

Does the couch resent having to do all this mothering when there’s a perfectly good mother storming around the five small rooms of this sugarcoated, roach-infested rental, gathering armfuls of clothes, tossing them one by one out the front door hissing, spit-spraying fury: Why her? Why her? Why her and not me, what more could I have possibly done? I mean it you sloppy, gaping fuckhole, you rotten fucking fuck ass, you tell me what I should have done, what I could have done to keep you faithful, you goddamn lowlife, you goddamn scumbag. Let you into my life, into my daughter’s life, and this is what you do. Useful to her this way. Her child for God’s sake: sweet, uncorrupted creature he was turning into collateral damage. Maybe the couch does resent having to do this mothering, but it doesn’t let on, because it’s a better Motherthing than this real mother could ever be.

The boyfriend, he’s yelling back: Aw, fuck you, man, aw, fuck you. Aw, come on, man, don’t, don’t do that, I said I was fucking sorry, all right? And you know I told you, I told you I wasn’t looking for anything serious, all right? I told you that.

Couchy Motherthing warms, opens, fills my ears with her calmest, brownest warmth. Tries to be the rolled-up socks for me, more mother than couch, because this woman storming from room to room in her peach T-shirt and ripped jeans and overprocessed blondness rubbed to cotton at the temples, she really isn’t perfectly good. She’s able-bodied. She’s not technically or traditionally sick. But there’s nothing perfect or good about her.

Yeah, right, then you’re here every night, I’m making you dinner and covering your phone bill, your drinks at Chuck’s, and you’re fucking me like it’s serious, asking me—you know what you asked me—you know what you asked me to do and I guess she did it for you, didn’t she? I guess she was “open-minded.” Leeching off me like I don’t have a kid I’ve gotta take care of. Why don’t you come in, why don’t you tell her what you did, huh? Tell her who you really are. Abby? Abby, come over here, okay, sweetie? Randy or Ralph or Reggie, he’s got something he needs to tell you, come here, right now. Long nails, clawing the air, tap-tap-tapping against her thumb. Come on, come over here, tap-tap-tap, massive eyes, red rimmed, bulging and delicate like blisters, mascara packed, collected in the corners, foam lapping lakeshore.

She looks so much like a person hurt beyond belief, with her rubbed-to-fuzz hair and her screaming and her blistered eyes. Nothing else matters but her pain, the biggest, loudest thing in the world, unimaginable, a way that people only ever expect to feel maybe once in their life, if ever at all, and maybe never even really recover from. She gets this way all the time. Ripped to shreds when a relationship ends. Is this real? Could this possibly be real? Can real grief even happen this many times to a single human body?

The fuckhole boyfriend outside is freezing cold because the ground is coated in snow, not sugar, and icy air is blasting inside the house and his words are wrought with shivers, ((Come)) ((on)) ((Dani)) ((come)) ((on)) ((don’t)) ((bring)) ((her)) ((into)) ((this)) ((maaaaaan))