Dig, p.24
Dig, page 24
“That’s not what I asked.”
“They always find ’em.”
Gottfried looks back at the robins. He thinks of his five grandchildren. Four now. Only four left and he’s only ever met three. They say outliving your children is the hardest thing but Gottfried isn’t sure. What if they’re still living but they don’t want to talk to you? Gottfried wants to scream, but he doesn’t know who to scream at. It’s got to be someone else’s fault, these missing grandchildren, this collection of grown children who never come around. His son Matt hasn’t talked to them since the day he called to tell them about what happened.
Gottfried knows that he’s opened his phone contact list at least fifty times since and stared at Matt’s number but never pressed the call button. What do you say to your kid when he’s in a situation like that? When you’re not close to begin with? Sorry about your missing daughter?
“I’m going to the side, now,” Marla says. She adjusts her gardening apron and watches Gottfried looking at the robins. “You’ll have to get the ham on soon.”
“Ham,” Gottfried says. “Gotcha.”
Marla shakes her head. She wonders sometimes whether Gottfried ever really loved her. She knows she got colder over the years, but these are the most important times. He drove her to the hospital two weeks ago when she fell. He’s there if she needs a foot rub. That’s about it. Always seems inside his own head.
Gottfried pictures five robins.
When Matt called, he didn’t have any news. Missing is all there is. The kid is missing. Her birthday was a few weeks ago. Gottfried always remembers it. He didn’t send a card this year. He wouldn’t know where to send it. Missing. Worse than dead—Marla said that once. Gottfried’s imagination runs away with him sometimes and he doesn’t like what it shows him. Poor girl. She could be anywhere. Or, she could have run away. That’s what the police said. That’s what Gottfried likes to believe. She ran off with some boy. They’re probably having fun in Las Vegas or something. But it doesn’t stop him from crying sometimes.
Gottfried never believed in the resurrection. Marla’s insistence on the perfect Easter egg hunt since the kids were little annoyed him. Her obsession with it now that there were grandchildren was infuriating, especially considering their grandchildren were mostly grown—teenagers. Especially considering one of them is missing and the three he knows may not show up. In his anger, Gottfried finally finds the word he’s been searching for since the night he and Marla got home from the hospital. Complicit. That’s the word. It was his thumbs that couldn’t dial Matt’s number. His mouth that told Marla about giving money to Missy ten years ago. It was his brain that made all those decisions.
She says, “And don’t forget to peel the potatoes!”
He throws the lumps of onion grass into the woods that surround the house.
He goes inside and washes his hands.
He puts the ham in the roaster.
He empties a five-pound bag of potatoes in the sink and retrieves the peeler from the drawer. As he slices the skin off inch by inch, he thinks of his family again and cries.
Jake & Bill can bring the snake out now
84 Days since the Snowstorm—April 1, 2018
Jake Marks and his older brother, Bill, walk through the high school parking lot because Bill told Jake to meet him there. Bill took his snake with him when he moved out, cracked two sides of the big tank when he shoved it into the back seat of the car, but now he’s trying to give the snake to Jake. “I can’t believe you’re not gonna take care of her,” Bill says. Jake doesn’t care. He doesn’t want the fucking snake. Fuck the snake. Fuck Bill. Fuck Ashley-the-fiancée, too. Just seeing the snake wrapped around Bill’s neck today annoys him.
Jake feels like he’s going to puke. He’s about to tell everyone about everything. He thinks: Resurrection, motherfuckers. He wishes he would have figured out Bill’s scam earlier, but he was just a kid and Bill gave no fucks. Bill never gave any fucks. Now Jake gives no fucks about Bill.
Six years between them, and Bill is a man now, about to get married—about to go to prison if Jake has anything to do with it. Jake’s just a kid. Tenth grade for the second time. Plans to act it now, too.
Today Bill is bringing his fiancée, Ashley, to Easter dinner at Jake’s house.
Today Jake is telling his parents what they did.
Today changes everything.
The Shoveler: Easter in a Sinkhole
When I was little, no matter what apartment we lived in, no matter what state or whether Mom had a job or not, she always hid eggs for me on Easter. She’d hard-boil them in secret, color them in secret, so I never knew where the eggs came from. We never went to church and I never understood the significance of eggs. I just accepted that one day per year, I’d get to look for brightly dyed eggs. In the apartment. Never outside. Our hunts were always in our apartments.
This morning, she wakes me up with a loud knock on my door.
“It’s time to hunt!”
I’m sixteen. Haven’t hunted for Easter eggs since I lived in Florida—which was the time we lost one of the eggs and it stank up Mom’s bedroom closet.
She comes in and I can’t get out of bed thanks to my morning boner, so I just lie there on my side. “Give me a minute,” I say.
“The Easter Bunny is waiting.”
“He’ll have to wait a bit longer,” I say. “I need to get dressed.”
I think Mom realizes then that I’m not nine anymore. The look on her face is funny. Not mortified, not embarrassed. I can’t tell what it is.
“Okay, dude. Do your thing.”
Fact: There isn’t a guy on Earth who’d jerk off after getting verbal encouragement from his mother.
* * *
I arrive downstairs to an empty Easter basket and clear instructions.
“There are eleven. Go!”
She usually put great thought into where she’d hide the eggs, but this year they seem to be sitting around out in the open. I see four of them just from where I’m standing. I gather them up and find six more inside of five minutes.
But there’s one missing. I can’t find it anywhere. She sits on the couch, smiling, with her arms crossed. “Wanna play hot and cold?”
“Not yet. I can find it.” I’m on my knees, looking under the chair. I’m on my tiptoes, looking on top of the fridge. I’m standing on a chair looking above the kitchen cabinets. I’m in the bathroom, rummaging through her makeup drawer. No egg.
“It’s not in my room,” she says as I take the stairs by twos.
“Is it in my room?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer.
I look through my bags of clothing, my bed, my closet, which is really just a place we keep the old five-gallon paint buckets Mike loaned us for the leaks. No egg.
“Hot or cold?” she asks again when I get back downstairs.
“Sure.”
“Cold.”
I move around the entire downstairs. She keeps saying cold.
“So it’s not in the house?”
She smiles.
I try to figure out why she has that look on her face. I already bought my own car so it’s not like she can surprise me with that. Oh. My car.
We go downstairs and outside and she says, “Warmer.”
I walk toward the sidewalk and my car. “Colder,” she says.
I walk to her car. “Colder.” I walk to the side of the house. “Warmer.” Toward the shed. “Colder.” Toward Mike’s house. “Warmer.” Toward Mike’s back door. “Colder.” Toward Mike’s brother’s sister-in-law’s house through the backyard. “Warmer.”
I stop and look at Mom, and she seems elated about something. I point toward the caution tape that Mike put there the night his mother fell in the bathtub. “Warmer.” I walk to the edge of the sinkhole, next to a cone. “A lot warmer.”
“It’s in the hole?” I ask.
* * *
Stop the film. Press pause. Why would a kid’s mother hide an egg in a sinkhole? She may have shoplifted meat all these years but she’s not psycho. There is no reason I can think of that this would make sense.
THE FREAK HAS MADE IT TO THE OTHER SIDE!
The Freak knows there are a lot of dead bodies underground. Seems obvious, but it’s not. People don’t think about that when they’re making funeral plans. They don’t think about how many bodies their loved one’s body will meet down here. The Freak thinks: Most people don’t know about the tunnels or how many people use them. Living people, I mean. Living people who aren’t really living.
The Freak knows you are aboveground. The Freak knows she is belowground. There’s more to it than just “passing on” the way funeral directors say it. There’s more to it than a heart that stops beating. Some people’s hearts are never quite right. It takes more than blood and muscle and tissue and a brain that works.
Bodies are machines and machines need love.
Without it, the heart can never figure out what it’s doing here. Millions of people are walking around aboveground, but really they’re down here in the tunnels. The Freak sees them all the time. They never know what to do when she smiles at them. They think she’s mocking them, but really she’s just trying to make them more comfortable.
* * *
Light pours into the tunnel ahead. This is not how tunnels work. Underground everything is supposed to be dark. You don’t need to be The Freak to figure this out. Everyone knows.
She walks slowly toward the light. And once she gets close enough she sees something bright green.
“It’s an egg,” she says to herself.
The Freak goes to it and looks up to see the sky. Yellow caution tape moves in the spring wind around the hole she’s in. Funny. A minute ago she was in a tunnel on her way somewhere, but now she’s in a hole. Holes are different. Everyone is always trying to get out of them.
She picks up the egg and puts it in her pocket.
She looks up to the sky and says, “Thank you.”
She turns back toward the tunnel, now sky-blinded, knowing she would do anything to live again on the other side of the sod. But you can’t change things like this. Easter eggs want you to believe you can, but you can’t.
Malcolm Holds Hands
Dad needs help to the car.
A driver has come to pick us up. Dad told me to dress in something classy and I decided not to. I’m not here to impress Marla and Gottfried. They’re not here to impress me.
Dad’s hat blows off in a breeze and I chase it.
By the time we get to Marla and Gottfried’s house, there’s already one car in the driveway.
“Shit,” Dad says. “My fucking sister’s here.”
“Isn’t that why we came?” I ask.
“No.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I guess, maybe.”
“We’ll get through it,” I say. I reach over and hold his hand.
I go around to his side of the car and open the door for him. He climbs out and reaches for my hand again. We walk to the front door, which is awfully formal considering I’ve lived here most of the school year.
He says, “Ring the bell.”
“Seriously?”
He nods. I ring the bell. Marla opens the door in her kitchen apron. “I didn’t think you were coming!” she says.
Dad says, “As if you didn’t make enough ham for half the county.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that, so she just hugs him. The look on her face isn’t something I can explain. She’s not letting it hit her yet, but it’s pretty hard to ignore when your forty-two-year-old son weighs the same as he did when he was in middle school.
“Harry!” someone says from inside. It’s her. My aunt Jean.
“Jean,” he says in the way you’d expect—sarcastic and dry. He’s got the upper hand here. I’m pretty sure pancreatic cancer isn’t going to take any shit from Jean today.
They hug. She says, “Holy shit. You need to eat!”
“Nice to see you, too, Jean. You’ve really wrinkled up since I saw you last. Congratulations.”
“What do you want to drink?” Gottfried says to all of us.
“Where’s Katie?” Jean asks. Then she yells. “KATIE?!”
“Can I help you?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m right here,” Katie says. She’s under the table, reading a book. “Malcolm?” She crawls out and gives me a hug. Then we disappear as quickly as we can toward the sliding door to the deck.
“You can’t go outside!” Marla says. “Egg hunt isn’t until one!”
“Marla, you need to calm down,” I say.
“Don’t call me Marla.”
“Okay,” I say. And then I open the door anyway and go outside with Katie. I don’t think I’ve seen her in maybe five years. Last time we were little enough that we still cared about drawing shit in sidewalk chalk and wore church clothes. This time, we’re both dressed in teenage stoner chic.
“This sucks so hard,” Katie says.
“So, so hard,” I say.
“At least you’re here, though. The last few years it was just us and listening to my mom and Marla talk made me want to hang myself.” I must look worried because she says, “Not literally.”
“Oh. Good.”
“How are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Your dad,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“Mom says you’ve been in Jamaica a lot. Something about Harry being crazy on weed and dragging you there.”
I shake my head.
“She’s such an asshole, isn’t she?” Katie says. “But hey, your tan is pretty serious.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Want to burn one?” she asks, producing a joint from inside her bra.
“Maybe after the ham.”
She puts the joint back in her bra. “Did you see Loretta yet?”
“Loretta’s here?”
“They went out to buy flowers or something. They’ll be back.”
“Holy shit. This Easter is hopping.”
“Punny.”
Both of us stare into the woods and I know what I’m thinking and I think Katie’s thinking it, too. Three of us. Me, Katie, and Loretta. That’s who’s left. I half think about telling Katie about the girl I met last week. The note on the paper plate. 39.992372, -74.844528.
“Do you have a car?” I ask.
“Not yet. Saving. Almost there.”
“You’re, like, rich.”
Katie says, “I won’t take their money.”
“Fuck. I would.”
Loretta, Act Three: Balloons for Easter
Loretta’s pop-pop didn’t tell Loretta’s mom-mom what she made out of balloons during the matinee last week, so in her Easter basket are four balloon animal kits. Her pop-pop didn’t recognize the female genitalia balloon at all during the matinee. The audience laughed at that. Since then, she’s decided to do the penis and testicles first, because he recognized those right away. Of course.
Her mother’s face bruise has faded and she’s in a different mood now. Happier, but more tired. Living with her pop-pop and mom-mom isn’t always easy. Loretta is still getting used to the food and her mother can’t seem to sleep at night.
No one has found her father yet, but they’re looking.
This morning Loretta woke up to her first Easter basket and she ate three marshmallow chicks before her mom-mom said, “Save that for later! When your cousins get here.”
Loretta doesn’t really remember her cousins. She’s excited to meet them. She put on her red dress first thing, and her mother asked her to wear the stiff flowered dress her mom-mom bought her instead.
The audience grumbled. Loretta looked out into the bright lights and asked, “Do you really think this suits me? Looks like something Mom-Mom would wear.”
“Don’t do it!” the audience yelled.
“You do you!” they screamed.
“Burn it!” someone yelled, and then the audience turned on him.
Loretta put the dress on and thankfully it was too big. Right size, but didn’t take into account that Loretta is only ninety-five pounds.
“We have to go out and buy flowers,” her mother said to her.
“For what?” Loretta asked.
“Tradition! I used to always bring my mother flowers on Easter.”
“Do I have to come with?”
“Yes.”
“I like you better without Dad,” Loretta said.
* * *
At the flower stall, Loretta’s mother can’t seem to function. She’s always a solid performer on set, but location work isn’t her strong suit. She needs Loretta to help her pick the right plants and to make the right calculations. She drives okay, Loretta notes, but she can’t seem to figure out how much money to give the man.
And the man keeps flirting with her.
Loretta says, “He’d better back off.”
“He’s sweet!” her mother says.
“He’s creepy. Trust me,” Loretta says.
Loretta is afraid for her mother. She refuses to live with another man in the house again. Except her pop-pop, who seems to love her more than he loves anything.
The audience interrupts her thoughts.
“No!”
“You don’t know the whole story!”
“What?” she asks. “He’s a nice old man!”
“Talk to your cousins,” the audience answers.
“I will,” Loretta says. She turns to her mother. “Get the hyacinths. They smell so nice.”
Her mother picks up two pots of hyacinths.
“They always find ’em.”
Gottfried looks back at the robins. He thinks of his five grandchildren. Four now. Only four left and he’s only ever met three. They say outliving your children is the hardest thing but Gottfried isn’t sure. What if they’re still living but they don’t want to talk to you? Gottfried wants to scream, but he doesn’t know who to scream at. It’s got to be someone else’s fault, these missing grandchildren, this collection of grown children who never come around. His son Matt hasn’t talked to them since the day he called to tell them about what happened.
Gottfried knows that he’s opened his phone contact list at least fifty times since and stared at Matt’s number but never pressed the call button. What do you say to your kid when he’s in a situation like that? When you’re not close to begin with? Sorry about your missing daughter?
“I’m going to the side, now,” Marla says. She adjusts her gardening apron and watches Gottfried looking at the robins. “You’ll have to get the ham on soon.”
“Ham,” Gottfried says. “Gotcha.”
Marla shakes her head. She wonders sometimes whether Gottfried ever really loved her. She knows she got colder over the years, but these are the most important times. He drove her to the hospital two weeks ago when she fell. He’s there if she needs a foot rub. That’s about it. Always seems inside his own head.
Gottfried pictures five robins.
When Matt called, he didn’t have any news. Missing is all there is. The kid is missing. Her birthday was a few weeks ago. Gottfried always remembers it. He didn’t send a card this year. He wouldn’t know where to send it. Missing. Worse than dead—Marla said that once. Gottfried’s imagination runs away with him sometimes and he doesn’t like what it shows him. Poor girl. She could be anywhere. Or, she could have run away. That’s what the police said. That’s what Gottfried likes to believe. She ran off with some boy. They’re probably having fun in Las Vegas or something. But it doesn’t stop him from crying sometimes.
Gottfried never believed in the resurrection. Marla’s insistence on the perfect Easter egg hunt since the kids were little annoyed him. Her obsession with it now that there were grandchildren was infuriating, especially considering their grandchildren were mostly grown—teenagers. Especially considering one of them is missing and the three he knows may not show up. In his anger, Gottfried finally finds the word he’s been searching for since the night he and Marla got home from the hospital. Complicit. That’s the word. It was his thumbs that couldn’t dial Matt’s number. His mouth that told Marla about giving money to Missy ten years ago. It was his brain that made all those decisions.
She says, “And don’t forget to peel the potatoes!”
He throws the lumps of onion grass into the woods that surround the house.
He goes inside and washes his hands.
He puts the ham in the roaster.
He empties a five-pound bag of potatoes in the sink and retrieves the peeler from the drawer. As he slices the skin off inch by inch, he thinks of his family again and cries.
Jake & Bill can bring the snake out now
84 Days since the Snowstorm—April 1, 2018
Jake Marks and his older brother, Bill, walk through the high school parking lot because Bill told Jake to meet him there. Bill took his snake with him when he moved out, cracked two sides of the big tank when he shoved it into the back seat of the car, but now he’s trying to give the snake to Jake. “I can’t believe you’re not gonna take care of her,” Bill says. Jake doesn’t care. He doesn’t want the fucking snake. Fuck the snake. Fuck Bill. Fuck Ashley-the-fiancée, too. Just seeing the snake wrapped around Bill’s neck today annoys him.
Jake feels like he’s going to puke. He’s about to tell everyone about everything. He thinks: Resurrection, motherfuckers. He wishes he would have figured out Bill’s scam earlier, but he was just a kid and Bill gave no fucks. Bill never gave any fucks. Now Jake gives no fucks about Bill.
Six years between them, and Bill is a man now, about to get married—about to go to prison if Jake has anything to do with it. Jake’s just a kid. Tenth grade for the second time. Plans to act it now, too.
Today Bill is bringing his fiancée, Ashley, to Easter dinner at Jake’s house.
Today Jake is telling his parents what they did.
Today changes everything.
The Shoveler: Easter in a Sinkhole
When I was little, no matter what apartment we lived in, no matter what state or whether Mom had a job or not, she always hid eggs for me on Easter. She’d hard-boil them in secret, color them in secret, so I never knew where the eggs came from. We never went to church and I never understood the significance of eggs. I just accepted that one day per year, I’d get to look for brightly dyed eggs. In the apartment. Never outside. Our hunts were always in our apartments.
This morning, she wakes me up with a loud knock on my door.
“It’s time to hunt!”
I’m sixteen. Haven’t hunted for Easter eggs since I lived in Florida—which was the time we lost one of the eggs and it stank up Mom’s bedroom closet.
She comes in and I can’t get out of bed thanks to my morning boner, so I just lie there on my side. “Give me a minute,” I say.
“The Easter Bunny is waiting.”
“He’ll have to wait a bit longer,” I say. “I need to get dressed.”
I think Mom realizes then that I’m not nine anymore. The look on her face is funny. Not mortified, not embarrassed. I can’t tell what it is.
“Okay, dude. Do your thing.”
Fact: There isn’t a guy on Earth who’d jerk off after getting verbal encouragement from his mother.
* * *
I arrive downstairs to an empty Easter basket and clear instructions.
“There are eleven. Go!”
She usually put great thought into where she’d hide the eggs, but this year they seem to be sitting around out in the open. I see four of them just from where I’m standing. I gather them up and find six more inside of five minutes.
But there’s one missing. I can’t find it anywhere. She sits on the couch, smiling, with her arms crossed. “Wanna play hot and cold?”
“Not yet. I can find it.” I’m on my knees, looking under the chair. I’m on my tiptoes, looking on top of the fridge. I’m standing on a chair looking above the kitchen cabinets. I’m in the bathroom, rummaging through her makeup drawer. No egg.
“It’s not in my room,” she says as I take the stairs by twos.
“Is it in my room?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer.
I look through my bags of clothing, my bed, my closet, which is really just a place we keep the old five-gallon paint buckets Mike loaned us for the leaks. No egg.
“Hot or cold?” she asks again when I get back downstairs.
“Sure.”
“Cold.”
I move around the entire downstairs. She keeps saying cold.
“So it’s not in the house?”
She smiles.
I try to figure out why she has that look on her face. I already bought my own car so it’s not like she can surprise me with that. Oh. My car.
We go downstairs and outside and she says, “Warmer.”
I walk toward the sidewalk and my car. “Colder,” she says.
I walk to her car. “Colder.” I walk to the side of the house. “Warmer.” Toward the shed. “Colder.” Toward Mike’s house. “Warmer.” Toward Mike’s back door. “Colder.” Toward Mike’s brother’s sister-in-law’s house through the backyard. “Warmer.”
I stop and look at Mom, and she seems elated about something. I point toward the caution tape that Mike put there the night his mother fell in the bathtub. “Warmer.” I walk to the edge of the sinkhole, next to a cone. “A lot warmer.”
“It’s in the hole?” I ask.
* * *
Stop the film. Press pause. Why would a kid’s mother hide an egg in a sinkhole? She may have shoplifted meat all these years but she’s not psycho. There is no reason I can think of that this would make sense.
THE FREAK HAS MADE IT TO THE OTHER SIDE!
The Freak knows there are a lot of dead bodies underground. Seems obvious, but it’s not. People don’t think about that when they’re making funeral plans. They don’t think about how many bodies their loved one’s body will meet down here. The Freak thinks: Most people don’t know about the tunnels or how many people use them. Living people, I mean. Living people who aren’t really living.
The Freak knows you are aboveground. The Freak knows she is belowground. There’s more to it than just “passing on” the way funeral directors say it. There’s more to it than a heart that stops beating. Some people’s hearts are never quite right. It takes more than blood and muscle and tissue and a brain that works.
Bodies are machines and machines need love.
Without it, the heart can never figure out what it’s doing here. Millions of people are walking around aboveground, but really they’re down here in the tunnels. The Freak sees them all the time. They never know what to do when she smiles at them. They think she’s mocking them, but really she’s just trying to make them more comfortable.
* * *
Light pours into the tunnel ahead. This is not how tunnels work. Underground everything is supposed to be dark. You don’t need to be The Freak to figure this out. Everyone knows.
She walks slowly toward the light. And once she gets close enough she sees something bright green.
“It’s an egg,” she says to herself.
The Freak goes to it and looks up to see the sky. Yellow caution tape moves in the spring wind around the hole she’s in. Funny. A minute ago she was in a tunnel on her way somewhere, but now she’s in a hole. Holes are different. Everyone is always trying to get out of them.
She picks up the egg and puts it in her pocket.
She looks up to the sky and says, “Thank you.”
She turns back toward the tunnel, now sky-blinded, knowing she would do anything to live again on the other side of the sod. But you can’t change things like this. Easter eggs want you to believe you can, but you can’t.
Malcolm Holds Hands
Dad needs help to the car.
A driver has come to pick us up. Dad told me to dress in something classy and I decided not to. I’m not here to impress Marla and Gottfried. They’re not here to impress me.
Dad’s hat blows off in a breeze and I chase it.
By the time we get to Marla and Gottfried’s house, there’s already one car in the driveway.
“Shit,” Dad says. “My fucking sister’s here.”
“Isn’t that why we came?” I ask.
“No.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I guess, maybe.”
“We’ll get through it,” I say. I reach over and hold his hand.
I go around to his side of the car and open the door for him. He climbs out and reaches for my hand again. We walk to the front door, which is awfully formal considering I’ve lived here most of the school year.
He says, “Ring the bell.”
“Seriously?”
He nods. I ring the bell. Marla opens the door in her kitchen apron. “I didn’t think you were coming!” she says.
Dad says, “As if you didn’t make enough ham for half the county.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that, so she just hugs him. The look on her face isn’t something I can explain. She’s not letting it hit her yet, but it’s pretty hard to ignore when your forty-two-year-old son weighs the same as he did when he was in middle school.
“Harry!” someone says from inside. It’s her. My aunt Jean.
“Jean,” he says in the way you’d expect—sarcastic and dry. He’s got the upper hand here. I’m pretty sure pancreatic cancer isn’t going to take any shit from Jean today.
They hug. She says, “Holy shit. You need to eat!”
“Nice to see you, too, Jean. You’ve really wrinkled up since I saw you last. Congratulations.”
“What do you want to drink?” Gottfried says to all of us.
“Where’s Katie?” Jean asks. Then she yells. “KATIE?!”
“Can I help you?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m right here,” Katie says. She’s under the table, reading a book. “Malcolm?” She crawls out and gives me a hug. Then we disappear as quickly as we can toward the sliding door to the deck.
“You can’t go outside!” Marla says. “Egg hunt isn’t until one!”
“Marla, you need to calm down,” I say.
“Don’t call me Marla.”
“Okay,” I say. And then I open the door anyway and go outside with Katie. I don’t think I’ve seen her in maybe five years. Last time we were little enough that we still cared about drawing shit in sidewalk chalk and wore church clothes. This time, we’re both dressed in teenage stoner chic.
“This sucks so hard,” Katie says.
“So, so hard,” I say.
“At least you’re here, though. The last few years it was just us and listening to my mom and Marla talk made me want to hang myself.” I must look worried because she says, “Not literally.”
“Oh. Good.”
“How are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Your dad,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“Mom says you’ve been in Jamaica a lot. Something about Harry being crazy on weed and dragging you there.”
I shake my head.
“She’s such an asshole, isn’t she?” Katie says. “But hey, your tan is pretty serious.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Want to burn one?” she asks, producing a joint from inside her bra.
“Maybe after the ham.”
She puts the joint back in her bra. “Did you see Loretta yet?”
“Loretta’s here?”
“They went out to buy flowers or something. They’ll be back.”
“Holy shit. This Easter is hopping.”
“Punny.”
Both of us stare into the woods and I know what I’m thinking and I think Katie’s thinking it, too. Three of us. Me, Katie, and Loretta. That’s who’s left. I half think about telling Katie about the girl I met last week. The note on the paper plate. 39.992372, -74.844528.
“Do you have a car?” I ask.
“Not yet. Saving. Almost there.”
“You’re, like, rich.”
Katie says, “I won’t take their money.”
“Fuck. I would.”
Loretta, Act Three: Balloons for Easter
Loretta’s pop-pop didn’t tell Loretta’s mom-mom what she made out of balloons during the matinee last week, so in her Easter basket are four balloon animal kits. Her pop-pop didn’t recognize the female genitalia balloon at all during the matinee. The audience laughed at that. Since then, she’s decided to do the penis and testicles first, because he recognized those right away. Of course.
Her mother’s face bruise has faded and she’s in a different mood now. Happier, but more tired. Living with her pop-pop and mom-mom isn’t always easy. Loretta is still getting used to the food and her mother can’t seem to sleep at night.
No one has found her father yet, but they’re looking.
This morning Loretta woke up to her first Easter basket and she ate three marshmallow chicks before her mom-mom said, “Save that for later! When your cousins get here.”
Loretta doesn’t really remember her cousins. She’s excited to meet them. She put on her red dress first thing, and her mother asked her to wear the stiff flowered dress her mom-mom bought her instead.
The audience grumbled. Loretta looked out into the bright lights and asked, “Do you really think this suits me? Looks like something Mom-Mom would wear.”
“Don’t do it!” the audience yelled.
“You do you!” they screamed.
“Burn it!” someone yelled, and then the audience turned on him.
Loretta put the dress on and thankfully it was too big. Right size, but didn’t take into account that Loretta is only ninety-five pounds.
“We have to go out and buy flowers,” her mother said to her.
“For what?” Loretta asked.
“Tradition! I used to always bring my mother flowers on Easter.”
“Do I have to come with?”
“Yes.”
“I like you better without Dad,” Loretta said.
* * *
At the flower stall, Loretta’s mother can’t seem to function. She’s always a solid performer on set, but location work isn’t her strong suit. She needs Loretta to help her pick the right plants and to make the right calculations. She drives okay, Loretta notes, but she can’t seem to figure out how much money to give the man.
And the man keeps flirting with her.
Loretta says, “He’d better back off.”
“He’s sweet!” her mother says.
“He’s creepy. Trust me,” Loretta says.
Loretta is afraid for her mother. She refuses to live with another man in the house again. Except her pop-pop, who seems to love her more than he loves anything.
The audience interrupts her thoughts.
“No!”
“You don’t know the whole story!”
“What?” she asks. “He’s a nice old man!”
“Talk to your cousins,” the audience answers.
“I will,” Loretta says. She turns to her mother. “Get the hyacinths. They smell so nice.”
Her mother picks up two pots of hyacinths.
