I wasn’t born at home. I was born far from it, far away from home; in a room with hard white walls and a silence that only the two of us can hear, me and Mom. I’m Susan and I’m six today. Tomorrow I might be eight, or twelve. There is no clock.
I draw. I like to look into my mother's eyes. I like to listen to my mom talk on the phone. I like to look into the mirror, and brush my hair, and think and talk with my mom.
Mom tells me wonderful stories. She says that I'm all she has. She says she lost everything else. She would be alone if it weren’t for me.
“What are you drawing?” she asks me.
“Harold, Grandma and you in the garden.”
She sighs, looking at the drawing for a minute. Then she falls back onto the bed and looks up into the ceiling.
“I loved that garden. I wish I could still be there with Grandma. Just Grandma and me. But, why did you draw Harold too?”
“I don’t know.” I said softly. It’s true, he didn’t spend much time with them, and he didn’t tend the garden. Mom didn’t love Harold, not like I love my dad. “I guess I miss Dad.”
“Harold wasn’t much of a father.”
I knew that Harold used to pay a therapist to speak with Grandma. She spoke with her therapist over the phone twice a week in her bedroom, far more often than Mom does, while sitting on a white chair with a scooped seat and skinny round legs that were tangled in the telephone cord. Mom stayed in her room upstairs while Grandma talked with a therapist. But, I know that my mom used to sneak out of her room, down the wood lined hall, down the stairs (skipping the third step down), past the shoe room to unlock the door of the kitchen with a hair pin, smell the potatoes in the oven, and enter the living room to press her ear against the dark door of Grandma’s bedroom.
Grandma used to say, "Thank you Jason, I appreciate your time. Again, no thank you, talking through the telephone is fine. Goodbye to you too." Then, Mom knew to hurry back through the kitchen, lock the door behind her, and hurry up the stairs (skipping the third to last stair), and sneak into her bedroom, and close the door. Then, in a minute, Mom would hear Grandma's foot creak on the loud stair and she would open the door and say, "Ok, let's go eat some dinner."
Grandma wouldn’t wait for Harold to come home before eating dinner. She said that it wasn’t his schedule that decided when they ate.
One night, Mom’s hands began to hurt, and her fingertips tingled. She knew something was wrong. They didn't hear Harold's car pull up that night. Mom thought he was in a car accident, but now Mom knows he left her. Anyway, Grandma stopped talking to Jason on the phone. Instead, he started to come and talk to Grandma in the front room.
Finally, two weeks after Harold’s disappearance, they took Mom to a school in the town of hills.
Mom always thought she would return home. However, days followed nights, and her thoughts of home only made her sad. She didn't eat and wouldn't talk to the other kids.
At the boarding school, the teachers tried moving her from one room to the next, from one class to the next, trying to find a good spot for her, so that she could be normal. On breaks, she drifted the long and empty hallways.
A teacher would find her and exclaim, “Snap out of it child, be like the others and play along.”
Now, I look up at Mom, away from the drawing, and I can see her as she once was; the little girl who wouldn't eat much or talk to the other kids. Her face would be thin, but rosy, less than mine, but beautiful. Her eyes would be wide, open to the entire world, hiding nothing, not even weakness. But now she's grey, and her eyes are red and guarded. "We’re you lost without your mom, did you give up?" I ask her.
She glances up at me with no answer, but I know the answer anyways. I know most things about Mom, even her secrets. "It wasn't your fault you couldn't be like the others when you were a kid, they should’ve understood; the nights without food," I explain, "not having a mom or dad."
"You know your dad would be here if he could be. He can't be. I knew I still had a mom out there somewhere. I knew she still loved me too. Grandma tried so hard to keep me, but they said she wasn’t healthy and that she was too poor to care for me properly. I wish they would have let her try.”
“They should have.”
“When I was younger than you, I remember a time when I was in the living room playing with a blond haired doll. Harold was on the couch reading a paper. Grandma was in her room. You know how she used to lock herself in her bedroom for quiet time. I wasn’t allowed to disturb her when she had quiet time; just like when I have quiet time in the bathroom and you have to wait here until I’m done. I told Harold that I was hungry. He was busy, and so I went to get Grandma. I tried to open the door, but it was locked as usual. I called out for her, but she wouldn’t reply. I started to cry, and finally the door opened. She picked me up, her eyes were red and she looked pale, it looked like she had been crying a long time.”
“Why was she sad?”
“I’m not sure Susan, but everyone is allowed to be sad, I guess she had to hide it from Harold, or maybe from me. She wasn’t sad all the time though. Anyway, she brought me to the kitchen and sat me on the counter. I asked her why she locked the door. She said it was because it was quiet time for her. I didn’t understand. She grabbed a red box from the cabinet above the sink. It was cream of wheat. I told her I wanted a banana, but we didn’t have any.
“I was upset because she just had quiet time with the door locked, and I couldn’t have a banana, so I asked a silly question. I asked, ‘Mom, do you lock me out because you hate me?’
“She dropped the box of cream of wheat on the counter and some spilt out of the top. She started to cry. Then, she came and picked me up and placed her hand on my head so that my head rested on her shoulder and I could smell the perfume on her neck. She said, ‘There aren’t enough locked doors in the entire world to stop my love from reaching you, Faith.’ Then she whispered while rocking me, ‘Jesus please, don’t let her forget how much I love her.’
“It’s true Susan; nothing can stop a mother’s love. I’ll always love you, even if I’m not always here."
She holds the back of my neck and brings me close and warm. I smile in her arms. I feel whole, I feel good in her arms, talking. It's when we hold each other that we love each other most.
"In a way, I think I was lost without her. At the boarding school, they pushed me away and I let them, Susan," she whispers. "As I’ve told you before, I was alone and I missed Grandma. I looked at the food and I couldn't swallow it. I couldn’t even eat potatoes. Food was my only connection to Grandma, that and gardening. So, whenever I tasted or smelt food, I would be sick with sadness. I got weak and I gave up. Years went by in a mere glimpse of a memory."
"What memory?"
I feel her delicate hands wrap my shoulders and hold me out; the corner of her mouth lifts, "I found a mirror. I looked into it for a long while, horrified. I remember wondering if I was a shadow of a girl. Like I was drifting, soulless, heartless, and mindless. I looked at my body and saw nothing but my mother's eyes, Grandma's eyes."
Her hold on me tightens, and I let her hold me in her white knuckled grasp for a while longer. Then I break free and move to the mirror. I pick up the brush and watch my hair fall gently behind the crooked combs. "Why can’t I see Grandma's eyes?"
"You have your father’s eyes," she answers.
“What ever happened to Grandma?”
Mom’s featureless face answers again. I’m left to my own thoughts. It was nice to hear another story. I wish she would tell me a new story every day. But, I think she can’t remember much. At least I remember her stories so that I can think about them when she’s being forgetful.
At the school, the children would yell out and call her a boy, and laugh at her. The teachers watched from barred windows as the children teased Mom. But, all they did was watch, and worry. They warned the other parents to guard their children from Mom’s sadness, “Steer your children away from Faith; she is quiet, joyless, and has no love,” they said. “Her stoned heart has seen too much. She’s as thin as paper, but she won't pass.”
Mom once told me that they waited for the day the grave would call her name and the weight of her sorrow would be forgotten. But, the grave never spoke Faith. I thought it was a strange thing to say.
One day, they brought Mom to a dark room that was filled with cigar smoke. They said, "Today you will be leaving us," as they stood, "these are your new papers, as your old ones were lost. There is a generous man, Jack Ross, who will be like a proper father to you. You will be better!" They grinned in a semicircle, bending down at the hips, as if to please her. “Faith, meet Jack.” They pointed behind her where a tall man leaned against the frame of the door. He stood upright when they introduced him. He smiled, but not easily.
“Hi, Faith. Trust these fine men, I’m here to help.”
So, Mom did as she was told and followed the tall coated man, pillow and papers in hand, drifting. They took a taxi. Mom watched as the smoky city left.
They entered a train station that smelled of gasoline and burnt smoke. No one told Mom where she was headed. There were people everywhere and Jack guided her through them. Only minutes later, they boarded the stinky train and took a seat in a cart with an old woman and a family. She looked about curiously, and then at Jack who was sitting across from her, meeting his gaze. Carefully, she walked towards him and handed him the folded papers. He unfolded them and scanned the documents. “Says your name is Jameson Ross, an adoptee from a boarding school in Pittsburgh.” He looked at her and smiled. “We’re going to Fort Bragg.” She looked at him for a while more.
Jack returned her gaze and saw a lonely girl. She looked scared, and sad. Her eyes looked empty. He asked, “So, who are you then?”
“I don’t know. They told me that I was lost from the moment they took me from my mom.”
“How about this Jameson fellow then? He sounds like a nice lad, happy and strong. Would you like to be Jameson Ross?”
“No. How do you know he’s nice, and happy?”
“Well, have you ever met a Jameson? I have. I might consider Jameson to be my favourite person, he’s always full of spark.” Mom smiled.
Suddenly, he reached out and grabbed her by the waist and she screamed. “Easy now,” he said. Some passengers looked at them for a moment, but didn’t pay them any further notice. He took her to a steel floored bathroom and closed the door. He had a knife, and she screamed again and cried. Then, handful by handful, Mom saw her hair fall into a wicker basket that had been filled with tissues and paper towel. She kicked and punched until the blade cut her ear. “Stop it, look what you’ve done,” he whispered harshly. She stopped thrashing, and he dabbed her ear with cotton until the bleeding stopped. Hurriedly, he finished with her hair as she sobbed. He pushed the door open with her shoulder and put her in her seat.
She slept and woke; her scalp hurt. She drifted through consciousness in the train stench, a shadow of a girl, now with the name of Jameson Ross, a boy from Pittsburgh. She smiled at the reflection of Jameson and he smiled back. She put her hand up to the window; it was cold, but Mom didn’t mind. The cold was somewhere else, far away, back with Grandma, back home in the garden. Mom could make out the faint outlining of bent bare trees. They shivered and shed their leaves from the passage of the train. She felt her eyelids become heavy, as her thoughts wandered to a time back home when Harold was raking leaves.
Harold had thick glasses and he hid his face with a rancher’s hat and a grey wool scarf. Mom could see him from the entrance window. She knelt there, inside at the windowsill, waiting for him to acknowledge her and return inside to start a fire; she knew Grandma was busy upstairs.
The white paint of the windowsill had lifted. She picked at the flakes of paint that stood up. She noticed the paint on the red steps outside was lifting too, revealing the grey wood underneath. Harold was beyond the stairs in the yellow grass, raking leaves of the trees that lined the road. She reached into her dress pocket, and grinned as her fingers found a red crayon. She began by drawing a tree. Then she drew Harold. Mom hummed, “Harold is raking the leaves. The leaves are raked by Harold. Harold and the leaves of the tree, Harold and the tree.”
The train hit a bump and startled Mom. She began to hum, “Jameson is raking the leaves. The leaves are raked by Jameson. Jameson and the leaves of the tree, Jameson and the tree.” And she continued to hum until she fell asleep.
It felt like no time had passed at all when Jack woke her. She tucked her pillow beneath one arm and was led into a thick crowd of the station by the other. “Stay close now, there’s murderin’ hippies about.” She was trying to rub her eyes, being jostled back and forth through a crowd of soldiers and town folk and smoke, while being pulled by the arm. It was loud and frantic, she cried out and the tall man picked her up. From his shoulders, she could see the transfer of people to and from the red brick train station. Her ears were cold. She coughed and watched them as they made their way.
They caught a cab; it was silent inside.
I feel like I need to do something. I drop the brush and leave the mirror and jump onto the bed. I feel like my legs and arms are ready to shake off of my body, but I feel tired at the same time. I look at the decorative pink and white desk where I sat. It is pretty. The front drawer follows the slight curve of the top and meets the thick rounded sides. In the center of the drawer is a bronze, slightly green pull, and above that is where I left my brush. Mom had a desk just like it when she was still at Grandma’s house.
Mom is sitting beside the bed on a cushioned chair attached to the floor, next to the table with the telephone. My heels are touching two drawers. One of them is where I keep my drawings, and the other is locked closed. Neither of us know where the key is.
I’m wearing my favourite tasselled dress. I like playing with the threading. On the ground is a pile of paper and some crayons and pencils.
I groan, bend down, stretch onto my belly and start drawing again. I’m using a pencil for now.
Usually, I don’t control what I draw. It’s like a dream; I can watch it and remember it, but I can’t control it. I watch as the drawing takes a form of its own. This time, there is an old man sitting on top of a funny tall chair in the desert. Strange flowers climb up the chair and dangle off the arm rests. It’s kind of boring, so I color the desert yellow and the plants green, the chair grey and brown, and the buds pink. I don’t like it. The old man has blonde hair and eyebrows, almost white. His skin is pale, and he only wears white rags.
I feel drawn to it, like I know it. A pink and violet voice sings out of the white skies behind it. I find my pink and purple crayons. Slowly I fill in the empty skies above the fields with the voice like a layered wind, hot, warm, and cold at the top. I notice my breath quickens, and a tingling feeling works its way up my crayon and tickles my fingers, and I can’t help but laugh.
It is one of those kinds of laughs that starts quiet in the chest and takes a while to actually find voice. My eyes water like they do when Mom talks about something Dad used to do that was goofy, or loving; I want him, I love him, and I love my mom too.
The tingle suddenly takes me whole. It wraps me and kisses me everywhere all at once; a wash of heat storms into my stomach and flies through my body. My eyes are thrown wide and a wild smile finds my face. The hairs on the back of my neck almost sting, and goose bumps cover my arms and back. The singing voices are in me and they pierce my heart in colors: pink, purple, red, yellow, gold. I begin to cry in joy. I feel my mom’s hand on my back.
“Do you like it, Mom?”
She doesn’t answer, but tears fill her eyes too. Her face is twisted. She quickly lifts me into bed, pulling the sheets over me, tossing me a bit. Her eyes are red, and her eyebrows drop as she presses down hard on the sheets either side of me. It hurts. I roll on my side and close my eyes with the lump in my throat.
In bed I can still feel my fingers tingling, and that voice, now in blues, sings softly, sweetly and subtly. I don’t want it to stop. I begin to slip into the embrace of my dreams. I hear my voice rise from within, a worried tone, thin and bare, did she hate it? and finally dreams take me.
Harold came charging down the hall while yelling, “Holy cats, Faith would you settle down. What have you done?”
He found Mom standing in the living room trembling, looking down at the broken fruit bowl on the long carpet. “Out!”
Mom ran to the top of the stairs and listened.
“Faith broke the fruit bowl, damn!”
“I’m coming.” Grandma said.
“She’s out of control. You see that right? Why is she out of control?”
“I was busy.”
“Busy is an overstatement, I know you’re just standing in there.”
“It was an accident really,” Mom interfered.
“Put those down. Here.”
“Jesus, Harold. Its fine, I’ll take care if it.”
“Don’t tell me its fine. You can’t keep our daughter in control, or yourself.”
“Neither can you.”
At once, Mom knew to run into her room. She wanted to stop the fighting. Her heartbeat filled her ears. She quickly poured through her books. When she found the one she wanted, she ran downstairs yelling.
“What is it Faith, what is going on in this household?” he hollered in response.
“I want to see these wolves.” She watched Harold, but she could also see Grandma on the couch, next to the high glass side table; she was reaching up to the brown book.
“No,” he practically yelled.
“We can’t afford it, Faith,” stated Grandma.
Harold wheeled around to look at Grandma, “You take her.” He took out his wallet, fingered through it and grabbed a bill, and then threw it on Grandma’s lap. “I’m leaving.”
Mom shrieked out in glee, jumping up and down in circles with a child’s smile and eyes gleaming.
After Harold left and Grandma cheered up, Mom changed her clothes and they began walking to the zoo. It was hot and they wore wide hats and long shirts, and Mom hated the feeling of her tight leggings. She picked at them intermittently between holding Grandma’s hand and hopping forwards.
They reached the gates of the zoo when Mom finally looked up and around. She shrieked again; she couldn’t hold her excitement.
She pulled Grandma from one display to the next until they reached the wolf pen, which she wanted desperately. She wanted to see the wolves hunt.
The wolves weren’t in their pen; instead, an older woman with rubber gloves carried the corpses of what looked like rabbits and strew them about the pen. Mom gave a fast concerned glance at Grandma, but was transfixed. The corpses were placed on rocks and logs, and on top of posts. Mom was biting her lip and her leg was bouncing with a mind of its own.
The old lady returned inside of a building. Before long, a wide door at the other side of the pen opened and one large white wolf emerged with his head low, nose on the ground. He would sniff a corpse and move on to the next, all the while very focused and quiet.
Then from inside the wide door, Mom heard a yelp. Two smaller grey wolves came out, one leading the other towards a rabbit. The wolf in the rear barked and snarled, calling the other back. To answer, the other grey wolf turned and lunged and they met with terrible force. The impact shook Mom’s bones. The wolves tore and growled. One bit down and spat out a mouthful of hair and blood. It was incredible.
But then, the white wolf came bouldering into them and tossed the two smaller wolves down into the grass. They stayed down and watched the white wolf pace from side to side. Blood began to soak the bitten grey wolf’s coat. Mom could smell the dirt and iron in the air; she stood on her tippy toes, gripping the guard rail. The grey wolves didn’t move and neither did Mom.
No one was moving. They were all tense in anticipation, focused on the pen. The zoo was silent, everyone obeying the mysterious power of the pacing white wolf. In fact, the crowd was so immersed in the scene that you could hear the wolves breathe. Mom could see wild magic in its eyes, and her throat tightened like it would before crying.
“Holy cats!” Mom yelled with her hands on her head, not being able to contain herself. Her jaw was dropped and she looked to Grandma whose jaw was also dropped. Mom broke the spell of silence, laughter broke out and some people moved on, and the two wolves stood again and began to eat, following the lead of the white wolf.
Grandma took Mom into her arms and said quietly, “When we get home, let’s read Luke. There’s a good part in there about wolves.”
“What is it?” Mom asked.
“Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves.”
But, Mom didn’t understand. “What’s wrong Grandma?” Mom asked, as Grandma’s eyes were wet with tears.
She inhaled quickly and wiped them away, “Nothing, let’s keep going.”