Gayla was standing at the door, a watchful ghost at our house atop a hill. With a flicker she was gone, and as I pulled up to the carriage porch, the light in the dining room switched on.
Ham. I smelled it before I hit the door. Plus collard greens, corn. They all sat still as actors before curtain. Scene: Suppertime. My mother poised at the head of the table, Alan and Amma to each side, a place set for me at the opposite end. Gayla pulled the chair out for me, whispered back into the kitchen in her nurse’s garb. I was sick of seeing nurses. Beneath the floorboards, the washing machine rumbled on, as ever.
“Hello, darling, nice day?” my mother called too loudly. “Sit down, we’ve been holding dinner for you. Thought we’d have dinner as a family since you’ll be leaving soon.”
“I will?”
“They’re set to arrest your little friend, dear. Don’t tell me I’m better informed than the reporter.” She turned to Alan and Amma and smiled like a congenial hostess passing appetizers. She rang her little bell, and Gayla brought the ham in, gelatin-wobbly, on a silver serving tray. A pineapple slice slid stickily down its side.
“You cut, Adora,” Alan said to my mother’s raised eyebrows.
Wisps of blonde hair fluttered as she carved finger-thick slices, passed them around on our plates. I shook my head at Amma as she proffered me a serving, then sent it on to Alan.
“No ham,” my mother muttered. “Still haven’t grown out of that phase, Camille.”
“The phase of not liking ham? No, I haven’t.”
“Do you think John will be executed?” Amma asked me. “Your John on death row?” My mother had outfitted her in a white sundress with pink ribbons, braided her hair tightly on both sides. Her anger came off her like a stench.
“Missouri has the death penalty, and certainly these are the kind of murders that beg for the death penalty, if anything deserves that,” I said.
“Do we still have an electric chair?” Amma asked.
“No,” Alan said. “Now eat your meat.”
“Lethal injection,” my mother murmured. “Like putting a cat to sleep.”
I pictured my mother strapped to a gurney, exchanging pleasantries with the doctor before the needle plunged in. Suitable, her dying from a poisoned needle.
“Camille, if you could be any fairy-tale person in the world, who would you be?” Amma asked.
“Sleeping Beauty.” To spend a life in dreams, that sounded too lovely.
“I’d be Persephone.”
“I don’t know who that is,” I said. Gayla slapped some collards on my plate, and fresh corn. I made myself eat, a kernel at a time, my gag reflex churning with each chew.
“She’s the Queen of the Dead,” Amma beamed. “She was so beautiful, Hades stole her and took her to the underworld to be his wife. But her mother was so fierce, she forced Hades to give Persephone back. But only for six months each year. So she spends half her life with the dead, and half with the living.”
“Amma, why would such a creature appeal to you?” Alan said. “You can be so ghastly.”
“I feel sorry for Persephone because even when she’s back with the living, people are afraid of her because of where’s she’s been,” Amma said. “And even when she’s with her mother, she’s not really happy, because she knows she’ll have to go back underground.” She grinned at Adora and jabbed a big bite of ham into her mouth, then crowed.
“Gayla, I need sugar!” Amma yelled at the door.
“Use the bell, Amma,” my mother said. She wasn’t eating either.
Gayla came in with a bowl of sugar, sprinkled a big spoonful over Amma’s ham and sliced tomatoes.
“Let me,” Amma whined.
“Let Gayla,” my mother said. “You put too much on.”
“Will you be sad when John’s dead, Camille?” Amma said, sucking on a slice of ham. “Would you be more sad if John died or I did?”
“I don’t want anyone to die,” I said. “I think Wind Gap has had too much death as it is.”
“Hear-hear,” Alan said. Oddly festive.
“Certain people should die. John should die,” Amma continued. “Even if he didn’t kill them, he still should die. He’s ruined now that his sister is dead.”
“By that same logic, I should die, because my sister is dead and I’m ruined,” I said. Chewed another kernel. Amma studied me.
“Maybe. But I like you so I hope not. What do you think?” she turned to Adora. It occurred to me she never addressed her directly, no Mother or Momma, or even Adora. As if Amma didn’t know her name but was trying not to be obvious about it.
“Marian died a long, long time ago, and I think maybe we should have all ended with her,” my mother said wearily. Then suddenly bright: “But we didn’t, and we just keep moving on, don’t we?” Ringing of bell, gathering of plates, Gayla circling the table like a decrepit wolf.
Bowls of blood-orange sorbet for dessert. My mother disappearing discreetly into the pantry and surfacing with two slender crystal vials and her wet pink eyes. My stomach lurched.
“Camille and I will have drinks in my bedroom,” she said to the others, fixing her hair in the sideboard mirror. She was dressed for it, I realized, already in her nightgown. Just as I had as a child when I was summoned to her, I trailed her up the stairs.
And then I was inside her room, where I’d always wanted to be. That massive bed, pillows sprouting off it like barnacles. The full-length mirror embedded in the wall. And the famous ivory floor that made everything glow as if we were in a snowy, moonlit landscape. She tossed the pillows to the floor, pulled back the covers and motioned for me to sit in bed, then got in next to me. All those months after Marian died when she kept to her room and refused me, I wouldn’t have dared to imagine myself curled up in bed with my mother. Now here I was, more than fifteen years too late.
She ran her fingers through my hair and handed me my drink. A sniff: smelled like brown apples. I held it stiffly but didn’t sip.
“When I was a little girl, my mother took me into the North Woods and left me,” Adora said. “She didn’t seem angry or upset. Indifferent. Almost bored. She didn’t explain why. She didn’t say a word to me, in fact. Just told me to get in the car. I was barefoot. When we got there, she took me by the hand and very efficiently pulled me along the trail, then off the trail, then dropped my hand and told me not to follow her. I was eight, just a small thing. My feet were ripped into strips by the time I got home, and she just looked up at me from the evening paper, and went to her room. This room.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“When a child knows that young that her mother doesn’t care for her, bad things happen.”
“Believe me, I know what that feels like,” I said. Her hands were still running through my hair, one finger toying with my bare circle of scalp.
“I wanted to love you, Camille. But you were so hard. Marian, she was so easy.”
“Enough, Momma,” I said.
“No. Not enough. Let me take care of you, Camille. Just once, need me.”
Let it end. Let it all end.
“Let’s do it then,” I said. I swallowed the drink in a belt, peeled her hands from my head, and willed my voice to be steady.
“I needed you all along, Momma. In a real way. Not a need you created so you could turn it on and off. And I can’t ever forgive you for Marian. She was a baby.”
“She’ll always be my baby,” my mother said.