American Elsewhere

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN




The ghost on that screen still watches her. Her heart still beats, her mind still flickers in its shell, her muscles tweak and twitch as they should. But she is gone.

She remembers:

It’s like there was someone else in there. In her head. Someone who wasn’t Laura at all.

And:

To be frank, the behavior of the lens can only lead me to think it was the result of external control.

But most of all Mona remembers how her mother held her on that July day back in 1981, with the sun so terribly bright and her mother’s skin so terribly soft, and how the poor woman, naked below her robe, held Mona tight and told her

I love you more than anything, but I can’t stay here, I am so sorry. I can’t stay because I am not from here, not really, I am from somewhere else, and I have to go back now.

But can I come with you? Can I visit you, Momma?

No, no, it is far, far away, but one day you will join me there, there in that happy place far away, far, far away. I will come for you. I will come and bring you with me. I will bring you with me, my love, I will come for you.

“You’re lying,” she says softly.

“Why would I lie?” says Kelly. “What would I ever have to gain?”

“Something, anything. Who knows what you f*cking things do.”

“Oh, please,” says Kelly. “I already told you one of our oldest methods of communication—mediums, dear. Did you think I told you that for no reason?”

“Then you knew. You knew and you didn’t tell me.”

“Some things can’t just be told. They must be figured out. They must be understood. And you understand, and believe, don’t you?”

She wants to reach into her head and gouge out this awful revelation. She does not want to think of her mother as a hollowed-out puppet, a ghastly little doll led about by some inconceivable abomination.

But she cannot erase the image of her mother, standing at a window and staring out at the bleak Texas landscape, faintly confused as if she’d woken up expecting to see something quite different outside her door that day.

And she would have, wouldn’t she? Her mother woke up every day expecting to open the curtains and see endless black mountains, and blood-red stars, and a swollen, pink moon…

Her mother had always seemed like a woman out of place. Mona just didn’t know how far out of place.

Laura Alvarez had never been mad. She’d just had another mind grow within her own, a black, pulsing tumor of intelligence eating away at her very being until there was nothing but an empty shell, echoing with the voice and thoughts of something quite, quite different from far, far away.


Why is it that I am always losing things, Mona thinks, that were never really mine to begin with?

Kelly, who has been picking his teeth, looks up and waits. “Then I never… knew my mother,” says Mona.

He shrugs. “I would assume not. Not to any significant degree, at least. My Mother never did anything halfway. And Her designs rarely failed.”

“And whenever I looked into my mother’s eyes… and whenever my mother spoke to me… it was always…”

“Her,” says Kelly. “My Mother. Yes.”

All the slurred, half-intelligible nursery rhymes. All the quiet promises of love and care.

Mona feels herself shutting down. She is not sure if she is angry or sad or disgusted. Her body and mind, both wiser than she, know that nothing can be gained by contemplating this and have, essentially, tabled the issue.

“You seem,” says Kelly, with cautious cheer, “to be reconciling yourself to this.”

Mona looks at him. It is the sort of look condemned people give their executioners.

“Or possibly not,” says Kelly. “I do not know if I can help. I assume you have questions. Many questions.”

Mona just shrugs.

“No?” says Kelly. “None?”

She shrugs again.

“Not even about yourself?” he asks.

This rumbles something in Mona. What the hell is he implying?

“Ah, so you do have questions?” says Kelly.

“What… sort of questions should I have?”

“Well… you know now that your own mother was not really your mother. She was not really a person at all, but an… extension of my own Mother, operating from the other side.”

Mona shrugs helplessly. She cannot passively accept such a thing as true. She can only pick it up, drop it, and leave it alone: it is too heavy.

“If this is true—and I do know that it is—you must wonder, why did She choose to have a child?” Kelly asks. “Why did She drive east, straight east, and, as I now assume, find the first willing, fertile man who would ask no questions about Her history, and proceed to procreate with him?”

Mona understands she should be insulted by his clinical description, but she doesn’t have the energy.

“Miss Mona,” says Kelly, “have you never felt different from other people throughout your life? Detached, adrift? Have you never wondered why you appear to age at a much slower rate than anyone you know? Have you not found the fact that you, and you alone out of the human race, have visited the other side—even if it was only for a moment—and come back whole and unharmed, to be slightly odd? Do you not find it queer that your arrival in this town—this bizarre, surreal, strange town, where nothing has ever happened for decades—coincides with every terrible event that has happened recently? And do you not somehow feel that you have been to this town before, that you know that it is, in some indefinable, intangible way, a home you never visited, but knew was waiting for you, all along, all throughout your life?”

Mona stares at him. First she wonders how he knows these things about her. But then she begins to understand his meaning.

“My girl,” says Kelly in a manner both kind and pitying, “haven’t you wondered even once why I’ve been calling you ‘sister’ since you came to talk to me?”





MOMMA