Nowhereville, p.27
Nowhereville, page 27
It wasn’t a lie. Technically.
Why didn’t she want to say it though? Mom’s dead.
She was afraid her voice might crack. It was stupid—it was stupid times ten, times fifty, but there it was.
Audrey wasn’t sure if thinking this way, letting her sentimentality rise up, heat her eyes, was specific to her mother dying or just generally what society had trained her to feel upon the death of a parent.
If so, then Audrey supposed what she might really be feeling was guilty.
She had the specimen bottle out now. She was sitting on one of the wooden benches, passing the bottle back and forth from her left hand to her right.
It was the color of a tick, she’d decided a few minutes ago. The tumor had a color that suggested that, if you drained it, let it shrink back to the size it had been years ago, it would be that coppery dull brown a tick is when it’s not latched onto a host.
As-was, though, the tumor was distended, its skin stretched out thin and grey.
Audrey shoved the plastic bottle back in her purse and signed off on the voicemail the way she always did: “Lying down happy face!”
It’s how you do an emoticon out loud—it’s what a colon followed by a closing parenthesis made: the stupidly grinning face of someone lying on her side.
It was how Audrey was telling Bonnie she was all right.
And she was, wasn’t she?
The ferry bellowed its horn when it pulled in, startling Audrey from her trance—what her therapist called her “Audrey is thinking” face.
Audrey bought a round-trip, of course, as the plan was to stay on, circle back. An hour and a half all-told, but it was going to be worth it. Mother’s last ferry ride. And for all Audrey knew, her first in twenty years too. Maybe longer.
Stepping off the platform onto the deck of the ferry, ready to accommodate the rocking that turned out not to be there in the slightest, Audrey was ninety percent sure the tumor sloughed over onto the floor of the bottle, its own adhesive qualities finally giving up on clinging to the side anymore. As if Audrey’s mother was reacting to being here of all places. As if she were showing her displeasure with a choreographed, overdramatic swoon. The indignity. The smell.
Everybody moving from shore to ship, if this even counted as a ship—as grimy as the ferry was, wasn’t it just a floating portion of the city, calved off into the murky river?—everybody had to have felt the tumor shift its weight, Audrey assumed. She was practically screaming in her head, loud enough that her legs went mechanical, forgot how to walk naturally.
She pressed the underside of the four fingers of her right hand to the hollow of her throat as if surprised and embarrassed to have just burped.
No one noticed. No one was watching her.
Looking down, she also confirmed that her purse had yet to become transparent. And the tumor had yet to raise its shrill voice, play its tubules like the bagpipe it most definitely wasn’t. And there was no mass of people in aquamarine scrubs and surgical masks building up behind her, skipping their breaks and lunches to retrieve these few ounces of medical waste.
“You’re being stupid, old girl,” Audrey said to herself and cast about for the loneliest, most private stretch of rail.
2
While Audrey would have allowed that there might be kids on the ferry, had she even thought that far ahead, she was a bit taken aback by the lanky speckled happy-happy dog running from person to person, nuzzling their fingertips for the treat it knew was here somewhere if this ferry was anything like its own home.
When it was Audrey’s turn for this inspection, she pulled her hand up to her purse strap and clamped tighter onto the rail with her other hand. She was sure a dog could give the alarm about what her fingertips had been touching.
“Allergic,” she explained for anyone watching and listening.
No one was. That’s the thing about the city.
She shifted her shoulder under the purse strap, and the tumor shifted with her, lolling to what felt like the other side of the specimen bottle.
Since no one was listening or watching, Audrey said to the tumor, “Just a moment now. Won’t be long.”
The ferry shuddered and started pulling for the other shore. At first, nothing changed but the pitch of the diesel engine, but then, like the world was on delay, the boat moved in its sluggish way. Audrey’s phone buzzed in her purse—she could feel it buzz even a room away lately—but she let it go to voicemail. It would either be Bonnie, returning Audrey’s call, or it would be the hospital, tactfully asking about a certain irregularity they were experiencing. A problem with, um, inventory.
Now that Audrey’s mother was gone, Audrey guessed it was someone else’s turn to start in with the veiled accusations. And if it was Bonnie calling, not the hospital, Audrey felt certain that now that she was actually doing it, now that she was actually engaging in this dark ritual, she might lie about where she was this precise instant, even though the ferry sounds and gulls would be giving her away. And she didn’t want to have to lie. That would be a bad first step into this new part of her life.
Another bad first step: stalling.
This section of the railing was hers, wasn’t it? It was her own private little part of the ferry. Her own little ritual space. And surely she couldn’t be the first mourner—ha—to dump a loved one’s remains into the water like this. Should she get caught, then she could just say that what she’d just dumped overboard had been the lunch she’d forgotten in the break-room refrigerator last week. It had been a large dumpling, say, from that new place two streets over. She would even dig for the receipt, frowning at the ridiculousness of this inquiry. The only way to prove she was lying would be to go into the water after her mother. Which is to say, she would be fine even when the receipt wasn’t there.
There was no reason not to do this, she told herself. The world was asking her to do it, pretty much. Insisting, even.
So.
Audrey cased her immediate area again in what she knew had to be a suspicious way, and she pulled her purse around and extracted the specimen bottle, holding it by the white lid.
To anyone watching, maybe it could be a thermos. Maybe this was going to be a drink of coffee. Or maybe Audrey could be a secret alcoholic, cupping herself around this shame.
Still holding onto the lid, Audrey grasped onto the side of the bottle to hold it in place so that her other hand could twist. She’d just started to apply pressure when the tumor squelched across the inside of the bottle, sucked up against what would have been Audrey’s palm, only a sixteenth of an inch of clear plastic between her skin and that deflated mass.
Audrey dropped the bottle, stepping back from it like you do when you’ve just let half a quart of milk slip in the kitchen: you don’t want to get splashed.
This was plastic though.
The bottle rebounded into her shin, causing Audrey to take another step back, and then—Audrey still shaking her hand as if trying to unremember the heat of that almost-touch and how the tumor had felt alive—the lid popped off, rolled on its edge like a coin.
“Oh,” Audrey said, and she covered her mouth.
The mouth of the bottle was of course smaller than the body, but not by much. It had been just small enough to keep the tumor from spurting out onto the deck though.
Except. Except the tumor was coming out anyway, wasn’t it?
One tendril had either fallen just past the bottle’s mouth, or it had slapped out into that open air to adhere to the decking. It tightened, straining, maybe pulling, maybe being pulled by the bottle trying to roll away, and the tumor’s shiny greyness—a bulging tick, ready to burst—filled the mouth. It slumped out.
Audrey noted, and wasn’t the least bit surprised by this, that the direction the tumor had either spilled or pulled itself was away from the railing. Away from the stinky, brackish water.
This confirmed to her that a sea burial was the proper method of disposal for her mother’s innermost self.
“Not so fast, deary,” she said, lowering herself to scoop her mother back into the make-do coffin, and at the exact moment she’d picked the bottle up, that damnable dog was there in a flurry of Christmas excitement and Valentine’s Day slobber—another saying of her mother’s.
The dog barked once, more of a yip—I found it, guys, I found it!—and it bit down at the tumor the way Audrey had once seen a dog snap at a crab on the beach. Like testing.
When nothing pinched the big dog’s nose or snipped at its whiskers, when nothing hot spurted into its eyes, it struck down deeper, the wolf in it coming alive for a moment. Its great white teeth dug into the fibrous grey meat, and it pulled the tumor up from the deck, angled its head back, and slurped the thing down all at once, its eyes seeming to bulge from the effort.
Audrey stood, felt behind her for the railing, her eyes never leaving this thing that was happening.
“Bad dog, bad dog!” a young blond woman was saying now, just suddenly there, her left hand hooked in the dog’s red collar, her right hand managing a toddler on her hip.
“It’s . . . it’s,” Audrey said, “it was just some old food. A dumpling from that place on the—”
“Not chocolate, right?” the woman said, somehow containing the dog and the child and her concern all at once.
“Dumpling,” Audrey spurted out again.
“Here,” the woman said, flapping her purse open with her child-hand somehow, making to pay, but Audrey waved the effort away.
“I didn’t even want it,” she said.
“Are you sure?” the woman asked back, the dog slipping her grip at last, blasting off to the front of the ferry in a rollicking animation of paws and ears and jowls and satisfaction.
“It’s nothing,” Audrey said.
“Thank you,” the woman said, “and I’m so sorry.”
At which point Audrey noticed she was being offered the specimen bottle lid. That was why the woman had let the dog slip: she’d been going after the lid.
The moments were clumping together for Audrey and then slipping ahead all at once before she could process them all.
Audrey took the lid, screwed it back onto the bottle, only twisting the lid, not the bottle itself, so as to keep the hospital label hidden.
“How long until—?” Audrey said, tilting her head at the far shore, which she wasn’t even going to set foot on.
“Twenty-five minutes?” the woman said back, finally setting the child down. It could barely walk—he, he could barely walk at the age he was.
Audrey wasn’t going to fall into the stereotype so many of her gay friends did—well, the male ones—of turning her lip up at children.
The boy tottered off after the dog.
The woman looked up to Audrey with a comical exhaustion and gave chase, herding and worrying. Audrey turned back to the railing and, when she was sure no one was looking, let the specimen bottle slip over.
Instead of bobbing in the wave like she expected, it was sucked under the boat nearly immediately. A draft to the propeller, Audrey surmised, and imagined a world where she knew fluid dynamics or whatever science it was that would explain the bottle’s immediate disappearance.
But?
It was done, wasn’t it?
Maybe not how she’d planned, but in what she had to admit was a pretty repulsive way. The smelly water would have been fitting, but the inside of a dog was no heaven either.
“Goodbye, Mother,” she said.
And to herself: twenty-five minutes.
Probably more like twenty-two now.
2
The screaming didn’t sound like screaming at first.
Audrey was having a private session in her head with her therapist and had on her “Audrey is thinking” face, she knew.
They were discussing what the memorial service had been like and whether it had shut the door on that part of Audrey’s life. Right then, right when the screaming started in for real and honest, Audrey was listening to her therapist explain to her how the metaphor of “shutting a door” on an event or time or memory was actually just asking it to all avalanche out into the hallway of a life at some later, less convenient time. Audrey was taking this lecture not as intended, precisely, but as an admonishment to better watch her figurative language. Except now someone was screaming. Not in the many hallways of her mind but at the front of the boat.
Audrey pursed her lips and fell into the stream of ferry riders tending that way, to whatever the emergency was. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and before she could remember not to answer, she had it pressed to her ear.
The call was just empty sound, hollowness. It prompted Audrey to look behind the ferry at the diminishing skyline of the city. It was broken and jagged and smoggy all at once. And then she was rushing along with everyone else toward the sound at the front of the ferry. Before shoving her phone back into her purse, she chanced a peek at the screen. It had been a text, not a call. But it was gibberish—a whole little speech bubble of capital letters.
Her phone asked if Audrey wanted a translation, but Audrey didn’t.
She knew who it was. She knew who only used capital letters like that.
The tone and volume were getting across, even if transmission from death to life was garbling the words. It’s not easy to text from the churning insides of a dog bouncing with happiness.
In the diary Audrey still kept in her head, she scribbled down that she was sorry, that she didn’t mean to steal it: she didn’t think it would matter, it was just medical waste, it wasn’t really her, this was supposed to have been just an exercise, part of her healing, a symbolic gesture, a guilty secret, a final get-back.
But then she was to the source of the commotion, along with everyone else.
It was the woman, the one with the dog and the child.
She was propped in a corner behind the bolted-down fiberglass benches. Her throat had been gnawed out. The chunks that gnawing had left behind trailed down her chest, had pooled in her lap. Her eyes were still open. The screaming wasn’t from her but from a young woman in a tight skirt and sneakers. Everyone else was just looking. Just watching.
Nobody understood but Audrey.
“Oh,” she said, steepling her hands over her mouth, shaking her head no, please no.
But yes.
Random voices were clamoring about authorities, and cell phones were all drawn. Some were snapping pictures, some were calling emergency services, and some were narrating this to who knew who, like they were reporters on assignment.
Audrey was all alone in the crowd.
She stumbled back, out of it, casting her eyes every direction at once for her mother’s distinct profile, but what she saw instead was the dog.
It was standing on a supply chest, white fiberglass like the benches. It was wagging its tail and doing the canine version of a smile, its eyes casting around for the next wonderful thing the world had to offer.
“You,” Audrey said to it.
“There it is!” a male voice boomed, and the dog snapped its face over to the crowd, its tail stopping mid-wag.
There was nothing to pull up from the deck to throw at the dog, so what came flying at it were shoes mostly. Two hairbrushes. A hot dog from the concession booth inside.
The dog sniffed the hot dog, rejected it, and the smell sickening it evidently, it dry heaved, its back humping over from it, its tail tucking down between its legs.
Again, again, these whole-body coughs from deep enough down inside it that Audrey felt her throat swelling like something was rising in her as well.
“What’s it doing?” a man asked out loud.
“My dog loves hot dogs,” a woman answered, her calmness out of place.
But she was right: dogs love hot dogs.
Just, not this dog. Not anymore.
It turned around and in a final undulation upchucked the corruption from its stomach.
The bulging grey tumor was still intact. Just shinier now. It filled the dog’s mouth for a breathless moment, its eyes straining, its torso convulsing with this birth, and it passed through, slipped into the foot or two of dark space behind the supply chest.
The dog looked to the crowd. To everyone gathered around it.
It shrunk back, its tail fully curled under, and a full bottle of water slung out at it, caught it on the shoulder.
The dog yelped, cowered, and that was the crowd’s cue to advance.
The dog edged back, dropped a foot into the dark space it had just thrown up in and, sensing that there was no retreat in this corner, darted forward, slipping through legs. Those with shoes could still kick though. The dog caught a wingtip to the ribs, went sliding, scrabbling for purchase, and then a mid-heel came down hard on its foreleg, and the dog cried out, all its Christmas excitement gone, all its Valentine’s Day slobber dried up, and it rose yelping its confusion, limped back to the railing. When the bodies and legs closed over it, that was Audrey’s chance.
She backed up to the supply chest and extracted the plastic container she carried her lunch in, peeled the top off.
She had to collect Mother. She had to stop this before anyone else got hurt. Only, when she stepped neatly around to reach back, leading with the square container, the dead mother’s child was there. The boy. The toddler.
The woman must have thrown him there when the dog came for her. A last maternal impulse. All she could do. It’s how mothers are supposed to be, Audrey knows.
Her eyes heated up.
The toddler was unharmed. Except for the mealy blackness on his hands. Except for the black stains around his mouth. Audrey cast all around him for the tumor, but of course, it was exactly where she thought it had to be.
Tumors don’t like being in the open air. They prefer the insides of bodies.
The toddler looked up to Audrey and blabbered its words that weren’t words, and a grey bubble stretched out at the corner of its mouth.
