Mosquitoland

  “Did God mess up?” I asked.

  “Nope,” said Bubbly Skinned Man, smiling like a fool. “He just got bored.”

  From that moment to this, I’ve pondered the peculiarities of an angry Almighty. And now I know. I see it in the medicated drool dripping from the face of my once youthful mother. I see it in the slew of trained specialists assigned to her keeping. I see it in the Southwestern motif, from floor to ceiling of this nightmare called Sunrise Rehab, and I know what God makes when He’s angry: a person with the capacity for emptiness. But not the always-emptiness of Dustin or Caleb or Poncho Man. A drained emptiness. A person who was once full. A person who lived and dreamed, and above all, a person who cared for something—for someone. And within that person, he places the possibility of poof—gone—done—to be replaced by a Great Empty Nothingness. I know this is true, because right now, a Great Empty Nothingness is staring me right in the fucking face.

  “Mary,” it whispers.

  I hold her hand for the first time since that fateful Labor Day, somewhere between mutiny and mediocrity. Crying, I look out the window, hoping like hell she doesn’t say what I know she’s going to say.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispers between sobs. “I never wanted you to see me like this. I’m just so sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Mom.” My words pour out in ugly, nasal globs, and I hug her as hard as I’ve hugged anyone. “It’s okay,” I say again, because if I keep saying it, maybe it will be true. It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay. I rest my head on her shoulder and gaze out the shaded window half expecting fireworks to go off in the distance. God, wouldn’t that just be the thing of Things? There are none, but it’s okay. It’s still Labor Day. Just a different kind of mutiny.

  And now Kathy is pulling my hand. “It’s time to go,” she whispers, motioning toward the door.

  I nod and kiss Mom’s forehead. Turning, I notice a vanity—not the vanity, but one similar—standing just next to her bed. It’s a dark wood, rife with the ornate vine etchings so popular in its day. Though the top of the vanity stands waist-high, a mirror attached to the back rises all the way to the ceiling, standing tall like it owns the place. I cross the room, noticing a hairline crack running the length of the mirror, from top to bottom. When I position myself in the middle, one half of my face is on either side of the crack.

  Right Side Mim and Left Side Mim.

  Split in half.

  My reflection is a throwaway recipe of expired ingredients: gaunt, unfamiliar, worldly, homesick, aged, exhausted, to name more than a few. On one side of the crack, my right eye is almost closed. The zipper from my hoodie follows the crack in the mirror, down, down; I notice the red cloth is deeper, dirtier, a thicker shade of blood.

  An image: Right Side Mim turning to Left Side Mim, asking oh-so-many questions. One hand on the vanity, I recall the dream I’d had only months ago: the old feet, the low whispers, the reflection of our faces. Her makeup tray isn’t here, but her makeup is: the perfumes, blushes, eyeliners, and concealers. All of it, save one item.

  I pull the war paint from my jeans pocket, and twirl it in my hands. Like me, it’s different now, well-traveled, a little longer in the tooth. Having never finished my last application, there’s still a little left. And I know just how to use it.

  In even strides, I cross the room, stepping between my mother and her shaded windows. Head down, I see her feet in those same old ratty slippers—right next to my feet in those same old ratty shoes. So many similarities . . .

  I twist the tube of lipstick, and like a phoenix rising from the ashes, so too it rises ready for work. Kathy stands silently by the door; she doesn’t try to stop or rush me.

  “You look different,” my mother whispers. It takes me off guard, because for some reason, she didn’t look like a person who was going to say something.

  I raise my eyes to meet hers. “I cut my hair.”

  Mom shakes her head and leans into my ear. “You look like my Mary.”

  The tears become a flood. And I have a new image now: my unopened bottle of Abilitol, the truest talisman of disappointment, snug in the bottom of my backpack. It’s been days since I bowed to the king of habit, and yet, I feel more Mim than ever before.

  I wipe my eyes, place one hand on my mother’s shoulder, grip the lipstick between my thumb and forefinger, and lean in. “Let me show you a thing or two.”

  She smiles a little, and so do I, recalling my first and last makeover. I paint her lips evenly, careful not to miss those elusive corners, careful not to go outside the lines. She’s staring at me, her eyes full of I-don’t-know-what . . . wonder, appreciation, embarrassment, love. All of it, and all at once.

  Finished with the makeover, I step back and admire my handiwork. Still a shadow of her former self, there is something there, something absent only minutes ago—a glimmer of youth, or a little light behind the eyes. It’s not much, but it’s something.

  “Look at you,” I whisper, smiling, crying. “Lovely.”

  I kiss my mother’s forehead and nod at Kathy. Before walking out of room 22, I set Mom’s empty tube of lipstick on her new vanity, back where it belongs.

  42

  New Beginnings

  I FOLLOW KATHY out the front doors of Sunrise Mountain and slip on Albert’s aviators.

  “I didn’t even notice how dark it was in there,” says Kathy.

  Metaphor is the word I’m thinking.

  “You wanna get some Chinese or something, Mim? I’m starving.”

  The image of a blank fortune crosses my mind, but before I can say thanks, but no thanks, something far more important occurs to me. “You see Beck or Walt anywhere?” I ask, looking around.

  Kathy is digging in her giant purse. “Damn it. I think I left my keys back at the desk. Wait here a minute?”

  She goes back inside while I squint across the lawn. A quick glance in the parking lot, and my poor heart—after beating its tail off in room 22—is performing backflips. Uncle Phil, the trusty, rusty blue pickup, is gone.

  I pull my phone out of my bag to call Beck, before I remember . . . his phone. These memories don’t tumble, they crash down: a lost phone knocks over Ashland Inn, knocks over I Love Lucy, knocks over an empty parking space, knocks over, knocks over, knocks over.

  We’ll be starting a New Beginning when you get back. Right, Walt?

  I put my hand on my chest, feel my heart beating . . .

  Hey, hey, I’m Walt.

  beating . . .

  Damn straight.

  beating . . .

  I feel the camera zoom in on my eyes.

  And what about the voices, Mim? Have you had any episodes lately?

  I feel the audience watching.

  Symptoms of psychosis, Mr. Malone, are not themselves psychoses.

  I feel the audience waiting.

  I am Mim Malone. I am Mim Alone. I’m alone.

  I feel the red hoodie, the pool on a roof, the untouched bottle of Abilitol.

  I’m not crazy.

  I feel the empty parking spot.

  You ever have the feeling you lost something important, only to discover it was never there to begin with?

  I feel all my sharp edges.

  I feel . . . a force, heavy, pulling me like an undertow, pulling me out to sea, the Sea of Trees, dragging me down to the bottom. It’s a strange lot down here: plants and animals, a secret society of creatures, a life of struggle and survival and the struggle for survival. The landscape is blurred, but the ground is firm. I watch myself, Aqua-Mim, as if through a lens: shadowy, blue, naked under the water, pushing against the current, holding her breath. She swims right up to a rainbow-colored plant, a plant urging her to live her life, a plant offering the possibility of a New Beginning. She grabs hold, feels the weight begin to rise until her head breaks above water and . . .

 
I breathe.

  Taped right in the middle of the New Beginnings sign is my life preserver. A stick figure masterpiece. The Reds program. In Sharpie—fucking physical and permanent proof of reality—my name is written across the front. I pull it off the board, ripping traces of indigo, violet, and yellow from the sanguine palette. Fumbling through the pages of the program, I see Walt’s precious diagram, and somehow, I know there’s more. On the next page, across the Cubs’ depleted scorecard, the script of my fellow stick figures:

  Hay hay mim! Ha. Beck told me wee’re going, so we are going but I miss you sooper big already. Doing the do, and oh i thought about the time we first met under that brige and how funny you look when you sleep maybe I nevr told you. but Also pritty. You looked pritty. so I will miss you while wee’re away but he says we can see you at the game, so thats what we will do. See you then cant wait!

  Sinsearly yours forever and ever.

  Walter

  I didn’t think I could cry anymore. I was wrong.

  Flipping to the next page, I see Beck’s reckless penmanship, scrawled across the picture of some top prospect. Even through my tears, I laugh at the salutation.

  DEAR MADAGASCAR—

  “I don’t know how to say good-bye to you,” said Mim, staring into the devastatingly handsome eyes of Beck Van Buren.

  “I know,” said Beck, in a devastatingly handsome tone.

  How do you like it so far, Mim? It’s for my memoir, The Devastatingly True Story of the Handsome Beckett Van Buren. Too writerly? Okay, how about this . . .

  “I don’t know how to say good-bye to you,” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  And I don’t, Mim. God. I really don’t.

  But I had a thought . . .

  On the way over here, Walt showed me a photograph. He’s with his mom in front of Wrigley Field, and I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but Mim, the kid looks 100% happy. Like, lifetime-supply-of-Mountain-Dew happy, and maybe his mom died, but what if she didn’t? Either way, if Walt has family somewhere, I intend to fififfiind them. Chicago is quite a drive, but I think Uncle Phil is up to the challenge. You found your home. It’s Walt’s turn.

  Last night, I promised not to leave you high & dry. Please believe me when I say—I kept this promise. And while I still don’t know how to say good-bye to you, I know a certain devastatingly handsome character who would like another shot. So here goes:

  “I don’t know how to say good-bye to you,” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  They sit together, trying to locate the impossible words. She finds them first. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be, like, a solid good-bye, you know?”

  He looks at her, wondering how he got to be so lucky. “As opposed to a liquid one?”

  “Yes, actually. I much prefer liquid good-byes to solid ones.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, kissing her lightly on the forehead. “When the day comes, you shall have your liquid good-bye.”

  THE END

  LOVE,

  AFRICA

  P.S.—I’m sure you’ve put this together by now, but I’ve basically stolen your truck. I feel like an ass, just so you know. Please don’t press charges. I’ll reimburse you at the game. Which brings me to . . .

  P.P.S.—Flip the page for your liquid good-bye . . .

  Barely able to breathe, I turn to the next page in the program. It’s a schedule for the following year’s slate of Reds games. One game in particular is circled: Opening Day. Reds v. Cubs. Then, next to it, three words in red: “Remember the rendezvouski!”

  I imagine Walt with a butterfly in his bottle, and Beck with the camera around his neck, and together, we stand around the statue of some old baseball player turned rendezvous point. Opening Day is early April, and suddenly, spring can’t get here soon enough.

  “You okay, Mim?”

  I look up, wondering how long Kathy’s been standing there. “Yeah,” I say, stuffing the Reds program in my bag. “You find your keys?”

  She holds up the key ring, gives it a shake. “It was in my purse the whole time. So. How about that Chinese food?”

  I hook my thumbs in the straps of my backpack, and follow her down the stone steps to the parking lot. “Could we do Mexican instead?”

  “Honestly, I don’t really care what we eat so long as we do it soon.” She pushes a dyed curl out of her face. “Izzie’s starving. Which reminds me, we’ll probably have to split up the trip—half today, half tomorrow. I get tired quick these days.”

  Kathy rubs her stomach, and again, I wonder if my sister can feel her mother’s touch. I hope so. And I hope she knows that kind of love is not nothing. It’s a huge something, maybe the biggest of all. It’s a mini-golf kind of love, the kind of love people like Claire and Caleb never experienced. Maybe those two never really got a fair shake. Maybe if they had fathers who let them win at meaningless games—or mothers who rubbed their pregnant bellies, reassuring Fetus Claire and Fetus Caleb that yes, even though the world was fucked up beyond measure, there was beauty to be had and it was waiting for them—maybe then, Claire and Caleb would’ve turned out differently.

  I watch Kathy walk toward the car, and I think about Dad—how his sister and first wife were both incredibly complicated women prone to topics of substance and despair. No wonder he wanted me to avoid those particular subjects with Baby Isabel. And no wonder he ended up with Kathy Sherone-Malone, she of the Grand Slam breakfast and glue-on nails, a wholly uncomplicated woman prone to topics of pop-culture and cheer.

  From the passenger-side door, I look at Kathy over the top of the PT Cruiser. “So this is why you didn’t want me to call her,” I say. “And why she stopped writing. This is why Dad moved us cross-country. So I wouldn’t have to see her like this. So we could all have a . . . whatever . . . a fresh start.”

  “Maybe. But then, we wanted you to visit, so . . .” She puts her keys in the door, pauses. “Let’s not do this, okay?”

  “Do what?”

  “This. This thing where we talk the hell out of it until there’s nothing left to just . . . think about, you know?”

  The funny thing is, I do know. I know exactly.

  Inside the car, Kathy turns on the radio. Wonder of wonders, it’s Stevie effing Wonder, telling all of us why he called.

  “Sorry,” says Kathy, blushing. She turns the dial.

  Against every bone in my body, I switch the station back to Stevie. Then, pulling Kathy’s Hills Bros. can from my bag, I hand it over. “Here. Also, sorry. Also, I’ll pay you back.”

  She takes the can, shrugs, tosses it in the back seat. “You teach me how to cut hair like that, and we’ll call it even.”

  “Deal.”

  “Listen, Mim”—her head tilts and she sighs, and I know, whatever she was going to say, she just decided not to say it—“you ready to go home?” she asks.

  A montage rolls through my head, and like a curtain call, the characters of my trip take a bow . . .

  Carl is driving a Greyhound to Anywhere, USA, summoning extra Carlness as a semi passes in the pouring rain. Arlene’s tombstone, a shining beacon of hope in the Land of Autonomy reads Here lies Arlene, a Grande Dame from the Old School, if ever there was one. Claire is frowning a new frown, pouring herself a glass of lemonade in her appropriately apathetic townhouse. Ahab and the Pale Whale are pumping gas, kicking ass, swimming and sunbathing. Officer Randy, like Doctor Wilson before him, is inventing new ways to furrow, wrinkle, shake, sigh, and doubt. Dr. Michelle Clark, with her blood, bows, and perfect teeth, would like to say hello.

  The villains of this odyssey—Poncho Man and Caleb (aka “Shadow Kid”)—are humming a sad song behind bars, staring ten to twenty in the face. And though it is a well-deserved end, I am reminded of a certain Amazon Blonde being helped through the wreckage of a bus by the unlikeliest of hands. And I am reminde
d of two distinct voices in the woods, one of which might even be considered sadly sympathetic. And I wonder at the virtues of the villain.

  And what of the heroes? My dearest Walt, Rubik’s Cube aficionado and doer of the Dew, is sitting in the passenger seat of the beloved Uncle Phil, laughing a laugh for the ages. And Beck, my Knight in Navy Nylon, with that smell (everything good in the world), that smile (ditto), and those deep green eyes, rolls down the window and lets the wind hit him in the face. And though it is a well-deserved end, I am reminded of a certain someone’s inclination toward the theft of shiny things. And I am reminded of a firework-infused confession of dishonesty. And I wonder at the faults of the hero.

  Maybe there is some black and white, though. In our choices. In my choices.

  Smiling, I add Our Heroine to the curtain call. She is riding with Beck and Walt, laughing at some singular, lovely thing Walt said, and now we’re discussing the Cubs, and New Beginnings, and oh my God, is it Opening Day yet?

  I miss them beyond belief. Way, way beyond.

  “Mim?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Let’s go home.”

  Kathy’s PT Cruiser, fueled by the smooth tunes of Stevie Wonder, rolls between perfectly angled magnolias. From behind the aviators, my good eye dares the bright sun to finish what it started, to take the rest of my sight. But the sun doesn’t, because I don’t mean it, not really.

  On a whim, I dig around in my bag for the Abilitol, pull it out, study it. For the first time, I notice the corner of the label is starting to peel back. I pull it off the rest of the way, revealing a slew of warnings, including the risks associated with taking the drug.

  “. . . common side effects reported by users of Aripapilazone may include headache, fatigue, inner sense of restlessness, extreme nausea . . .”

  Extreme nausea.

  A dark corner of my brain shakes off its thick coat of dust and comes alive in the hopes of redemption. Could it be? Could my misplaced epiglottis be no more than a misprescribed drug? I see another list, this one related to the side effects of withdrawal.