Page 32 of Bred Mate
“I’m hungry,” Tate says. He’s small and he’s skinny and I know he needs more than we’ve had these last few days. I’ve got to feed my brothers. I’ve got to help us all survive. It’s my job now. Nobody else is coming to save us. Anybody who comes will probably try to put us into some awful foster home where we’ll never be able to be ourselves. And if the boys accidentally shift, I don’t even know what will happen. We have to stay wild.
And that’s what we’re going to do.
I get us all in the old ute and we drive into town. I learned how to drive last week. I stacked some old books on the seat to help with that, but then I couldn’t reach the pedals. Tim fixed that problem by tying old blocks of wood to them. So we can get along now.We can get to town and get our supplies, water and formula for the baby, and snacks for us. I can hunt, too.
We don’t need a mom or a dad. That’s for kids, and we haven’t been kids for ages.
I make sure everybody puts their seatbelts on and that Tim holds the baby real tight.
“Don’t let him go anywhere,” I tell him.
He locks his fingers around Connor’s tummy and nods at me seriously. Off we go down the road, bumping when we hit the potholes that are left from all the rain washing out the road so many times.
It’s the first time I’ve ever felt proud of myself. And it’s the first time I’ve felt as though I have any chance whatsoever of keeping my family together.
Baby Connor squeals with excitement, the boys laugh, and we all go get burgers.
The memory fades as the squeal of the baby’s cry turns into the squeal of the hinge of a door that hasn’t been tended to as well as the general decor of the house would suggest.
My mother steps into the room.
In daylight she looks the same as I remember her, which is weird because it’s been ten years. She should be so much older. She should be lined and wrinkled and gray, but I guess now that I think about it and do a little math, she’s only forty years old. Ithink of her like a ghost, or a corpse. It’s the ghost I’m seeing now.
“Why am I here?”
I could ask where I am, but I think I know exactly where I am.
“You’ve gotten old enough to be a problem,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest and smiling at me in a way that is not maternal or friendly. “I thought you’d find a man and go settle down somewhere civilized. But you stayed right in the same hole I left you.”
“The hole where you abandoned us,” I remind her. “When Connor was a baby.”
“We’re not here to talk about the past,” she says in the breezy way people who did terrible things in the past always do. Must be nice to be the sort of person who can walk away from every single one of your kids and start over like they’re nothing.
I think about Karl, how he’s been trying to get me pregnant. What if I’m the same kind of mother she is? What if I decide to walk away from my babies because they’re inconvenient? What if I’m already pregnant? Just looking into her face makes me doubt myself to my core.
“What are we here to talk about?”
“You could have gone to jail. You should be glad to be here, in a safe house and home.”
There’s nothing safe about this home, that’s for sure. This is like some simulation of a home, the idea of one, but none of the reality. It looks like one. I bet every inch of it has been designed to look like a show home. But it’s inhabited by her.
I don’t say anything. I don’t want her to know what I’m thinking. It’s too much that she’s looking at me.
“I wasn’t the best mother in the past,” she says as if she missed a few school lunches, or maybe couldn’t make a dance recital or two. “But I’m going to make up for that now, because baby, if you don’t stop doing what you’re doing, you’re going to end up dead. Rainer doesn’t like it when people get in his way. If it weren’t for the fact you’re my daughter, you’d have disappeared last night in a whole other way. Your brothers, too. Now I’ve told him that the boys aren’t going to be a problem. He believed me. He didn’t believe me about you, though. You’ve been too much trouble for too long. There’re too many stories about a dark-haired mad woman who rips cooling systems out of trucks and assaults grown men just trying to get their work done.”
I smile out of pride.
“Boys did that too,” I said.
“Yes, honey, but they do it because you do it. They follow you. And the man you’ve got hanging around? We’ll take care of him too.”
“You killed him?”
“We won’t need to. We just have to take you out of the picture, and the whole thing falls apart.”
She smiles at me, and it’s a creepy, demented sort of smile. One that makes me feel like I’m being hunted. This woman doesn’t feel like my mother anymore. I don’t know if she ever did. Right now she’s a malevolent stranger.
“I never thought I’d see this day,” she says. “I’m glad I get to.”
