“I want to be the old gypsy woman in the werewolf movies,” I say. Without thinking.
“No! Absolutely not. There’s been enough wolf business around here.” Mom wets the corner of a dishtowel and begins wiping Lauren’s face.
“But Mom . . .”
“If you don’t want to go as a potato, you can stay home. End of discussion.”
“But . . .”
“The end.”
* * *
Lauren goes out with Rusty and Sherman, while I stay home with Mom.
Three adults in costumes come to our door before dusk. The man in a suit and hat with face and hand bandages holds out a UNICEF box. “The Invisible Man,” Mom smiles. “May I give an invisible donation then?” The quiet man shakes the tin box. Raggedy Ann and Andy stand behind him.
“Hi, Kit,” Raggedy Andy says in an embarrassed voice. It’s mean Mr. Marks, Judy’s stepdad.
Mom laughs. “I see she talked you into it. Very cute, Connie.” Raggedy Ann curtsies. It’s Mom’s phony voice. She doesn’t mean it.
The Invisible Man walks off. Maybe it’s the full moon. Dad said yesterday that Halloween on a full moon is a double whammy. “Chock-full o’ nuts,” he laughed.
After the Markses leave, Mom and I light the jack o’ lanterns and sit together on the couch. “I bet the lake seems like a long time ago now, huh?” she says.
“Sort of.”
“Almost four months. We’ve gotten used to life without Mrs. Wiggins, haven’t we?” She lights a cigarette. “Life goes on.”
“I’m sorry about hurting Lauren,” I say.
“Of course you are. I know you, Lily. You’re a good girl.” She takes a puff. “Are you sleeping better? I mean, since the lake?”
I nod. I lie. I don’t sleep much at all. My body feels different, even my feet wiggle like they’re running down the street without me, and I itch everywhere.
* * *
Lauren bet Sherman and Rusty she could eat half her sack of candy before eight o’clock, and she won. She also barfed so much it made her cry.
Mom assigns me to the last trick-or-treaters, and when Dad calls at nine she’s still in Lauren’s room, so I pick up.
“You won,” I tell him. “Two pirates. Three cowboys; triplets even!”
“What are the chances?” Dad laughs. “That’s seventy-five cents, Diamond Lil.”
I smile. He can’t see me of course. “I got in trouble today.”
“I know. Mom called earlier. Better now?”
They don’t know what to do with me.
“Yeah.”
* * *
Sometimes I like Dad better than Mom.
Dad didn’t tell anyone about Peace Lake, but Mom did. She told her closest friends and Aunt Jamie, of course, but she even called old friends she doesn’t usually talk to. Women she met in a writing class at Lewis &. Clark before dropping out “because I have nothing to say,” and the mah-jongg group she left because they were “a bunch of gossiping old hens.”
After tearful pauses, Mom ended each call with, “It was awful. I can’t talk about it anymore.” After Dad yelled at her for buying a whole carton of cigarettes, she didn’t talk to anyone on the phone for a week.
* * *
Sometimes I like Mom better.
At night, I hear her walk down the hall to the kitchen, take down a glass, and fill it with the last cubes from the ice bucket. The door of the liquor cabinet, over the refrigerator, doesn’t like to open; it’s stickier than the others, even after being cleaned. Daddy told me that once he put gum in the catch, a “gob stopper” he called it, to “tease Mommy,” but she pulled the handle so hard it knocked her right off the stool.
She didn’t fall last night. I heard her turn on the TV and sit on the couch. I imagined her lighting a cigarette and pulling her knees to her chest, to keep herself warm. I imagined tiny reflections of Johnny Carson on her freshly polished fingernails when she brought first the cigarette, then the wineglass, to her mouth.
Mom never watches more than fifteen minutes before going to bed. Sometimes, in the summer when she and Dad fight, she doesn’t watch TV at all. I hear the sliding glass door open and the clatter of a metal lawn chair on the patio when she turns it to face either the moon, or the newlyweds’ house. She calls it the newlyweds’ house because they’re always getting new furniture and cars, or taking trips to beautiful places. “Pretty girls get lots of nice things when they’re young,” she tells me.
* * *
After twenty minutes, I blow out the jack o’ lanterns and lock the front door.
When I listen in at Lauren’s door, everything is quiet; Mom must have fallen asleep too.
Back in the family room, it’s my turn to curl up on the couch and watch TV.
“A wolf? A gypsy woman? A murder? What’s going on here?” asks an old English guy with a mustache and pipe.
Poor Lawrence Talbot turns away, tears in his eyes, wringing his hands. Only a skinny flat-chested woman notices. She touches his shoulder and asks if he’s all right.
I scoot closer to the TV. Will he tell her he’s a werewolf this time? It’s okay if he does. Everybody likes Lawrence Talbot; he’s big and quiet and sweet, just like Hoss Cartwright. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone.
I don’t want to hurt anyone either. So I never tell Mom how, after the gypsy lady tracks the werewolf into the dark foggy woods and hides him in her buckboard, she drives the wagon right up to the movie camera and looks at me. Me. Lily Asher of Portland, Oregon.
Or how, after I go to bed, I pray that God won’t change me into something everyone is scared of. Even though that would make it even-steven because I killed Mrs. Wiggins and fair’s fair.
A few minutes later, Mom sits down next to me on the sofa. “Horror movies on Halloween, that makes sense. You tired yet?”
I shrug. “Do I have to turn it off?”
“Are you okay? You’ve had a long day.”
“I’m okay.”
Mom puts her head on my shoulder. “Why do things always happen when your father’s out of town?”
“I don’t know.”
Even though Mom smells like the regular stuff—cigarettes, wine and that special shampoo Dad says is too expensive—she seems different. Her body is wider and heavier, her voice sad and tired. If Mom isn’t herself, who is she?
Did Jesus kidnap the real Mom while I was in the lake? Is He buying her lobster dinners and new art supplies? Judy says a boy cat will eat his own kittens to make a girl cat come into heat again. Would Jesus eat Lauren and me?
What if He falls in love with her? “Everybody does,” I’ve heard Dad say.
Suddenly Mom bursts into tears. “Your father and I thought if you girls learned how to swim, everything would be okay. But if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. You’re struggling to . . . be yourself and . . . find your way, and then there’s the lake and Mrs. Wiggins, and even these monster movies—they get under your skin, don’t they? They get under mine.” She reaches for my hand in the dark. “I’m so sorry, Lily.”
Mom doesn’t usually apologize. “You didn’t do anything. Besides, I can still swim a little.”
“You