Don't Call Me Mother by Linda Joy Myers Read Free Book Online Page A

She always closes the blinds and turns on the lights sooner than this, long before it’s so dark. She’s never fallen asleep—I hope she’s just asleep—like this before, slumbering through the afternoon and into the night.
    I curl up as small as I can. Fear frosts over my arms and legs, as if I’m being slowly dipped in ice water. She’s not breathing; I know she’s not, or she’d be awake. I can’t cross the dining room into the living room to find out because the monsters will smell me. They lie in wait tucked under the window ledge outside, holding their breath, just waiting to come in and eat me.
    The wind blows against the creaking house. Its walls groan as if they will fly away, leaving me exposed in the bare air. I curl up even tighter on the floor, shivering. I can barely make out the imposing dark shape of the desk beside me, but I catch the smell of its polished wood. Across the room there is the half-moon of the mahogany dining table and beyond that the long table that separates the two rooms. Gram is so still, I am sure she is dead. I can’t hear her breathing.
    What will happen to me if she dies? I would cause my parents a lot of trouble by being alive if Gram is dead. An abyss opens in my stomach, a flap in time and space. I tumble into it, at the same time feeling the solidity of the cool hardwood floor. My mind ticks through what would happen: If Gram is dead, and Mother and Daddy don’t take me in, then some other adult somewhere would have to. It could even be Vera again. I know there’s nothing I could do about this, and now I’m really scared. The abyss is total for a few minutes, swirling me in black terror, but then I get my courage up and begin crawling, one hand and then one knee on the cool hard floor, my knee bones crunching, making my way like a prehistoric creature across the desert of that floor, keeping my head down, alert for movement at the window. If she’s dead, I’ll have to figure out what to do. What do you do when a grown-up dies?
    At last I turn the corner and see her body lying on the couch in the glow of the streetlight, her hands over her chest, her mouth agape. Is this death? Her face looks pale and empty, and she is so still. I crawl quickly, the only sound now my heart beating against my chest. Trembling with dread, I lay my head on her chest and hold my breath.
    Gram’s chest is moving up and down, up and down. I am safe; she is alive. The flap to that dark world closes, but the edges of myself are ragged, torn like a piece of paper. I need to hear her voice. I need her to wake up and talk to me, but I don’t want to make her mad. Gently I stroke her arm and chest. She gasps a little and flutters open her eyelids. “Sugar Pie.”
    She smiles and holds out her arms. I climb up and hold on tight, her warm body against my own, her breath against my neck.

 
    Liebestraum
    The Great Plains is an inland sea. I am a speck in that sea, brought to the copper dirt of this place by a migration, as were fish now fossilized in the red rocks. The landscape is dotted with derricks whose steel arms pump oil up through layers of time. The whole town smells of oil. I stand outside to listen to the wind blowing the spirit of the past against my pale body. Dirt from some ancient era blowing against me, I bow my head to the power of the land, the wind lifting my hair and tickling my skin with pinpricks of bone too small to see with the naked eye.
     
    I lift my head at the sound of a train whistle from across town, a familiar ache of longing for my mother spreading under my left rib. Today I get to see Mommy for the first time since coming back to Gram’s. I can hardly remember her; even her face is blurry to me. I go back inside to check on Gram’s progress getting ready. She sits at her dressing table, smoking and staring in the mirror, her face drawn into an unhappy scowl. I can’t understand why she isn’t happy. After all, her daughter is arriving today in Perry, a