Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Behind her, the sunset has ignited the smog, and the evening redness rises on the horizon behind the hazy towers of Century City, barely visible less than a mile from here. The traffic on Olympic is Sunday-evening sparse, the noise and the heat of it lapping around us rather than crashing down, the way it mostly did when we lived here. Low tide.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur, starting back around the corner toward the side-street where we parked. “I didn’t mean to bring you here. I actually forgot this place was so near. I just thought you’d want to see the building where Danny and I are going to be liv—”

“Do you remember the turtle?” my mother asks. And then she just folds her legs under her and sits down in the square of grass in front of the triplex. The angry expression has vanished. But there are tears. “Ry? Do you remember?”

She pats the grass. My legs are bare under my skirt, and if I sit there, they’re going to itch. I do it anyway. For a moment, I wonder what whoever currently lives in the front apartment will think, two women camped on their lawn with their backs to the traffic and their eyes riveted to those bay windows like paparazzi . But if the existing tenants are anything like we were, they’ll never open those curtains — too many cars passing, too stark a reminder of the carbon monoxide seeping through every little gap in the walls and window frames — so they’ll never see us.

All at once, I do remember. And I find myself glancing toward the hedge, then the back alley where the dumpster is, half-expecting to see that little, darker-green hump in the grass. That tiny, wrinkled head turned slightly sideways. “ So it can see the sky .” That’s what Evie used to tell me.

“A hundred years after we die,” I say.

“What?” snaps my mother.

“Sorry. It’s what she used to say. Evie. She said that turtle of hers could live 250 years. She’d already had it for like twenty. She said we could come back here a hundred years after we die and there it would be. Just being.”

“Evie,” my mother says, and for the first time all night — in a long while, really, at least around me — she offers up her gentle, close-lipped smile. Her softest one, that I loved so much when I was little, and lost when we left here. “Oh, God, Ry, you should have seen her.”

“Mom, you used to make me call her Adopted Grandma. Didn’t she walk me home from nursery school when you were at work? I saw her all the time.”

“Not this time, you didn’t. Oh, wow.” To my amazement, my mother starts to laugh. Right on cue, from all the way down Olympic, comes a whiff of ocean breeze, just strong enough to blow out the laughter like a candle. Her shoulders tremble, though she can’t possibly be cold. My shins have begun to itch.

I put my palms in the grass and make to stand, saying, “Well, I guess we should go.”

But my mother is still smiling. At least, I think she is. “You asked how it started.”

“Yeah. I did.”

“Maybe this is it. I mean, obviously, it’s not the beginning, it had to have been in full swing by then, but this is the first one I really remember. This is as close to the beginning as I can get.”

Her shoulders tremble again. “Leyton,” she says. “Mr. Busby, I mean…”

“I know who you meant, Mom.”

“I actually don’t know why he didn’t blame me. Because it was kind of my fault.”

I sigh, roll my head back on my neck to watch the ribbons of orange run the rim of the sky like a brush fire along a ridge. My mother follows my eyes up, and she goes rigid. She says something, too, but I can’t make it out. I sigh again. “I’m not sure this qualifies as starting at the beginning.”

“Mr. Busby’d moved in… I don’t know… six months before? Fall of ’95. I think.”

“Did Evie always hate him?”

“I don’t think she ever hated him, Ry.”

“What are you talking about? Why else would—”

“She hated his being here. Totally different, in this case.”

“Okay. Why did she hate him being here?”

My mom looks at me, and I want to weep. I’ve never actually seen the expression I unleash on her every fifteen minutes or so during our Sunday-night outings. But I suspect it looks like that. If that’s true, at least my mother can’t be as fragile as she generally appears.

“Why do you think?” she asks.

“Yeah. Okay. I just meant that that always surprised me about Evie. She seemed so open about everything, and everyone. Always talking about the Clintons, and propositions, and Greenpeace. I’m pretty sure she taught me all those words.”

My mother nods. I’m still surprised she’s let us sit here this long. “I think the riots really spooked her. Remember, she was eighty-four years old. She’d lived here a long, long time. For most of that, this neighborhood was one hundred percent Jews.”

“A lulav in every window,” I say, and my mother laughs.

“An etrog on every plate. Where’d she even get that? I’ve never seen an etrog on anyone’s plate. Have you?”

I laugh, too. And my surprise tilts toward amazement. I am sitting with my mother in front of our childhood home — the one we left for the last time in an ambulance, with my mother in restraints and screaming — and we’re laughing.

“So anyway,” my mother says. “Here’s our coal-skinned new retiree neighbor Mr. Busby, walking around the yard all the time in his half-buttoned, purple satin shirts—”

“That’s right, those shirts!”

“—with his barrel chest stuck out. And there’s little Evie, trapped upstairs tending to Stan — that was her husband — who was pretty much just a pool to pour morphine in by then. So mostly, she just stared out the window.”

“‘You become the neighborhood,’” I say, gliding my hands across the tops of the blades of grass, feeling their chemically treated ends prickle like gelled hair. “Do you remember her saying that?”

My mother pauses a moment, then shakes her head. “No, actually.”

I do. More than once. Though I can’t remember when. And even now, I don’t know what it means.

My mother shakes her head again, but harder, like a dog shedding water. “You know, I really do have no idea how the pranks started. I think he might have brought her up a cold shrimp platter the first weekend he lived here. As a new-neighbor gesture, you know, not realizing. I don’t think he’d ever met a Jew before, either, let alone known anything about keeping Kosher. But not long after that, she got him the gift subscription to Hustler , with the note that said ‘ To go with your shirts .’ Then he hid a bunch of those black, rubber June bugs all over that sukka she put up every year around back, on strings so he could make them scuttle across her little folding picnic table. Do you remember any of that?”

I shake my head. “Just the picnic table. And ears of corn? Did she hang ears of corn in there?”

“He put rubber bugs in those, too. After that, it was on. Seemed like one of them came up with a new torture for the other every single week.”

Instead of smiling some more, my mother starts muttering again. At least now I can hear her. “She was so lonely,” she says. “They both were.” Then some things that I don’t catch. The sky purples over our heads, and the breeze brushes past.

“So, this one time…” I finally prod.

She looks surprised, as though she thought she’d still been talking to me. Her braid swings like the tongue of a bell, and her body vibrates. “Sorry. Yes. This one time. I assume she got the clothes from Madolyn, Tell me you remember Madolyn.”

“Good God, how could I forget them,” I say, and my mother says them right with me, holding her hands a good two feet in front of her breasts, and there we are smiling again. Mother and daughter. We glance together across the street toward Madolyn’s duplex. “You don’t think she still lives there?” I ask.