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

My mother doesn’t respond.

“Whose ex was she again? The Family Affair guy?”

“Not him. The one from the knock-off. With the beard.”

“Oh my God, Mom, do you remember what she told me? When I was just sitting out here with the turtle, minding my seven year-old business? She came across the street in this tiny black dress, and she had to have been as old as Mr. Busby, right? Sixty, at least.”

“Older,” says my mother.

“So it’s just me and the turtle, looking at the sky. And here comes Madolyn and her shadows. And she stands over us. And she puts her hands right on her boobs. And then she says…” I try for a smoker’s rasp, though it doesn’t quite come off. “ Just remember, Girlie. I got these for the husband. But I kept ’ em for me. ” And then she turned around and went right back home.”

My mother just nods, and takes a long time doing it. Her voice comes out sad. “That would be Madolyn. She was always so nice.”

Nice?

More silence. Another sudden, nervous glance up in the air from my mother, and I know this can’t last long. “Sorry I interrupted. You said Evie got something from her?”

“Oh. Right. Very possibly the same little black dress you just mentioned.”

“What are you talking about?”

“And some fishnets. And some red lipstick. And some stilettos. Jesus, Ry, they had to have been seven inches high.”

“Wait… she borrowed that stuff for herself? To wear ?”

“For Mr. Busby.”

At the gurgle in my throat, my mom actually grins. “It was horrible, really. And ingenious. You wouldn’t think that sweet old woman… Mr. Busby’s daughter was worried about him skulking around here by himself. She got him to take out a Personals ad in the L.A. Weekly. I helped him write it. And then I guess, maybe when I was trying to convince Evie to let me watch her husband sleep for a couple hours so she could go out and see a movie or something some evening, I must have let it slip. And that’s what gave her the idea, which is why it was kind of my fault.”

“You’re telling me she answered his ad?”

“Made a date, told him she’d be by to pick him up. She didn’t tell him who she was, of course.”

“She actually went through with it? Went to his door dressed like that? What did he do?”

“I don’t know, exactly. That is, I couldn’t quite see. She made Madolyn and me hide in the hedge. All I could hear over our laughter was his screaming.”

“That’s…” I start, and don’t know how to continue. I want to keep her talking about this forever, or at least long enough for me to get the picture straight in my head. Not of Evie, but of my mother crouched in a hedge with a friend, laughing. “I can’t believe you haven’t told me this before.”

I know it’s the wrong comment even before I finish. My mom’s mouth twists, and her shoulders clench inward. She folds her arms across her chest.

“What happened after that?” I keep my voice light.

“Stan died,” says my mother.

The sun goes, dragging all that color behind it, and around us, the apartment buildings lose their depth like false fronts on a set. Across the street is Beverly Hills. A whole other world. You can tell by the curlicues on the street signs.

Without warning, my mother starts to swell. Her arms come loose and drop to her sides, and her spine arches and her head tilts all the way back as her mouth falls open. The moan seems to surge out of the grass and up her throat, rattling her teeth as it bursts out of her.

“ Mom ,” I gasp, grabbing for her hand, scrambling up on my knees to try getting an arm around her.

The moan stops. My mother holds her position, completely frozen, like a sculpture of my mother moaning. Then her eyes pop open.

“Do you remember that sound, Ry?”

“Remember it? What the hell are you—”

“You don’t,” she says. “I’m glad.” Then she folds her arms back across her chest and lowers her chin and sits there, holding herself. “I’m so glad.”

Usually, by this point on our Sunday evenings, I’ve dutifully offered up the most innocuous details of my work life and my grad-school plans and my relationship with Danny (since I have no intention of actually bringing Danny), for which my mother trades seemingly grateful nods and sometimes an anecdote about women’s feet from the shoe store where she works. Most weeks, she doesn’t break down, especially if I have her back in her apartment and ensconced in front of her Tivo’d American Idol episodes — all of which she also watched when they were first broadcast — by eight. This is the first night in years where I’ve lost track of the time, even for a little while. And yet, I’m all too aware we’re on dangerous ground.

“Do you want to go home?” I ask gently. I even touch her shoulder, and she doesn’t pull away, though she also doesn’t unclench.

“It usually started around 2 a.m.,” she says. “Sometimes earlier than that. Mostly not, though. You really don’t remember?” There are no tears, now, just a gauntness that seems to have surfaced in her chin and cheeks.

This is what she’ll look like, old , I think, for no good reason.

“The most amazing thing is that I really think she had no idea she was doing it. I think she did it in her sleep. By the third or fourth night after Stan died, I couldn’t sleep at all for knowing it was coming. Somehow, being woken up by that, to that… it was just too much world, too fast.

“There wasn’t any lead up. It came like an earthquake. That sound I just made, only a lot louder. And a thousand times as heartbroken. It went on and on and on, like she didn’t even need to breathe. Then it would stop for maybe an hour, and then there’d be aftershocks, these quicker, more jagged moans. Those were so loud that that suspended light in my bedroom started swinging back and forth. You couldn’t drown them out. I tried the fan. I tried headphones. Nothing worked. It was like they’d crawled inside my head.

“Which reminds me. This was also when the spiders came.”

That , at least, triggers a memory. Up until now, it’s been like watching my mother recount a completely separate life. Part of which she’s made up, or at least exaggerated, because I may have only been seven, and I’ve always slept heavy, but surely I would have heard what she’s describing. And retained it.

But those webs. Everywhere, on everything. “I remember them,” I say.

Mostly, I remember the wolf spider outside our front door. We had bougainvillea climbing the iron grating on either side of our little stoop. And for months that spring and early summer — the last months we lived here — this one bulbous, pregnant wolf spider would weave a new web between them every single night. We discovered the web the first time when I raced out the door one morning, headed for the park, and wrapped most of the strands around my face. I don’t think I started screaming until my mom did, and she didn’t start, she later said, until she saw the spider itself dangling just under my earlobe like some outsized, nightmare earring, clawing with its hairy legs as it tried to scuttle up the air into my hair to hide. My mom whacked it into the bushes with her hand, then spent half an hour calming us both down and picking the insect carcasses and threading out of my curls.

We weren’t laughing, then. Or ever, really, about the spiders. There were too many of them, attracted, the tv said, by the freakishly humid spring, the eruption of greenery and insects that draped the hillsides and gardens of midtown L.A. and made it look, for just that short while, like somewhere living things actually belonged.