Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby

In the bathroom, there are dirty clothes separated into different-colored piles on the floor. Whites. Darks. Somebody's jeans and shirts stained with oil. There's towels and sheets and bras. There's a red-checked tablecloth. I flush the toilet for the sound effect.

There's no diapers or children's clothes.

In the living room, the chicken woman is still looking at the ceiling, only now she's shaking with long, jerking breaths. Her chest, under the apron, shaking. Helen is touching the corner of a folded tissue to the watery makeup. The tissue is soaked and black with mascara, and Helen's saying, «It will be better someday, Rhonda. You can't see that, but it will.» Folding another tissue and daubing, she says, «What you have to do is make yourself hard. Think of yourself as something hard and sharp.»

She says, «You're still a young woman, Rhonda. You need to go back to school and turn this hurt into money.»

The chicken woman, Rhonda, is still crying with her head tilted back, staring at the ceiling.

Behind the bathroom, there's two bedrooms. One has a water bed. In the other bedroom is a crib and a hanging mobile of plastic daisies. There's a chest of drawers painted white. The crib is empty. The little plastic mattress is tied in a roll at one end. Near the crib is a stack of books on a stool. Poems and Rhymes is on top.

When I put the book on the dresser, it falls open to page 27.

I run the point of a baby pin down the inside edge of the page, tight in next to the binding, and the page pulls out. With the page folded in my pocket, I put the book back on the stack.

In the living room, the cosmetics are dumped in a heap on the floor.

Helen's pulled a false bottom out of the inside of her cosmetic case. Inside are layered necklaces and bracelets, heavy brooches and pairs of earrings clipped together, all of them crusted and dazzling with shattered red and green, yellow and blue lights. Jewels. Draped between Helen's hands is a long necklace of yellow and red stones larger than her polished, pink fingernails.

«In brilliant-cut diamonds,» she says, «look for no light leakage through the facets below the girdle of the stone.» She lays the necklace in the woman's hands, saying, «In rubies—aluminum oxide—foreign bits inside, called rutile inclusions, can give the stone a soft pinkish look unless the jeweler bakes the stone under high heat.»

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

The two women sit so close, their knees dovetail together. Their heads almost touch. The chicken woman isn't crying.

The chicken woman is wearing a jeweler's loupe in one eye.

The dead flowers are shoved aside, and scattered on the coffee table are clusters of sparkling pink and smooth gold, cool white pearls and carved blue lapis lazuli. Other clusters glow orange and yellow. Other piles shine silver and white.

And Helen cups a blazing green egg in her hand, so bright both women look green in the reflected light, and she says, «Do you see the kind of uniform veil-like inclusions in a synthetic emerald?»

Her eye clenched around the loupe, the woman nods.

And Helen says, «Remember this. I don't want you to get burned the way I was.» She reaches into the cosmetic case and lifts out a bright handful of yellow, saying, «This yellow sapphire brooch was owned by the movie star Natasha Wren.» With both hands, she takes out a sparkling pink heart, trailing a long chain of smaller diamonds, saying, «This seven-hundred-carat beryl pendant was once owned by Queen Marie of Romania.»

In this heap of jewels, Helen Hoover Boyle would say, are the ghosts of everyone who has ever owned them. Everyone rich and successful enough to prove it. All of their talent and intelligence and beauty, outlived by decorative junk. All the success and accomplishment this jewelry was supposed to represent, it's all vanished.

With the same hairdo, the same makeup, leaning together so close, they could be sisters. They could be mother and daughter. Before and after. Past and future.

There's more, but that's when I go out to the car.

Sitting in the backseat, Mona says, «You find it?»

And I say yeah. Not that it does this woman any good.

The only thing we've given her is big hair and probably ringworm.

Oyster says, «Show us the song. Let's see what this trip is all about.»

And I tell him, no fucking way. I tuck the folded page in my mouth and chew and chew. My foot aches, and I take off my shoe. I chew and chew. Mona falls asleep. I chew and chew. Oyster looks out the window at some weeds in a ditch.

I swallow the page, and I fall asleep.

Later, sitting in the car, driving to the next town, the next library, maybe the next makeover, I wake up and Helen has been driving for almost three hundred miles.

It's almost dark, and just looking out the windshield, she says, «I'm keeping track of expenses.»

Mona sits up, scratching her scalp through her hair. She presses the finger next to her pinkie finger, she presses the pad of that finger into the inside corner of her eye and pulls it away, fast, with an eye goober stuck on it. She wipes the goober on her jeans and says, «Where are we going to eat?»

I tell Mona to buckle her seat belt.

Helen turns on the headlights. She opens one hand, wide, against the steering wheel and looks at the back of it, her rings, and says, «After we find the Book of Shadows, when we're the all-powerful leaders of the entire world, after we're immortal and we own everything on the planet and everyone loves us,» she says, «you'll still owe me for two hundred dollars' worth of cosmetics.»

She looks odd. Her hair looks wrong. It's her earrings, the heavy clumps of pink and red, pink sapphires and rubies. They're gone.

This wasn't just one night. It just feels that way. This was every night, through Texas and Arizona, on into Nevada, cutting through California and up through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana. Every night, driving in a car is the same. Wherever.

Every place is the same place in the dark.

«My son, Patrick, isn't dead,» Helen Hoover Boyle says.

He's dead in the county medical records, but I don't say anything.

With Helen driving, Mona and Oyster are asleep in the backseat. Asleep or listening. I sit in the passenger side of the front seat. Leaning against my door, I'm as far from Helen as I can get. With my head pillowed on my arm, I'm where I can listen without looking at her.

And Helen talks to me without looking back. This is both of us looking straight ahead at the road in the headlights rushing under the hood of the car.

«Patrick's at the New Continuum Medical Center,» she says. «And I fully believe that someday he'll make a complete recovery.»

Her daily planner book, bound in red leather, is on the front seat between us.

Driving through North Dakota and Minnesota, I ask, how did she find the culling spell?

And with one pink fingernail, she pushes a button somewhere in the dark and puts the car in cruise control. With something else in the dark, she turns on the high-beam headlights.

«I used to be a client representative for Skin Tone Cosmetics,» she says. «The trailer we lived in wasn't very nice.» She says, «My husband and I.»

His name is John Boyle in the county medical records.

«You know how it is with your first,» she says. «People give you so many toys and books. I don't even know who actually brought the book. It was just a book in a pile of books.»

According to the county, this must've been twenty years ago.

«You don't need me to tell you what happened,» she says. «But John always thought it was my fault.»

According to police records, there were six domestic disturbance calls to the Boyle home, lot 175 at the Buena Noche Mobile Home Park, in the weeks following the death of Patrick Raymond Boyle, aged six months.