Nine months later, it happened again. Betty left for two days, and when she came back, she broke into Roman’s darkroom and exposed all his negatives to the light. “Your camera eyes stole my soul!” she’d screamed so loud that even with the pillow pressed against her ear, Audrey had heard. Roman left that night with bags he’d already packed, like he’d been waiting for the excuse to go. He peeked into Audrey’s bedroom only once. “Are you coming?” he’d asked, even though neither of them had ever spoken of the problem out loud. She’d squeezed the pillow to her stomach and felt the air against her wet cheeks. He’d mistaken her silence for an answer. After he left, he never wrote or called or sent a dime.
They got evicted a couple of months later. “I’m sorry you got stuck with me,” Audrey said, as they’d stuffed the white Pontiac with so much crap—the sewing machine, Betty’s illustrations, garbage bags full of clothes, the empty cage, its wires still caked with shit—that its chassis grazed blacktop.
From her back pocket, Betty had produced Audrey’s second-grade class picture. A scrawny kid with a lopsided grin to match the lopsided hair that she’d shorn, all by herself, because scissors were cool. “Funny girl, even when you’re at school, I keep you with me,” Betty told her. “I see your face in my mind.
“You do?”
Betty had nodded. “I’m not like other people. There’s something missing, and I’m full of holes, but never when it comes to you. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved. We’re the same that way. You’ll see, you’ll break hearts you never wanted.” Betty had smiled when she said this, like she was happy, but it was a pretend kind of smile. Audrey got the feeling that if she could fix the broken thing inside her, she would.
“You won’t leave me?” Audrey had asked.
Betty hugged Audrey tight. She’d smelled like Winston cigarettes and Baby Soft perfume, and Audrey had wanted so much right then, to climb inside her mother, and eat her red ants, and fill the empty space with better things, so they could both be whole. “Let’s make a deal, Lamb of mine. We throw our lots in together. Nobody else counts. Just us. I’ll never leave you, and you’ll never leave me.”
Weeping with relief, Audrey had put her mouth around Betty’s sharp shoulder and sucked on it. “Deal, Momma,” she’d mumbled. “It’s us, forever.”
Low points of life with Betty: the time she locked them both inside the Yuma Motor Inn because she was convinced the cleaning staff was trying to poison them. Burning her boyfriend’s clothes in his own oven, dancing a circle around the smoke, then running across his backyard in their pajamas like maniacs, so they didn’t get caught. Trying to convince that state trooper with the gun that nine-year-old Audrey really was of legal driving age, because Betty’s burnt-out red ants had made her too depressed to get behind the wheel, and they’d needed to blow town, since they’d owed three grand in back rent. Waking up to find that Betty had shorn the hair from both their heads, so they’d looked like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens. So they don’t recognize us, lamb. We’re wanted!
High points with Betty: see previous. Crazy is often fun.
For a while, tramping was a thrill. Betty knew how to sing into a pretend microphone with perfect pitch, talk a waiter into a free meal, tramp it at the Lakeshore so they spent every morning swimming in warm waves, every night in a kind stranger’s guesthouse. She taught Audrey early how to read and draw, so even though she wasn’t often enrolled in school, the staff at the local libraries always knew her name. They were renegades, who knew the secret most people would never learn: the trappings of life are just that: traps. They moved because it was carnival season, and Audrey had never won a teddy bear, or a storm was passing, and if they rushed with their windows rolled down, they could chase the lightning; or Betty’d had a fight with a boss or a boyfriend, or the debt collectors were knocking, or because her red ants had come and trashed all the things they’d worked to build, so that they had to start over again.
Packing and unpacking. Twice a year. Three times. Four. After a while, the drifting frayed Audrey’s nerves. She got the idea that with every ditched motel or trailer, she left