a tiny part of herself behind and became more like a ghost. Was it so strange that she began scrubbing bathroom tiles, patting her own thighs, and running her fingers along hard objects, just to reassure herself that she was real?
At twelve, Audrey started sleepwalking. Every time they moved to a new place, she pissed the corners of the room like a dog marking its territory, then marched right back to bed, like she’d un-potty trained. When Betty would tell her about it the next morning, Audrey would always wonder if it was true, or a story her mother had invented to shift the blame from herself.
At thirteen, she developed a rash across her entire body, itchy and throbbing, as if in sympathy with Betty’s red ants. She spent fourteen high or drunk. Sneaked out and traded sips with the neighbors, who thought a boozy kid was cute, or found another street urchin, and together they scored what they could from panhandling. She cut her wrists, but chickened out once the water in the tub turned pink. If Betty noticed the scabs that became scars that Audrey had to this day, she’d never mentioned it.
At fourteen, Audrey gave up hurting herself for attention because she knew she wouldn’t get any. At fifteen, she passed the tenth-grade equivalency, and enrolled in high school, then kept up classes, or at least the schoolwork, wherever they moved. By then, she’d wised up, and had finally started to wonder if indeed, they were alike at all, or if Betty’d only told her a story that last day in Wilmette, so someone would follow her from town to town, and clean up her messes. She’d started to plot her escape.
Briefly, she got out. Through perfect math ACT scores and a lot of begging, she landed a work-study scholarship to the University of Nebraska. That fall, before her freshman year, she sneaked out with a packed bag, just like Roman, and was free. But three years later, Betty knocked on her dorm door carrying a stale box of Russell Stover cherry-filled chocolates. In that short time, without Audrey to come home to, the woman had contracted a full-blown case of hepatitis C, and grown old. Her blond hair had gone wiry, old-lady gray, and she’d pinned it from her eyes with pink barrettes, like she’d mistaken herself for a little girl.
Caring for her after that had been inevitable. Giving up on graduate school in architecture had been inevitable, too. So she got that job at IHOP, rented that little tomb-sized studio, painted its walls black, then set Betty up on disability in the outpatient community residence down the road. Betty’d lost steam by then and finally agreed to take her lithium, which had coincided nicely with Audrey’s newfound hash habit. They spent ten years in Omaha before Betty had to be committed. During that time, Audrey had watched the days go by, grateful that at least, now that she was the one paying the bills, they weren’t running anymore.
And here she was, dreaming of Hinton, Iowa—1992. Long before college and Omaha. Long after the slits in her wrists had healed into narrow white lines. Smack in the middle, when things had been bleakest. The man in the three-piece suit scritch-scratched against the closet she’d locked him in. The theatre seats below were dark, but she could see the audience’s glassy black eyes. The hole in the kitchen floor was broken faux linoleum and plywood, whose edges could have been teeth. Yes, she remembered this. It all came back.
As she watched, the show began. Starring characters reprised their roles like a movie on repeat that had always happened, would always happen, forever and ever.
Suddenly, Betty Lucas was kneeling in front of the hole. Blond still, and surprisingly young. She grunted as she pressed the knife against the tile and broke open more plywood. The hole widened. She cut her fingers as she worked, but the blood didn’t slow her down.
Audrey watched from the fold-out chair at the kitchen table. Hand cupped over her mouth, knees pulled under her butt, chin tucked close to her chest, she tried her best to make herself small.
Outside, an early frost. A cold walk home from school. The girl, sixteen years old, opened the double-wide screen door. The hole over the crotch of her tan, Salvation Army coveralls was closed by a row of safely pins, and her hair was so greasy it looked wet.