A few minutes later, Liz left, slamming the door on her way out, and didn’t come back for almost a week. When she did, they made up. In the bedroom. With the door closed. I heard that, too, because the making-up part was pretty noisy. Groans and laughter and squeaky bedsprings.
They argued about police tactics, too, and this was still a few years before Black Lives Matter. That was a sore point with Liz, as you might guess. Mom decried what she called “racial profiling,” and Liz said you can only draw a profile if the features are clear. (Didn’t get that then, don’t get it now.) Mom said when black people and white people were sentenced for the same type of crime, it was the black people who got hit with the heaviest sentences, and sometimes the white people didn’t do time at all. Liz countered by saying, “You show me a Martin Luther King Boulevard in any city, and I’ll show you a high crime area.”
The arguments started to come closer together, and even at my tender age I knew one big reason why—they were drinking too much. Hot breakfasts, which my mother used to make twice or even three times a week, pretty much ceased. I’d come out in the morning and they’d be sitting there in their matching bathrobes, hunched over mugs of coffee, their faces pale and their eyes red. There’d be three, sometimes four, empty bottles of wine in the trash with cigarette butts in them.
My mother would say, “Get some juice and cereal for yourself while I get dressed, Jamie.” And Liz would tell me not to make a lot of noise because the aspirin hadn’t kicked in yet, her head was splitting, and she either had roll-call or was on stakeout for some case or other. Not the Thumper task force, though; she didn’t get on that.
I’d drink my juice and eat my cereal quiet as a mouse on those mornings. By the time Mom was dressed and ready to walk me to school (ignoring Liz’s comment that I was now big enough to make that walk by myself), she was starting to come around.
All of this seemed normal to me. I don’t think the world starts to come into focus until you’re fifteen or sixteen; up until then you just take what you’ve got and roll with it. Those two hungover women hunched over their coffee was just how I started my day on some mornings that eventually became lots of mornings. I didn’t even notice the smell of wine that began to permeate everything. Only part of me must have noticed, because years later, in college, when my roomie spilled a bottle of Zinfandel in the living room of our little apartment, it all came back and it was like getting hit in the face with a plank. Liz’s snarly hair. My mother’s hollow eyes. How I knew to close the cupboard where we kept the cereal slowly and quietly.
I told my roomie I was going down to the 7-Eleven to get a pack of cigarettes (yes, I eventually picked up that particular bad habit), but basically I just had to get away from that smell. Given a choice between seeing dead folks—yes, I still see them—and the memories brought on by the smell of spilled wine, I’d pick the dead folks.
Any day of the fucking week.
15
My mother spent four months writing The Secret of Roanoke with her trusty tape recorder always by her side. I asked her once if writing Mr. Thomas’s book was like painting a picture. She thought about it and said it was more like one of those Paint by Numbers kits, where you just followed the directions and ended up with something that was supposedly “suitable for framing.”
She hired an assistant so she could work on it pretty much full time. She told me on one of our walks home from school —which was just about the only fresh air she ever got during the winter of 2009 and 2010—that she couldn’t afford to hire an assistant and couldn’t afford not to. Barbara Means was fresh out of the English program at Vassar, and was willing to toil in the agency at bargain-basement wages for the experience, and she was actually pretty good, which was a big help. I liked her big green eyes, which I thought were beautiful.
Mom wrote, Mom rewrote, Mom read the Roanoke books and little else during those months, wanting to