year ago. When I found out about the accident, we were playing Hacky Sack—me, my friend Billy, and some college girl. The RC always has college kids who come for the summer, and they all kind of blend together, but this one I remember perfectly. She was a hippie, and she was trying to play the game with her shirt off.
“She’s like her own personal volleyball court,” Billy said. Billy could be really obnoxious. He loved to pinch my fat, and he made fun of anyone he could. Still, I’ll always be grateful to him for making us all laugh just then, because that’s about the best thing I can think of to be doing when you get news like I got that day.
I didn’t know right away, of course. But I knew to stop laughing. Something was really, really wrong. Wendy, Big Jon’s daughter, came up to us looking scared and interrupted our game.
“Alex,” she said, “Big Jon needs you at the Main. The cops are here.”
I thought someone had narced on us. See, the RC is known for its holistically grown organic produce and herbal tinctures. But to be straight, it’s also a pot farm—just a few plants, but enough to make Big Jon, the owner, some money, and definitely enough to make everyone nervous when helicopters fly overhead.
My mom and I didn’t have anything to do with that. Still, along with everyone else, I knew about the shady agriculture at the RC, and I was thoroughly trained in just-in-case-the-feds-come scenarios.
“Plants?” I was going to say. “What plants?” I’m pretty good at keeping a straight face, so as I walked into the Main behind Wendy, I was silently practicing what to tell the police. But it turned out that wasn’t what they were there for at all.
Big Jon was crying. He’s a big, jolly Santa Claus kind of guy, so this behavior was pretty alarming. When he saw me, he pointed to his favorite easy chair, which no one gets to sit in, ever.
“Alex,” he said, “I’m afraid I got a bad trip for you. I’m so sorry. Go ahead, sweetheart. Sit on down.”
Even thinking as hard as I can about that afternoon, I can’t remember exactly what those policemen said. Instead, I have only little details and phrases. For instance, I remember that one officer had a birthmark on his forehead in the shape of a crescent moon and that the other had cheeks as shiny as waxed apples. I remember trying to make sense of the words themselves, because the whole story wasn’t working for me. “Orr Springs Road.” (Ore? I thought. Like gold?) “Hairpin turn.” (Mom uses barrettes, not hairpins.) “Instant death.” (Instant coffee?) “Wouldn’t have felt a thing.” (Huh, that’s what I hear happens on a good LSD trip.) It took a couple of days for me to fully comprehend that my mother’s old VW bus went off Orr Springs Road while she was driving back from the hardware store in Ukiah. She had driven away and wasn’t coming back.
My mom’s dead. It’s a pretty horrifying thing to have to tell people. And yet I have to say it all the time. When I do, reactions vary. Some people want to give me a hug, which I usually refuse. Other people simply change the subject.
I wish there were better words so that I could explain everything about her in a sentence. Because if I just say, “Yeah, she’s dead,” you won’t get to hear about how cool her shiny brown braids were, or how all the guys stared at her even though she was a mom, or how she smelled like coconuts, or how she loved to sing but had the voice of a wounded badger. You’ll never know how she planned secret meetings for us in the Sanctuary, with the eucalyptus trees bending in the wind and sighing overhead. How she would tell me ghost stories about the mysterious, unnamed town she came from, or how we’d sit for hours chatting at our daily teatime, or how she taught me to make a sleep potion from valerian root and chamomile. I say “accident” and you picture a bus flying off a cliff, and probably blood and broken bones, but what you don’t know is that the accident wasn’t the worst part. The most terrible thing about her death was the weeks after. The mornings when, instead of waking up to my mom’s horrendous, out-of-tune singing and the smell of cinnamon-spiced coffee, all I