When she reaches the guard kiosk she rolls down her window and hands over the ticket.
“Ah!” the guard says. “The girl who went into enemy territory and came out the other side!”
His eerie specificity throws her, but then she recalls their conversation. He looks at the ticket, then back at her, then places it out of her sight in front of him. “What happened?”
“Still no one’s told you?”
“They just hit their sirens and lights, and I’m supposed to hold the gate open. No real opportunity.” He sounds petulant.
“It was ugly,” she says.
He still hasn’t lifted the gate.
“A girl got hit by a car,” she continues. “Some say, she got what was coming to her.”
She stares frostily at him. He opens the gate and lifts his cap.
“Have a good’n,” he says.
Beddy drives home in silence. She heads back the way she came, and she’s out by the starless darkness of the coast only five minutes before she realizes again how desperately tired she is. Her head does little furtive dips and the scenery disappears for a second, and so she keeps the window rolled down, and the cold and misty air keeps her awake enough for the passage.
When she arrives at her house she sees the amber glow of the living room lamp through the window and knows Ma is asleep in her chair. She opens the door, unlocked as always, and pulls it shut behind her with the knob already turned so it falls into the jamb softly. The locking is the loudest part. There’s only so much you can do to muffle a deadbolt sliding into place. And everything seems to disturb Ma, even rustling air. Ona used to joke with Beddy that their mother could hear a Cheeto hit the carpet.
But when Beddy freezes, listens, Ma doesn’t sound like she stirred.
She rids herself of her heels at the door and tiptoes across the carpet toward her. There she is like most nights when she comes home from work too keyed up to sleep and Beddy has to set an alarm to come down and wake her. Stuffed into their old white high-backed chair. Still in her Super Duper uniform of dark green t-shirt tucked into black jeans with candy striped green and white belt. Her short neck bent awkwardly into the corner. Newspapers and magazines abandoned in her lap mid-sentence. “Why’s my body bone tired but my mind’s awake?” she likes to say. “They should work together.”
Beddy squats down into a crosslegged position on the floor and observes her mother sleep. She looks older than she does during the day. Willful gray hairs have sprung from the shackling ponytail, sticking out like thin bent paper clips from the copper brown majority. Her frown lines are textured with darkness and her mouth sags. But she looks happier. Her face doesn’t carry the tension it does during the day. Whatever these thirteen-hour shifts do to her, whatever their spiritual cost, dreaming does something to bring her peace.
Beddy wonders if Ma was as versed in humiliation as she. If her childhood and adolescence were the same one-legged sprint through a minefield. Beddy has never seen any photos of her as a girl.
Ma’s body jerks in sleep and the magazines shift. They slide gently toward the gap in her legs, and then they’re picking up speed and Beddy knows she doesn’t have much time. She gets to her feet and is already behind the chair when the magazines hit the carpet with a slap. Ma jumps forward and the newspapers flutter to her feet.
“Ma, it’s time for bed.”
Ma opens her eyes shallowly. Exhales deeply.
“Mmm. That time again.” She dumps the last magazine off her lap and stands up. “How was your special night?”
Beddy stays behind the back of the chair, obscuring her dress from view.
“As good as it gets for me,” she says.
Ma yawns. “Great.” She heads for the stairs. “You’ll have to tell me about it tomorrow.” But she won’t ask and Beddy won’t prompt her.
Beddy grabs a glass from the kitchen and checks the back door. On the return pass through the living room she turns off the lamp and follows Ma into the enabling darkness. Ma surmounts the staircase heavily, leaning on the banister like a twenty-foot cane. Beddy steps on the stair where she waited for Todd and Aunt Simone’s voice resounds again. There was so much she overheard from this staircase. Every slight or declaration of war. Now each is recalled in its corresponding stair like the keys on a piano. She wants to jump with two feet on each one, bang her sad song out in the middle of the night, but she doesn’t. She follows Ma up quietly and slips into the bathroom as Ma shuts the door to the master bedroom. Fills her glass at the sink and chugs the whole thing down. Belches. Fills it up again and carries it back to her room and shuts the door. Flips on the light closest to her bed. She pulls her dress apart, grimacing as parts of the tape that have clung to her skin take with them tiny hairs. She tosses it over her chair, steps out of her underwear, and pulls on a pair of pajamas she keeps in a chest under her bed. At last, she climbs into bed.
Elsewhere, the vast engines of high school parties are chugging into the night, their vaporous noise escaping from the houses through doors negligently ajar or windows cracked to vent the redolent smoke. The merrymakers are loosing their ids from their cramped cages. They are levitating. The last of the rotgut spirits have been consumed, either lifted from their aisles and smuggled out swaddled in baggy sweatshirts or shouldertapped into possession. The dares have turned into self-propulsion and one shot one cocktail one beer becomes another, the husks dropped into bins or gaping black trash bags in the middle of living rooms. Boys and girls who think they are men and women are dipping into bedrooms, inviting themselves to savage disappointment or bliss.
But back in her room, Bedelia is in bed. Before she turns off the light, she looks reverently at her VHS tapes, her canon. She pauses at the lonely horror classic hemmed in by the Brat Pack dramedies and impossible wish-fulfillment films. The affinity cannot be ignored.
“Good night, Carrie,” she says.