Chanel Bonfire by Lawless Wendy

Author:Lawless, Wendy [Lawless, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2013-01-08T08:00:00+00:00

chapter ten

INNER MEDEA

That night, Mother ran out of the house in her nightgown. The sound of her tires on the gravel woke us up, and we dashed out after her just in time to see her peel out of the driveway and reverse into the street. I shouted at her to stop.

“Just let her go,” Robin yelled. She grabbed my arm and tried to pull me back toward the dark house. I wrenched away from her, ran to the street, and stood in front of the car, waving my arms in the air. Mother put her foot on the gas, revving the engine theatrically, and headed straight for me.

“Mother! Stop!” I screamed.

I moved a few feet over to the side of the street and she steered toward me. I jumped backward as she approached, throwing myself onto the mounded lawn. Her face was almost unrecognizable over the steering wheel—hair flying, eyes practically screwed shut, and her cigarette glowing from between her bared teeth. She just missed me by sharply turning at the last second, then gunned it down the street. I got up and watched her taillights melt into the blackness. I turned and saw Robin standing in the doorway. We looked at each other with no idea of what to do. It wasn’t like there was a manual that tells you what to do when your drunk mom tries to run you over and then drives off at a hundred miles an hour in the middle of the night. It was like a scene in a bad TV movie. Except, of course, it wasn’t a movie; it was our life.

We went quickly back into the house and I ran to the sunporch to use the phone to call the police and discovered, in her still-running typewriter, a note announcing her intention to kill herself: Life was no longer worth living, her children hated her, no one loved her, she was ten pounds overweight, and it was time to end it all.

I called the police and gave them a description of the missing person: about five foot four, blue, bloodshot eyes, 110 pounds, wearing a blue nightgown, no shoes, probably drunk, and most likely holding a cigarette.

Robbie stood beside me, arms crossed, tapping her bare foot on the floor.

“Yes, Officer, it’s our mother,” I said.

“Well, your mother has to be missing for at least twenty-four hours before we can start searching for her,” the policeman said.

Robin grabbed the phone away from me. “Look, she left a suicide note! Are you telling me you’re not going to do anything?!”

“I’m sorry, but she has to be gone for that amount of time to legally qualify as a missing person.”

Of course, we knew she’d been missing for years.

We sat downstairs in the guest bedroom watching a Columbo rerun on TV, waiting for her to come back or for a call from the morgue. I prayed for rain to make it easier for her to drive her car off the road. It was going to be a long night.

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