Los Angeles Review 2023 Short Fiction Award: Vera Chan
Final Judge: Carlos Allende
These Poor Mothers by Vera Chan
They look like my daughter. Sixteen or seventeen, blonde hair that touches their shoul ders, pale faces. The newspaper runs their photographs in black and white. I don’t know if their eyes are the same translucent blue, like the veins in her forearms. “Lucy,” I tell her, “they look so much like you.”
She won’t look, won’t stop as she picks up my yellow porcelain cup with the cracked rim. She downs my coffee. Black, no sugar. I make sure it can’t scald. “Tastes like shit as usual.” Lucy puts the cup right on the face, the latest girl. The liquid sloshes over the newsprint. I flinch, but she is out the kitchen door, the echo of the slam al ready sinking into walls, covering the ache of my voice saying, please, please, don’t be so rude. I hear her bound upstairs, the hammer of swinging doors and cabinets as though she must command a symphony wherever she is present. I tear a paper towel and dab at the newsprint.
Lucy is beautiful. She can’t hide it, underneath the heavy paste of eyeliner the color of smoldering ashes, the smear of distaste on her face. Even this morning, sleeplessness smudging the skin under her eyes, the pallor from her late homecoming, the trace of last night’s confrontations barely marks her.
I was in awe of Lucy when she was born. She had her father’s coloring, maybe a little of my straight nose, and pale-pink skin. Lucy had a beauty beyond our imagination. It made me grateful but scared. Grateful as any mother would be of her lovely child, scared because I didn’t know how she would grow to use it.
I scrunch up the paper towel and lay it next to blue-handled kitchen scissors, the blunt ones. I wait for the newspaper to dry.
Lucy comes in again, damp hair tied back. Water streaks her white crocheted tank top to the bare band of flesh above her jeans. She applies lipstick, a glimmering pink. I shudder and look away.
“Are you cutting those out again? Is that why you get newspapers? Ghoulish freak.” “Their poor mothers. Their daughters brutally cut up.” I stare down at the eyes of the girl in the photograph. Not at Lucy.
“Who the fuck cares.”
The paper is not dry yet, but I cut around the article. Four girls found, two missing. All blonde, all pretty, although not as pretty as Lucy.
“It doesn’t matter if they’re prostitutes or not. They’re your age,” I say. “These are girls you could have known. You might want to think about your safety.”
My breath catches. I’ve gone too far. My flesh shrinks from my own bones. “Whatever. Freak.” The insult sounds bored, obligatory. This morning, the energy to abuse me is lacking. “Then pay for my phone on time. Fucking do it before they shut it off again.”
That bill comes in about $100, equipment plan and unlimited freedom for running com mentary about her “boring-ass” home life and “fucking loser” parents. We’ve canceled our credit cards save one, locked in her father’s desk at work. We use a PO box for paper mail, keep spare keys in the safe deposit box. Keep ourselves under lock and key in our own home, because of Lucy.
Lucy always finds a way. Beautiful girls do. She knew that, almost from the day she was born. Fear replaced gratitude. What mother should be afraid of her own child? Lucy knows that fear. Like last night. I can’t look at her. Maybe she doesn’t remember. “You’re dropping me off at that volunteer bullshit tonight.”
The gallery. I nod. She crowds into my face. Spearmint toothpaste. I stop myself from recoiling. I look into the blue of Lucy’s eyes. So clear. I can see my own eyes in her irises. “Got something on your lower lip,” she says. Her thumb brushes against my mouth. A
sour taste chokes me. This time, I can’t stop the reflex. My fingers tighten, tearing the damp newspaper.
And Lucy laughs. She does remember. Coming home, high, smelling of alcohol and se men. Her father out of town, so no one to tell me to let her sleep it off. Lucy laughing at me, youth blazing in the weak wattage of hallway candlestick lights. Kissing me, her tongue scraping against my lower lip, her hand squeezing my right nipple as though she would twist it off, a cold beer bottle pushing against my thighs. I’d made it to the kitchen sink and thrown up. I could hear her laughing hysterically as she crawled up the stairs. I relax my fingers.
“I’ll drive you.”
“Freaky bitch,” Lucy says, and leaves.
I smooth the article and piece together the girl’s face. I wonder if she was an only child. When Lucy was six, I became pregnant. Another girl. The hospital said I’d lost con sciousness when I fell. Thank goodness, the nurse said, Lucy knew to call 911. Lucy always finds a way.
I leave the house, article in hand. It is my map. I make the same circuit as with the oth ers. Sometimes where their bodies are found isn’t reported. When it is, I drive there, then the homes of the family. I’ve thought of bringing flowers to the wakes, as I stand in the back watching the mourners’ faces. Instead, I donate to the online memorial funds. The ones still missing, I visit their mothers. I don’t ring the doorbell. I sit in my car, down the block, and cry with them about lost daughters.
My eyes are dry when I pick up Lucy. Her top looks sheer under certain light, her short blood-orange skirt matched her sandals.
“Drop me off on the corner,” Lucy says, earbuds tuned to her phone.
“I need to make a quick stop,” I say and feel the slap of her hostility.
“You had the fuck all day.” But Lucy stops this time. “Whatever. I have a fucking head ache.”
After a little while, I look over. Her eyes are closed, but she isn’t asleep. Newspaper arti cles sit folded between us. My maps. There is no digital trace with a newspaper, what I read, what I cut out. Nobody knows except Lucy. I keep driving. The rose of twilight deep ens. The scenery of brick houses and pine trees shrinks to cracked asphalt illuminated gray in the twin headlights.
She opens her eyes as the tires scrape over gravel. I stop the car. In the fuzzy yellow glow of the headlights, I see her contempt for me. It is clearer in darkness. “Where the fuck are we? Are you lost? Jesus, you’re such a dried-up cunt.” “Please don’t talk to me that way.”
Maybe she will hear my voice is different this time. My resolve. But my beautiful daugh ter laughs. My skin prickles.
“Like you can do anything about it.” She sounds cheerful, as though her power is abso lute. She leans in, smelling of decaying sweet peaches. “Cunt. Cunt. Cunt. What’re you go ing to do?”
“Get out, Lucy. Apologize, or get out.”
By twelve, she’d outgrown me. She learned I didn’t hit back. If she wants, she could drag me out of the car again.
“Whatever with your power trip. You think I need you?” Lucy laughs. “Watch.”
I do watch. I watch her pick up her orange purse, touch the power lock, slide her legs out the door. She slams it behind her.
“Fucking bitch. You can’t stand your dried-up pussy to be in the same house as my sweet one?”
And Lucy goes on. To humiliate me into submission, like she does her father. I lock the doors. No one will hear her. Not where we are. No one heard the others here, if they had sound left. I back up the car. Lucy still screams, ugly, filthy hate. I turn the car around. The rear lights wash her in a red glow.
I drive away. The screams will change. She will call for mamma.
But all I can think of is the poor mothers.
By day, Vera Chan has worked at the intersection of journalism and technology as a reporter, editor and news-publisher advocate. At all other hours, the SF-Bay Area resident writes nonfiction and fiction. Past honors for works-in-progress include the Eleanor Taylor Bland (Sisters in Crime) and Effie Lee Morris (WNBA-SF) awards. She made her mystery-fiction debut as HC Chan in the award-nominated Midnight Hour anthology (Crooked Lane) and recently published the editorial project Working the Way: Martial Artists on Their Career Journeys. Chan is currently out on submission in two manuscripts and working on a third novel.
27 March 2024
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