On the Savage Side: A Novel

by Tiffany McDaniel

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Arcade and Daffodil are twin sisters born one minute apart. With their fiery red hair and thirst for an escape, they form an unbreakable bond nurtured by their grandmother's stories. Together they disappear into their imagination and forge a world where a patch of grass reveals an archaeologist's dig, the smoke emerging from the local paper mill becomes the dust rising from wild horses galloping deep beneath the earth, and an abandoned 1950s convertible transforms into a time machine that can take them anywhere.
But no matter how hard they try, Arc and Daffy can't escape the generational ghosts that haunt their family. And so, left to fend for themselves in the shadow of their rural Ohio town, the two sisters cling tight to one another.
Years later, as the sisters wrestle with the memories of their early life, a local woman is discovered dead in the river. Soon, more bodies are left floating in the water, and as the killer circles ever closer, Arc's promise to keep herself and her sister safe becomes increasingly desperate - and the powerful riptide of the savage side more difficult to survive.
Drawing from the true story of women killed in Chillicothe, Ohio, acclaimed novelist and poet Tiffany McDaniel has written a moving literary testament and fearless elegy for missing women everywhere.

Release date: February 14, 2023

Publisher: Knopf

Print pages: 539

Sample

CHAPTER 1

 

The power of a flower is that she can tower.

—Daffodil Poet

The first sin was believing we would never die. The second sin was believing we were alive in the first place.

When a woman disappears, how is she remembered? By her beautiful smile? Her pretty face? The drugs in her system? Or by the johns who all have dope breath and graceless desires?

In Chillicothe, Ohio, there is the familiar quarrel. The same quarrel that is known through once-pastoral fields, where industry was made and generations were supported by grandfathers and fathers working in the paper mill until they came home at night to become the captains of the dinner table while our mothers were women of immortal hands who picked up our dropped prayers and answered them.

But it was all a myth, these gods in ordinary folk. No more real than the heroes of ancient Greece. Chillicothe, Ohio, it turned out, was full of mortals.

The land had once been called Chala-ka-tha by the Indigenous tribes who had lived there for thousands of years before European settlers came to steal it and rename it something the white tongue could own. Chillicothe.

In their white ways, they industrialized the land. Chillicothe rose in building and pitched roof, competing with the surrounding hills. In her newfound kingdom, she had been the first capital of Ohio, before that, too, was taken away. Remnants were found in the presence of a couple of department stores, the aisles married to the turning wheel of shopping carts and Sunday coupons. Beneath the harsh breath of development and asphalt, there existed the rounded tops of the trees blowing in the wind and the traces of those who had come centuries before.

Home to what had been the rich culture of the First Peoples, Chillicothe was a primal place of geometric earthworks and burial mounds. Ripe with fossilized shark teeth, obsidian, and shells from the faraway ocean, the earthworks were magic to someone like me. As a child, I would dig, beneath the seething beetles and below the earthworms, into the deep cool and native soil, hoping to uncover the buried trace of the beautiful and the hidden.

Some folks look at a place by how it is. I like to look at a place by how it would be discovered in the future. What artifacts would Chillicothe, Ohio, leave in the dark ground if it were lost to time? There would be leather straps from the purses of the women who visited the cosmetic counters every Easter sale, plastic straws from the never-ending selection of fast-food joints, camo jackets from the predators, feathers from the nests of the prey. There would be old Tecumseh brochures, family photos from fabric-covered albums, earmarked pages from the Bible, and used needles to remind us we were not perfect.

Most of all, there would be layers. Layers of fury, of beauty, of the hours that shrivel like dry grass. On top of that, as the crowning deposit, there would be the sawdust from the paper mill. Maybe there would even be the smell, mixed into the soil, hardened with the rocks, renewed with each inhale. Locals called the odor coming from the paper mill the smell of money. But for the ones who were not born and raised in Chillicothe, they held their noses and said, “Damn this town stinks.”

There our entire lives, my sister Daffy and me figured it was what the whole world smelled like. A mixture of rotten eggs, hot garbage, and the toxic fumes that wood makes when it is forced to become paper. This odor would spew from the red-and-white-striped stacks, up into the sky, choking the birds. It would fall back down like a blanket upon us and cling to our clothes, hair, and homes.

It was in the shadow of the paper mill that Daffy and me lived with our mother Adelyn and her sister Clover in the part of town not visible when looking down Main Street with its brick and concrete, the works of old men. We lived on the south side, where slum landlords rented out small cinderblock houses. Ours was painted a brown that Daffy said was the color of watered-down Pepsi cola. I thought it was the color of sand from the riverbank, left to dry on the bottoms of our feet and get dusty in the light. The house had a little front porch that had black metal rails my sister and me would slip notes back and forth through when we pretended we were on opposite sides of the world.

“I wrote my note in purple unicorn ink,” Daffy would always say, her pen as black as mine.

The houses had an uncomfortable nearness to one another. If there was an argument next door, you heard it. If there was dinner on the stove, you smelled it. If there was a woman sitting down at her kitchen table with her face in her hands, you saw it.

Perhaps when the houses had first been built, the concrete had been carefully poured on the porches in anticipation of the welcome mats. But as the nights tightened against the wasted time of those who slept their days away, it became the part of Chillicothe that the rats would chew their own legs off to be free of the hellhole falling in on them. A hellhole my sister and me would try to escape on our bikes.

We didn’t think it could get much worse, but in 1979, when we were six years old, our father died and our mother screamed while my sister and me held hands, our backs pressed against the wall.

I thought our mother had hung our father’s clothes on the windows out of anger. She seemed furious he had died, the way she banged on the walls with her fists.

“If he wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him,” she said as she kicked in and dented the kitchen cabinet. She pulled out a junk drawer and let it spill out on the floor as she headed for the hammer and nails.

“I’ll show that son of Chillicothe.” She yanked one of Dad’s flannel shirts up off the floor by its sleeve and jerked it toward the window like she was jerking the man himself out of the grave. Then she dragged the old upholstered chair across the floor and climbed up on its brown floral cushion, falling no less than five times.

The thin strap of her red camisole had slid down, exposing herself. My mother wore camisoles as shirts year-round. Even during the months when the ground froze. Sometimes she paired them with loose cutoff shorts. Other times just satin panties, worn so many days, they were stretched and baggy in the rear and crotch. Come winter it was elastic band sweatpants, mostly the peach- or teal-colored ones, pushed up over the sores on her calves. That day in 1979 was late spring, and it was the satin panties, baby blue but faded to gray.

Daffy and me watched our mother nail our father’s clothes to the wall, hammering with such force, there’d always be little cracks in the plaster around his ripped and dirty jeans, his yellowed underwear, even his army uniform, which was charred from the time he had tried to burn it, only to decide he didn’t want to do that after all.

“Goddamn lizard dick,” Mom grumbled as she stepped up on the wide armrest to balance.

“You better not fall off that chair, Addie.” Aunt Clover kept her eyes on the image of the Danube River in Hungary flowing across the TV. “We’ll have to throw your body into the tall weeds and let the animals drag you away. Spittle, spittle, spider, where you gonna hide her?” Aunt Clover spit into her palm and smacked it against the sofa’s arm. “In the blood. That’s where.”

Whenever Aunt Clover said the word blood, which she often did, she would say it like she was from a people who had shed more of it than any other. She was sitting slumped on the old sofa, the same color as the rust ring in our bathroom sink. Her feet were up on the coffee table, spaced far enough apart that the empty cigarette cartons, beer bottles, and small squares of foil could pile between her ankles, the bracelets on them sliding down to her dirty heels.

She used the nightie wrapped around her shoulders to dab the sweat on her forehead. The satin was a creamy blue. Nearly as old as she was, which to Daffy and me at the time seemed an hour younger than the dust in our house. Truth be told, Aunt Clover wasn’t more than a week into being thirty. She just wore the hardness of life a little too early.

“You think you could be any fucking louder with that hammer?” she asked, her head tossing with each word.

Even though Aunt Clover never watched TV with the sound on, she was always screaming about someone being so loud, she couldn’t hear the damn program.

“Stuff your fist in your mouth and choke on it, Clover.” Mom hammered even louder.

After every window was covered, I started to doubt Mom’s fury because all she did then was cry as she walked down the hall to her bedroom, dropping the hammer along the way.

“Your mom’s the wife to a ghost now, girls,” Aunt Clover said as she leaned forward, managing to find her blue eyeliner rather quickly amid the trash on the coffee table. “She’ll never be young again.”

Without using a mirror, Aunt Clover circled her eyes with the eyeliner and drew it out to each of her temples. On these straight lines, she crossed tiny x’s until it looked like the barbs on the wire fence by the railroad tracks.

“Aunt Clover?” Daffy watched her. “How come you always wear blue eyeliner?”

Daffy sang out the word blue until I joined her.

“Because when our skin drops off,” Aunt Clover said, “blue is the color we’ll be beneath. How’s my barbed wire look?” She turned her head side to side, showing the tiny x’s. “Will it protect me from the nine-eyed monsters who try to feast on a woman’s blood?”

We nodded as she stood, slipping her black fringed vest over her crop top, cut low enough to see the lace of her bra. No matter what she wore, she always had her faux fur leopard collar on. It had rounded flaps and a snap in the front, like the collars I’d seen on sailors in the paintings in the books I got from the library.

She took the collar off her neck to knock it against her leg. The puffs of dirt kicked up in the air. It would be the most cleaning it would see. When she wrapped the collar back around her neck, she curled her tongue into a purr as she clicked the snap.

I stood up on the sofa cushion to pet the collar myself. “Where’d you get it from again, Aunt Clover?”

“I got it from the time I visited the jungle,” she said. “It was my only souvenir. Now get your sticky fingers off it.”

“How’d you get it in the jungle, Aunt Clover?” Daffy crossed her arms. “You ain’t ever been outta Chillicothe.”

“There’s jungles here, too, child.”

She’d never called either of us “child” before. It sounded soft in her accent, like she’d said it a hundred times over boiling soup.

“Now, hand me my scarf.” She pointed to the nightie on the sofa.

After I gave it to her, she draped it over her shoulders. She called it her nighttime scarf. “Because,” as she’d tell you, “only women who carry the river on their backs get to wear it. And I’ve been carrying the river on my back since I was old enough to know you either carry the river or it carries you. My nighttime scarf is the ripple of the water. The type of ripple that only comes in the moonlight.”

We followed behind her into the bathroom, her long, stringy red hair grazing the back pockets on her denim skirt. We sat on the edge of the tub and watched her use the pink brush to feather her bangs. Then we stared at the white leather belt she wore. It had a bloody fingerprint by the gold-toned buckle and more in the area over her right hip. The blood was from a busted lip she’d once gotten. Another time, from a fist to the nose. A time after that, a cut to the back of her hand. Always she would rub the fresh blood into the tiny swirls on her finger and press it hard into the leather, blowing on it to help it dry faster.

“You think I’ll make a lot of money tonight, girls?” She laid the hairbrush down to push up both of her boobs. “Enough to go to Brazil?” She shook her hips. “Or Morocco? Yeah, that’s where I’m going.”

We watched as she brushed what teeth she had left with her finger. After she spit, she looked up into the mirror. There were small pieces of clear tape in a few places on the glass. As she studied her reflection, she leaned closer to it with a frown, her eyes on her right shoulder.

“There’s another one,” she said, picking up the small roll of tape from the sink. “Another crack.”

She tore off a piece of tape and put it over the reflected image of her shoulder.

“You’ve got to seal the cracks,” she said, pressing down on the tape. “If you don’t, they’ll keep getting bigger and bigger until they break open completely and steal your name from you. Remember this, girls. One day your skin will crack, too. Your skin will crack even more because you’re twins and you both have witches’ marbles for eyes.”

She stared at the tape on the glass, checking to make sure its edges were tightly sealed.

“Help me,” she said. “Help me make sure the cracks are sealed good.”

We hopped up from the tub and stood on our toes, pressing our fingers into the tape, the glass cold behind it.

“Press hard now,” she said. “Give it all you’ve got. You don’t want your aunt cracking to pieces, do you?”

We pressed so hard, the three of us grunted. That seemed to satisfy Aunt Clover as she smiled at her reflection.

“Spittle, spittle, spider, where you gonna hide her?” She spit into her palm and smacked it against the mirror glass. “Right there,” she said, turning out the light.

“There’s frozen dinners in the freezer.” She grabbed her purse on her way to the front door, her nighttime scarf trailing after her. “It’s a good thing we live in a cinderblock house.”

“Why’s that, Aunt Clover?” I asked.

“You can’t burn it down.” She winked, then slammed the door.

Once she was gone, Daffy and me mimicked her walk, sashaying our hips side to side. We giggled and fell back against the window. When one of Dad’s pant legs fell over Daffy’s shoulder, she stopped laughing and asked, “Why you think Momma didn’t throw Daddy’s clothes in the mud like she did his shoes? Or cut ’em up like she did his belts?”

“Maybe it’s for the wind,” I said. “When it blows in through the window, it’ll get to wear the clothes. Get to wear his old shirts and pants. Maybe that’s why she did it. To give the wind some clothes, so it don’t come in our house naked all the time.”

“Let’s get her to say that in a whisper,” Daffy herself whispered. “And then we’ll keep it like a secret.”

We raced each other to our mother’s bedroom. It was at the very end of the narrow hall. The white door was closed. Daffy stuck her finger into the keyhole and turned it, like she was unlocking it. Inside, the room was dark. The bulb in the ceiling fan had not been replaced after burning out. The only source of light came from a green lamp sitting on the floor in the corner, but the shade was so dirty, the light had little chance.

“Momma?” Daffy called from the doorway. “You in here?”

We stepped slowly, using our bare toes to feel around the items littered on the floor. There was no bed frame any longer, just the gray mattress, printed with big blue flowers, pressed against the wall. The remaining furnishings were bare. An oak dresser, the drawers open and the clothes spilling out. The pink side table had legs at one time, but Mom broke them off, so the drawer sat directly on the floor, the tabletop within easy reach of the mattress.

I ran my fingers along the walls of the room, painted mint green years earlier and graffitied in marker with the words two addicts made together. I could tell my father’s handwriting from my mother’s. He always wrote with a slant to the right. She always wrote with a slant to the left. Their words never fully touching. In some places, their writing looked like drawn birds flying away from one another.

“Momma?” Daffy called again.

We saw her move on the mattress. She was using Dad’s canvas bag from the army as a blanket.

“Who is it?” Our mother’s voice came in a husky whisper. “Who’s in my room?”

“Hi, Momma.” Daffy stepped over to the mattress and sat down on the drift of dirty clothes there. “Why’d you put Daddy’s clothes up on the windows?”

“What?” Mom’s eyes rolled as she felt around the cluttered bedside table.

“His things. Mommmma.” Daffy had to repeat the question not once, but three times more. “Listen to me.”

“Oh, I hung his clothes, Daffy. It was me,” Mom said. “I did it.” Her words sounded like they had glue on them, each one sticking together.

“We know you did, Momma,” I said. “But why? Was it to dress the wind?”

“He’s gone now, babies.” She turned over. “Your daddy’s dead.”

“We know that,” I shouted. “We already know that.”

She sat up, blinking, Dad’s army bag sliding down to her waist.

“Well, why the fuck didn’t you say so?” She ran her fingers through her greasy hair. “Ya little shits. Is Clover already gone?”

“Yep,” Daffy said. “She wore her barbed wire. She’ll be gone all night.”

“Fuck.” Mom laid her hand on her head.

I nudged Daffy and pointed down to the mattress. There was a new hole in the side of it, a couple of inches across, the edges frayed. I could see the end of a lighter sticking out of it, a few rubber bands, and what appeared to be the cap off a pen.

“Leave me alone, girls.” Mom turned over, the smell of body sweat drifting out to us.

We held our noses as Daffy asked, “But why’d you put Daddy’s clothes on the windows?”

“Well, goddamn.” Mom wiped the dribble off her chin. “So the world will think a man still lives here. If they know we’re a house of women now, they’ll make us sit naked on gravel until it embeds in the backs of our legs. We’ll never be able to swim in the river then. We’ll sink like stones. Do you know what will happen? We’ll walk so heavy we lose our breath. The rest of our lives will be us trying to find it again. Now leave me alone.” She slapped the mattress, the smell of urine rising up in the air. “I can’t think with you two on me all the damn time.”

“C’mon, Daffy.” I pulled her up. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

On our way out, Daffy grabbed the sleeve of the plaid shirt on the window. She yanked it so hard, the fabric ripped and tore off the nail. The sound took over the room and caused our mother to rise up as quickly as we’d ever seen her do.

“I’m sorry, Momma.” Daffy stood there shaking as she dropped the shirt. “I didn’t mean to—”

“No.” Mom cried as she crawled off the mattress, her knees banging hard against the floor and making a thumping sound. “Why would you do this, you endlessly stupid girl?”

“I’m sorry, Momma,” Daffy said in a small voice.

Mom grabbed Daffy by the arm. When I tried to step in, she yanked me into her, too.

“I’m gonna sell you both to the paper mill,” Mom said as she threw us down onto the floor. “They’re gonna put you up on the big conveyor belt like you’re logs and the saw is gonna come for you. Whosh, whosh.” She made the sounds of a saw as she ran her nails up and down our skin. “It’s gonna cut you into thin paper. Whosh, whosh. You ain’t gonna be no girls no more. You’re gonna be quiet. Quiet as paper.”

“No, Momma, no.” We both screamed.

“Oh, yes Momma, yes.” She dug her nails deeper into our skin. “After you’re turned into paper, I’m gonna burn you until you’re nothing but ash.”

“No.” I reached up and slapped my mother across the face. As Daffy scooted back and cried against the wall, I stayed pinned beneath Mom. I frowned up at her, and she looked down at me. Growling, she picked up Dad’s shirt from the floor and held it to her heaving chest.

“Bad girls, very bad girls.” She hugged the shirt and crawled across the floor to the lamp, where she checked the fabric under the light as if searching for tears or holes. She held the shirt close as the light caught on her face.

Someone had once told her she had beautiful cheeks, so she cut her red hair in a short shag that was so common in the magazines she looked at in those late 1970s. She would bleach and spike her tips, leaving the roots to show. Maybe at one time she’d had beautiful cheeks, but by then her hooded eyes were sunken and watery, the green irises having disappeared more and more until she looked to have nothing but black pupils, a reflection of the shadows around her.

Her nose constantly ran, the nostrils red because of it. She had marks on her skin from her endless picking that got worse at night, the scratch lines connecting the old sores with the new ones. The sweat on her forehead always made the hair at her crown wet, and the dirt she didn’t wash off every day collected in the wrinkles she was too young to have. Even at six years old, I wanted to take her and put her into the tub because I thought I could wash it all away as if it were nothing more than the filth of having fallen down.

“Why would you do this to your daddy?” she asked as she cradled her pointy chin into the shirt. “Why would you yank him off the window like that? Huh? Why would you do this to him? I hate you both. You’re half of the same rotten apple. I wish the two of you’d never been born.”

She ran toward us on all fours, screaming. We jumped out of the room. Our hiding place wasn’t very good. It was in the kitchen, in the narrow space between the green refrigerator and the paneled wall where the old calendars were thrown. We piled them on top of us and waited.

“You’re breathing too loud, Arc,” Daffy said in a whisper. “She’ll find us and feed us to the needle monster.”

But we knew when we heard Mom shout “Stay the fuck out of my room” and slam her bedroom door that she would not emerge for the rest of the night.

“We’ll be okay now,” I said to my trembling sister. “I’ll make us something to eat and we can invite anyone we want to have dinner with us.”

“Even Daddy?” she asked.

“Even Daddy,” I said.

We crawled back out of our hiding place, the calendars sliding out with us.

“Sometimes Momma is scary,” Daffy said as she took a bowl and filled it with water from the sink. She cleared a spot on the table and set it down. She tapped the side of the bowl until the water rippled, then she said, “Hi, Daddy. Arc’s gonna make us something to eat.” She tapped the bowl again, the ripples answering her. “Daddy, you’re so funny.” She laughed like the ripples had told her a joke.

While I opened the freezer and grabbed the box of macaroni and cheese, Daffy pushed the stool across the floor and stood up on it to reach the phone on the wall. As her tears fell on the buttons, she dialed Mamaw Milkweed’s number, counting the seconds before she answered.

“Hi, hi, Mamaw? Mamaw Milkweed, you hear me?” Daffy shouted into the phone. “It’s me. Daffy. Mom’s a mad rat, Mamaw. She put Daddy’s shirts and pants on all the windows and she tried to turn me and Arc into paper.”

“Don’t worry, honey.” Mamaw Milkweed’s voice filled the kitchen as I peeled the plastic back on the macaroni and cheese and set the container in the oven. “I’ll take care of it.”

The next morning Mamaw Milkweed came wearing her sheer scarves in three shades of fuchsia. She had a bolt of bright yellow fabric beneath her arm.

“You can’t drape your house in a dead man’s clothes,” she said to Mom. “I don’t know what gets in your head at times, Adelyn.”

“It’s so shiny,” Daffy said as she reached out toward the yellow fabric. “It’s the prettiest thing we’ll ever have, Arc. I bet it’s the stuff butterflies use for their wings.”

“That fabric ain’t gonna look right ’round here, Momma,” Mom said as she looked into a small mirror on the kitchen table. She was getting ready to go out somewhere and was dragging blue liner across her eyelids. She kept circling them until she had to sharpen the pencil again, using a knife to do so.

“Where’s Clover?” Mamaw Milkweed made room for the bolt on the table by gathering up the dirty dishes. The sink was full, so she had to set them on the floor. She used her foot to slide them out of sight.

“She went to Paris,” Mom said, pushing her lips out and making kissy noises toward her reflection. “I don’t know why you’ve got your mind set on new curtains anyways, Momma. Our curtains are fine. In fact, they’re marvelous.”

“Think about the children, Adelyn.” Mamaw Milkweed put her hands on her hips.

“Mamaw Milkweed?” Daffy reached up and tugged on her sleeve.

“Oh, I almost forgot. Here ya go, babies.” Mamaw unzipped her fanny pack and handed my sister and me a new set of markers.

The flooring of our house wasn’t wood, it wasn’t linoleum, it wasn’t carpeting. It was cold hard concrete that’d been painted white by someone who I suppose had been trying to cover up the cold hard fact of the ground they walked on. Through the dirt and grime, my sister and me drew. Houses with stick figure families. Dogs and cats. A clown or two. Horses we wished were ours and flowers we wished we had.

It was Mamaw Milkweed who brought us markers to make sure we’d always have enough red to color the ladybug’s back, enough blue for the sky, enough green to bring the hills to life. We even drew our mother and father. We gave them smiles because it was a drawing, and in drawings you don’t have to tell the truth.

“Thank you, Mamaw Milkweed,” Daffy said as she beamed up at her.

We always called her Mamaw Milkweed, named after the plant the Monarch butterflies laid their eggs on. I can’t tell you how often we would reach up to the flat moles on her neck and say they were eggs left behind by the passing butterflies that swarmed the flowers out by the back door.

“You’re welcome, honey.” Mamaw Milkweed patted Daffy on the head. “Now you and your sister go play. I’ve gotta speak to your momma.”

We ran out into the hall but didn’t go any farther, as we laid our ears against the wall.

“Hanging their father up like that,” Mamaw Milkweed was saying. “Shame on you, Adelyn. How the hell are they supposed to get over his death if it’s his clothes that block the very light they should be seeing? Now I meant what I said over his grave. If you don’t clean up, I mean you, the house, everything, I’m gonna take ’em again.”

“Momma, don’t start.” Mom groaned. “Clover’s here. Everything’s fine. The girls are happy.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?”

“You’re not gonna take my kids, Momma. I’ll kill myself if you do. You hear me? If they’re not here, what reason do I have to be better? I love them. Please, Momma. I swear, I’ll kill myself. You wanna clean up your daughter’s blood? You wanna bury her? You better pick me out one hell of a nice coffin, Momma. ’Cause it’s gonna be all your fault if you take my babies.”

“Oh, Adelyn.” Mamaw Milkweed’s sigh was deep and weary.

When I heard the chair’s legs scrape against the floor, I knew my mother had gotten up to hug Mamaw Milkweed. It was something she always did so she could reach into Mamaw’s fanny pack and take what money was up for grabs.

Silence followed until Mamaw Milkweed tsk-tsked and said, “All this blocking of light. You’ll love yellow curtains, Adelyn. Make ya happier to see such a bright color. You need more yellow in your life, honey.”

“She’s coming,” I whispered into Daffy’s ear.

We grabbed hands and ran outside, flopping down in the grass like we’d been there all along as Mamaw Milkweed came out to go to her car. She smiled at us as she reached into the back seat and got her workhorse of a sewing machine.

I cupped my hands over my mouth and hollered, “You gonna sew something, Mamaw Milkweed?”

“I’m gonna sew you some new curtains, honey.” She carried the sewing machine with both hands and a series of grunts.

“New curtains, Arc.” Daffy beamed. “I hope she makes them for my room first.”

Within minutes of the front screen door closing, we could hear the steady hum of the sewing machine. We also heard the arguing. Daffy sat down and covered her ears.

I grabbed one of her hands and asked, “You wanna see something cool, Daffy?”

I pulled her up, and we ran into the backyard.

“Look there.” I pointed to the hornets’ nest balanced in the branches of a dying maple.

“Oh.” Daffy sighed. “It’s so pretty, Arc. Bzzz, bzzz, bzzzz. You think them hornets will be our friends?”

“Maybe not. The nest is high. Means it’ll be a hard winter,” I said as Mamaw Milkweed would have.

Daffy clapped at the nest, while I sat down and used a rock to scrape back layers of ground at the base of the maple’s trunk. I tried not to listen to Mom’s yells coming from inside the house, getting louder and louder all while the sewing machine continued. Mamaw Milkweed’s voice was like a distant echo.

“Clap with me, Arc.” Daffy buzzed around.

“Can’t,” I said. “Busy digging. I’m gonna find something nice to make Momma happy again.”

We both looked up at the sound of Mom running out the back screen door. She was naked except for a bright yellow scrap of fabric she wore around her hips like a fallen sash. She gripped a vodka bottle in her hand and had white powder around her nostrils.

“Mamaw Milkweed is gonna be mad,” Daffy said as I stood up from the hole I’d dug.

“Momma?” I yelled at her. “Put your clothes on. Put your clothes on, Momma.”

I wished for camisoles and cutoff shorts to rain down from the sky at that very moment.

“She’s so sweaty,” Daffy said as we stared at how our mother’s body glistened.

“Momma, stop.” I screamed. “Please. What you doing?”

“She’s dancing.” Daffy giggled.

“Dancing?” I thought she was jerking away from something, like a bee or a fly. It took me a second to see my mother was swaying in tempo. When she fell down to the ground, she didn’t stop. It was as though she didn’t recognize her back was against the grass. She kept swinging her arms and kicking her legs through the air.

“Not everyone’s momma can dance on the ground, Arc,” Daffy said, laughing louder.

Mom’s orange lipstick had smeared. Her electric blue mascara ran in lines over the boils in her cheeks. She was a thin woman. This thinness gave her body hard lines akin to corners struggling to make what should be curved, like her waist and hips. My sister and me silently stared at those narrow hips of our mother, curious how we could have been born from between them.

“I’m free,” Mom screamed as she got back up.

When she ran by us, Daffy reached out, her fingers grazing the trailing end of the yellow sash.

“I’m free,” Mom screamed again. “I’m—”

The hiccups came for our mother just as Mamaw Milkweed stepped out of the house, her reading glasses down on her nose and a measuring tape still in her hand. She gripped the curtain panel she had already sewn as her eyes widened at the sight of her daughter.

“Adelyn, where are your clothes?” Mamaw Milkweed shouted.

“I’m so-rry, Mom-ma.”

As if to prove the empty vodka bottle in her hand was nothing more than a vase, Mom began to pick dandelions from the yard.

“For goodness’ sake. The children, Adelyn.” Mamaw Milkweed looked at Daffy and me. She worked hard for a smile as she shook out the curtain in her hand and chased after her daughter. “Come here, Adelyn. Stop this very instant.”

But Mom wouldn’t. She kept running, picking dandelions and shoving them down into the bottle until the opening was sealed with stems. Only then did she hold the bottle up to her mother and say, “I picked—you flo-wers.”

“I see.” Mamaw Milkweed quickly wrapped the curtain around Mom’s body that was shaking with each and every hiccup. “Come inside now, honey. Let’s get you dressed and calmed down.”

The two women walked inside the house. My mother staring at the dandelions and her mother staring at the bright yellow curtain. A minute later Mom returned to run around the yard, the curtain sliding down her back like a falling cape. As she skipped and hopped, Mamaw Milkweed cried loudly in the kitchen, saying the curtains had been “a goddamn mistake.”

“Arc?” Daffy leaned against my side.

“Yeah?” I leaned back against hers.

“Mamaw Milkweed’s cries sounds like apples falling from a tree.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll probably sound like that one day, too.”

We watched Mom lie in the grass, this time not moving except for the blinking in her eyes and the slight rise of her chest each time a hiccup came.

“Momma’s gonna lay here so long,” Daffy said, “she’s gonna turn into a town. We’ll live there and nothing bad will happen. No Daddys will die, and no rivers will freeze, except when we want to skate on top of them with cats.”

“Where’s my blue-eyed girl?” Mom asked. Whenever she did that, I would close my left eye and Daffy would shut her right one, until only our blue eyes were showing. “Where’s my green-eyed girl?” Mom asked. We each closed our one blue eye, leaving our green eyes open.

Mom smiled as Daffy stepped over and began to pick the remaining dandelions from the yard. I joined her. Together we laid them upon our mother.

“You’re bu-bury-ing me?” she asked.

“I’ll dig you up later,” I said.

“I kno-ow you will, kiddo.” She smiled up at me. “You di-ig up everything.”

This was something she would say over a decade later, when a journalist from New York came to interview her.

“My Arc dug it all up,” she would tell them. “My Arc likes digging. She digs up everything.”

“Why?” they would ask as if they really cared, but it was just their job.

“Because she was an archaeologist,” my mother would answer.

“Where is she at now? This archaeologist daughter of yours?”

“In the dirt.” Mom’s eyes would light up with hope. “In the dirt digging something else up. Whatever she digs up, she’ll bring home to me. She always did. She always will. When she was a kid, she’d bring home bottle caps. Another time, a piece of old rope. A time after that, someone’s retainer that’d been in the ground a long time. You could tell from the way the wire had rusted. Can you imagine? I wonder what she’ll bring home to me this time.”

Then my mother will sit and wait, getting high enough to know there is little space between the past and the present. In that space, maybe I really will come back home to her. She will think this because it was my promise.

But I will never come back home. I’m too dead to do a thing like that.