Girls on Fire

THEM

DEX’S MOTHER KNEW SHE SHOULD be afraid for her daughter. This, she’d been told, was the tragedy of birthing a girl. To live in fear — it was the fate of any parent, maybe, but the special provenance of a mother to a daughter, one woman raising another, knowing too well what could happen. This was what lurked inside the luckiest delivery rooms, the ones whose balloons screamed It’s a girl!: pink cigars and flowered onesies and fear.

So she’d been told.

Now she was supposed to be more afraid than ever. Now they were all more afraid than ever, the mothers of Battle Creek, because whatever illusions they’d had about their children and their home and the inevitability that the future would unfold as uneventfully as the past had been punctured by the bullet that Ellison boy blew through his brainstem. And Dex’s mother had been afraid, that first night. She and Jimmy had stood in their daughter’s doorway, watching her sleep, dipping a toe in the unimaginable. They’d counted her breaths, the easy rise and fall of her chest, and Dex’s mother felt her own lungs sighing in time with her daughter’s, breathing for her the way she had when her daughter was a newborn, when she’d sat by the bassinet, fingertips resting lightly on infant chest, because only by feeling the rhythm of breath and the flutter of heartbeat, one moment after the next, could she reassure herself that the baby was still alive.

They’d resolved everything would be different, after the tragedy. Nothing was different, of course, because it wasn’t their tragedy, and Dex’s mother had little patience for the mothers of Battle Creek who seemed unable to comprehend this basic fact. Boys weren’t supposed to be vulnerable; it overturned the natural order of things, a boy falling prey to pain. That was a girl’s purview. So maybe it was understandable that they groped for other answers, these mothers, still twittering all these months later about what had “really” happened, about demonic influences and satanic cults, about heavy metal and blood sacrifice, but it infuriated her, all these ginned-up monsters under the bed, as if that would recuse them from worrying about anything that mattered, overdoses and car crashes and AIDS and, especially in the case of those mothers of sons who thought only daughters should be worried for, accidentally raising little proto-rapists who thought wining and dining a girl meant getting her drunk enough that she’d swallow a mouthful of ejaculate without complaint. Dex’s mother hadn’t known the Ellison boy, but she’d known plenty of boys like him. There had always been boys like him. And she knew whatever trouble he’d gotten into, if there had been trouble, he’d probably brought it on himself. All these mothers, so concerned about the terrible things that could happen to their children — so unwilling to think about the things their children might make happen. Maybe this was why Dex’s mother never had managed to muster up much fear for her daughter. Her daughter wasn’t the type to make things happen.

Dex’s mother was well aware that she embarrassed her daughter. But her daughter couldn’t know how much she embarrassed her mother. How she, too, often dreamed of some other, prettier, happier daughter, imagined showing her off to an admiring world, gaze at my lovely creation and marvel at what I have wrought.

You created a child; you nursed her, bathed her, wiped her, loved her, kept her alive until she grew up; then she grew up. Ugly and sullen and wanting nothing more than to be a motherless child.

Dex’s mother, despite claims by her husband and daughter to the contrary, did in fact have a healthy sense of humor. She had for many years, for example, found her life hilarious. That everything she had been and wanted had been whittled away, her edges smoothed into a featureless surface without a name of its own. Hannah Dexter’s mother. Jimmy Dexter’s wife. You when something was needed; she when something was not. She felt, at times, that what had seemed like an infinity of choice turned out to be a funnel, life narrowing itself one bad decision at a time, each mistake cutting the options by half, spiraling her ever downward until there was nowhere left to fall but into a small, dark hole that had no bottom.

Choosing a life for yourself, that was the joke. She had chosen Jimmy Dexter, yes, but only after the state had chosen to yank her scholarship because the governor had chosen to cut educational funding; she had chosen the charming guitar player with the lopsided smile, yes, the one who kept her up all night declaiming Vonnegut and debating Vietnam and allowing her, through a haze of smoke and pseudointellectual acid rants on the doors of perception, to pretend she was still in college — but she had chosen that Jimmy, not the one who couldn’t understand why he wasn’t to play his guitar while the baby slept or why the changing table wasn’t an appropriate surface for rolling joints. They’d fallen in love because they both desperately wanted the same thing: Better lives. Bigger lives. It never occurred to her that it should matter how they expected to get there. She believed in work; he believed in hope. Here was the biggest joke: It turned out this wasn’t wanting the same thing at all.

They’d hollowed each other out, she and Jimmy, and now they were good for no one but each other. Most days, she thought that was no worse than anyone else had it, that the world was full of empty husks, smiling and following through. Some days, though, the bad ones and the best ones, she thought about running.

Her daughter would leave for college soon. When the time came, Dex’s mother thought, she would leave, too. She was almost worried that he’d leave her first, except that if Jimmy still had it in him to leave, she might have found it in herself to love him again, and to stay. She wanted her daughter gone so they could get on with it; she wanted her daughter to stay, wanted to hold on and scream stop growing stop changing stop leaving—then Lacey came along and soon there would be nothing left to hold onto, because piece by piece, Lacey was taking her daughter away.

Dex’s mother knew what it was to lose herself in someone brighter, to be trapped by the gravitational field of another sun. She knew what happened when it emerged that the sun was only a lightbulb, and what happened when the lightbulb burned out. It didn’t seem fair that her mistakes hadn’t been genetically encoded in her daughter, that there’d been no evolutionary adaptation, no innate biological resistance to light and charm. It made her shamefully jealous, watching her daughter fall in love, and what else could you call it — jealous and wistful and mindful of younger days, and maybe it even made her a little nostalgic for the strum of Jimmy’s guitar and the way his eyes had always found her in a sparse crowd, fixing her with every sorry lyric he sang. But more than anything, it made her feel like the mother of a daughter, like she’d taken Communion and joined a fellowship of women across distance and time, because finally, as had long been promised, Dex’s mother was afraid.