Where She Left Me

We cut through the downtown park, racing curfew, when I saw the empty outdoor stage. The sun had begun its slow retreat over Tampa Bay, washing the sky in tangerine and blood orange. Behind the stage, palm trees swayed, their shadows stretching across the pavement, long fingers pointing in every direction.

I climbed up the wooden platform and threw out my arms. “I’m tired of being admired!” I belted, twisting my voice into the singsong lilt of Madeline Kahn. I swayed my hips, over-exaggerating each movement like I’d seen her do in Blazing Saddles, every line rehearsed in my head a hundred times before. My mother, standing below, burst into laughter, her head tilting back, her mouth a perfect O of delight.

I grinned and curtsied, my bare feet sliding against the warm wood. It never occurred to me that I was sixteen, that maybe the words I sang weren’t exactly innocent.

That’s when I heard the clapping.

It was faint at first, but then it grew, deliberate, measured. A figure stepped out of the shadows near the tree line, and I saw his face. Paul. My mother’s next mistake.

She shifted, adjusting her red bandana top, the one she wore when she wanted to be noticed. The evening light made her hair gleam, long and brown, a striking contrast to my own sandy blonde. We shared the same eyes, deep brown, the same curves that men noticed too easily. But she used hers differently.

“You go ahead, Ladybug,” she murmured, her voice dipping into that smoky softness I’d come to dread. “I’ll catch up later.”

“No.” I leapt off the stage, reaching for her arm, but she was already gone, slipping out of my grasp as if I were nothing but air.

Paul beckoned with one fat finger. She went.

I watched as she sauntered toward him, swinging her hips beneath the denim mini-skirt we’d promised to share. He leaned against a palm tree, the bronze bark fibrous beneath his sweating hands. The park lights flickered on, humming with electricity, but they stayed in the dark, their outlines blending into the night.

Paul snapped open his Zippo, flicked it to life, and lit two cigarettes, handing her one. She took it with a flutter of her lashes, feigned surprise, as if he’d gifted her something rare and precious. When he leaned in to whisper, she laughed. A light, breathy sound. A sound I hated.

I waited for her to look at me. When she did, it was the look.

I knew my cue. The scene had played before.

I turned and walked back to the shelter alone, my hands clenched, my face burning. I was losing her again.

Her street name was Cricket. She picked it up in Berkeley, in a place called All My Children, where they sat in circles and screamed into pillows. Dragon and Chaga Moonbeam ran things, guiding them through the trauma of being born.

Mom mailed me letters about underground cloning facilities and the US military transmitting her thoughts to other galaxies. Could I hear them too?

I was fifteen and living on Doris’s bus route when those letters arrived, crumpled from their journey across the country. Doris was my favorite city bus driver—twenty-five years on the job, looking like a bespectacled Mrs. Jefferson from the old sitcoms. She smelled like gardenia and fresh bread and didn’t mind when I read Mom’s letters to her.

“No woman should have to hang off the arms of men,” she told me. “That’s why you gotta sign up for school.”

I agreed, mostly because my free student bus pass was about to expire. And I missed drama club.

Doris kicked kids off if we rode in packs, but when I was alone, she invited me up front. She taught me the things mothers were supposed to teach their daughters—how to cook a proper plate of grits, what to bring to the beach, the right way to iron a man’s shirt, though she never told me why that mattered.

I wondered what it would be like to have her for a mother.

Mom came back from Berkeley with nothing but a thrift-store backpack and a few stories. There was Arrow, the man with a bank of surveillance cameras mounted next to his waterbed, the one who could snort a line of coke and make love to her at the same time. There was the moment of clarity, the screaming realization in Arrow’s bathtub that what they were doing was illegal, oh my God, illegal, and her naked escape through the window, down the hill, back to Chaga Moonbeam.

Chaga paid for the bus ticket to Florida.

She met a man somewhere between Albuquerque and Houston who said he was Fabio’s cousin. They hopped off the bus and ended up under a bridge, humping like teenagers, she told me later, in front of a group of migrant apple pickers warming their hands around a barrel fire.

I was sixteen and sleeping at the St. Petersburg bus depot when she found me again. “I can tell you’ve been cloned,” she said, hugging me close. Then she leaned back, her fingers tracing my cheek. “You should moisturize.”

For a little while, we played house in a downtown shelter. We worked as motel housekeepers, took the bus with Doris every morning, sang Whitney Houston songs on the way home. She stopped talking about cloning machines and government conspiracies. She pinkie-swore she’d give me a good Christian upbringing, took me to St. Luke’s Lutheran twice before she grew restless.

Then Paul showed up.

He was fresh off a bus from New Jersey, a man with alcohol on his breath and nothing in his pockets. I watched him watching her. The night she followed him into the park, I knew what was coming.

When she came back to the shelter, drunk and laughing, Francine, the manager, met her at the door, arms crossed. “If you leave, she leaves, remember?”

Mom didn’t argue. Didn’t hesitate.

She grabbed my bundle of cash from beneath the mattress and tossed it to Paul. Then she packed her bag, linked her arm through his, and walked out the door.

She never even looked back.

Doris was already waiting when I dragged my garbage bag onto her bus the next morning. She sighed and pointed to the empty seat behind her. “Get some sleep, Baby Girl.”

I curled up, whispering those words over and over like a lullaby until I slipped into dreams.

When I woke up, there was a boy sitting beside me. Max. He had sun-bleached hair and a Buccaneers shirt two sizes too big.

“No school today?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Can’t. No home address.”

He nodded. “I know a place,” he said. “A foster home. They’ll give you an address, get you into school.”

The world outside the window looked alive with possibilities. The sun climbed higher. Palm fronds danced in the Gulf breeze. I imagined stepping off the bus and into a new life.

I stepped off with him instead.

The door slammed shut behind me.