Detroitus
Jessica Dealing
Nel’s mother, newly deceased, materialized one day in the kitchen as Nel was preparing her morning coffee. She jumped at her mother’s likeness—beautiful, zaftig, and frowning—consisting of a gauzy translucence, like morning mist, and coffee sloshed from the mug and drip-dropped onto the floor as Nel gaped at her. It wasn’t the apparition itself but that it was her mother that Nel found most alarming, and yet it didn’t stop her from noticing the way she wavered at the edges like gossamer.
She couldn’t resist sweeping a hand through it, which briefly stirred the image.
“Stop that,” her mother scolded, turning away from her reach. “That’s no way to treat the dead.” She glanced around the apartment disapprovingly as she hovered a foot above the ground—all the better, Nel suspected, to look down her nose at it—and her gaze passed over Nel, too, like she was just another of the dirty dishes on the counter, and finally fixed on the window, which overlooked an abandoned neighborhood. “Good Lord, it’s gotten even worse,” she said, clucking her tongue.
Nel knew she was speaking of the city itself, as if the crumbling houses behind them, missing doors and windows like teeth, was a synecdoche of the whole city. Nel supposed the metaphor accurate, except that her mother, who had moved away before the housing bust ravaged the city’s economy, had no way of knowing that. Then again, her mother had always associated a particular dirtiness to Detroit, and the overgrown terraces heaped with piles of wreckage—disintegrating mattresses, old tires the color of mud—didn’t exactly prove the case otherwise.
“Well,” Nel said, scorched in annoyance, “at least we know you’re not in heaven.”
“You didn’t come to the funeral.” her mother said, not turning from the window.
In truth, Nel hadn’t seen her mother in over a decade. She’d run away as a teenager, never looked back. She might not have even known her mother had passed if it weren’t for Frank, her mother’s boyfriend, who had somehow found her and called to break the news. A heart attack, fitting in a metaphorical sense, love and violence often hand-in-hand as far as they were concerned. She didn’t know what to tell the man on the phone—she had no desire to comfort him—and when she hung up, she realized she hadn’t known what to feel either. Nothing came to the surface, which she might have been relieved by, if not for the sensation of something sharp and metallic lurking in the corners of her subconscious, alive and lying in wait.
Then Nel suddenly registered Niblet, her mother’s damn dog, strapped to her ghostly chest in the kind of sling meant for babies.
“What is he doing here?” Nel glared at Niblet, who blinked back at her with eyes large and wet.
Her mother turned up her nose in indignation, stroking Niblet’s head in long motions that peeled back the skin on his forehead and had the unnerving effect of making his large, wet eyes bulge from his face. “We happened to reunite in the afterlife.”
Nel needed a cigarette—she would try quitting again when she wasn’t dealing with the undead.
“Still?” her mother asked when Nel shook one from the pack. “I hate that habit of yours.”
“I hate that habit of yours,” Nel returned, chinning toward the shaking mutt. He was always shaking, god knew why. Being too small was Nel’s guess. A teacup Chihuahua. As if you needed a teacup version of a dog already the size of a squirrel.
“She doesn’t mean it, Nibbie,” her mom baby-voiced into Niblet’s fur.
Shaking her head, Nel called her own dogs, Pit and Rot—who had somehow slept through the morning’s events—to the front door and leashed them for their walk. Once outside, Nel lit her cigarette and took long soothing drags that alternated between menthol and February’s iced air, and watched them piss holes in the snow.
She had gotten the dogs from one of the regular customers, who had come into the bar particularly distressed one evening because his girlfriend was making him get rid of them.
“A beautiful pair of Huskies,” was how Garrett had described them that evening. He clutched his pint with both hands and stared distantly into it. “I didn’t even want them at first,” he admitted. “I wanted to get a Pitbull and a Rottweiler. Dogs that would protect us, make people think twice before messing with us.” The Huskies had been a compromise to their landlord’s rules, which forbade so-called attack breeds and which—for some reason that felt arbitrary to Garrett—didn’t consider Huskies as such. He named them after the dogs he’d wanted, and fell in love with them faster than he expected. Except one fateful day, they were caught in the backyard together, gleefully ripping apart a squirrel as his girlfriend watched in horror, refusing to put their soon-to-arrive baby at risk of the same fate. Garrett had tried to convince her they would know the difference. “It’s all about the smells,” he had argued. The baby would smell like them, like family. Pit and Rot would recognize them as part of their pack. But his girlfriend remained obstinate. “They’ve tasted blood now.”
So that’s how Nel ended up with them, a soft spot for anything that resisted compliance. Besides, the last thing the city needed were more strays. They already roamed the streets in droves.
When Nel got back upstairs her mother was straightening pillows to their proper right angles on the sofa and ignoring her. Well, that was fine with her. She grabbed her mug of coffee and keys and left for work.
“You need an exorcist,” Trudy said as she dried pint glasses with a rag. She could never tell if Trudy took the things she said seriously or was just humoring her, and maybe that was the draw. Her ability to listen without any real investment in her life.
“You know any?”
“I was kidding.” After the pint glasses were stacked, she plunked herself on the countertop and began scrolling through her phone. “Besides, aren’t you supposed to ask what her unfinished business is first or something?”
The day had been slow, the same handful of regulars and not much else, and Nel allowed her thoughts to drift to possible unfinished business her mother might have, when a familiar truck rumbled into the lot, the peeled paint on its side a dead giveaway.
Shit, she thought. She had forgotten it was delivery day. Making her way to the front door, she called to Trudy that she was going to go smoke.
“You’re not even going to say hi?”
The alarm beeped to signal someone entering the backdoor, and instead of answering, Nel pushed open the front door, wind whipping into her face. In her hurry, she’d forgotten her coat and, for that matter, her cigarettes. Still, hugging herself against the cold, her breath, visible, steaming the air, she remained outside as long as she could manage, about six minutes. If he had any decency, he’d be trying to avoid her and not the other way around. Cursing herself, she stalked back inside, unable to feel her fingers.
“Hey, Nel,” Alex said. Her ex. “I have something for you.”
She saw he held a paper bag and leaned in to peek inside. Empty beer bottles nearly filled the bag to the rim and made small clinking sounds as Alex shifted his weight, waiting. “I remember you said red is a hard color to find.”
“Those are beer bottles,” Nel said, not taking the bag. “I can’t use them. The glass is too thin.”
“Oh,” he said, glancing from her to Trudy as if looking for help. “My bad.”
Trudy, who was doing her best to pretend not to eavesdrop, now frowned at Nel from behind the counter, thanking Alex too loudly as he left.
When his truck could be seen, through the side window, pulling away onto the main road, Nel began wiping down the bar stools distractedly.
“Poor guy,” Trudy said. “He’s probably been drinking red-bottled beer all month for you. What happened with you two anyway?”
Nel shrugged. “Too much of a mama’s boy.” It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it had truth to it.
Alex had always been a get in/get out type of worker, rarely saying more than the obligatory greeting, but that fateful day nearly a year ago, Nel learned he had a penchant for dad jokes and the gleam of a rebel in his eye. Alex had been born here as well, unwilling to leave as so many others had done. Which brought up the abandoned neighborhoods—cropping up more and more in the last five years as the housing bubble burst and homeowners walked away from their bloated mortgages—with piles of garbage on every terrace as if the houses themselves had wanted to purge all signs of human existence. “Like some postmodern sculpture,” Nel said.
“I call it Detroitus,” Alex had said. When Nel looked at him quizzically, he blushed. “You know, like detritus, er, garbage.”
She had found the stupid pun charming, as well as his embarrassment, and she surprised herself by telling him about the mosaics she constructed with tumbled glass, on the sides of decayed buildings scattered across the city. Recognition flashed over his face. “That’s you?” And the way he looked at her then, as if in awe, well. Whenever she thought about that look, she felt sore in the chest with his absence. But that’s what happened when you let people in.
When Nel returned home, the sun had long set, her mother was on the sofa arranging a bowtie around Niblet’s neck, expression turned in a frown like she’d been in deep thought. As Nel passed by, she cleared her throat.
“I always thought you’d come back eventually. At least to visit.”
In the span of a sentence, they’d retreated to where they’d left off, when Nel had left home.
“I guess I was trying to make a point.”
The point being that walking out was possible. She had needed the proof, and since her mother wasn’t leaving, the only way to get it was to do it herself. She couldn’t remember the first time she had noticed the bruises that, one by one, cropped up on her mother’s body. She remembered a night in particular when her mother was getting ready for a date with Frank, fastening new earrings in the mirror. She had already been trading injuries for gifts for some time by then, the earrings being one of these gifts. Nel, fourteen, sat on the edge of the bed, watching her mother’s reflection and, specifically, staring at four elliptical bruises the size of fingerprints on her upper arm. Her mother noticed her staring, and responded defensively, snapped at Nel not to hover. Nel realized something she had always known, that attractiveness was a currency, and how it most often bought all the wrong things.
While Frank hardly gave Nel any notice—he never cared for children—he continued to leave marks on her mother, till one day, he shattered her wrist. Or, as they both explained to Nel, she had shattered her wrist. As if all on her own. Frank didn’t spend the night that night, pretending instead to have some business to take care of back in the D.
He returned the next evening with a puppy, the tiniest dog Nel had ever seen. The leash may have been on the dog, but even then, Nel knew it was Frank’s way of chaining her mom to his side, turning them into a family, this trembling creature a surrogate child, his presence securing Frank’s own.
The nervous creature seemed to be the exact thing her mother was missing, filling a hole Nel had neglected to see. So maybe Frank did love her mother in his way, understood her even better than Nel, who expected to find a companion in Niblet—they could be allies, alone together, so to speak—but Niblet, as she quickly discovered, only had eyes for her mother. It must have surprised even Frank, Niblet’s apparent capacity to forget who had brought him home in the first place, which surely entitled him to a certain amount of gratitude. But no one else existed as far as Niblet was concerned, at least until you got too close to Nel’s mother, where he’d often growl from the comfort of her lap as if guarding a precious resource. Frank, at least outwardly, knew to laugh at the tiny dog, and the three of them became the family he meant for them to be, a picture of happiness, if never the original. Meanwhile Nel looked on, unable to escape the feeling she had failed on some fundamental level. Maybe if she just let herself be loved in the way her mother needed, she wouldn’t have had to turn to Frank in the first place. But to watch the pathetic, shaking mutt so desperate for her mother’s attention curdled her stomach. He’d be eaten alive in the wild, or anywhere really, besides the safety of complete and utter dependence, and if that’s what it took for her to connect with her mother, well, it was something she’d never stoop to. When she had enough money saved, she packed a bag and left for the place she never stopped thinking of as home.
Nel woke up at the crack of eleven to the smell of coffee. She ambled into the kitchen in her pajamas, suspicious. She noticed the house looked bare somehow, and she realized her mother had cleaned. Now, she poured Nel a mug of coffee and set it on the counter toward her.
“A peace offering,” she said, shrugging.
Nel forced a smile, though terribly uncomfortable with the idea of her rummaging through her stuff.
“Why did you have all those empty bottles?”
Nel shot up too quickly, sloshing her coffee. Her grogginess was instantly replaced with adrenaline, as she realized her apartment was more than just clean, it was cleaned out. Anxiously she scanned the living room for the familiar bags of glass, all of the wine bottles she had yet to break and tumble. “No no no no no! Tell me you didn’t throw them away.”
“If you have—a problem—you can tell me. I won’t judge.”
“What? I’m not an alcoholic, Mom. I use them for. . . projects. Did you throw them away?”
“I’m not a monster,” her mother said, appalled. “I recycled.”
It was the breaking point. Deciding Trudy may have been on to something, Nel scoured the Internet till she found a church near her that advertised “Deliverance Ministries,” and after a half hour on the phone with the priest, who recently finished a MasterClass--taught by the Pope himself!—on how to perform the ritual. He would charge Nel eighty dollars, which he kept referring to as a “suggested donation,” and when she agreed, he volunteered to meet her at work.
The beginning of a thousand jokes, Nel thought, as the priest walked into the bar. But she set the thought aside and offered to make him a drink. The priest, who somehow looked the way he sounded on the phone—round, bald, shy—declined, and Nel wondered if priests were even allowed to drink, realizing she didn’t know a thing about it.
“So,” she said when he sat down at the counter, “eighty bucks is all it takes to fuck with the spirit world, huh?”
He gave her a small smile. “Times are tough.”
It was unclear if he meant the price, or the apparent desperation of the church, that it had to resort to such performance. She relayed to him the story of her mother, coming back from the dead and haunting her apartment. He explained to her the differences between a major and minor exorcism, between the deprecative and imperative formulas, all which meant nothing to Nel, who wished he would just get on with it. He told her exorcisms were appropriate only as a last resort, and asked Nel if she had simply tried asking her mother to leave.
Nel lied, not bothering to tell the priest that her mother wouldn’t have listened to her anyway. She would have simply taken offense, and if Nel was going to affront her either way, she may as well make sure she’d only have to do it once.
The priest followed her home. She was thankful he wasn’t in the car with her, surrounded by her doubts, her misgivings. After all, she was attempting to mess with something she didn’t even fully understand. But maybe life was like the space in front of her, where her headlights met, illuminating. Maybe that’s as far as anyone could ever see, and any sense of control you felt beyond that was only an illusion. By the time she reached her parking lot, she had talked herself back into going through with it, only wishing there existed exorcists for feelings too. For exes.
Motioning for the priest to follow her inside, Nel saw her mother going through some mail at the kitchen table, holding an envelope to the light above to try to see inside. When her mother saw the priest, she froze.
“Mom,” Nel said, grinning catlike, “this is Father Marcus.”
Her mother hadn’t put two and two together yet. A smile attempted to override her bewilderment, as her daughter didn’t exactly strike her as godly.
Nel’s mother, on the other hand, liked to pretend an attitude of faith, a gold cross around her neck for as long as Nel could remember, though never actually ever making it to a service, even the bare minimum on Christmases and Easters. Now, she acted as if the priest might have come to chastise her.
In the dim light, you could see through Nel’s mother to the kitchen cupboards behind her, and the priest gaped at her unable to avert his gaze. Clutching a bible to his chest, he approached her, knocking into an end table in the process as Nel fought the urge to steady him.
“We’re going to need something material, to bind her to,” he stammered. “A vessel.”
Nel scanned the room, spotted on an Altoids tin on the floor near the couch. She dumped two joints from the tin then handed it to the priest.
“Just what do you think you’re doing?” her mother asked, the first note of concern entering her voice.
“Forgive me, Ma’am,” the priest said, turning through his bible to Luke. “’They sailed to the region of the Gerasenes’,” he began to read.
Nel’s mother frowned.
Nel realized she was clenching her fists and jaw. Would her mother be able to escape it once she figured out what was happening? The priest’s steady voice reassured her as he ploughed ahead with the passage.
“‘When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but lived in the tombs’. . .”
Nel’s mother watched the priest with a quizzical expression, occasionally turning it on Nel.
“. . . ‘A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs, and he gave them permission.’ Dear Lord, today we similarly beseech you to intervene on this cursed spirit, to banish it, as though did from Legion, into the vessel thus provided. . .”
Nel suddenly felt like she had woke up in the middle of a dream and, seeing the situation around her, seemed to herself to have gone completely batshit. Either she was being taken in by some quack who was willing to rip her off or else willing to share in her delusion. She couldn’t decide which was more pathetic on her part. She felt her face tingle with humiliation until something began to happen. The morning-mist translucence of her mother’s form began to dissipate. Her mother looked down at herself, then turned to Nel with pleading alarm. Nel clutched the priest’s arm as if trying to stop him. There had been times in her life—particularly her teenage years perhaps, when she would have fantasized about her mother needing her help, childish revenge-type fantasies that ended with Nel getting to turn her away. But now that it was actually happening, she found nothing in it from which to take pleasure. The truth was that the helplessness in her mother’s eyes as she faded from sight haunted Nel more than her ghost had.
But aren’t I entitled to some boundaries? Nel thought. If life with her mother had taught her anything, it was that physical boundaries were just as important as emotional ones. Surely the boundary between the living and the dead was one of the most important, meant to be impenetrable. She was simply correcting a breach, some cosmic oversight.
Twenty minutes after the priest left, she found herself on the sofa, still pondering, when a sharp clanking sound brought her back to herself. It happened again, then again: clank! Clank! And her eyes shot to its source, the tin, on the kitchen counter where it had been left. Nel creeped toward it, and another clank made her jump.
Her mother was trying to escape. The hits against the top of the tin were so fierce they left dints in it. And it wasn’t the volume that caused Nel to flinch at the sound but the intensity. Glancing around the apartment, she decided to stuff the vessel in her dresser under a stack of t-shirts, then pinned the drawer closed with a chair for good measure. She returned to the sofa and her thoughts. It had worked. It was real. And though she had hoped to banish the spirit completely, at least it--she—was no longer chastising Nel. But what was she to do with the vessel, carry it around the rest of her life? Or would her mother’s ghost eventually give up and go back to wherever it was the dead were supposed to stay? Nel hoped for the latter, since, even in the next room, in the dresser, muffled under the t-shirts, she could still hear it. Clank! Clank! against metal. She turned on the television, turned up the volume to drown it out. But it persisted.
Sometime in the night she decided to get rid of it. Her mom was supposed to be gone, and the city would help Nel bury her. She drove to the river, pulled over to the icy narrow shoulder of the overpass. She felt much smaller on foot, testing each step carefully so she wouldn’t slip into traffic, which whizzed past her at deafening speeds. In her hand, the tin continued to pulse, the spirit somehow trapped inside something a fraction of its size. She crossed the street to the other shoulder, where the slate-colored water churned below.
It hadn’t hurt when Alex slapped her. To even use the word slap seemed like an exaggeration. More like a hard pat on the cheek, the kind you might give a child if they’d just slipped something poisonous in their mouth and didn’t want to spit it out. Nel had never told him the part about her childhood, not really, about her anxiety that it might run in the family, the need for love so desperate you’d put up with anything. It was the first time she’d even mentioned her mother in the eight months they’d been together. His hand had moved so quickly it surprised them both, as if on its own. She could see his own surprise in his eyes, which had taken on a large, startled expression.
“I’m sorry,” he had sputtered, trying to regain control, then, “but you really shouldn’t talk about your mother like that.”
She tried to imagine feeling the same way he did, that being a mother exempted you from the possibility of being a bitch, like the two terms were mutually exclusive. She hadn’t kicked him out that night, not right away at least. She’d always been slow when it came to figuring out her own feelings, needing both time and space for that. And so they had finished the show they’d been bingeing and afterward, Nel claimed she was tired so he’d leave and she could think.
It was one of the things he texted her, after: You didn’t even seem angry at the time. Because she hadn’t been. The anger had heated her like coal, slow to catch, then long-burning. He tried to explain himself. His mother, he told her, wouldn’t hesitate to slap him and his brothers around. Being the oldest, he was even expected to help her discipline his younger brothers sometimes, on her behalf. It was never anything hard, he assured her. Just enough to get their attention. Snap them out of it.
Likewise, it was obvious he hadn’t meant to hurt her either, because it hadn’t hurt (physically). He apologized several times, promised he’d never do it again, and even as she believed him, she thought Isn’t that what they all say?
Nel cocked her arm back and threw the tin into the river. It smacked the surface and stayed there, bobbing along the current. She didn’t know why she’d expected it to sink. Just because the contents were heavy to her didn’t mean it still wasn’t hollow.
Indeed, she felt a weight lifted as, tinless, she returned to her car and drove home with the radio turned all the way down, the silence almost womb-like around her.
Two days later, the front door of the bar chimed and Alex walked in. Nel, who was cutting limes at the counter, swallowed over a lump in her throat when she saw him. He wasn’t dressed in his khakis and company polo, but street clothes, his day off. He approached the counter slowly.
“I really need to talk to you.”
Which most likely meant he needed her to talk to him. He’d been talking. Trudy got up from the barstool she was sitting on and walked off to the back without saying a word, giving them space.
“Please, Nel,” he whispered. “Please say something. I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”
“I really can’t do this here,” she said, wiping the sticky juice off her hands with a wet rag.
Alex sighed. “You won’t talk to me anywhere else.”
When she didn’t yield, he rapped the counter with his knuckles. “OK, I’ll leave. I just needed to make sure you hear me apologize.”
As he opened the door to leave, she said, loud enough to for him to hear, “I hear it.”
He nodded without turning around. When she was alone, she relaxed, leaning against the shelf of liquor bottles.
You threw him away too, huh?
Nel peered around sharply.
That is what you do isn’t it? Just throw people away.
She shoved open the door to the back room where Trudy was camped out on top of an unopened box, eyes glued to her phone.
“Did you say something?” Nel asked.
“What. No,” she said, without looking up.
It hadn’t sounded like Trudy anyway; the voice was her mother’s. The worst part though was it seemed to be coming from her own mind.
This probably isn’t the best place for you to work. Around all this alcohol.
“I’m not an alcoholic,” she whispered harshly.
Trudy was now staring, studying her. “Are you all right? I’d say you looked like you saw a ghost if I didn’t already know the answer.”
“I’m fine.”
All evidence to the contrary.
Nel frowned at the voice, careful not to respond. Did she throw people away? And how would her mother, who either gave it away or took it away for nothing, be the expert on love?
Was her mother bound to her now? Nel squeezed fistfuls of hair at the thought.
She didn’t realize Trudy had still been staring at her. “Seriously, why don’t you go home for the day. Get some rest. I got this covered.”
Don’t bother. She doesn’t take help from anybody. Her mother, inaudible to anyone else, was clearly saying this for Nel’s benefit only.
Nel took Trudy up on her offer, but instead of going home, drove to the church. She had never before stepped foot inside a church, and half expected to melt or something when she crossed the threshold.
Inside was quiet. The carpets were crimson. The blood of Christ? The atmosphere felt heavy, almost like she were being watched, but the church was empty except for the priest, who sat in an office just off the nave.
Him again!
“She’s in my head now.”
The priest turned pale at her words. It reminded her of the expression he had when he’d seen her mother, and didn’t exactly fill her with confidence.
“You’ve never even seen a ghost before her, have you?”
He wilted under her gaze.
“Did you even believe in them at all?”
He put his hands up defensively. “I believed I could help put people’s minds at ease.”
“And now?”
He shrugged bashfully. “And now I’m frightened.” He rummaged through a drawer and handed Nel a familiar stack of bills. “I’m sorry.”
She snorted, took the money. Then turned around at the last second and dealt him back twenty. Because, what the hell, it had done something.
She couldn’t bring herself to go inside, once back home, and began walking instead.. At least the snow, which had been falling the entire afternoon, was large and soft and now insulated the streets in that same softness. What if I’m crazy? she allowed herself to think. But the snow instilled in her a sense of calm, how it floated downwards with such pure trust it could only be called grace. Teaching her, too, how to fall. Maybe she had felt like this for longer than she was willing to admit. Maybe she’d always been like this.
She continued to wind through the abandoned neighborhood, her shoes leaving their patterns on the sidewalk. Her mother had not spoken for awhile, perhaps in awe of the beauty around them, just like Nel was. How vast the cover, how unbroken the land.
Finally she said, Isn’t it tiring to have only yourself to rely on?
As there was no one within hearing distance, she shrugged. “I’m a lone wolf.”
The trash heaps—detroitus, as Nel will forever think of them now—were contorted igloos under the snow.
Wolves are pack animals.
Up the block, a dark silhouette blotted the horizon. A stray, snout pressed to the ground, possibly trying to pick up a scent, the snow likely making it only the more difficult. Nel glanced around for anything she could use as a weapon, should she need to. Considering how many strays there were, attacks were few and far between, but they still managed to make the news on a weekly basis. As this one lumbered between the empty houses, Nel could see how starved it was, patches of bristled fur over sinewed limbs, a body made for and by scavenging. This dog who once belonged to someone.
It spotted her and stopped in its tracks. She could see its whole body tense as it hunkered in wait, a creature made mean by its fright. As they watched each other, Nel tried to decide if the world was more cruel or loving.
She lifted her face to the sky and howled till the creature scampered off.
Jessica Dealing
Nel’s mother, newly deceased, materialized one day in the kitchen as Nel was preparing her morning coffee. She jumped at her mother’s likeness—beautiful, zaftig, and frowning—consisting of a gauzy translucence, like morning mist, and coffee sloshed from the mug and drip-dropped onto the floor as Nel gaped at her. It wasn’t the apparition itself but that it was her mother that Nel found most alarming, and yet it didn’t stop her from noticing the way she wavered at the edges like gossamer.
She couldn’t resist sweeping a hand through it, which briefly stirred the image.
“Stop that,” her mother scolded, turning away from her reach. “That’s no way to treat the dead.” She glanced around the apartment disapprovingly as she hovered a foot above the ground—all the better, Nel suspected, to look down her nose at it—and her gaze passed over Nel, too, like she was just another of the dirty dishes on the counter, and finally fixed on the window, which overlooked an abandoned neighborhood. “Good Lord, it’s gotten even worse,” she said, clucking her tongue.
Nel knew she was speaking of the city itself, as if the crumbling houses behind them, missing doors and windows like teeth, was a synecdoche of the whole city. Nel supposed the metaphor accurate, except that her mother, who had moved away before the housing bust ravaged the city’s economy, had no way of knowing that. Then again, her mother had always associated a particular dirtiness to Detroit, and the overgrown terraces heaped with piles of wreckage—disintegrating mattresses, old tires the color of mud—didn’t exactly prove the case otherwise.
“Well,” Nel said, scorched in annoyance, “at least we know you’re not in heaven.”
“You didn’t come to the funeral.” her mother said, not turning from the window.
In truth, Nel hadn’t seen her mother in over a decade. She’d run away as a teenager, never looked back. She might not have even known her mother had passed if it weren’t for Frank, her mother’s boyfriend, who had somehow found her and called to break the news. A heart attack, fitting in a metaphorical sense, love and violence often hand-in-hand as far as they were concerned. She didn’t know what to tell the man on the phone—she had no desire to comfort him—and when she hung up, she realized she hadn’t known what to feel either. Nothing came to the surface, which she might have been relieved by, if not for the sensation of something sharp and metallic lurking in the corners of her subconscious, alive and lying in wait.
Then Nel suddenly registered Niblet, her mother’s damn dog, strapped to her ghostly chest in the kind of sling meant for babies.
“What is he doing here?” Nel glared at Niblet, who blinked back at her with eyes large and wet.
Her mother turned up her nose in indignation, stroking Niblet’s head in long motions that peeled back the skin on his forehead and had the unnerving effect of making his large, wet eyes bulge from his face. “We happened to reunite in the afterlife.”
Nel needed a cigarette—she would try quitting again when she wasn’t dealing with the undead.
“Still?” her mother asked when Nel shook one from the pack. “I hate that habit of yours.”
“I hate that habit of yours,” Nel returned, chinning toward the shaking mutt. He was always shaking, god knew why. Being too small was Nel’s guess. A teacup Chihuahua. As if you needed a teacup version of a dog already the size of a squirrel.
“She doesn’t mean it, Nibbie,” her mom baby-voiced into Niblet’s fur.
Shaking her head, Nel called her own dogs, Pit and Rot—who had somehow slept through the morning’s events—to the front door and leashed them for their walk. Once outside, Nel lit her cigarette and took long soothing drags that alternated between menthol and February’s iced air, and watched them piss holes in the snow.
She had gotten the dogs from one of the regular customers, who had come into the bar particularly distressed one evening because his girlfriend was making him get rid of them.
“A beautiful pair of Huskies,” was how Garrett had described them that evening. He clutched his pint with both hands and stared distantly into it. “I didn’t even want them at first,” he admitted. “I wanted to get a Pitbull and a Rottweiler. Dogs that would protect us, make people think twice before messing with us.” The Huskies had been a compromise to their landlord’s rules, which forbade so-called attack breeds and which—for some reason that felt arbitrary to Garrett—didn’t consider Huskies as such. He named them after the dogs he’d wanted, and fell in love with them faster than he expected. Except one fateful day, they were caught in the backyard together, gleefully ripping apart a squirrel as his girlfriend watched in horror, refusing to put their soon-to-arrive baby at risk of the same fate. Garrett had tried to convince her they would know the difference. “It’s all about the smells,” he had argued. The baby would smell like them, like family. Pit and Rot would recognize them as part of their pack. But his girlfriend remained obstinate. “They’ve tasted blood now.”
So that’s how Nel ended up with them, a soft spot for anything that resisted compliance. Besides, the last thing the city needed were more strays. They already roamed the streets in droves.
When Nel got back upstairs her mother was straightening pillows to their proper right angles on the sofa and ignoring her. Well, that was fine with her. She grabbed her mug of coffee and keys and left for work.
“You need an exorcist,” Trudy said as she dried pint glasses with a rag. She could never tell if Trudy took the things she said seriously or was just humoring her, and maybe that was the draw. Her ability to listen without any real investment in her life.
“You know any?”
“I was kidding.” After the pint glasses were stacked, she plunked herself on the countertop and began scrolling through her phone. “Besides, aren’t you supposed to ask what her unfinished business is first or something?”
The day had been slow, the same handful of regulars and not much else, and Nel allowed her thoughts to drift to possible unfinished business her mother might have, when a familiar truck rumbled into the lot, the peeled paint on its side a dead giveaway.
Shit, she thought. She had forgotten it was delivery day. Making her way to the front door, she called to Trudy that she was going to go smoke.
“You’re not even going to say hi?”
The alarm beeped to signal someone entering the backdoor, and instead of answering, Nel pushed open the front door, wind whipping into her face. In her hurry, she’d forgotten her coat and, for that matter, her cigarettes. Still, hugging herself against the cold, her breath, visible, steaming the air, she remained outside as long as she could manage, about six minutes. If he had any decency, he’d be trying to avoid her and not the other way around. Cursing herself, she stalked back inside, unable to feel her fingers.
“Hey, Nel,” Alex said. Her ex. “I have something for you.”
She saw he held a paper bag and leaned in to peek inside. Empty beer bottles nearly filled the bag to the rim and made small clinking sounds as Alex shifted his weight, waiting. “I remember you said red is a hard color to find.”
“Those are beer bottles,” Nel said, not taking the bag. “I can’t use them. The glass is too thin.”
“Oh,” he said, glancing from her to Trudy as if looking for help. “My bad.”
Trudy, who was doing her best to pretend not to eavesdrop, now frowned at Nel from behind the counter, thanking Alex too loudly as he left.
When his truck could be seen, through the side window, pulling away onto the main road, Nel began wiping down the bar stools distractedly.
“Poor guy,” Trudy said. “He’s probably been drinking red-bottled beer all month for you. What happened with you two anyway?”
Nel shrugged. “Too much of a mama’s boy.” It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it had truth to it.
Alex had always been a get in/get out type of worker, rarely saying more than the obligatory greeting, but that fateful day nearly a year ago, Nel learned he had a penchant for dad jokes and the gleam of a rebel in his eye. Alex had been born here as well, unwilling to leave as so many others had done. Which brought up the abandoned neighborhoods—cropping up more and more in the last five years as the housing bubble burst and homeowners walked away from their bloated mortgages—with piles of garbage on every terrace as if the houses themselves had wanted to purge all signs of human existence. “Like some postmodern sculpture,” Nel said.
“I call it Detroitus,” Alex had said. When Nel looked at him quizzically, he blushed. “You know, like detritus, er, garbage.”
She had found the stupid pun charming, as well as his embarrassment, and she surprised herself by telling him about the mosaics she constructed with tumbled glass, on the sides of decayed buildings scattered across the city. Recognition flashed over his face. “That’s you?” And the way he looked at her then, as if in awe, well. Whenever she thought about that look, she felt sore in the chest with his absence. But that’s what happened when you let people in.
When Nel returned home, the sun had long set, her mother was on the sofa arranging a bowtie around Niblet’s neck, expression turned in a frown like she’d been in deep thought. As Nel passed by, she cleared her throat.
“I always thought you’d come back eventually. At least to visit.”
In the span of a sentence, they’d retreated to where they’d left off, when Nel had left home.
“I guess I was trying to make a point.”
The point being that walking out was possible. She had needed the proof, and since her mother wasn’t leaving, the only way to get it was to do it herself. She couldn’t remember the first time she had noticed the bruises that, one by one, cropped up on her mother’s body. She remembered a night in particular when her mother was getting ready for a date with Frank, fastening new earrings in the mirror. She had already been trading injuries for gifts for some time by then, the earrings being one of these gifts. Nel, fourteen, sat on the edge of the bed, watching her mother’s reflection and, specifically, staring at four elliptical bruises the size of fingerprints on her upper arm. Her mother noticed her staring, and responded defensively, snapped at Nel not to hover. Nel realized something she had always known, that attractiveness was a currency, and how it most often bought all the wrong things.
While Frank hardly gave Nel any notice—he never cared for children—he continued to leave marks on her mother, till one day, he shattered her wrist. Or, as they both explained to Nel, she had shattered her wrist. As if all on her own. Frank didn’t spend the night that night, pretending instead to have some business to take care of back in the D.
He returned the next evening with a puppy, the tiniest dog Nel had ever seen. The leash may have been on the dog, but even then, Nel knew it was Frank’s way of chaining her mom to his side, turning them into a family, this trembling creature a surrogate child, his presence securing Frank’s own.
The nervous creature seemed to be the exact thing her mother was missing, filling a hole Nel had neglected to see. So maybe Frank did love her mother in his way, understood her even better than Nel, who expected to find a companion in Niblet—they could be allies, alone together, so to speak—but Niblet, as she quickly discovered, only had eyes for her mother. It must have surprised even Frank, Niblet’s apparent capacity to forget who had brought him home in the first place, which surely entitled him to a certain amount of gratitude. But no one else existed as far as Niblet was concerned, at least until you got too close to Nel’s mother, where he’d often growl from the comfort of her lap as if guarding a precious resource. Frank, at least outwardly, knew to laugh at the tiny dog, and the three of them became the family he meant for them to be, a picture of happiness, if never the original. Meanwhile Nel looked on, unable to escape the feeling she had failed on some fundamental level. Maybe if she just let herself be loved in the way her mother needed, she wouldn’t have had to turn to Frank in the first place. But to watch the pathetic, shaking mutt so desperate for her mother’s attention curdled her stomach. He’d be eaten alive in the wild, or anywhere really, besides the safety of complete and utter dependence, and if that’s what it took for her to connect with her mother, well, it was something she’d never stoop to. When she had enough money saved, she packed a bag and left for the place she never stopped thinking of as home.
Nel woke up at the crack of eleven to the smell of coffee. She ambled into the kitchen in her pajamas, suspicious. She noticed the house looked bare somehow, and she realized her mother had cleaned. Now, she poured Nel a mug of coffee and set it on the counter toward her.
“A peace offering,” she said, shrugging.
Nel forced a smile, though terribly uncomfortable with the idea of her rummaging through her stuff.
“Why did you have all those empty bottles?”
Nel shot up too quickly, sloshing her coffee. Her grogginess was instantly replaced with adrenaline, as she realized her apartment was more than just clean, it was cleaned out. Anxiously she scanned the living room for the familiar bags of glass, all of the wine bottles she had yet to break and tumble. “No no no no no! Tell me you didn’t throw them away.”
“If you have—a problem—you can tell me. I won’t judge.”
“What? I’m not an alcoholic, Mom. I use them for. . . projects. Did you throw them away?”
“I’m not a monster,” her mother said, appalled. “I recycled.”
It was the breaking point. Deciding Trudy may have been on to something, Nel scoured the Internet till she found a church near her that advertised “Deliverance Ministries,” and after a half hour on the phone with the priest, who recently finished a MasterClass--taught by the Pope himself!—on how to perform the ritual. He would charge Nel eighty dollars, which he kept referring to as a “suggested donation,” and when she agreed, he volunteered to meet her at work.
The beginning of a thousand jokes, Nel thought, as the priest walked into the bar. But she set the thought aside and offered to make him a drink. The priest, who somehow looked the way he sounded on the phone—round, bald, shy—declined, and Nel wondered if priests were even allowed to drink, realizing she didn’t know a thing about it.
“So,” she said when he sat down at the counter, “eighty bucks is all it takes to fuck with the spirit world, huh?”
He gave her a small smile. “Times are tough.”
It was unclear if he meant the price, or the apparent desperation of the church, that it had to resort to such performance. She relayed to him the story of her mother, coming back from the dead and haunting her apartment. He explained to her the differences between a major and minor exorcism, between the deprecative and imperative formulas, all which meant nothing to Nel, who wished he would just get on with it. He told her exorcisms were appropriate only as a last resort, and asked Nel if she had simply tried asking her mother to leave.
Nel lied, not bothering to tell the priest that her mother wouldn’t have listened to her anyway. She would have simply taken offense, and if Nel was going to affront her either way, she may as well make sure she’d only have to do it once.
The priest followed her home. She was thankful he wasn’t in the car with her, surrounded by her doubts, her misgivings. After all, she was attempting to mess with something she didn’t even fully understand. But maybe life was like the space in front of her, where her headlights met, illuminating. Maybe that’s as far as anyone could ever see, and any sense of control you felt beyond that was only an illusion. By the time she reached her parking lot, she had talked herself back into going through with it, only wishing there existed exorcists for feelings too. For exes.
Motioning for the priest to follow her inside, Nel saw her mother going through some mail at the kitchen table, holding an envelope to the light above to try to see inside. When her mother saw the priest, she froze.
“Mom,” Nel said, grinning catlike, “this is Father Marcus.”
Her mother hadn’t put two and two together yet. A smile attempted to override her bewilderment, as her daughter didn’t exactly strike her as godly.
Nel’s mother, on the other hand, liked to pretend an attitude of faith, a gold cross around her neck for as long as Nel could remember, though never actually ever making it to a service, even the bare minimum on Christmases and Easters. Now, she acted as if the priest might have come to chastise her.
In the dim light, you could see through Nel’s mother to the kitchen cupboards behind her, and the priest gaped at her unable to avert his gaze. Clutching a bible to his chest, he approached her, knocking into an end table in the process as Nel fought the urge to steady him.
“We’re going to need something material, to bind her to,” he stammered. “A vessel.”
Nel scanned the room, spotted on an Altoids tin on the floor near the couch. She dumped two joints from the tin then handed it to the priest.
“Just what do you think you’re doing?” her mother asked, the first note of concern entering her voice.
“Forgive me, Ma’am,” the priest said, turning through his bible to Luke. “’They sailed to the region of the Gerasenes’,” he began to read.
Nel’s mother frowned.
Nel realized she was clenching her fists and jaw. Would her mother be able to escape it once she figured out what was happening? The priest’s steady voice reassured her as he ploughed ahead with the passage.
“‘When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but lived in the tombs’. . .”
Nel’s mother watched the priest with a quizzical expression, occasionally turning it on Nel.
“. . . ‘A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs, and he gave them permission.’ Dear Lord, today we similarly beseech you to intervene on this cursed spirit, to banish it, as though did from Legion, into the vessel thus provided. . .”
Nel suddenly felt like she had woke up in the middle of a dream and, seeing the situation around her, seemed to herself to have gone completely batshit. Either she was being taken in by some quack who was willing to rip her off or else willing to share in her delusion. She couldn’t decide which was more pathetic on her part. She felt her face tingle with humiliation until something began to happen. The morning-mist translucence of her mother’s form began to dissipate. Her mother looked down at herself, then turned to Nel with pleading alarm. Nel clutched the priest’s arm as if trying to stop him. There had been times in her life—particularly her teenage years perhaps, when she would have fantasized about her mother needing her help, childish revenge-type fantasies that ended with Nel getting to turn her away. But now that it was actually happening, she found nothing in it from which to take pleasure. The truth was that the helplessness in her mother’s eyes as she faded from sight haunted Nel more than her ghost had.
But aren’t I entitled to some boundaries? Nel thought. If life with her mother had taught her anything, it was that physical boundaries were just as important as emotional ones. Surely the boundary between the living and the dead was one of the most important, meant to be impenetrable. She was simply correcting a breach, some cosmic oversight.
Twenty minutes after the priest left, she found herself on the sofa, still pondering, when a sharp clanking sound brought her back to herself. It happened again, then again: clank! Clank! And her eyes shot to its source, the tin, on the kitchen counter where it had been left. Nel creeped toward it, and another clank made her jump.
Her mother was trying to escape. The hits against the top of the tin were so fierce they left dints in it. And it wasn’t the volume that caused Nel to flinch at the sound but the intensity. Glancing around the apartment, she decided to stuff the vessel in her dresser under a stack of t-shirts, then pinned the drawer closed with a chair for good measure. She returned to the sofa and her thoughts. It had worked. It was real. And though she had hoped to banish the spirit completely, at least it--she—was no longer chastising Nel. But what was she to do with the vessel, carry it around the rest of her life? Or would her mother’s ghost eventually give up and go back to wherever it was the dead were supposed to stay? Nel hoped for the latter, since, even in the next room, in the dresser, muffled under the t-shirts, she could still hear it. Clank! Clank! against metal. She turned on the television, turned up the volume to drown it out. But it persisted.
Sometime in the night she decided to get rid of it. Her mom was supposed to be gone, and the city would help Nel bury her. She drove to the river, pulled over to the icy narrow shoulder of the overpass. She felt much smaller on foot, testing each step carefully so she wouldn’t slip into traffic, which whizzed past her at deafening speeds. In her hand, the tin continued to pulse, the spirit somehow trapped inside something a fraction of its size. She crossed the street to the other shoulder, where the slate-colored water churned below.
It hadn’t hurt when Alex slapped her. To even use the word slap seemed like an exaggeration. More like a hard pat on the cheek, the kind you might give a child if they’d just slipped something poisonous in their mouth and didn’t want to spit it out. Nel had never told him the part about her childhood, not really, about her anxiety that it might run in the family, the need for love so desperate you’d put up with anything. It was the first time she’d even mentioned her mother in the eight months they’d been together. His hand had moved so quickly it surprised them both, as if on its own. She could see his own surprise in his eyes, which had taken on a large, startled expression.
“I’m sorry,” he had sputtered, trying to regain control, then, “but you really shouldn’t talk about your mother like that.”
She tried to imagine feeling the same way he did, that being a mother exempted you from the possibility of being a bitch, like the two terms were mutually exclusive. She hadn’t kicked him out that night, not right away at least. She’d always been slow when it came to figuring out her own feelings, needing both time and space for that. And so they had finished the show they’d been bingeing and afterward, Nel claimed she was tired so he’d leave and she could think.
It was one of the things he texted her, after: You didn’t even seem angry at the time. Because she hadn’t been. The anger had heated her like coal, slow to catch, then long-burning. He tried to explain himself. His mother, he told her, wouldn’t hesitate to slap him and his brothers around. Being the oldest, he was even expected to help her discipline his younger brothers sometimes, on her behalf. It was never anything hard, he assured her. Just enough to get their attention. Snap them out of it.
Likewise, it was obvious he hadn’t meant to hurt her either, because it hadn’t hurt (physically). He apologized several times, promised he’d never do it again, and even as she believed him, she thought Isn’t that what they all say?
Nel cocked her arm back and threw the tin into the river. It smacked the surface and stayed there, bobbing along the current. She didn’t know why she’d expected it to sink. Just because the contents were heavy to her didn’t mean it still wasn’t hollow.
Indeed, she felt a weight lifted as, tinless, she returned to her car and drove home with the radio turned all the way down, the silence almost womb-like around her.
Two days later, the front door of the bar chimed and Alex walked in. Nel, who was cutting limes at the counter, swallowed over a lump in her throat when she saw him. He wasn’t dressed in his khakis and company polo, but street clothes, his day off. He approached the counter slowly.
“I really need to talk to you.”
Which most likely meant he needed her to talk to him. He’d been talking. Trudy got up from the barstool she was sitting on and walked off to the back without saying a word, giving them space.
“Please, Nel,” he whispered. “Please say something. I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”
“I really can’t do this here,” she said, wiping the sticky juice off her hands with a wet rag.
Alex sighed. “You won’t talk to me anywhere else.”
When she didn’t yield, he rapped the counter with his knuckles. “OK, I’ll leave. I just needed to make sure you hear me apologize.”
As he opened the door to leave, she said, loud enough to for him to hear, “I hear it.”
He nodded without turning around. When she was alone, she relaxed, leaning against the shelf of liquor bottles.
You threw him away too, huh?
Nel peered around sharply.
That is what you do isn’t it? Just throw people away.
She shoved open the door to the back room where Trudy was camped out on top of an unopened box, eyes glued to her phone.
“Did you say something?” Nel asked.
“What. No,” she said, without looking up.
It hadn’t sounded like Trudy anyway; the voice was her mother’s. The worst part though was it seemed to be coming from her own mind.
This probably isn’t the best place for you to work. Around all this alcohol.
“I’m not an alcoholic,” she whispered harshly.
Trudy was now staring, studying her. “Are you all right? I’d say you looked like you saw a ghost if I didn’t already know the answer.”
“I’m fine.”
All evidence to the contrary.
Nel frowned at the voice, careful not to respond. Did she throw people away? And how would her mother, who either gave it away or took it away for nothing, be the expert on love?
Was her mother bound to her now? Nel squeezed fistfuls of hair at the thought.
She didn’t realize Trudy had still been staring at her. “Seriously, why don’t you go home for the day. Get some rest. I got this covered.”
Don’t bother. She doesn’t take help from anybody. Her mother, inaudible to anyone else, was clearly saying this for Nel’s benefit only.
Nel took Trudy up on her offer, but instead of going home, drove to the church. She had never before stepped foot inside a church, and half expected to melt or something when she crossed the threshold.
Inside was quiet. The carpets were crimson. The blood of Christ? The atmosphere felt heavy, almost like she were being watched, but the church was empty except for the priest, who sat in an office just off the nave.
Him again!
“She’s in my head now.”
The priest turned pale at her words. It reminded her of the expression he had when he’d seen her mother, and didn’t exactly fill her with confidence.
“You’ve never even seen a ghost before her, have you?”
He wilted under her gaze.
“Did you even believe in them at all?”
He put his hands up defensively. “I believed I could help put people’s minds at ease.”
“And now?”
He shrugged bashfully. “And now I’m frightened.” He rummaged through a drawer and handed Nel a familiar stack of bills. “I’m sorry.”
She snorted, took the money. Then turned around at the last second and dealt him back twenty. Because, what the hell, it had done something.
She couldn’t bring herself to go inside, once back home, and began walking instead.. At least the snow, which had been falling the entire afternoon, was large and soft and now insulated the streets in that same softness. What if I’m crazy? she allowed herself to think. But the snow instilled in her a sense of calm, how it floated downwards with such pure trust it could only be called grace. Teaching her, too, how to fall. Maybe she had felt like this for longer than she was willing to admit. Maybe she’d always been like this.
She continued to wind through the abandoned neighborhood, her shoes leaving their patterns on the sidewalk. Her mother had not spoken for awhile, perhaps in awe of the beauty around them, just like Nel was. How vast the cover, how unbroken the land.
Finally she said, Isn’t it tiring to have only yourself to rely on?
As there was no one within hearing distance, she shrugged. “I’m a lone wolf.”
The trash heaps—detroitus, as Nel will forever think of them now—were contorted igloos under the snow.
Wolves are pack animals.
Up the block, a dark silhouette blotted the horizon. A stray, snout pressed to the ground, possibly trying to pick up a scent, the snow likely making it only the more difficult. Nel glanced around for anything she could use as a weapon, should she need to. Considering how many strays there were, attacks were few and far between, but they still managed to make the news on a weekly basis. As this one lumbered between the empty houses, Nel could see how starved it was, patches of bristled fur over sinewed limbs, a body made for and by scavenging. This dog who once belonged to someone.
It spotted her and stopped in its tracks. She could see its whole body tense as it hunkered in wait, a creature made mean by its fright. As they watched each other, Nel tried to decide if the world was more cruel or loving.
She lifted her face to the sky and howled till the creature scampered off.
