Last Mother’s Day, I lost my mom.
It was a little awkward. When I tried to explain the situation, my coworkers rushed in with sympathy casseroles and a chorus of “I’m sorry for your loss” – which was kind of them, and I suppose I was sorry too, but endless frozen lasagnas and platitudes wouldn’t help me find her again.
So I took a few days off work to search for her. I started at my dad’s house in the country, stopping by with something Marnie from Accounting described as “eggplant surprise” and searching the usual places (you know: sitting room, bedroom, barn, trash) while Dad’s wife Erin casually scraped Marnie’s casserole into the trash and replaced it with something less surprising.
After dinner, I pulled Erin aside and asked her to let me know when Mom pops up again, because Erin always seems to find her first when she disappears. Erin only wrinkled her nose and said, “Maybe it’s time to let her go.”
I kissed Dad goodbye and drove a mile down the road—passing long stretches of freshly tilled soil where the soybeans would soon grow, and the burned-out shell of the Tomlinson’s old house—to the closest neighbor. The Fletchers have always welcomed me like my presence can somehow make up for Georgiana’s absence, but I don’t like to take advantage, so I offered Marnie’s “zucchini surprise” in exchange for the opportunity to rifle through their house. Mom wasn’t there either.
I drove home in the dark, half-heartedly scanning the long, unlit country road for any trace of her. She would have scolded me for not paying attention; I could almost hear her saying, “This road kills people.”
Next, I checked every odd place I could think of: I cleaned every corner of my house, rummaged through every thrift store and estate sale and garage sale, tried the library and our two-screen movie theater, even stopped at the abandoned Family Video in case she’d forgotten that no one goes there anymore. After a month or so, I considered filing a police report, but… how?
I didn’t think anyone took her. She’s not the kind of thing people want to take. Honestly, when I sat down and thought about it, I wasn’t completely sure that I wanted to take her back.
That’s why I didn’t immediately open the envelope when it came in. I stuck it to my fridge so that I’d see the red Sharpie scrawl proclaiming “She’s here!” where a return address should be every time I ventured into the kitchen. And then I started ordering take-out. Like, a lot of take-out. Like, my pants were getting so tight that Marnie cornered me by the coffee station and said, “The surprise is heavy cream and flour. You should only eat my casseroles in moderation.”
With that encounter repeating in my head, I finally opened the envelope. It contained a poorly designed flier with a WordArt title and a clip art banner advertising “No Discounts Ever!”
It was an eyesore, but it got the point across: a new video rental store had moved into the old Family Video.
I didn’t go right away. I drove by it a few times, and saw that it looked as abandoned as ever: a concrete block hunkered down at the edge of a dying strip mall, the outline of its long-removed logo still tattooed in dirt across its face, its narrow windows still boarded shut. I finally worked up the nerve to pull into the empty parking lot on Wednesday. Thankfully, the store was closed. According to the sign, the store is always closed, except from midnight to 3:33AM on Saturdays and sometimes on Tuesdays, if the day of the month is divisible by three.
Anyway, I went this morning. Mother’s Day is tomorrow; I thought I might as well stop by and say hi.
It was… I don’t know what I expected, but it was probably exactly what I expected. The heavy black door opened with a chime, revealing rows of fluorescent lights over rows of white shelves and the kind of speckled navy carpet that looks the same whether it’s freshly vacuumed or covered in blood. A pimpled teenager chewed gum noisily behind the laminate counter, bracketed on either side by movie theater candy displays. Three televisions mounted high on the far wall showed the same scene of a man’s bare ass obscuring a woman’s face, her purple nails digging into his flank as she filled the store with obscene smacking sounds. It all smelled faintly of must and popcorn.
A single customer—a mountain of a man, clothed in flannel and work boots, gray trucker hat pulled low over his eyes—stood among the racks. He looked up at the bell and then quickly looked away.
I wandered into the stacks. The VHS tapes were lined up individually with covers facing outward: class photos of teenagers in braces, a man in full scrubs standing at an operating table, an elderly woman doing laundry, a young boy hugging a golden retriever in front of a wooden playground. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to how they were organized.
On the TVs, the man came with a shout, strong hands holding the woman’s head in place even as her nails left angry red marks on his skin.
The teenager continued to chew his gum.
Turning back to the racks, I paused at a cover of a young woman sitting on the floor in front of a sagging sofa, smiling softly as she tucked a tiny pink chair into the plastic dollhouse her three children were tumbling over each other to play with. In the photo, she looked peaceful; her hair neatly plaited, her fair skin radiant. The children were clean, dressed in matching rompers, smiling at the world. In the photo, the ugly floral wallpaper wasn’t cracking at the seams, and the soybeans fluttering outside the window were gold and fluffy, swaying in a gentle breeze.
In reality, Mrs. Tomlinson had always been frazzled, her eyes darkened by shadows that looked like bruises in the afternoon light; the kids, always sticky and streaked with dirt. She’d call me after school sometimes and say, “This will be our secret,” and I’d hop on my bike and find the three kids racing through the house, filling every room with shrieks and giggles, and she would tuck crumpled dollar bills into my hand before disappearing into her bedroom. I’d round up the hellions with boxed mac and cheese, tire them out with epic games of tag or hide and seek, clean them up as well as I could, and wake her up around eight, when most bars kicked Mr. Tomlinson out.
In reality, Mrs. Tomlinson and her three kids are gone. The sagging sofa and plastic dollhouse and ugly floral wallpaper are nothing but cinder and ash in a field of soy.
I stepped back.
A man’s voice cut through my thoughts—cocky and familiar. “Trust me, babe.”
No, I thought. I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t help it. On all three television screens, Georgiana Fletcher nodded nervously as her boyfriend fitted a leather bridle over her face. My stomach churned as he slid the bit between her teeth.
A week after this video ends, I found one of those teeth in the grass beside the road.
“Turn it off,” I ordered the teenager, marching toward the counter.
“I can’t,” the kid said, smacking on his gum. “If you don’t like it, don’t watch. I don’t.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I asked, “How do I find someone here?”
“It’s sorted by year.”
“That’s… dumb.”
He shrugged, bored. “I didn’t do it.”
On the three screens, Georgiana’s boyfriend buttoned his jeans and tugged her—naked, giggling uncomfortably—behind him. Her giggles turned to wordless protests when he opened the front door.
As kind as the Fletchers are, Georgiana was terrible to me in high school. She’d stick gum in my hair and call my mom “roadkill” and destroy my things, all while spreading stupid rumors and snickering about them with her friends. But she didn’t deserve what he did to her; her hair and skin and nose and teeth ground into the pavement.
I kept my back to the screens as I returned to the stacks. I was thirteen when the Tomlinson house burned down; I used them as a starting point and guessed my way into the future.
Behind me, Georgiana’s boyfriend laughed as he revved his motorcycle. Georgiana’s protests grew frantic, desperate—muffled first by the bit in her mouth, then by the squelch of flesh on concrete.
I covered my ears, trying to focus on the VHS tapes lining the shelves. It would have been easier if they were all local, but they weren’t: there were titles in foreign scripts; covers with buildings taller than any I’d ever seen, landscapes more barren or lush than any I could imagine. I couldn’t determine what year the videos were made, or whether I was moving backward or forward in time.
I bumped into the other customer when I tried to switch stacks without turning around, but he hardly noticed. His eyes were fixed on the screens behind me, his face flushed, his pupils blown wide. There were three VHS tapes tucked into his arm.
A shiver skittered down my spine.
When I found Mom, finally, she was on a bottom rack between an empty space and a toddler with watery eyes and grubby hands fisted in a tattered blanket. On her cover, Mom looked like Audrey Hepburn: elegant in a little black dress, her dark hair swept back in an ornate bun. I’d never seen her with a case before, but it suits her; she always wanted so much more than a quaint country life.
“Do you like it here?” I asked, reaching for her. I wondered if sitting on a shelf was better than constantly being stomped into Erin’s trash, her tape unraveled and torn out, but then Georgiana rattled her final breath on three separate screens and that seemed answer enough.
I was careful to avoid the other customer when I brought her to the counter, but I made the mistake of looking up; bile rose hot in my throat at the sight of Georgiana sprawled across the country road, head thrown back too far, jaw detached, nothing but angry red flesh and black burns.
The teenager chewed his gum as he scanned Mom in at the cash register. “One week rental is twenty dollars.”
“It’s my mom,” I replied. I wasn’t going to rent my mother.
“It’s not your video, though. See?” He turned the screen to face me, and I frowned at the copy of Erin’s driver’s license. “I can only give it to this lady. Everyone else has to rent.”
Mom’s VHS has always gravitated to Erin; sometimes she’d vanish from my house only to reappear in Erin’s. It’s why I asked Erin to let me know if she found Mom before I did.
Looking back, I only know about the tape because I got tired of Dad and Erin talking over Erin’s dinner table every night after Mom’s funeral, and finally stalked off to watch her TV in the other room. I turned it on and there was Mom slamming the front door on an argument with Dad, speed-walking on the side of the dark country road to clear her head, and then there was the car—a sedan, maybe, its details obscured by the night—barreling down the street. Two weeks after my Mom’s death, I watched the car veer deliberately into her, over her, again and again. I watched her die.
This morning, thirteen years and then some after her death, I looked at the register and finally understood.
From the TVs, Georgiana’s meat gurgled. Her remaining eye met my gaze. She was waking up.
Nodding toward Georgiana, I asked, “Who owns her video?”
He gave me the flat look of a teenager dealing with an idiot adult. When he named her boyfriend, it sounded more like, “Duh.”
“And Mrs. Tomlinson’s?”
“Who?” he asked.
I darted off to retrieve the Tomlinson tape, brushing by the other customer as I went. He’d clearly grown bored with Georgiana and had resumed shopping; there were five videos in his arms now. I couldn’t help but wonder if any of the tapes lining these shelves belonged to him.
At the counter, the cashier scanned in the Tomlinsons’ video. Mr. Tomlinson has been in prison for so long now that his expired license is the wrong color, but the video was clearly his.
I can’t explain the VHS tape any better now than I could all those years ago, when I first watched my mom die on a recording no one could have made. I can’t explain how, after the sedan reversed over her abdomen and legs twice before speeding off, after her final breath was torn from her lungs, her glassy eyes turned to me and her bleeding mouth asked, “How did the history test go?”
But suddenly I can explain why Erin’s face drained of color when she found me in her living room, talking to my dead mother about points I’d lost on the French Revolution. I can explain why she wasn’t surprised to see the video, and why she made me promise to never tell my dad, and why she always seems relieved when I leave their home, and why Mom always returns to Erin’s house when she disappears.
So I rented my mom for Mother’s Day, and the Tomlinsons too, so I could tell Mrs. Tomlinson that her terrible husband was rotting in jail and let the kids watch the Power Rangers finale they didn’t live to see. The other customer was considering Georgiana’s unrecognizable corpse on the three screens as he waited behind me in line, so I rented her, too. She’s the Prom Queen on her cover, bright and beautiful; I don’t know whether it would be more kind or cruel to drop her off at the Fletchers when I go to the country tomorrow.
I called Erin after lunch. She was so excited when I asked to celebrate Mother’s Day with her. “I’m proud of you for moving on,” she told me. And, “I’ve always loved you like a daughter. Even before your dad and I got together, I loved you like a daughter.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I lied.
My real Mom is in the living room now, all dressed up in her pretty box, standing proudly beside the TV.
I think I’ll make something nice for dinner tonight while she dies. I’ll eat with her as she slowly wakes up, and tell her about my morning and how much I’ve missed her this last year as she listens from the pavement. We’ll talk about the dangerous country road outside Dad’s house, and the freshly tilled soy fields, how she stormed out on her last night because she thought Dad was having an affair.
And maybe, if she approves, I’ll celebrate Mother’s Day by making a VHS of my own.