for another customer service agent to pick up. Then she looked at me and said, “God help me,” and went off to the downstairs bathroom to soak her face with a hot, dripping washcloth over the sink.
Mom introduced her latest safety demonstration when Lola was away at an overnight. I was watching The Giant Gila Monster on TV, getting ready to go out. Mom called me into the kitchen. She stood by the stove and handed me a box of wooden matches. She wanted me to start a stove fire so she could show me how to put one out.
Glancing into the living room, where the TV was still lit up, she asked, “What are you watching?”
“It’s about a big lizard that terrifies a town in Texas.”
Mom began to say something, but maybe she thought better of it. She pulled a cast iron pan off its hook, got a high flame going, and when the pan was hot, she dropped a tablespoon of bacon grease into the center and then another. We watched the fat turn transparent with small bits of black in it. “Once the grease starts to smoke,” she said, “I’ll give you the signal.”
“I have to finish getting ready,” I said.
“If you’re alone with Lola, you need to know how to do this.”
I had started to live more out of the house than in, so my mother liked to snag me whenever I landed. The thing was, I had made hundreds of meals for Lola. They were never complicated. Lola liked pasta, macaroni and cheese, apple slices, carrot sticks. Mom just wanted the world buttoned down because none of it was anymore. Sometimes it seemed easier to go along.
Taking a match out of the box, I held the red tip against the striker.
“Ready?” she said. She was in a heightened state now, apron sash tight, straight dark hair loose around her shoulders, her eyes large and bright. She put her hand on the paper sack on the table like an actor in a public service commercial. “In case you have to put a fire out while you’re cooking, it’s always good to have salt at the ready.”
“Got it,” I said. My mother began to tug at the white string at the top of the sack. I saw that everyone was already at the sock hop and the Giant Gila Monster was headed their way.
I didn’t see that the string wouldn’t budge. She told me this later.
I did, however, clearly hear my mother say, Now.
She meant Now as in Now … if the bag won’t open, you might need to get a pair of scissors. But I was sure I heard the signal, so I lit the match and it left my hand and arced toward the pan at the same moment she turned away from the stove to look for those scissors, her hair flying out in a wide circle.
I saw a blue flame surround her head like a crown of stars, and I heard her scream the same terrifying scream a wild peacock will make out in the dark. I had a great uncle who lived near wild peacocks, and as the fire danced along my mother’s head and I stood there paralyzed, I heard that exact sound leave her throat.
In a sudden flood of safety memories, I knew to grab a jacket off the back of a chair and cover her head, holding it there until the fire was out, holding my mother until the flames were gone.
We took a taxi to the hospital because she was afraid of the cost of the ambulance. I was the one who cried, apologizing in a soft whisper, thinking her ears had been burned. She seemed to be holding her breath while she patted my leg to quiet me.
Once the examination was done, the ER doctor shut his eyes for a moment as if he were pulling up thoughts from a dark cave. He said my mother was a lucky woman. “You’ll have some scarring on the back of your scalp,” the doctor said, opening his eyes again and indicating places around her head while I held the hand mirror. “But much of your hair will grow back and more or less cover those places.”
My mother flinched, and he said, “You might have been facing the stove,” as if he thought she would do this again.
That’s when I realized how easy it is to burn the house to the ground with all the people in it because you’re trying so hard to prevent disaster.
On the ride home she asked me not to tell my father, like we should be worried about protecting him.
For weeks afterward a vision of that crown lit up my mind, sometimes during the day but often in the middle of the night. It was the pain I felt over what had happened, of course, but I was sure I had also seen a drawing or painting of that halo. When I searched online, I found Our Lady of the Apocalypse.
I recalled that a photographer friend of Mom’s had given her a coffee table book filled with shots of Virgin Mary statuary. Locating it in the shelves of art books, I read that he had spent months traveling around the States following a path of closing parishes. He would set up his camera the day before a church was going down and shoot those ethereal figures, many already pulled from their pedestals. Some had crowns on their heads, some with stars. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of abandoned Marys with missing noses and arms and heads. On her worst days, I think that was exactly how Mom saw herself after my father took off.
I went begging and Geary, my old photo teacher, hired me to help in his darkroom. It was my job to set up lighting and backdrops in the studio, order supplies, catalog, and make deliveries around the city. He and his wife, Lettie, had only one car, so this often meant public transportation.
One delivery was to a fashion photographer on the near west side named Nitro. He did some of his own fine art prints but relied heavily on Geary for the fashion stuff. I was supposed to call if Nitro gave me any shit. Before I could find out what Geary meant he got a call from his wife. So I left and rode the L and when I leaned my head against the train window, I heard the wheels on the tracks sounding: Nitro. Glycerin. Nitro. Glycerin.
A guy in his late thirties, wearing jeans and a white button down, met me at the door to his loft. He had two controllers in his hands. Halo was on a big monitor across from his couch. Looking a little embarrassed, he said, “Just setting up some new equipment.”
I held out the two black photo boxes, one stacked on top of the other.
“You’re from Geary’s?” he asked, making a study of my face.
I looked down at the boxes, Geary’s studio name and address typed right there, and looked back at him.
“Halo?” he asked, taking the boxes.
I shrugged and he handed me a controller.
He wasn’t very good at it. I had to keep explaining how the controls worked. Or he was good at it and just wanted to sit close to me on his old leather couch. He put his hand on my knee and I took it off. After I beat him at the game too many times I got up and looked around.
Nitro had photographs of his parents on one wall, their faces blown up so big you could drift into them and feel like a speck, like a bug in their eyelashes. Nothing flattered, nothing pulled back. They reminded me a little of Mehdi Bouqua’s stuff, a street photographer working out of LA. On another wall Nitro had seven shots of young gang members in the city. He used backlight and fill, and somehow this made them appear as if they were about to ascend into the sky in a threatening yet childlike moment. They sat on beat-up playground equipment in a city park and I realized what he was after. “You like William Blake, his artwork,” I said.
He looked at me as if to say, What kind of creature are you? I could hear that word creature in his thoughts. “Yes, very much. Pity. I think that’s my favorite. Do you know that
