After Mother puts you to bed and you’re almost asleep, another woman appears at the threshold of your bedroom door, backlit, her hair haloed by the yellow light of the hallway. She looks just like your mother, except she’s taller and there is no love for you on her face.
There is, however, an urgency.
And, urgently, she tells you stories.
She tells you about a woman she knew when she was growing up. Her name was Stella. She was married to a guy with a motorbike. She was always dressed in black, and she had long, dark hair that she covered with a sheer, black veil. Her skin was very, very pale because she would never go out during the day. But at night, her husband would take her on his motorbike, and together they went drinking around town. They had no children. She laughed a lot. Her teeth were very white, her tongue an annihilating red.
“What happened to her?” you ask, your breath growing cold in your lungs.
But your mother doesn’t reply.
Instead, she tells you another story, about a monster that used to live in the swamp outside that same town, where Stella lived, where your mother grew up.
Nobody had ever seen it, but everyone knew it was real. In summer, the town filled with the monster’s scent, heavy and damp, like freshly turned soil and rotting leaves.
Many men went after it with rifles, or with spears that they fashioned out of broken garden tools. Stella’s husband went too. Nobody ever came back.
“Why are you telling me all this?” you ask your not-mother, your other-mother, but she just looks at you with her other eyes, her other mouth set in a harsh line. “Are you trying to scare me?”
“Are you scared?” she asks.
“No,” you lie.
So she continues.
She tells you that the monster was small, almost the size of a child. She tells you about its jaws that were perfect circles rimmed with razor-sharp teeth and about its delicate wings that trailed behind it like a bridal veil. It had fins, too, and long, thin spines. It balanced on its back legs and had a snake for a tail. It walked haltingly, like something drunk, but, when it wanted to, it moved so fast that no one could get away. Whoever heard its roars could only stand stunned with fear while the monster went for their throats. Ate them alive.
You don’t ask how she knows all these things.
The woman looks at you to see if you’re scared now. You’re not. Or you are, but you’re also sad more than you are scared. You’re sad for the monster that was born out of the swamp, alone and unlike any creature in the whole world.
You never find out if the nocturnal mother was real or if your mother was aware of this woman and her stories, her nightly visits. You never confront your mother about it either. Occasionally, when she drifts off and stares at the wall, her gaze reminds you of the overcast eyes of that woman at your bedroom door. But then she snaps out of it; she looks at you and smiles, her face full of love. “It was nothing,” she tells you, putting her hands on you, her skin clammy on your skin, her lips tight, answering a question you never asked. “It was really nothing.”
All you want is to grow up, and so you grow up. You go to high school, then college to study history because you like making sense of old stories and buried things. At the library, you sometimes do a search for “night mother” and “mother double,” but nothing helpful ever comes up.
You become busy, working your way through college to pay for your degree. For a long time, you forget about the nocturnal mother altogether. You tell yourself she was a nightmare. Something your childish mind made up to scare you. You move away, leaving your mother to live alone in that house with the attic and the basement that nobody ever mentioned when you were small. You do a master’s degree in genealogy and family history. You make friends. And every so often you stumble across a memory you didn’t know you had. There’s the image of Stella moving away from the edges of the swamp in her black dress and her black veil and no tears streaming from her eyes. There’s the old rolltop desk you discovered when your mother asked you to help clear out the attic. The desk was locked, but you had it opened with the help of a locksmith. There was a yellowed notebook inside, its pages covered in scrawled handwriting. It contained no dates and no names, but it was full with what you could only describe as stories written from the point of view of the monster. You thought of them as the monster’s adventures, and the more you read them, the more you became convinced it was Stella’s diary.
But then you fall for a girl who’s always dressed in black and you forget about all of that again. She slips into your dorm room on cold nights when you’re almost asleep, and you think it’s your mother again, come to tell you stories. Her hair is haloed by the yellow light that streams from the corridor outside, her skin very, very white—you think it’s because she’s never gone out during the day. Her lips an annihilating red.
One night, sleeping next to that girl, you dream of your mother. You’re a child again. You know it’s a dream because you’re sitting by a campfire, on the desolate beach of a black ocean. Your mother appears suddenly, a cocoon of a woman backlit by flames. She doesn’t come any closer. Her eyes are dead, the color of a swamp. She opens her mouth to show you the emptiness inside.
You call her in the morning, ask her about those stories she used to tell you, but she says she doesn’t remember. “Wasn’t there a swamp outside the city where you grew up?” you insist. You half expect her to say no, there was no swamp, there was never any swamp, but instead she says, “Not anymore. They had it drained years ago.”
“Did they find the monster?” you ask her then, and immediately you bite your tongue, as if you allowed something unspeakable to be spoken. You imagine her looking away, the phone held loosely in her thin hands, the clammy skin you haven’t felt on you for so long. She says she has no idea what you’re talking about, her voice cold and flat like a surface. You ask her why Stella never had children, and at first you think she’s not going to reply, but then, as she’s hanging up the phone you hear her say, “Why would she?”
You don’t talk about it again for a couple of years, and you make it through long stretches of time when you don’t think about your mother at all. You break up with the girl in black, amiably. You crave the silence of your childhood home, the hollow vastness of the valley that surrounds it. You find yourself missing the nocturnal mother at the door of your childhood bedroom. You move back.
She returns then, even if only in your dreams. You remember her clearly, in all her detailed glory, the way she smelled of clean blood and rotting leaves. The way she tilted her head and pointed at her throat. This time, she doesn’t always stand at the threshold, backlit by the corridor, but sometimes waits for you in bed. White skin and black hair. Red lips and dead eyes. She’s all bones, her breasts covered in white scars. She tells you to come closer, and you obey—she’s your mother, after all. You sit next to her and she leans over you, her mouth full of mother-teeth. She whispers, “It’s almost your turn now. Do you remember what I gave you?” When you wake up, you cry because you don’t.
When you think of Stella, you imagine her with your mother’s face, which makes you want to have a child of your own. A bit of your flesh, a splash of your blood. You imagine what stories you’d have for your child if you became a mother. You tell yourself you’d shun your mother’s stories, would spare this child the horror of your dreams. This is what you wouldn’t say: All families have their origin stories, and for your family, the swamp is it. It’s where you all come from. You leave it, but it never leaves you. Its monsters are your monsters. If you close your eyes at night, if you open a window and sniff the air, you’ll always be able to catch a whiff of it, that rotting stench, that depth. The dead, forgotten things.
You want to think you’d tell a different story. Something softer and more comforting.
But then you really do have a baby and, finally, you understand. It’s a girl; of course she’s a girl. She has your mother’s eyes. Your mother helps you, teaches you how to hold her, how to feed and clean her. But she’s frail now; she tires so easily that you send her to her room with the order to rest and not worry about you. “As a baby,” she says, “you cried all the time.”
You decide to call your daughter Stella.
Your daughter gets the same stomachaches you had when you were a toddler. You spend endless hours holding her to your chest, wrapped in a blanket, not knowing how to protect this tiny creature. In the end, you try to soothe her by simply showing her she’s wanted. When she quiets, you fall asleep right there in the chair. In your dreams, you walk out into the night, into the swamp, with an axe in your hand and no fear in your heart. You touch the soft mud, sink your whole hand into it, up to the wrist. It smells impossibly sweet. You look for the monster, with its circle of teeth, its fins and spines, but you never find it. And when you wake up, you cry. You don’t know why. You cradle your baby and promise her you’ll never tell her stories of teeth and fear, of mothers and daughters fighting to love each other, of that terrible, cloying need, of things given, and taken, and given up. Your daughter’s hair smells like moss and thunderstorms, and that makes everything okay.
The difficult first year passes, and so do your daughter’s aches. Your mother stays with you, but you never talk about the swamp again, or the Stella of old, or the monster. She wears her heavy earrings, black, each with a round piece of amber hanging from a loop. When you kiss her, her skin tastes like leather and ashes.
You reconnect with that girl dressed in black. She wears other colors now, sometimes, purple and teal and a dark cypress green. She has pierced her eyebrow, which makes her eyes look uneven and depthless like a cat’s. You take her out, leave your baby with your mother at home. You go to the movies, the swamp monsters frequent and laughable. You don’t tell her about the nocturnal mother, the stories of the swamp, your black ocean dreams. You get milkshakes and a burger. You make out in the back of your car. She thrills when you don’t hold back and take her piercing into your mouth, the taste of metal burning your tongue. She has a sadness in the corners of her lips but feels like midday heat and dark roses. You invite her to stay over, and she likes your daughter, and your daughter likes her back. She offers to stay with Stella while you go to work, which is sometimes an office where you spend your days as a data entry clerk and sometimes a diner where you wait tables. In the end, it makes more sense for her to move in, so she does. Your daughter is a toddler now. She says her first words. She calls you both “Mama.” Most days, if anyone asked you, you’d tell them you’re happy. Your mother passes away the autumn after your daughter learns how to speak. In the weeks before, you spend more time with her. It’s the closest you ever come to talking to her plainly about your childhood nightmares, the stories, the swamp. When you ask her if she knows any bedtime stories you should tell your daughter, she tells you stories are like vaccines. “Vaccines?” you ask and she says, “Yes. Vaccines to guard against the cruelties of the world.”
She’s less and less lucid after that. You spend the afternoons by her bedside and then, later, you grieve her briefly and intensely. You empty out her room and throw away almost everything. Even Stella’s diary, which you find under your mother’s mattress. You hold onto so little, these days. Not even then do you tell your wife about your night mother—afraid, perhaps, of summoning her, now that your real mother is no longer there to keep her at bay.
Time passes like a thick, slow-moving river. You go back to work at the office and the diner and the movie theater where you show people their seats in the dark with your little flashlight, because there is no employment for historians in love with swamp monsters and their family secrets. You never dream of that vast, black ocean anymore. You never dream of anything at all, and, for that, you’re grateful.
But then there are times when, as you put your daughter to sleep, you catch yourself hesitating at the threshold of her bedroom door, with the sound of another heartbeat in your ears, distant and ancient. Your daughter looks at you with your mother’s eyes, and you stand there, something fearful and spiny growing around you and in you, the taste of dark water filling your mouth, like a story.
***
Rumpus original artwork by Dolan Morgan
