Cold Hands

Shadows

Colesville was a ghost town. Drive two hours one way and you get to New Orleans, drive two hours the other way and you'll probably get somewhere, but there's a whole two hours of a whole lot of nothing first in every direction.

"It's kind of fun, isn't it, Zeff? Like a little oasis," my mom said when we rolled into town in her modest black PT Cruiser with the dent in the hood and the "Jesus Saves" decal she has had on there since probably before I was born.

If I looked past the bored reflection of the skinny Mexican paraplegic in the window, the view seemed a bit bleak for an oasis. I thought it was more like a deserted island. Colesville was the first patch of civilization in a big sea of wet. Or maybe like an abandoned castle, the battlements crumbling on the ruins of the gas stations and antique shops, surrounded by a moat filled with cypress trees and Spanish moss. Hell, there might even be crocodiles, it seemed like Louisiana always had tons of those in the movies. I didn't want to ask my mom if they actually had those here and risk sounding stupid.

Signs of life even in the town were scattered. There were long, muddy stretches of dirt road and forest between the settled patches of houses and stores, an eerie steakhouse or sinister Five and Dime peering out of the trees every hundred yards or so. The stoplights were the old-fashioned kind that hung from cables, and there weren't any big chain establishments in sight except for McDonald's. I doubted if they even had a Walmart.

We took a left turn before Main Street onto a bumpy gravel road. After winding through twisty trees in what seemed like an endless tunnel of darkness, we reached our destination in a little clearing.

The All Saints Episcopal Church of Colesville was not like the ones I was used to in Los Angeles, where big cathedral-looking buildings were the norm and there was a parish for every neighborhood. This was more like the Little Church That Could that you'd see in a Hallmark channel historical drama in New England or a movie about slavery in the antebellum south, complete with a white picket fence, brick walls that were more green now than red, and a bell-tower, though the bell was long gone. There was a spindly bald man in a cardigan standing on the front steps waiting for us, smiling. Even from back here I could see his teeth were yellower than lemons. They creeped me out.

My mom pulled down her mirror and fixed her clerical collar, fishing around in her purse for hairspray; her California beach curls weren't holding up too well in this Louisiana swamp weather. When my mom was young she looked a little like María Montez but with 80s hair. Now that she was older, she looked more like María Montez but with 80s hair and some extra pounds.

"Stop, you look super pretty, Mom," I said. "It's not like you didn't already get the job."
She smiled at me, but her eyes stayed sad. They usually were these days. I hated it, so I looked out the window instead. This was nothing like home. "Mom, how did we end up here?"

"You know why, Zeff. A change of scene is going to be good for both of us." She was hollow.

My mom was a preacher, so she always knew the best-sounding thing to say at any given moment. I hated that too.

She reached into the back seat to grab my folded up wheelchair for me, but I stopped her. "I got it."

"Can't I help you, still?" she said.

"If I'm ever going to learn how to drive on my own, I've got to know how to get myself in and out of the car," I growled, and pulled out the wheelchair myself. My mom got out of the car so I could push down her seat. She shut the door behind her hard.

If I stored my chair in the back seat within reach, I could open my door, lift the chair over myself, get it open on the ground, and use my arms to transfer out of the car. It wasn't a big deal anymore, I had done it lots of times. The accident was more than three years ago. I think that seemed like a longer time for me than it did for my mom, because she'd been around for longer.