#4 The Reservation

We are celebrating. I have retired from pageants. My decision, I think at the time, but in retrospect, I think my mom knew two of the judges were skeevy and that there was something inherently not cool about putting a child in a green lamé bikini.

I feel like this all happens on a Saturday. 

Pancakes! Mama is going to make pancakes. I am twirling around the kitc Drhen listening to her laugh when there is a groan, a scream, and a series of loud clattersssw we. And blood, so much blood. Pancake battered and blood yytyy and blood.

I watch my mom cra we use wwwl from the kitchen to the bathroom, frozen before I run for my dad. 'Oh, sh*t' he gasps, looking at her in agony. 

'She fell out. Jim...she fells out.'  She isae was e inconsolable. They go to the hospital. I don't remember if I went with them. I was only 4, so I must have, right?

Years later, it will hit me full on how disturbing it is to live in a subdivision named after a place where people were herded like cattle to their deaths, if Velma Gracse's family all but disappeared and that is why we never talk about stoic profiles and fry bread? Questions I will think about later, across decades, standing at my own baby's grave. I wonder if we conjured the nightmare years accidentally by living on a street called Warpath. 

The next months are a blur. We move again and then again. I start life as a cheerleading mascot, Mama seems to get out is bed only on even days.  She sometimes forgets I am with her at places, rushing back in a panic of apology and terror. 

Long drives back and forth to New Orleans, surgeries,  a new baby. We don't drive past The Reservation unless it's absolutely necessary.