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It is raining outside, and I am home alone. Mitch is working evenings at United this week and won’t be home until midnight, which is good—I won’t have to see him. I don’t know where Mom is, just that the trailer was dark and empty when I came home. Milk and soggy Fruit Loops sit souring in a bowl on the table. I wonder which of them left it here. Probably Mitch, since Mom doesn’t usually eat food. I tip the contents of the bowl into the sink. The window behind the table is up, and now everything is wet: the floor, the table, the windowsill. I push the window down, leaning over the table, rain splattering against the sill and onto my arm. My skin prickles to gooseflesh, and I use a rag from the counter to mop up all the water so the worn linoleum won’t warp, a wasted effort considering the state of everything already. The metallic clang of the rain slapping against the tin roof of our trailer pings out a metallic chant. The lamp is turned over on its side, evidence of the morning battle. I set it right again. I believe Mitch is on his way out, which is good—it’s past time.
The fridge is empty, except for some cheese, old cheese, left over from Christmas and wrapped in foil from one of those prepackaged sampler sets. The light in the fridge reflects off the foil and bounces a rectangle of white into the dark kitchen. I flip on the light switch and let the refrigerator door fall shut. I find chicken noodle soup in the cupboard and crackers in the cabinet. There is a pan in the sink, so I wash it and set it on the stove, adding water to noodles, turning the heat up to medium high. The flames lick out beneath the pan, blue fingers grasping at the scarred silver metal. Broth begins to bubble, and I eat a cracker, staving off my hunger while my mind hisses like gas from an unlit stove. I wonder where she is, where she has gone, and when she will return.
In my mind’s eye, she is lying dead on the bed with an empty bottle of pills. I go to her room, turn on the light, and there she is, her head turned slightly to the side, her mouth open. Her chest is rising and falling in time with the shallow catching of breath that passes for snoring in the heavily sedated. I run my finger along the disintegrating edge of a bruise along her jawline. She said that she tripped coming up the steps, but I think it looks very fist shaped. I told Mitch that if I ever catch him hitting her, I will kill him. Maybe that’s why he is working late this week, waiting until the evidence disappears.
On the bedside table is a glass, and peaking from beneath the bed, I can see the cap of her liquor bottle, her own self-prescribed tranquilizer. I bend down and lift the bottle, tilting it up to see the remains—a shallow pool of clear liquid in the bottom, all that was left to drain from the sides after the last drink was poured. I take her glass, too, and leave her sleeping. I rinse her glass in the sink and tuck the bottle into the trash can alongside another companion. Everything is getting worse and worse and worse. Something should happen to break the cycle, one way or the other, but what? Maybe Mitch leaving? She was a little better after Ed left, for a little while. I don’t know.
I nudge her shoulder. “Mom.” She groans and turns to face me, one eye opening to a slit. “Mom. Where’s the car?” She groans, turning her face away from me, her hand drawing up to cover her head. “What are you doing here? You should be at work.” She draws a deep breath and breathes out enough vodka vapor to stun a horse. “Where is the car?” Did she wreck it? How did she get home?
“S’at work.” She groans yet again, her words mushed together like she is talking through mouth full of food.
“What? Your car is at work?” I pause. “Why aren’t you at work?”
“Just leave me alone,” she mumbles, trying to push me off the edge of her bed.
“Did you get fired?” I ask, my voice ringing in the room. “Mom, did you get fired?”
She tells me again to leave her alone and edges toward the other side of the bed to sit up, weaving when finally upright.
“What happened?” I ask. I demand.
“Leave me alone.” There is a sheen of sweat erupting on her lip and forehead. “I’m gonna be sick.”
I help her stand up, and she pushes my hand away, weaving toward the bathroom, banging solidly against the doorjamb as she enters. Maybe she did fall on the steps. I listen to her vomit splashing into the bowl and wait. The water in the sink comes on; she sluices the water around her mouth, spits. I am waiting for her when she comes back. Her eyes slide off of me like I am a shadow in the corner.
“Why did you get fired?”
She shrugs, her eyes touching the spot where her glass was, missing it, noticing that the bottle is gone from under the bed. Her eyes flash and flick to me, then the anger is gone as suddenly as it came.
“Were you drunk?” My voice whispers out of me, a sigh, a gasp.
“Lee me’lone.” She flops back into her bed and closes her eyes.
I heave a huge sigh—disgust, anger, and frustration coming out with my breath. Crap. I make my way over her piled clothes and back into the hall, slamming her door behind me. Crap. Crap. Crap. “Goddammit!” I scream, slamming the side of my fist into the front door as I pass. My skin stings. Happy sucky birthday to me.
My soup is hot by the time I return to the kitchen, but my hunger is gone. I wonder what she did at work today. Did she go in drunk or get that way later? I turn back to my soup and dip a cupful out, leaving the rest to grow cold with the fire gone.
The noodles spin in my bowl, and I stare out the window, the water still sluicing in rivulets. Listening to the chant on the roof, I think about the woman lying at the end of the trailer, my mother. The word itself draws up images of something very different. Something that maybe she used to be but isn’t now. I don’t know. I just know I hate that drunk version.
The rain begins to slacken, and the rivulets running down the window break into drops, clinging to the glass, quivering with the force of gravity pulling them downward. The sun begins to break through the clouds, and I take the remains of my soup, which I haven’t touched, and put it and what is left in the pan into a bowl covered with foil in the fridge. Another something to sit and wait for mold.
When I step outside the air is tinged in orange from the sun seeping through the still-roiling clouds. I grab my bike and peddle down our road, avoiding the potholes and puddles, weaving as the spray whistles off of my tires, heading toward Dylan’s house, my mood hovering in dark corners until I see his barn break through the tree line.
We’ve always been friends, since I moved here. Friend by proximity I suppose. I don’t know if I want Dylan to be there or if I just want the horses. I used to always want him to be there, but things have changed a bit since I stayed back in sixth grade and he moved into junior high. Even though we never really hung out at school because I am a year younger, that took him to a different school entirely, and we’ve never really gotten back to where we were. It made a difference, him moving on and me staying behind. Our worlds shifted a step further apart that year, and even though we are still friends, we are not the friends we were. It was stupid for me to have to repeat a grade, but it was the year my mom spent three months in the halfway house and I was left to shunt pretty much on my own. She was clean when she finally came home, and stayed that way for a bit, long enough to get Mitch to come home to her, but it was too late for me. I had already missed too many days of school to pass on, regardless of how my grades turned out. So I stayed behind, and the kids in my class figured I was stupid, even though I’m not, and that changed everything. The kids coming into sixth grade also figured I was stupid because they saw me as going backward. It was a really bad year. By the time I did make it to junior high, I almost didn’t care that I was mostly alone in it.
I wheel my bike into the lane and swing off. The ground is soft under my feet, and the muck sucks up around my shoes and makes a low, thooping sound as I pull away. The clouds tumble just above the barn, and the soft, orange glow fades as the sun is forced back behind the shifting clouds. It could rain again at any second. Thunder growls around me, and the newly budded leaves on the trees turn their light sides up against the wind. In the distance, a flash of lightening slashes through the grey. The grass is bright, vivid with color after the long winter, shimmering when the errant sun sparkles across it. Not that there has been much sun over the last week, with one storm system rolling in after another. But the buds on the trees and bushes lining the lane are beginning to pop, just ready to open.
The barn stands to the left of the house. The gingerbread house, with its white siding, deep green shutters, and orange roof. It’s a beautiful house. In the spring and fall, it blends with the colors of the trees around it, and in the winter, it’s a splash of color against an otherwise desolate landscape. As I come through the paddock, I see the horses, nuzzling at the trough, waiting for their feed. There are three of them: Pride, the white Arabian; Adelaide, the chestnut; and Chessa, the red with a thick blaze on her face. Chessa and Adelaide are Morgans, with finely shaped heads but not as delicately boned as the Arabian. With the three of them nuzzling at each other and watching the front of the barn so intensely, I know Dylan must be there, portioning out oats and grains for the feeding. I hesitate and almost turn back, but then I slip inside. There he is, just as I thought, filling the pail with oats and cracked corn. The naked bulb overhead swings, throwing shadows across the walls. I lean against the jamb, just watching. He won’t see me until he turns to come out.
He is dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt. His rubber boots come up to his knees. He leans into the feed bin and back out, pouring oats and corn into three separate buckets. He is liquid motion. He has very loose limbs that don’t seem hindered by joints or bones. He is hanging the buckets for the horses when his dad, Jake, arrives in the doorway beside me. I jump, bringing my hand to my neck.
“Didn’t mean to scare you.” He says in his very calm, well-mannered voice. I like Dylan’s dad okay, but he makes me nervous.
“You didn’t.” I smile and look away, feeling my face flood with color. I step closer to the wall, giving him more berth to pass through.
“Dyl, dinner’s on,” he calls from where he stands beside me. Dylan turns and grins when he sees me. I raise my hand and wave. “Have you eaten, Alison?”
“Yes sir, I ate at home.”
“That’s too bad, there’s enough for thrashers.” Jake smiles, displaying large, somewhat crooked teeth.
“She’ll eat.” Dylan closes the feed bin. “Won’t ya, sneaky?” It’s not so much a question and neither of them wait for a response. He really hasn’t changed. It’s just me. I’m the awkward creature in the corner of the room, the one drooling and farting and gnawing on the carpet.
“Great, I’ll tell Vaude to set a plate.” Then Jake turns on his heel and is gone, loping toward the back door as Dylan reaches up and pulls the beaded chain to make the light go out.
“Ya sneakin’ up on me, Al?” He makes his way toward me.
“Not really.” He drops his arm over my shoulder, and I duck under before he can catch me in a headlock. He never hurts me, he just doesn’t let me get away. It’s something he’s done for years, a holdover from younger days when we’d wrestle across the living room floor, trying to pin each other. That was before he hit his growing spurt and gained about sixty pounds on me, and before we both hit puberty. I like it though, his arm resting across my shoulder, the fingers dangling, following the curve of his wrist. I like his closeness. But today I feel so prickly that I have to shrug my spines away so I don’t poke him.
“How ya been?” We walk toward the back door, swaying slightly, squishing into the wet grass. I haven’t been around much this spring.
“All right, I guess.” I pause. “Mitch is working late this week.” I don’t mention that my stupid mother got herself fired today. I’m not ready to divulge that personal tragedy yet. “You know you don’t have to feed me.”
“Thought so. His truck wasn’t there when I went by. I looked for you after school.” He ignored my last comment, and my stomach turns over.
“I caught the bus.” We’ve reached the back door, and he swings it open. “I thought you had your student council thing tonight.”
“Got cancelled. John’s got the flu, and Mindy had cheerleading.” We step inside, and he bends to pull off his boots, removing his arm from my shoulder. I kick my shoes off, too, and leave them, covered in muck, outside the door beside the welcome mat. I can hear Jake and Vaude talking as Dylan pulls up his socks, and we pad our way to the dining room. I love Dylan’s house. It’s very clean, with cream-colored carpets and vaulted ceilings. The dining room opens out from the kitchen, where Vaude and Jake are putting the finishing touches into a salad.
Even though I love the house, I don’t like being inside it. There should be signs that say “DO NOT TOUCH” across everything. I feel like I’m going to run into something or spill cranberry juice on the carpets. It used to be homier, but now it’s pristine, like newly fallen snow. The carpets still smell new. It’s overwhelming, all that white, and when I get overwhelmed or nervous, I get very quiet, like a hummingbird, hovering, but never quite touching down.
Jake and Vaude are smart and funny, and they seem to love each other too much to have been married forever like they have. What makes that work for some people and not for others? I can’t imagine Mom ever making a salad with someone. Actually I can’t honestly imagine Mom cutting up a salad—maybe an olive for her martini. She’s not a fan of “rabbit food,” and when it comes right down to it, mealtimes are certainly not events in my house. Maybe that’s the problem, not enough roughage. But Dylan’s family is nothing like mine, and I sometimes find myself wondering what my life would have been if Jake and Vaude had been my parents instead. Would they be talking about colleges for me and planning our summer trip to Alaska or something? What if I had won the family jackpot and Dylan had been dealt the snake eyes.
“How is your mother?” Vaude asks, as she always does, polite and mannerly.
“She is fine.” I answer as I always do. “Thank you for asking.” Vaude was my seventh-grade history and English teacher, which was odd but nice, since she already knew me so well.
We eat lasagna, garlic bread, and salad. I watch them and listen as they talk about their days. This is how it’s supposed to be: a FAMILY, in great big capital letters. I wonder if they are different when they’re alone. Do they fight and yell and throw whatever is handy? I glance at their flawless walls and know there is no throwing of anything in this house. Still, I wonder if they keep the peace until the house is empty and then let it rip, when nobody can hear. They seem almost too much like “family,” the way families are supposed to be, like it just comes easy and natural. Unlike my family, where the basic form of talking is yelling and the general topic is complaint. I wonder if that is the difference, what makes them the “Haves” and us the “Have Nots.”