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I make it back to the trailer and am thankful that Cal’s car is not here. I wake my mother and remind her to take her medicine. I bring her a glass of water to wash it down. I have been stewing in my throbbing head all the way home. I take her other glass, the vodka glass, and refill it for her. I hand it to her and she looks at me with stupefied eyes but takes it, graciously thanking me. “I think maybe you are right, Mom. Maybe I do only see the bad.” I take one of her Percocets for my own aches and wash it down with a glass of water from the tap. The water tastes like rust.
“What are you talking about?” she asks.
“Remember saying that to me last night?” She looks blearily at me, and I know she doesn’t. “Oh anyway. It doesn’t matter. Just I’m sorry if you feel like I am not nice to you.” Her lower lip puckers out a bit, and I turn away because I want to slap her.
I go to my room and empty my backpack. I put in a sketchbook, three pairs of jeans, four shirts, underwear, bras. A light jacket. I grab my money from my vent and tuck that into my pack as well. I crumple papers that are on my desk and leave them strewn through the house. I close my bedroom window.
She has finished her drink when I come back and is bleary eyed. I refill it, hand it to her, leaving the bottle on the counter for easy access. She totters a little in her seat, and the liquid pools out across her chest. There is a pack of cigarettes. I take one and light it. Taking a slow draw before coughing all the smoke out of my lungs. Why do people do that? My mother laughs, a slow, inert laugh, and jostles more liquid around her. “I can’t do that,” I say and laugh a bit at myself. “Want it?” She purses her lips and nods slowly. Sure, why the hell not?
“Oh, Mom. Don’t forget your medicine. You don’t want that leg to act up.” She looks puzzled, but I open the bottle and take out two pills, and I hand them to her. She still looks puzzled but the look passes, and she reaches for the pills. She washes them down with the vodka. Now there’s a good mother.
She is sucking long breaths of air when I leave the trailer, her cigarette smoldering to ash in her stained fingers. The dredges of the empty bottle tipped at her side. I am never coming back. I will never come home again. I stay just down the road, crouched in some bushes, watching until I see the smoke beginning to sneak out of the cracks. There should be flames by now, but there are none.
I think about the trail I’ve left, and if the fucker doesn’t burn to the ground, it will be so obvious what I did. I turn my face to the side and retch into the grass, causing the pain in my head to magnify and pulsate again. I sit back, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, holding my head until the throbbing subsides enough that I can open my eyes again.
The first flame licks out from the kitchen window. Burn baby burn, but then I think of her, and I remember her smile and how much I loved her when I was small. I see her lip puckering when she thought I was being kind. What have I done? I heave my backpack and stumble, jog back down the road.
The trailer is smoldering, not so much burning as steaming. I push through the front door and instantly drop to my knees. The smoke is overwhelming. Is it true that most deaths related to fire are caused by smoke? I heard that somewhere. I think. I can see the couch. My mother is still there, asleep, breathing in the noxious air, her casted leg propped on a pillow. Her brows are furrowed in her sleep. I grab her hand and try to shake her awake, but she just bobs, and I can’t tell if she is breathing or not. Then she lets out a long, wet snore, and I pull her off the couch. The trailer is hot, and when I open the door, the air licks the flames into a frenzy. Now that whole section of the living room is engulfed.
I try to lift her off the couch, but I don’t have the strength in my wounded shoulder to do it, so I drag her. Her butt thumps against the floor, followed by her cast. She moans. “Wake up!” I yell into her ear, but the fire is getting so loud that my words are sucked away. What have I done? What have I done?
I drag her through the kitchen, which has not yet lit, and torturously down the hall toward my room, toward the back door. I shove the door open, and the change in wind sucks the smoke down the hall, and it roils over us out into the morning sun. I am trying to turn her body, to make the angle toward the door, and my lungs are screaming with the pain of the smoke. I close my eyes and pull her toward me. She flops to her side, and I drag her to where my feet are now standing on the step outside of the door. The door swings wide and bangs against the trailer, rebounding in the wind again and swinging to hit me in the back. “Fuck!” I scream and yank her, shoving back against the door, and she jerks forward. I wrap my arms under her chest and drag her out into the sunlight. Her poor leg bumps along the steps, and I drag her back and away from the smoldering ruin of our trailer until we are surrounded by grass and have fresh air again in our lungs. I turn her on her side and listen to her back. I can hear the slow, irregular beating of her heart, and I’m afraid it isn’t going to matter. I’ve killed her. I try to remember how many of the pills I handed her, how many did she already have in her stomach, how much vodka went down? I don’t know. I can’t remember. It is a blur, confused in my memory.
Throw up. I think. She needs to throw up. I don’t know what to do. I wrap my arms around her so her head is in my lap. I am crying, rocking her.
She shifts, retches, and vomit splatters into the dirt and across my leg. Her casted leg bounces against the ground as her body convulses. The flicker of red and orange scorches my face and hands, her face and hands, the yard and world surrounding us. The opened doors have given the fire the breath it needed, and it is fully lit now. Her hair clings in strands to her neck and my arm where I support her head. She convulses again.
“Good girl.” The voice is clear in my head, and “girl” sounds like “gurl.” I twist my head around to see who has spoken, but we are alone, my mother and I, cast in gold by the smoldering inferno of our trailer. If I weren’t so consumed by the misery of what I have done, what I attempted to do, I would maybe think I was losing my mind. My mother is still retching, terrible dry heaves pulling the dregs of acid from her stomach, drawing the remains of my attempted murder from her body. I squeeze her to me when she stops and rub her hair out of her face. Tears are dropping from my chin and into her tangled, smoky hair. The wind lifts my hair, and a chill wraps around my body. I have the strangest feeling that we are not alone.