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I am lost in my own thoughts when I come in to work on Thursday. I’m doing my best to suck it up at school and just stay below the radar. I hate to let Mrs. Shaw down. My mother went to her third AA meeting at the United Methodist Church last night. Faye came and took her. Rob told me while I was at work today that Faye has really high hopes for her. She told him she’s requested a sponsor, and one of the women stepped forward to offer herself. I wonder why she didn’t mention it to me. I made her breakfast this morning before I left for school, and we talked for a few minutes while she ate and watched the news. She did look good, though, like she had slept well, and I even told her I loved her as I walked out the door.
I have four weeks of school left, and I’ve talked to all of my teachers about making up the work I’ve missed or not completed, and for once I am happy to accept the charity of their leniency. This last week I’ve really done a lot to catch up, and only one report in English is still to be done, a book report on The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, which I am about a quarter of the way through. I have a hard time concentrating when I read.
I am coming back in from the sheds where I went to find Rob to give him paperwork for the lumber delivery he is taking out in the morning. I’m almost feeling normal. My body is back to normal, and even the deep bruising from the accident has faded to a faint yellow. Spring always makes me happier, and today has been a good day. It’s my birthday, and even though nobody knows, it makes me feel good. One year and I will be eighteen and can do whatever I want. Twelve months. I am contemplating this prospect when a familiar face catches me up. Warren, whom I haven’t seen since the Friday night when he took me to see his band play. I thought I would hear from him earlier, but when a week closed out with no sign of him, I figured he just wasn’t as interested in me as I thought. I thought we had a good time, and when he kissed me in his car, all of the sparks and electricity that I remembered from Christmas were clearly still there. But he didn’t come by; he was nowhere. I think I overestimated his interest.
Seeing him so suddenly this evening leaves me weak-kneed, and I try to decide if I can go back out to the shed until he is gone. Then he sees me, right before I decide to bolt, and his face lights up with that smile. I smile back and give him a little wave as I head his way. I meet him before he makes it to the door. I resolve not to ask him where he has been and to play it cool, as if I hadn’t noticed that he just disappeared, but my betraying mouth says, “Where have you been?”
He laughs and holds the door open for me. “You know, just around.” He smiles, but there is something in his eyes that I am not sure about.
“Uh-huh,” I say, but laugh as well. He leans into me, and I feel a little ridiculous.
He closes one eye and looks at me with the other, trying to decide something, then he takes me back outside. His voice is low. “I would have come by earlier, really, but I had some stuff to take care of.”
“I get it. You’re a player. I get it.” I say it as a joke, a big teasing joke.
“No. I’m not.” He sounds a little offended, and I wish I had just kept my mouth shut. “You really think that?”
“Sort of.” But I shrug, dismissing the subject. “It’s okay. Seriously.”
“I’m not a player, Alison.”
Great. Everything is so much clearer now.
“Okay. So, what are you looking for today?” It’s not like I care that he took almost two weeks to think of me again.
“You, actually.”
I blow out a breath in a huff. “Whatever.” I want to add “player” to the end of the sentence, but I bite my tongue.
“No, really, I was.” He laughs.
“Here I am.” In one of the three places I can generally be found.
He smiles but I realize there is something hiding in his stormy eyes, something uncomfortable. “Seen Cal lately?” he asks. This is not quite what I was expecting. We have not spoken of Cal except the day he told me he was his brother.
“I saw him one night last week.” The night I made spaghetti for them.
“Well, he’s gone,” he says in a low whisper.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“Can’t be found. Found his car on 57, parked with the trunk open. Three days ago. No sign of him. He’s gone.”
How did I not know this? I know I have been preoccupied for the most part, but, surely, Mom would have said something about him going. I close my mouth from where it has fallen open. I realize suddenly that Warren is still here, standing in front of me and that he has said something that I have missed while I was busy recalibrating my mind to see my mother for the first time. “What?” I say, shaking my head to clear it.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I just got distracted. What do you mean he’s gone?” Could I possibly be so lucky?
“I mean he’s gone. Took nothing, just gone.”
“No ideas?” This just gets better and better.
“Nobody knows.”
“Wow.” I can’t help the excited tone in my voice. I am the ambulance chaser, the accident gaper that bottlenecks traffic. He’s been gone for three days. That does not really even qualify as a missing person, does it? He just went somewhere, broke down, had somebody someplace else pick him up. I say as much to Warren, and he shrugs, clearly thinking this is something bigger.
***
I open the door to the apartment and call out. The TV is dark; the kitchen is dark. There is no light coming from under her bedroom door. There is no light coming from anywhere, and I flip switches as I move through the apartment. I open her door, and the rectangle of light from her bedroom window shows the lump of her in her bed. She is there. I start to close the door, but then I recognize the scent in the air, that vodka smell that had been gone for days, maybe a week. The light bounces on the curve of the bottle, and I find myself walking across the room, lifting the bottle, watching the slow pool of oily liquid in the bottle. So, not sober. Not sober. I had been so hopeful when Rob told me about Faye’s enthusiasm. I was just excited that she actually went to a meeting or three. I set the bottle back down on the table and begin to turn. Only then do I look at her limp face, her mouth open like a cavern, her hair strewn across her face, and I reach out to move it back from her forehead and feel like I have touched a table, or a cool counter. She is cold. She is so cold.
I pull back the blanket, thinking to wake her up, but she is not waking up, and in the dim, faltering light of the window, I finally see the syringe, looking big and ominous next to her skinny arm. But not really a syringe. The plunger is missing and in its place is a tube, duct taped to the syringe, lying along her stomach ending in a bladder, a hot water bottle. I am confused by what I am seeing. Nothing about any of that makes sense. Hot water bottle, tube, syringe. “Has your mother ever suffered suicidal tendencies?” I hear this question in my mind, the one Officer Daniels had asked me. I step away, back away from her, staring down. The sight before me is very much the one that used to haunt me when I was younger, when I had the fear of finding her dead. When did I stop fearing that? Was it the day I tried to kill her or before that? I don’t know. I sit on the floor for a very long time, looking at her. Not crying, not even really thinking, just etching her into my memory as she was in her last minute on Earth. I cannot reconcile the hot water bottle. That doesn’t even make sense.
I pull her covers back over her, and I push her mouth closed so she doesn’t look so cavernous, so wasted, so dead. I leave our apartment with the door open and knock on the door down the hall. A girl answers the door, a college-age girl, and I ask her if I can use her phone.
“Sure,” she says, opening the door wide to me. “You live down the hall, right?” I nod, and she steers me toward the phone.
I dial 9-1-1. Isn’t that what you are supposed to do? They’ll have to figure it out. I turn my back to the girl and pitch my voice, low, embarrassed, ashamed. I’m always so fucking humiliated by my life. “This is the 9-1-1 operator, what is your emergency?” Her voice is tinny over the line, unenthused.
“I need an ambulance.”
“What is your emergency?”
“I think she is dead.” I repeat that I need an ambulance, ramble our address.
“Would you like me to stay on the line with you until the ambulance arrives?”
“No, I’ll wait outside.” I hang up the phone and turn toward the door to see the girl standing with her mouth in an “O,” her hand halfway to it, tears pooling in her eyes. I nod and mumble a thank you as I go back out into the hall, past the open door to our apartment, down the stairs, and out into the night, where the air smells clean.
My mind races with images of her, my mother, going in reverse, from this desiccated shell to her crying on the floor and sleeping in my arms after Mitch left, to the day at the Goodwill when she tried to be as good as Mrs. Bancroft, to all the stories about the house we would build, to walking me home from kindergarten, buying me Milk Duds, to just her face above me, in the glow of the street lights, her voice low and singing. Beautiful in the glow, her eyes clear, her face so full of love and goodness. I feel the scream ripping through my vocal cords, and I settle on the curb, folding into my knees. “What happened to you?” I ask. I should cry, but I can’t; there are no tears inside of me. I am barren and wasted, dried out.
I hear feet behind me, and the girl from upstairs has come to sit beside me, her arm around my shoulder, drawing me to her. She doesn’t speak, and I don’t pull away from her. She smells like lavender and vanilla. The kindest people in my life have always been strangers. The vanilla and lavender begins to fill the empty space inside of me, washing away the dirty, angry emptiness, and I realize suddenly that I am free. She is free, too, my mother, from whatever broke her life. I have to do better than she did of not breaking. I owe her that.
We wait for the call of the sirens as we sit pooled in the glow of the street lamp.
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