IT’S EXACTLY sixteen and a half seconds, because I started counting out of sheer curiosity, when the door is opened and my mother unceremoniously flops onto the bed and joins me. Emmett chooses to go to the corner and drag over a beanbag, which he settles into, pulling out his phone and checking it as he so often does. He slides it back into his pocket with a worried expression that he probably doesn’t want me seeing.
A moment later, the crescendo of paws clattering out of my mom’s room and into mine bring in the dachshund. She is sleeping on my stomach in record time, curled tight into a little ball while I rest my hand on her rump, which is dangerously close to my face. The slamming of my bedroom door must have woken her.
“Sarah missed you. She slept on your bed the first two nights. I couldn’t get her to move at all.” My mom is lazily stroking one of her ears. It slips from the top of her head to sprawl on my chest.
“I’m just tired, Mom,” I groan in response. “It’s been a pretty weird four months.” Emmett bursts out laughing. I raise my head off the pillow to glare in his general direction. As he struggles to contain his guffaws, he looks at me. There are actually tears streaming from his eyes. I have no clue what I’ve done or uttered, but something must have been amusing. I flop my head back to the pillow.
“It’s just,” Emmett begins, trying to swallow the laughter, “that is the understatement of the entire history of the planet Earth itself. Weird? Please, that doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
He is incredibly right. I have to smile again. I lift my head again to give him an angry look. I don’t understand why he insists upon being so damn happy and all infectious with it. I guess I got lucky with a perfect friend. How cliché.
I lower my head onto my pillow after my neck begins to feel stiff with the ferocity of my glare. I tell Emmett my thought process about his infectious happiness inducing ability, and he just looks at me. He makes everyone laugh. Go figure. My mom sits up and walks over to Emmett.
“Hey there, Emmett. How’s it going?” She keeps her tone light and cheery. “Do you think that you might be willing to go get a nice coffee and then drink it in the privacy of your own home? I’d like to have a heart-to-heart conversation with my daughter. We’re going to talk about all sorts of girly things I’m sure you have no desire to hear about.”
“Well, when you put it that way,” Emmett says, matching my mother’s tone, “I can see where I become the—”
“I have a uterus!” I shout, sick of their playful bickering. “Let’s talk about that!” Emmett leaves very quickly after that, screaming over his shoulder that he has absolutely no desire to learn about the exact functions of such female organs.
He should get it, though. I’ve only been home a little while, but Emmett’s sense of privacy is not the best. I don’t blame him for not realizing he should leave me alone with my mom. I’m amazed she let him in at all.
When my mom closes the door behind him and returns to me, I haven’t moved. My excuse is the sleeping canine on my stomach. As she lies down next to me, my mom looks at me.
Without averting my gaze from the ceiling where it has returned, I choose to inform my mother, “You are incredibly passive-aggressive but at the same time utterly sassy. I very much appreciate your skills in both, and I assume the live studio audiences of your inevitable sitcom will agree.” I am thanked profusely for my observations.
Then my mother picks up Sarah and moves her, which is only the cruelest thing she can do to someone who was busy absorbing the body heat reflected by a very small animal. I roll over onto my side to protest, which I know is exactly what she wants.
“Want to talk about it?” Her unasked question lingers in the air. I roll back so that I can stare at my ceiling.
“About what? The note? The fact that I tried to kill myself? The unending and crippling depression where I felt nothing, and when I did feel, it was sorrow and self-pity? You want to talk about that? The scars all over my body from cutting my skin over and over and over again in a desperate attempt to feel anything.” I know I’m wallowing, but what is there to say?
“Carter,” my mom says, then she is quiet for a moment. I look at her, expecting her to be fighting tears, but she is only staring at the ceiling. “When you came home that day after you lost your hand, there was a sadness in your eyes that vaguely worried me, but you took such good care of yourself that you seemed okay. But toward your, uh, attempt, you weren’t you anymore. I hoped it would go away and you would feel better. You did improve at one point; you were smiling and happy that day, and I thought I had you back. I thought you just needed your privacy and time to grieve, so I gave it to you.
“But you stopped writing poems, stopped being happy, stopped loving, stopped caring, and you ceased to be my daughter. But I didn’t realize until it was too late. I would have helped if I could, if I had known. But you were a master of disguise, and you kept everything hidden so well. You were always so mature. It was almost like you didn’t need me.” She smirks for a moment. “I thought that parenting was supposed to be way harder than it was for you.” She pauses to sigh.
“There aren’t any words to describe this. No actual words, no creative words, there is nothing. In all my years, I have never had or seen anything remotely like this happen. Not the hypothermia, not the frostbite, not what happened to your hand, none of it. The situation is anything but normal.
“Then again, you are not a normal girl. You are special, Carter, and I’ve always believed that. No matter how hard the universe tries, it will never again be able to create someone exactly like you. What I don’t understand is why you would want to stop any of it.
“But you know, Otto Frank, the only survivor of those families that hid in the attic during the Second World War? He said once something along the lines of all children need to raise themselves. No disrespect to him, but if that’s how you think you need to raise yourself, you have another thing coming. Me.
“Carter, you had opportunity after opportunity to come to me and get help and do something to get better. I’ve never thought suicide was the answer to anything. I could have helped you work through it.
“So now, I will be watching you like a hawk. I am your mother, and I have eyes in the back of my head. So, my baby, welcome home. I love you, but I’m not letting you have as much privacy as you did for a little while. And just for now, no Internet for you. I don’t want you near that blog of yours. You wrote that password into the note because you wanted me to see ‘who you really are,’ and I do not think that blog is healthy. I read every single post. And despite what the rest of the world thinks, I am quite savvy with your technology, and I do know how computers work. I’m a computer technician. I know every function of your laptop, some that I bet you don’t even know. For now, I’ve taken the liberty of expropriating your laptop. The only computer with Internet is the password-protected one in my office. If you go online, I will be right there. Since I’ll be working, I can make sure I’m here and doing what needs to be done as your mother. Capisce?”
I must admit that I am shocked and duly impressed with my mother’s computer skills. I had no idea that she knew how to do that. I don’t really know all that much about my mother, I suppose.
“That was incredibly comprehensive. What about all the homework I have to make up? I missed the majority of February and part of March, and then May and now it’s July and school ended already, which I can’t go back for.” My begging excuse is nothing less than absolutely pathetic, but I need to move on. “There’s going to be summer work too,” I add, a touch too smugly.
But my mother is prepared, and not to be outdone. “I only disconnected the Internet. You still have your document creators and whatnot. And you can learn from textbooks, which are in your backpack in the closet, where I put them after I picked them up from school. And, I did state before, I have Internet, because I need it. You can send an e-mail if you ask nicely.” And, with that, I am defeated. My mother, despite the fact that I don’t mention it nearly enough, is one hell of an evil genius mastermind when she needs to be. Like right now. I love her for it. She’s fantastic, and she really knows what she’s doing.
It takes me several minutes after she puts Sarah back onto my stomach and leaves to realize I had actively counted time. Those sixteen and a half seconds were seconds that I counted and noted in my brain. Keeping time feels so foreign.
When I start to sit up, Sarah makes an indignant sound at being disturbed and shoves her snout into my face, licking it and demanding I pet her. I comply before gently moving her to the bed. But something is wrong. The comforter is different. This one is blue and simple, the old flowery one I grew up with, gone. I look to the floor. There is a matching blue throw rug on top of the hardwood. That’s new.
I sit up fully, and Sarah yawns at my face grumpily. I flop back down, onto my stomach now, and reach down, to pick up the corner of the rug. There is a large stain on the hardwood, faded to a brownish color. But it is obviously the remnants of a lot of blood. I let the corner of the rug thump softly back down and look at the bedspread.
The moment is hazy and tinged with the light-headedness of blood loss in my memory, but I was definitely on this bed. I guess that means I ruined the comforter too. I feel the sudden loss of the blanket in my gut, throbbing vaguely as if I’ve just been punched. I never imagined the lost feeling of a warm blanket. Maybe this one is warmer.