I close the basement door and breathe in the familiar, musty-mold-mice-poop smell of my house. There’s a bang in my bedroom, like a drawer shutting. I’m thinking right away, it’s you. “Chris?!”
“Jessie?” Mom steps out of my room into the hallway, peers at me over the piles of newspapers and clothing.
Disappointment sits in my chest, plops its legs out, gets comfortable. Mom never goes into my room. It’s off-limits.
“What are you doing?” I demand.
“I was worried about you.”
“You were worried about me?” I say, incredulous.
She blinks her murky-green eyes. You once said her eyes were just like mine, only dulled with sadness. She used to look like me in other ways, too. Her body was just like mine at my age, and her hair, too. We look like sisters in pictures. It freaks me out, if you want to know the truth.
“Did you find Chris?” she asks.
“No.”
“Are you okay?”
I can’t remember the last time she asked if I was okay, and all I can manage is a quick shrug. It really hits me, no joke. She hobbles toward me, in her flowery nightgown that she calls a housedress, and wraps her arms around me. I stiffen at first, and then I relax.
I’ve forgotten how much I like her hugs. It’s like hugging a soft, squishy pillow. Plus, she smells like baby powder and flowers from spending all that time in the tub Dad installed for her arthritis and her fibromyalgia and her million other disorders. When she lets go, I miss it.
“How do you know about Chris?” I feel guilty I didn’t tell her, though she could’ve come downstairs and asked me before I left for work.
“I heard the kids talking through the window this morning.”
That’s funny, right? Why didn’t she come down to talk to me? I just stare at her. She’s a goddamn mystery.
“Do you think the police are going to come?”
“No, Mom. For god’s sake.”
This is why I’m scared of cops. You always laugh at me every time we get pulled over. You ask what do I got to be worried about? You say I act like I’m being kidnapped. It’s true. I freeze right up. And I don’t have a good reason like you do; I mean, I’m a white female. But my whole life, I’ve always worried about our house being condemned, of being thrown into the streets, homeless, or even worse, into foster care. My mom’s been in foster care, and she’s told me horror stories. Even when I was little, she said we could never call the cops or the fire department, and we could never allow anyone to enter our house in case they called the authorities.
It was dangerous. I mean, sometimes you need the authorities. Like, one time, when I was just nine, we had a grease fire on the stove. The whole damn house could have gone up. Mom was screaming at me from the kitchen: “Fire!” I flew up the stairs. I was always worried that one of her big, flowy outfits would catch on fire when she was cooking. Mom was screaming on the dirty linoleum floor in her nightgown. A frying pan was shooting flames toward the ceiling. “Get the fire extinguisher!” she yelled. It was in the cabinet on the other side of the fire. I grabbed it from the shelf and the damn thing felt so heavy, I nearly dropped it, but then I shot the white stuff all over the stove and put it out. No fire alarm went off. I guess we didn’t have batteries in them. “Tell the neighbors we’re fine,” she screeched. “Don’t let them call the fire department.” So then I had to run outside. Sure enough, the old lady neighbor across the street was standing on her lawn with her phone. “You okay?” she called. “Should I call 911?” From the lawn, I could see the upstairs filled with smoke. I told her that it was just toast, we were fine. (In my world, fine has always been an alternate word for awful.) I went back inside and told Mom nobody was calling the fire department, and she said I was a good girl. And I actually felt proud.