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There is something wrong with me. Not with the baby, but with me, with who I am, what I am. There is something missing from my genetic coding. I know I’ve always been a little off, but it has gotten worse, I’m convinced. It is Christmas Eve, and I am sitting in my room, alone, because Cici is still at work and we’ve already had dinner and group. I am thinking about all the Christmases of my life. The only one I can really remember is from last year. I was so angry at Mom, and so upset at Dylan for having company, which meant I couldn’t sneak off to his house, and Warren had strung up a strand of lights on one of the trees behind the trailer just to make me smile. I haven’t thought of any of them in weeks. I don’t miss them.
I don’t miss my mother. How can you not miss your mother when she dies? How can you not even really care? I don’t miss Dylan, and there was a time when I thought I would die if I didn’t get to see him every day. I don’t even let myself think of Warren even though we made this baby together, and I thought that was true love. Now the only person that matters to me is this baby, and the only person I want to see every day is Cici. How messed up is that? I just let go, and it’s like they stop existing, or worse like they were never there.
I know that what I felt with Dylan was more about wanting to be him than wanting to be with him. I wanted his life to rub off on me. It never did, so I gave up and forgot about him. But have I really forgotten about him? No, but I don’t let myself think about him, much. What is his life like now, away at college? Probably home for the holidays, hanging out with all his old friends. Hanging out with Kelci, I’m sure. Does he have a girlfriend at college? I wonder, and I see him as I saw him so many times, riding on Pride as we went through the trails that lead up to Donovan's Ridge. I see his sway, his loose-limbed movements, and for a small moment I feel something. Something like longing but maybe more like envy.
I think of Warren, and the way his skin touching mine made electricity spark all through my body. Is he a good man? I try to figure it out, because if I heard it from somebody else about how he was twenty-eight and hitting on a sixteen-year-old, I would not be impressed. But we were different. We weren’t those people. Yes, he was older, and, yes, I was sixteen when we first started liking each other, but maybe I was older than the average sixteen-year-old. Maybe he was younger than the average twenty-eight-year-old. But for all those sparks and all that heat between us when he walked out that door, I have not once thought about trying to find him. He is gone. Just like my father had gone, just like Ed had gone, just like Mitch had gone. They are all gone, and not a one of them ever looked back to see that I was okay.
That’s it, really. Suddenly I am very much feeling something, and it isn’t sadness, and it isn’t loneliness. It is anger. I am so angry at this life. I am so angry that I wasn’t enough to keep my mother from shattering, from going head over heels into the bottle and never coming out again. I am so angry at Ed, who I only remember because of his hands and the way they had touched me and the way he made me touch him. But I loved him. I remember because I cried for days when he left. How fucked up is that? Was he a bad man? Was he like Curt, my mother’s father, just a man with demons?
I shake my head pushing the thoughts away. It’s too close. Too much to process. When my vision snaps into focus, I am staring at one of the scars from my year of cutting. I trace the line with my finger and remember how the sharp object passing through the flesh left a calm in my head that I could really use right now. I squeeze my eyes shut. There are knives in the kitchen. It would be so easy. Just walk down the darkened hall and bring a blade back up with me. Nobody would know; nobody would see me. I am off the bed and out into the hall before I even realize that I had made a decision. I take the steps. Pop. I remember the popping in my head where everything went silent, where all the crazy thoughts and every memory from my too-short and too-messed-up childhood was washed away with the blood.
I stand in front of the knife block, looking at the black handles, thinking about the sharp, silver edges hidden by the wood. Paring. That would be the one. I am reaching for it. My fingers slip around the handle and I draw it out. Yes, my mind hisses, my blood sluices through my veins, through my ears, through my skin.
The lights flash on, and I blink at the sudden change from darkness to light, and I drop the knife with a clatter onto the counter, caught, busted, trapped.
“Whaddya doing?’ Cici asks from the doorway, one hand on the light switch and the other on a bag of food she has brought home.
I stammer. There are no words. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Everything about me is wrong. I want to melt on the floor and cry like a baby, but I just stand still, staring at her, dressed in her white oxford and black slacks, her hair so black and her skin so white. Her eyes are dark in their sockets. She looks dead.
She is dead, and she is walking toward me, and the past week of restless sleeping, of sleepless nights, makes her skin go gaunt and gray, and it’s not Cici walking forward. It’s my mother, her hair hanging greasy around her shoulders, her mouth opening and closing in words that only the dead can hear, her jaw working like it did when she was using meth, chewing chewing chewing.
I blink again and again, and I see that she isn’t coming toward me. She is just standing there in the doorway—not my mother, dead and gray, but Cici, her eyes dark in their sockets, but because of her eyeliner not death. The relief shudders out of me, and I reach out to touch the table to regain my footing. Sitting with my head swimming, I put my face down onto my arms. All the shit in my head.
Cici sits across from me, the bag with her dinner in it sitting on the table, leaking out the smells of her work: lobster and butter sauce. Her fingers creep into mine, and I let my fingers curl around hers. Touching her is different than touching anybody else. She calms me, and when I finally dare to look up at her, she is waiting, a small, sad smile on her painted lips.
“What’s going on?” She asks it light, but I see the heavy in her eyes.
I whisper, “Do you ever just feel wrong?”
“Every day.” Her fingers entwine with mine, lacing together, a conjoined prayer. My shoulders sag, and I let my head drop, my hair falling forward, shielding my face. “When was the last time you slept?” I shrug, letting my head bob. Don’t let go, I think, please don’t let me go. “Alison. What demons, girl?”
I shake my head—where to start? I roll my free wrist so it is facing up in the stark light, letting the scars gleam. The worse scars, the words etched in my feet, are ugly and hidden, covered always. I feel her look; I feel her fingers tracing the white lines, and a shiver runs along my spine. When I look up, a tear sits perched, as if too frightened to break through the jagged edges of her sharp lashes. I roll my wrist over and draw my hand to my face, rubbing my sore, aching eyes and pushing my hair back. She starts talking.