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"When I was ten years old, a neighbor boy from down the street paid my brother twenty bucks so he could fuck me. My brother pimped me for the next three years before he was shot in an alley.” She raises an eyebrow, leaving it up to my interpretation who did the shooting. She goes on, and I absorb what I can while she opens the bag and pulls her food out, spreading the scent through the room. She takes a bite, and the butter sauce drips from her lip onto the table, a yellow dot on the white. She holds a piece out to me, and I take it gingerly. I’ve never had lobster before, and the white meat melts on my tongue. A small groan escapes me, and she smiles, offering me another. We sit and she talks, telling me the story of her life and how she came to be eight months pregnant, how she came to be here. She talks in a no-big-deal way; these are just details, just the color of someone’s hair.
“It’s not who I am,” she says, pushing her buttered fingers into her chest where the shirt parts at the top button. “That’s just what other people did. It doesn’t define me. I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just a tool. It didn’t have anything to do with me.”
“How do you do that?” I ask, because I can’t stop thinking about how it is me, how all that dirty water out there in the trailer has tinged my skin and marked me.
“I didn’t want my brother to pimp me out, but I didn’t have a lot of choice. He was bigger and way meaner than me.” She takes a bite, offers me another. “I don’t have to own that. It wasn’t my choice.” She smiles, placing the last piece of lobster in my mouth. My lips close over her fingers, and I close my eyes, letting the butter on her fingers linger.
***
For the first time in days, I sleep like I may never wake up. The dreams are tangled and many, and when I wake I feel like I have been drugged with the weight of them. It is well past light when I finally pull myself from my bed; I feel like many days have passed. The mound of my belly has grown overnight, lifting up under my rib cage, and it seems like just yesterday that she slept mostly in my abdomen. Everything grew overnight, it seems. My breasts are uncomfortable in my bra, and even the band now seems too tight. When I am clean from the shower and dressed in a shirt that I found amongst the left-behinds, I make my way downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast.
I am hoping to find Cici, but she isn’t there. The dreams and reality of last night are blurred, and I can’t tell where each ends. I want to talk to her; I need to talk to her. My mind is more settled today, but I still don’t quite understand why it has all just started hitting me now, and I need to talk it through. Mom has been gone for eight months, and it is only now that I feel driven to understand her. Why am I now fixating on things that happened when I was six or nine or sixteen? It’s over. That’s always how I deal with stuff—just close the door and walk away and never look back—but not recently. Now all I can do is look back. The future is unknown, and once Little Miss is born and gone, I will have to figure it all out. I’m not a child anymore, and there is nobody else responsible for me. A small shift of panic starts to brew, and I push it down. It’s this safe place that is making me panic. It is the calm, and the routine, and the fact that I’m never hungry.
Pieces of the conversation from last night, of Cici’s laying out the details of her childhood without a single shudder or blink, puts me to shame. I didn’t have a great start, but most of the time I had a place to live, and most of the time I had food. I always had what I needed for school—clothes, supplies, a backpack—yet I resented her because it wasn’t always nice. She was younger than I am now when she had me. At least I know I am not prepared to be a good mom; she taught me that at least. I wouldn’t do it any better than she did. Maybe I wouldn’t drink, but I’m every bit as broken. I’ve been so angry at her. A memory plays out in my head, over Christmas break last year, when we’d spent a snow day sitting in the living room, almost talking. She had been drinking all day, moving in a slow dance toward drunk. At some point, after I had fallen asleep, she had tripped in the hall, crying, sobbing about losing Mitch, who’d left us and married Theresa Calverson right under our noses. I thought she was talking about Cal, because she was seeing him by then, but then I understood, and she had looked at me with the saddest eyes, the most pathetic, confused, childlike eyes. “Why am I never enough?” she had asked.
Why didn’t I help her more instead of just being angry? Why didn’t I hug her more? Why didn’t I tell her I loved her more? Selfish. I was so selfish. Selfish and worried about what the stupid kids at school thought of me instead of trying to help the only person who ever stood beside me. She didn’t go off the deep end until I cut her off, until I gave up on her. She died to set me free. She killed herself to free me of her, to cut me loose from her brokenness. Assuming Warren hadn’t killed her.
I knew. I knew. I always knew I was the reason, I was the cause that her life was so hard. Even if she wasn’t pregnant with me when she ran away, when she did get pregnant, she wasn’t ready.
It was me who broke her. Me who killed her. Which is the next thing I have to look at. If she wanted to kill herself, why was he there? What did she need him for? What was the fight that Molly White had overheard? Why was Warren at my apartment? If it was a suicide, like Warren said, why didn’t she leave a note? That’s what a normal person would do, leave a note, “Hey Alison, I’m killing myself, but it’s nobody's fault. I just don’t want to live anymore.” That’s what a normal person would do, if a normal person were going to commit suicide. Is it just Warren's bullshit lie? Did he kill her? Why would he want her dead? It just doesn’t make any sense. Why? Why? Why did he bring me to Greenville, twenty minutes from my grandparents, and then leave? If he was “crazy” about me, like Sylvie had said, why did he has such a fire under his feet to be gone? Were the cops getting close? Did he know my grandparents were there? Did he know my mother had left me their name in that box I had never opened?
My head is beginning to ache, and I check the board to see my chores for the day. I have toilets today. It seems somehow appropriate, and I make my way to the janitor closet and get my supplies for the four bathrooms and shower room. It’s better than the floors, though. I love the look of all the gleaming hardwood, but it makes for a long day to clean it and wax it properly. I’ll happily do the toilets. That’s only a two-hour job to do it well. I know the thoughts aren’t going to rest any time soon, but if I make myself busy, maybe they won’t take over.