The morning after, I take refuge in my bed.
Each time I surface into consciousness, I will myself back down into sleep, or something like sleep. I don’t think or dream about anything, unless a big, black canvas of nothingness counts. I feel my mother come into my room twice, once putting her hand on my forehead as if to feel for a fever.
“I’m not sick,” I mumble.
“I know,” she says. “I just wanted to touch your forehead.”
Sometime later I feel another presence in my room; not my mother, though.
“Danielle.”
It’s Adrian. “What are you doing here?” I squint. “Don’t you work on Saturdays?”
“I slept over,” he says. “Thought I’d spend some quality time with my sister.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway,” he says as I turn over to burrow, once again, into my bed and avoid whatever this day has to bring, “I’m not going to have quality time or quantity time with you if you sleep all day. It’s one fifteen. Get up and I’ll make you my award-winning salami omelet.”
“I’ll get up,” I say into my pillow, “if you don’t make me your award-winning salami omelet.”
“That works, too,” Adrian says. “See you downstairs.”
When I flop into a kitchen chair fifteen minutes later, my washed hair dripping down the back of my T-shirt, Adrian puts a plate in front of me.
“But,” I say.
“My award-winning cheese omelet. No salami.”
Mom and Dad appear as I take the first bite.
“How’re you feeling this morning, Danny?” Dad asks.
Empty. But I don’t want to say that out loud.
“Numb,” I say. Numb is true, too.
“Understandable,” he says.
I chew and swallow, chew and swallow. Mom and Dad sit down at the table with me.
“Want to talk?” Dad asks.
“How about later?” I counter.
“Later is fine,” he says.
Adrian finishes drying the omelet pan and sits, too.
“Someone’s already started one of those roadside memorials,” he says. “Stuffed animals. Flowers.”
“You know, in some places they’re not allowed,” Mom says.
“You mean like certain streets?” Adrian asks.
“No, I mean some cities and towns, also some states, have laws against them,” Mom says. “Or at least regulate them. On the theory that they’re distracting to motorists, or an improper use of property.”
“How about here?” Adrian asks.
“No, I don’t think we have any rules about them,” Mom says. “It’s easy enough to check.”
“I get the sense you think these rules are a good idea?” Adrian says.
“No,” Mom says. “I was just—saying.”
“But you don’t like them,” Adrian says. “The roadside memorials, I mean. Not the rules. You do like the rules, I gather.”
This is how things begin between Adrian and Mom. I don’t know whether Mom is oblivious to the fact that her always-opinionated, never-neutral statements push Adrian’s buttons. I don’t know whether Adrian knows that Mom usually doesn’t mean anything by it. That is, she does mean what she says, but she doesn’t mean anything personal by it. Opinions course through her veins. It’s who she is.
“I don’t really have an opinion about it,” Mom says. “I shouldn’t have said anything.” This is her disappointed voice, the voice that I know drives Adrian crazy.
But he’s been able to let it go since he moved out last February. He still seems compelled to call Mom out on things she says that push his buttons—so he can’t just let her make her observation about roadside memorials without challenging her—but he doesn’t have the need any longer to follow up with a full-blown argument. She, too, shrinks back these days from voicing her strongly opinionated dissertations on—everything. At least at home.
I eat; the talk shifts to nothing in particular, which is good. It’s as though we’re strangers sitting at the same table in one of those family-style restaurants. We feel the need to make conversation, because that is what polite people do, but we are careful to keep the conversation safe. Nothing to ignite sparks between Adrian and Mom. Nothing to upset me.
We aren’t always like this. Adrian and Mom do rile each other up all the time, but they forge ahead in explosive conversational territory anyway. I am not always such a delicate flower in need of protection from the elements. But we aren’t always having breakfast on mornings like this.
So: It’s a beautiful day outside. Not too hot. We all agree on that, even me, although I haven’t been outside. People always say you have to leave town in August if you don’t want to stifle to death—today is August 1—but really, August just gets a bad rap. We all agree on that, too. August can be, and often is, really nice, not the heat-and-humidity hellhole people always say it is. August needs better publicity. Yes, it could use a good ad campaign. But then more people would stick around in August instead of heading off to the beach, and part of the charm of August here in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., is that there is less traffic, shorter lines at movie theaters, more chances to get into the trendy restaurants. So we all agree to keep the considerable charms of August our little secret.
And that is that conversation.
The day oozes by. I sleep more. Adrian hangs around, which he is doing for me, which I appreciate. There is dinner, which he cooks. There is sleep, which I lunge into gratefully. And then there is another morning, which dawns despite my urgent request to the universe that the earth just stop in its tracks for a while.