Julia's Daughters

It’s after six o’clock when Mom taps on my door. I’ve been waiting for it, that knock that I know will be tentative. She won’t bang on my door, just like she won’t yell at me, because she feels sorry for me. Pities me.

I wish she would bang on my door. I wish she’d kick it in.

I’ve been sitting on the edge of my bed staring at my arm for a long time. I took the gauze pads off and it started bleeding because I pulled some of the scabs off with it. And now there are red welts where the tape was. The packing tape was probably a stupid idea. But it’s just one stupid thing I’ve done in a whole lifetime of stupid things.

I haven’t been able to stop looking at my arm.

I keep thinking, what the hell is wrong with me? Why would I do this to myself? Why would I keep doing it?

I’m afraid I’m going crazy, that I’m becoming schizophrenic or something. We learned about schizophrenia in my psychology class last semester. It doesn’t usually hit people until their teenage or young adult years; I’m the right age to go skitzo. Of course, cutting’s not really a skitzo thing. Cutting’s about control when things are out of control. I googled it, in honor of Caitlin. According to WebMD or some other bullshit site, I’m cutting myself because I’m in so much pain. Which sounds counterproductive, even to me, and I’m the one doing it.

I first started it in the ER after Caitlin died. Not the cutting. That came later. But that night, I kept pinching myself: my arm, my thigh. I was trying to wake myself up because, in those first few hours, I just knew it wasn’t real. I knew what was happening was a nightmare.

If someone was going to die in that crash, it should have been me. For a hundred reasons. I remember that at one point while I was lying on a hospital gurney waiting for an X-ray that it actually crossed my mind that maybe I was the dead one and that the feeling that my heart was tearing into bits was part of some kind of purgatory or something. Not that I believe in that sort of crap, but I was definitely a little crazy in those first few hours, so nothing I thought surprises me.

When pinching myself didn’t wake me up from the dream, I scratched myself with my fingernails. That was the day after she died. Or maybe the day after that. It didn’t work; I still didn’t wake up. And other people started bumping into my nightmare, forcing me to realize it wasn’t a dream, it was reality: Mom crying, funeral arrangements, Mom crying. People calling and coming to the house, all crying. Mom crying.

Sometime that first week when I didn’t have Caitlin anymore, I realized that if I pinched myself or scratched myself really hard I felt . . . I don’t know. Better. The cutting kind of came out of that. Pinching and scratching made me feel better. Cutting made me feel even better. I stole a couple of Dad’s razor blades from the little cardboard pack in his bathroom. He uses an old-fashioned razor and a brush and soap. The razor blade makes a sharp, sweet pain and then the blood bubbles up. Somehow, somewhere in that burning sting, I can breathe again.

I’m definitely crazy.

Mom taps on the door again. It’s a sound that reminds me of a rodent scratching in the wall, somewhere.

“Come in already!” I say loud and meaner.

The door swings open. I don’t pull my sleeve down. What’s the point? She’s already seen it.

“Hey,” she says.

I sigh loudly.

She comes over and sits beside me, not touching me, but so close I can smell her mom smell. It makes me feel better, which makes me angry and I don’t even know why. Now I feel like I’m going to cry, which in turn makes me even angrier.

“Your dad and I have been talking,” she says. Her voice is gentle and controlled. I don’t know how she’s so calm. If I were my kid, I’d be losing my shit about now.

I don’t say anything. I just sit there anticipating the whole counseling conversation: psychologist, psychiatrist. I’m so batshit crazy, maybe they want to hire both. In another state, if Dad has his way.

He and Linda were whispering last night; only she was so drunk that her whispering was louder than Mom’s version of hollering. Linda wants Dad to send me to boarding school somewhere. She even had brochures for him that she left on his desk at work. She said she’d pay. I think she’d pay a lot to get rid of me. I wouldn’t even put it past her to hire a hit man to kill me, I’m making such a mess of her family.

Mom looks at my arm and a sadness passes over her face that makes me sad. It makes me wish I wasn’t being such a jerk and had pulled my sleeve over my ugliness.

“We’ve been talking,” she says, “and—”

“You said that,” I interrupt.

She looks down at her bare feet, then at me. “And I think you need to get away from here.”

“I’m not going to any freakin’ boarding school.” I spring off my bed.

I was talking to my old boyfriend, Todd, earlier. After the kitchen fiasco. He’s a total dickhead, but we kind of hooked up again after Caitlin died. Not because I like him any better, but just because he doesn’t act any different around me now than he did pre-dead sister. And he knows I cut myself so I don’t have to hide it the way I have to with Marissa or Cassie. He’s been telling me for weeks that we ought to take off, him and me and leave this shit show called our lives behind. He has a brother who works on the Alaska pipeline. He said we could probably stay with him for a few weeks. Todd was thinking about going anyway. He said he wasn’t feeling the whole community-college thing. We actually talked about opening a coffee shop in Alaska. We’ve talked about it before. But Todd doesn’t know exactly where his brother lives so I don’t know how feasible that plan would be. Especially since Todd is probably the laziest person I’ve ever known in my life.

But if Mom and Dad are sending me to boarding school, Todd and I are hitting the road for sure.

“I’m not talking about boarding school, Haley.” Mom looks at me like she’s afraid to say what she’s going to say. “We’ve decided that you and I are going to take a trip. A road trip.”

I look at her like she’s lost her mind, mostly because I think maybe she has. But also because that’s kind of what’s expected of me, the crazy girl who cuts herself. A girl like me, angry, defiant.

“We’re going to drive to Maine,” Mom says.

“I’m not going to Maine in a car with you.” I shove down the sleeve of my T-shirt. “No way.”

She gets up off my bed. “Actually, you are going, Haley. Your father and I decided.”

I make a face of disdain. (Disdain is a word Caitlin would have liked.) “Dad decided? I didn’t know Dad decided anything except for whose lawn gets mowed when.”

Mom walks toward the door. “I’m not going to argue with you, Haley. You need to get out of here for a little while and I think I do too. So we’re doing it together. It’s not up for discussion.”

I rub the bumps on my arm. It hurts, but I need the pain. I’m not going with her. There’s no way I’m going to get locked up in a car with my mother for days. I can’t stand listening to her cry for five minutes. A couple of days and I’ll be wanting to throw myself out of the moving car.

“I’m not going, Mom.” I rub the cuts hard enough to make them hurt. I feel warm blood under my thumb. “You can’t make me go.” I take a step back from her, feeling panicky.

“Actually, I can make you go.” She surprises me with the firmness in her voice. I keep expecting her to burst into tears, but so far, she hasn’t. So far, I’ve been the one crying today.

“I’m your parent and you’re not eighteen years old yet,” she tells me. “So I can make you go.”

“I don’t understand.” I’m getting loud now. I’m still holding my arm. “We’re going to drive to Maine? That’s how you’re going to fix me? We’re going to take a road trip?”

“You like Maine. Every summer you’re the one who says we should stay in Maine. Move there.”

“Caitlin wanted to move to Maine. Not me.”

“No,” she says quietly. “Both of you wanted to move there. Don’t you remember last summer when you two asked me if you could stay with Laney for your senior year?”

“Now you’re just making shit up.” I walk away from her, wishing I could get farther away than the other side of my bed.

This is it, I tell myself. As soon as she leaves, I’m calling Todd. I’m telling him let’s do this. Let’s move to Somewhere, Alaska, and open a coffee shop or maybe go with his idea of a pot truck, kind of like a food truck. Of course I know I won’t have to call Todd and tell him I want to run away to Alaska with him even though he’s a dickhead, because Mom will back down. She hasn’t got it in her to make me go.

“Pack a bag.” Mom reaches for the doorknob. “We’re leaving in the morning.”

I feel that panic again in my chest. A little bit like I can’t breathe. “I’m not going,” I tell her as she opens the door.

“You are.”

“I’m not.” I cross my arms across my stomach. We’re having a stare-down now. “What are you going to do? Carry me to the car? Tie me in?”

She looks away from me and I know I’ve won. I know we’re not going to Maine. We’re not going anywhere.

She looks back at me. “So here are your choices,” she says, her voice still calm. Except now it’s creepy calm. Like she’s crazy, too. “Either you get in the car tomorrow morning with me or I’m having you committed.”

For a second I don’t know what she’s talking about. Committed? Committed to what?

Then it dawns on me. She’s talking about the fifth floor of the hospital. The loony bin.

A girl in my physics class was committed for a psych evaluation last fall. On a suicide watch. She and her boyfriend broke up and she slit her wrists. Sort of. She didn’t do it right, obviously, because it didn’t kill her. My theory? She didn’t really want to die.

“You understand what I’m saying, Haley? I’m your legal guardian,” Mom says. “If I call nine-one-one and say I’m afraid you’re going to kill yourself, once the paramedics see your arm, no one will argue with me.”

The look on her face amazes me. She’s totally serious and I’m caught between being so furious with her that I could throw something at her and being completely fascinated. I had no idea Julia Maxton had this in her. She’s always been so easygoing, so . . . weak.

“Mom.” I say her name like I’m trying to get her attention. “You’d have your daughter put in a psych ward?” I manage. “You wouldn’t really do that, would you?”

She just stands there looking at me and I recognize the look on her face. It’s a Caitlin look. Caitlin’s stubborn look. I don’t ever remember seeing it on Mom’s face before, but Caitlin had to have gotten it from somewhere, didn’t she? And since Caitlin’s genes were Mom’s genes . . .

It’s such a weird thought that it sidetracks me for a minute. Then I remember I’m standing in my bedroom discussing my possible commitment to the psych ward with my mother. My mother who’s supposed to be on my side.

“Pack a bag,” she says. “We’ll leave in the morning when Izzy goes to school.”

And then she just walks out of the room, leaving my door wide open. And I almost laugh.