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Whenever it happens, whenever Mom gets this way, it seems like it’s the rains that set her off as much as anything. I don’t know how long it’s taken me to figure that out. Longer than it should’ve. It’s not just any rain, though. Almost every time, it’s these cold, hard, dreary rains of late fall that do it to her. Spring rains, it happened that way once, but that was a fluke, I think.
They aren’t the same rains. They’ve got totally different personalities, for being just water. In springtime, everything’s green and new, and the rains feed that. Those are nourishing rains. But getting into late October and November, it’s like the rains come to wash away the death. The leaves have lost their colors, then their hold on the trees, and nothing’s growing anymore. Everything in the garden has turned brittle and brown. The flowers look like something from three weeks after a funeral. The rains soften all that up, so the earth can take it back and try again in a few months after a winter that feels like it’s never going to end.
For all that, I used to love rainy days anyway, as far back as I can remember, because they would make me slow down and sit at the window, or on the porch if it wasn’t too cold yet, and look out at the world and think. Just think. I’d see the changes in the sky and feel them in the air, like the world was getting ready to tuck itself in to sleep awhile. If I listened just right, I’d feel in touch with something deeper, that ached in my chest like sadness, but wasn’t sad, because how could you be sad over something that made you realize you were another year closer to being grown.
I had to keep this to myself, though. You talk about things like that to the other kids at school, and most look at you like you’re growing a second head, and before you know it, you’re the Really Weird Girl, and nobody wants that. I’d rather just keep being the Girl Whose Dad Left, because that doesn’t narrow it down nearly as much.
So I learned to love that time of melancholy just for myself.
At least until I got to be nine, and the rains started to bring something else.
What Mom hears or sees or smells in themI don’t guess I’ll ever know. I think maybe I don’t want to. For sure I’m never going to ask. It has something to do with Daddy, duh . . . but what, exactly, I can’t say. I don’t even know if it means something good or bad to her, or if there’s a difference anymore, because of how good memories can get tangled up with bad ones, and the day comes that you don’t know how you feel about any of it anymore, you just know that it hurts.
It started with the rains this time, same as the rest, cold and shivery from the start, until they brought sleet, too, sharp bits of ice pecking at the windows like frozen birds that wanted in.
We always know Mom’s bad time has come again whenever we hear something like a plate shatter, or a bottle. No matter how good the day might have started off, all at once she’s down there crying, like a sob gets ripped out of her so hard it takes her by as much surprise as it takes Petey and me. The tears and anger seem to show up before she even knows they’re coming—hi, it’s us again, mind if we move in for a few days?
This time we were upstairs in our TV room, another night of me showing Petey how to play Minecraft on our Xbox. He was impatient to get out of playing in Creative mode and jump to Survival, eager to get to the mobs and creepers and other monsters.
When he heard Mom smash that first plate, Petey froze. He always freezes. Seven years old, and sweet most of the time, the way boys can be before they get a bit older and turn into such mean little shits. Seven years old and he loves our mother as much as I used to, and all he wanted was to go downstairs and help, to make things better.
“Don’t. Just wait. Don’t be in such a hurry,” I said, then lied: “Maybe it’ll blow over and she’ll be okay.”
Petey looked like he had all the worries of the world weighing on him. “She doesn’t sound okay.”
“I know.”
“One of us should go check on her.”
I pushed his controller back at him. “Not right now. Later, maybe.”
For almost as long as I can remember, he’s been a skinny little boy with an oval face and fretful eyes and uncombed hair with the most stubborn cowlick in the history of hair. My friends think he’s so cute that, when he’s not being a brat, they want to hug him and squeeze him until he pops. Which he hates.
Still, he’d changed over the past year. There was a little more bone around his eyes, and his jaw was looking different, too, with a little less softness, a little more strength.
As we played, he’d flinch whenever he heard a crash or slam that didn’t belong in what he was sure was a happy home. We’d started building a fortress on a hilltop when from downstairs there came a wrenching wail and a huge shattering sound.
By now I know the differences between one kind of glass and another. I can tell the sound of the full-length mirror crashing to the hardwood floor of Mom’s walk-in closet from the sound of the bathroom mirror going to pieces in the sink.
I’ve swept up a lot of broken glass these last five years.
“Maybe we should . . . ?” Petey started, and I shook my head no.
“Just keep digging more rocks. That’s your job right now.”
I listened to the sleet at the window, thinking how much I hated this sound I used to love. She took that from me, took it away just by being herself.
After all this time I still don’t know what to do for her. Every year I think the same thing, that maybe this fall will be different and we can go back to being how we used to be and can finally get on with life. Every year she breaks my stupid heart.
I hate Minecraft now, too. It teaches you a lie, that if your world doesn’t work out, you can delete it and start over. That’s not how things really work.
Or maybe they do, and I just haven’t figured out how. Great, I’m the slow one.
“Do you remember . . . ?” I asked Petey. “Anything at all? From last year? When she got like this?”
He went empty-faced, then looked like he thought he was letting me down. “She did? No. I don’t remember that.”
“It’s okay. I guess you wouldn’t.”
The little gleam of hope in his eyes then, that broke my heart too. “So she was okay?”
“After a while. She was okay, yeah. Sort of.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
He deserved to know, even if I’d have to tell him all over again someday.
“She misses Daddy. She still misses him. But she’s mad at him, too. She never stopped missing him and she’s never stopped being mad at him. You understand why, don’t you?”
Petey turned solemn. “Because he left us, right?”
“That’s it, pretty much. You don’t get to have two families. You have to pick one. Daddy . . . he picked the other one.”
“How come? What was wrong with us?”
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with you or me.” I clutched his arms, like I was electric and could shock the truth into him so hard he’d never forget. “It doesn’t matter. There’s no reason good enough to make it right.”
Whenever we have a conversation like this, sometimes Petey takes everything in and it makes him stunned and quiet and sad. Other times it makes him hurt and angry and he throws things. He never seems to be the exact same Petey twice. There’s the core Petey, of course, and then there’s whatever fine-tuning the past year has brought out of him, but every year is different. Every year I’m different.
This time he went bewildered, like he didn’t understand why it had to be this way, while at the same time a wispy memory really was trying to break through. It teased him, stuck its tongue out at him, catch me if you can.
He never can, poor little guy.
Over the next hour, the loud crying from downstairs came and went like sheets of rain during the chaos of a storm. It would die down and I’d think maybe that was finally the end of it, clear skies ahead, but then the fury would wind up again, and on she would rage.
We tried to ignore it the best we could, meaning I stayed cued in to every sob and gasp, while doing my best to distract Petey. There was always something else to work on in the game, another bag of chips or candy to open.
Whenever the rains come, I always wonder where my biggest responsibility is. You’d think it would be to Petey, but I was a daughter first, before I ever was a sister. What kind of daughter would I be if I took off with my little brother and tried to find our dad, after what he did to us all? What kind of daughter would I be if I left Mom here alone?
But then, what kind of sister am I that I keep letting this happen?
I always wonder if I should take Petey away from the house before it happens again, but it’s always so cold and wet out, and we don’t have anywhere to go. If he caught pneumonia or something, it could even go worse for him that way.
Over the last year I’ve graduated to thinking I should steal the car and that’s how we’d get away. We’d stay warm and dry, at least, but that wouldn’t magically give us someplace to go, and it’s not like I can actually drive yet—that’s still a couple years away. Which means all I would probably accomplish is getting us into a wreck and sending Petey through the windshield.
What kind of sister would that make me then?
But then, what kind of mother is she that I even have to ask?
It was close to Petey’s bedtime when we heard her coming up the stairs. They’re old stairs, as noisy as they are solid. All those creaks and clunks they give off, nobody could sneak up them, and Mom didn’t try. She was only crying a little bit now, so it hardly counted. She was at that stage of trying to put a normal face back on herself, like the past few hours hadn’t happened.
Like Petey and I were deaf.
Like we wouldn’t spot it the moment she opened the door to the TV room.
There’s not much worse than that shaky smile she forces across her face, and the way she looks at us with those crazy sad miserable hopeful desperate eyes. Blue, like cartoon ice, the same color as mine, and I used to love that connection, but now I don’t want it anymore. There will come a day, I know it, when I won’t be able to stand the sight of them looking back at me from a mirror.
“I . . . I just want to check on you,” she said. “And . . . I’m sorry. I really am sorry. I shouldn’t make you put up with these moods of mine. It’s not good for anybody.”
Her eyes are never brighter than they are after a long noisy crying jag. Like there’s so much life in there, going on behind them, that it doesn’t know what to do with itself anymore, or how to be happy.
Petey was the one she really had eyes for now, the main one she was apologizing to. Me, I guess she thought I was old enough to understand, the two of us being such experienced hands at wounded hearts. I had a boyfriend once and a breakup and I’d cried, and there have been boys I’ve crushed on who never knew I was alive, or worse, did, but acted like they wished I wasn’t.
Sure, Mom. I’ve got your back. I am so over needing a mother, right? We’re practically sisters now instead, right?
She took a few steps in and bent over, eyes beaming and arms wide, and Petey hopped up and ran to her. Don’t do it, I wanted to tell him. It’s a trap. Only I forgot to breathe and how to talk.
They hugged each other tight with his little innocent head burrowed into her, and I thought please oh please, why can’t we just stop right here? Why can’t we go on and be normal, finally?
Break my stupid heart again, why don’t you?
Mom pulled back and held Petey by his knobby shoulders, at arms’ length while she looked him over and marveled, like she hadn’t seen him in months.
“When did you get so big?” she asked. “I keep missing it. I turn my back for a minute, and look at you now. You look so much older than what I see when I close my eyes.” She blinked like she was clearing away the last residue of tears, maybe hoping more than that would clear up and Petey would go back to looking the way she thought he should. “You’re Mommy’s little man now, aren’t you? You’re Mommy’s little man.”
And I thought, one day, one day I’ll get over the paralysis and know what to do.
Mom kissed him on the forehead with a reassuring smack and pulled away with a glance toward me like, oh yeah, I have that daughter-thing too, then went on like she didn’t remember last year, or the year before, or the year before that, any better than Petey did. She left us to ourselves and left the door open.
Petey was cheery again, and we got tired of building that dumb fortress, even him—this year’s Petey, who seemed to never tire of anything no matter how dumb it was. We watched TV until we were sleepy, him more than me. After we went to bed, I figured he dropped right off while I tossed and turned to the constant sound of that cold, hard rain beating at the eaves.
And sometime in the middle of the night was when she snapped and did it again.
I could hear it going on across the hall and down a door, Petey in his bed that looked like a race car. Did he even know Mom was in his room before it started? Which would be worse—thinking a monster had broken in to kill you, or realizing you’d been living with one all along?
This time it sounded like she was doing it by putting a pillow over his face and pushing hard. The noises he was making were muffled like that, and went on a long, terrible time, as he kicked and thrashed and the headboard banged against the wall. You’d think such a little boy couldn’t have that much fight in him, but I guess there’s no telling how much even a seven-year-old wants to live.
Or should I consider him twelve by now? There are all kinds of things at work here that I can’t begin to know how to figure out.
The first time she did it, it was sudden and unplanned, a moment’s impulse that she obeyed. She flung Petey down the stairs, those big hard noisy stairs that left him broken at the bottom, looking up with disbelief in his dead eyes.
And she was sorry. So sorry she was about to go for the nearest chunk of broken glass big enough to cut deep enough to let her join him, until I screamed enough to talk her out of it.
She just wasn’t sorry enough to never do it again after getting Petey back as good as new.
A couple times she choked him with a towel—once rolled into a cord, the next, stuffed way back into his mouth while she pinched his nose shut. Another time she burst in on him in the bath and held him under the water. Another, she just wouldn’t stop hitting him.
And for what? I never knew. If it was because a few months after his seventh birthday Petey got to a point that he looked too much like our father that she couldn’t handle it, or what. I didn’t know. I couldn’t ask. The one time I did, I got that same look she’d give Petey, like she hadn’t really seen me until that moment. Like, where did you come from, when did you get like this, I don’t even know who you are anymore.
I don’t ever want her looking at me that way again, with those eyes we share.
When the thumping and thudding stopped, Mom started crying again, a sound of such mixed emotions it was hard to conceive of them all going on at the same time. Like she hated what she’d done and hated Petey for making her do it and was relieved it was over and hated herself too and couldn’t wait to see him again.
The first time she did this, I was the one to move him, only because I didn’t know what else to do. She’d gone catatonic on the stairs, and I figured, well, if I drag him outside where she can’t see him, she’ll come to her senses again.
But that was then. This was now, and she knew the drill. She handled it herself, her footsteps in the hall heavier, with fifty pounds of dead weight in her arms. Down the stairs next, slow, careful not to drop him, like that actually mattered.
Then the back door. Creak . . . clunk . . . gone. And I was alone again, as alone in the silent house as I am in the world. While she carried my brother, my terminally baby brother, outside to leave him in the rain, the fall rain that washes away the death.
An hour ago? About that.
No more sleep for me. Now, there’s just the waiting.
I know what’s to follow.
He’ll come through the back door around breakfast time, and he’ll be soaked to the skin. She’ll scold him for going out to play in the rain. You’ll catch your death of cold, she’ll tell him, then hustle him to the bathroom to peel him out of his soggy pajamas and rub him down with a warm, fluffy towel.
When Petey tells her he’s sorry, that he forgot, his voice will be a little higher again. His footsteps will sound a few pounds lighter. He’ll be a couple inches shorter. There will be a little less bone around his eyes, and his jaw will look different, too, with a little less strength, a little more softness.
Just like he was the day he turned six. As obedient a little boy as you could ever hope for, answering the call of her need. Her selfish need, from way down in a place so far inside I can’t imagine a deeper, darker, more powerful place on earth, not even at the bottom of the ocean.
Used to be, Petey and I were only a couple years apart. But every cold, rainy autumn, the gap between us gets wider.
People tell you it’s good training, caring for a baby brother. It teaches you how to be a mom. Like that’s anything I’d ever want to be. Not for my sake, but for whoever might pop out of me. I don’t know how well I’d do.
I’m only just now figuring this out. Maybe I don’t know what I want to be, but I know what I don’t want to be, and that’s a mother who’s really only good with the littlest ones, because the bigger and older they get, the less she knows how to accept that. How to deal with somebody who talks back and asks the wrong questions and gets their own ideas about life and says “no” like they mean it and can’t be counted on any longer to fall in line just from hearing the words, “Because I say so, that’s why.”
Mom already let one of us slip through her grasp. She’s determined to not make that mistake a second time.
After she gets Petey dry again, in fresh pajamas, Mom will feed him pancakes, if that’s what he wants, or scrambled eggs and bacon. Because he’s a growing boy, she’ll say. He needs a big breakfast.
She’ll watch him eat. She’ll adore him. She’ll take his temperature, just to be safe.
She’ll dream of all the fun things they can do this winter, just the two of them, cooped up in this house while the snows build up outside.