“What did you do with the other letter?” I ask him again.
“What letter?” he says, looking down at me with his wet lamb eyes.
Is he lying? Where did he put it?
“She said she sent another letter. You can’t hide things like that from us.” I feel the blood rushing into my face. “It’s not right.”
“I’m not hiding anything! You’re with me all the time. You see me get the mail.” This is true, but it’s not like we pay attention to it. He could easily have hidden it in a magazine, read it later in his room.
“She probably never even wrote it,” Mae says slowly. “She probably just thought she did, or dreamed she did and got confused.” That’s Mae—she’ll take any opportunity to make Mom look foolish. It’s disgusting.
“Or, maybe the doctors held on to it,” Dennis says. “They monitor her correspondence.”
I imagine a doctor unfolding and reading my mother’s letter, and then folding it back and putting it in a manila folder in her file, evidence against her, words she said to us in anger that will now be used to keep her locked up.
“I think you’re lying.” The chair falls backwards as I stand, bangs against the tile on the kitchen floor. Mae puts her hand on mine, but I shake it off. That little know-it-all traitor. No, thank you. She probably knew about the letter all along. Dennis must have showed it to her, and she told him it would upset me too much to see it. Well, I’ll find it.
“Edie, what are you doing? Please don’t touch my desk. Edith!” Dennis follows me into his room. He crouches, gathering the papers I threw on the floor.
“Enough,” he says as I try to swipe at a stack of papers on his bedside table. I open the book he’s been reading and shake it out. A bookmark flutters to the ground, nothing else. “Edith, that’s enough.” He holds me by the back of my shirt, but I leap forward like I’m on a leash. I’m looking at the windowsill. That’s where he probably sat, reading it. Smoking, reading, crying.
“Why is there so much ash in the ashtray?” I say.
He burned it, lit the tip with a match and watched the words melt.
“Edie, stop,” Mae’s voice is quiet. She’s embarrassed. I look at her face. No, she’s not embarrassed, she’s scared. Of me. I place the ashtray back on the windowsill, careful not to spill any of it.
MAE
I was the one who threw out the first letter from Mom. I could hear the whistle of it hurtling towards us, so I intercepted it. This was difficult since I was almost never alone, but desperation makes you crafty. The envelope felt heavy and hot to the touch and it contained ten illegible pages, each word a barbed hook. I skimmed it, careful not to let any of the words catch in me, before I tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. I didn’t want Edie getting any more agitated about Mom than she already was. I wouldn’t say I wanted Mom dead, I’m not a monster, but I wanted her vacuum-sealed somewhere where she couldn’t get to us. In New York I was happy. Happy and safe from her, I thought.
I failed to intercept the second letter. It arrived—narcissistic, well wrought, barely legible, and full of those elliptical riddles that get under your skin and tug. Edie became obsessed, analyzing it to death: What did it signify that nothing was capitalized? Mom’s low sense of self-worth? Her aversion to order? Her artistic temperament? Was she a frustrated creative person with no outlet for her artistic energies? Was this the true source of her unhappiness? Would poetry prove to be her salvation? I let Edie talk and talk about it. I didn’t contradict her, even though I knew that none of what she was saying was true or relevant. She did not understand Mom at all.
The third letter came a few days after that. Edie was already wound up, and she pored over the new one like a cryptologist. It wasn’t really a letter. There was no “Dear” or “Love.” It was a poem. How coy of Mom, how opaque to communicate with us in this way, to demand that we guess what it was she was trying to say, like she was Sylvia fucking Plath.
“What do you think it means? What do you think it means?” Edie kept saying, standing too close and watching me as I read it.
The poem was gibberish, the unpunctuated words together unpleasant sounds, repeated, oppressive. goatman’s goatpelt fur mouth spackle choke grind down water in the throat ears choke. But reading it filled my mouth with the fetid taste of lake water. It made me think of those night trips when Mom would disappear into Lake Pontchartrain and I would nervously pace the shore, waiting for her head to break the surface. I was dry and on land, getting devoured by mosquitoes, but I could only feel the algae squishing under my feet, the black water burning in my nose. Once Mom emerged from the water with an enormous catfish latched onto her arm. On the drive home the fish flapped and struggled in the backseat while Mom laughed so hard I had to steer. She was laughing, but what does that mean? It wasn’t an expression of joy. It was just a sound, like something in her was trying to get out.
“What?” Edie said. “What?” She sensed that I had been able to decode it in some way.
It was clear to me the poem was a suicide note. It might as well have been an acrostic that spelled out: GOODBYE! FOREVER!
How selfish, how grotesque. Why pull us into all that again? We were children. And the text, the handwriting, jerky and weak, it forced me to imagine her in the act of writing, which I also resented. I did not want to imagine her at all, because if I allowed her in, I felt like I would lose myself again. It was better to take this rare opportunity that forced her off of me and leave it that way.
I never told Edie what the poem really meant. I think I made up an interpretation involving mythology and even tried to convince myself of it. But I couldn’t get the images out of my head of Mom floating face down: in a lake, in a bathtub, in the neighbor’s pool. I remember hugging Cronus at night and burrowing my face in his fur, letting his purring replace the static that her words had left in my head.
PHONE CONVERSATION BETWEEN EDITH AND DOREEN
EDITH: Doreen.
DOREEN: Yes, Edie baby.
EDITH: I need to go home.
DOREEN: Go home? Your momma’s not up for that.
EDITH: Can’t I stay with you?
DOREEN: No, baby. I have a lot on my plate right now. My brother’s sick and he’s staying with me. I couldn’t be responsible for another human being.
EDITH: Doreen! I’m 16. You wouldn’t have to be responsible for anything…
DOREEN: Did you call me just to cry on the telephone?
EDITH: Yes.
DOREEN: How’s your sister?
EDITH: She likes it here. She’s very adaptable.
DOREEN: Well, shit, honey. You don’t adapt, you die. Why do you say it like it’s a bad thing? You don’t adapt, you die.
EDITH: …
DOREEN: I’m not going to talk to you if you keep sniffling.
EDITH: Don’t hang up!
DOREEN: I’m not hanging up, Edith. God damn.
EDITH: Have you gone to visit her?
DOREEN: