At the apartment, we sit at the kitchen table to have tea. When I think about the woman swaying on the stage, I start to cry again. Mae strokes my hair, rubs my temples with her cold fingers. Dennis hovers behind her. He helps her out of her coat, tries to help me with mine, but I shake him off. “What have we done?” I say. “How could we have left her?”
“Please calm down,” he says and hands me a napkin. I blow my nose. His face is stiff and unreadable but his hand is shaking as he pours water into our mugs and he has to steady it so he won’t spill. I look away at the box of teas Mae is holding. I don’t like that his hand is shaking. He has no right to lose it. I take a deep breath and focus on the box. It’s wooden with carvings of elephants and full of tea bags—ginger lemon, rooibos, açaí berry, shit I’ve never heard of. Mom only drinks coffee. I pick one that smells the least like grass. I bet the box was left here by a woman, just like the small sock we found balled up in the corner of our room.
Dennis wedges his chair between the table and the refrigerator. He buries his fingertips in his beard as he stares at us. I look away, but I see Mae staring back at him. He shakes my shoulder until soon I’m looking at him too. It’s strange because his eyes are the same eyes that I see in the mirror. I feel momentarily hypnotized, like I’m outside my body.
“Listen to me,” he says and his voice is wet. “I understand that you might feel, at first, that I’m a stranger. But I’m not a stranger. I am your father.” And then his rigid face collapses and he pulls us into his chest and holds us until the tea gets cold.
MAE
This is the kind of thing my mother liked to do: she’d pick a person and follow them for hours. Through the mall, to the garage, to their house. Once, we drove all night through the woods with our headlights off to somebody’s hunting cabin. Sometimes, if it was during the day, she would let Edie come too, though when Edie was there it would become something fun and toothless. A game where she and Edie would share a bag of Twizzlers in the front seat and speculate about the people we were following.
But when it was just Mom and me at night, the trees and swamp rushing past the windows in the dark, it was not a game at all. I was submerged in Mom’s reality. Sometimes she’d get out of the car and I’d have to go with her. Once we walked for a long time down an overgrown path to somebody’s deer stand. The air was thick and cold. The sound of crickets and tree frogs was deafening. I was 10, maybe 11, and I remember this unpleasant recurring feeling I’d get every few steps like I was waking up and waking up and waking up.
The deer stand was a plywood shack on stilts. I don’t know if we stumbled on it, or if Mom had been leading us there deliberately. I followed her up the ladder because I was scared to stay on the ground alone. It was like a treehouse, but it smelled of mold and blood. Mom went through an entire book of matches, reading the headlines of old newspapers covering the floor. We got lost on the way back to the car. I was terrified that we would get shot at or chased by dogs. These things had happened too. It was light out by the time we got home, and then I had to go to school and pretend like nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. I’d have to try not to fall asleep in class or draw attention to myself in any way.
I don’t know how much Edie knew. She would say I was Mom’s favorite, but it’s not true. It was more that Mom saw me as an extension of herself, while Edie was free to be her own person. Edie would be out with her friends, riding her bike, sunbathing, sneaking into the movies, and I would be trapped upstairs in Mom’s bedroom, buried under blankets despite the summer heat, my grandmother’s fur coat draped over both of us. The coat was made from nutria—swamp rats—and Mom would make me lie under it with her for hours, sweating and itching, while she sucked the sleeves bald.
Yes, Mom dragged me with her to every terrible place. I needed to get as far from her as I could. She was consuming me. That day when she tried to hang herself from the rafter in the kitchen, I’d been lying on my bedroom floor. My mind was a radio tuned to her station and her misery paralyzed me. I must have known what she was doing, but I did nothing to stop her. It was Edie who saved Mom’s life.
When Dad appeared out of nowhere to rescue us, it felt like he’d been summoned by magic. He took us out of school—I was a freshman and Edie was a junior—and brought us back with him to New York City. It was our first time out of Louisiana. We didn’t know how long we’d be staying because everything was up in the air, but I understood that I was being given an opportunity to start over, and I wasn’t going to squander it.
Everything about Dad felt like déjà vu. I would see an object and feel inexplicably pulled towards it. A pair of brown leather shoes at the back of his closet, for example, worn soft and in need of resoling. I didn’t remember them exactly, but my body did. I’d shut the closet door and hold them in the dark, cradling them in my arms. I didn’t want Edie to know that I did these things, and it was hard to hide from her in such a small apartment.
I loved that apartment. It was like a tight, dusty womb. Edie was constantly sneezing because the dust was so hard to clean out of all the books. The shelves in the living room overflowed onto the floor and there were stacks of books everywhere, against all the walls, on top of the piano, under the kitchen table. Dad was a writer, so books found a way of multiplying in his apartment. He got new ones in the mail every day, mostly from young authors hoping for a blurb. A blurb from Dad went a long way. He was a cultural icon. Once he’d even been a clue on Jeopardy!.
Mom had been a writer too, a poet, though not nearly as well known. She read to us a lot. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the floor of the kitchen with Edie, watching as Mom towered above us with her eyes closed, swaying, stomping, intoning, her notebooks covering the counters. Sometimes she would send her work out to magazines and have Edie and me lick the envelopes for luck. She rarely got published. At some point she stopped writing, and then eventually she stopped reading. The books became props. She could spend entire days sitting in the breakfast nook, staring glassily at some volume of poems open in her lap, her oily hair staining the shoulders of her nightgown. She would stare and never turn the pages. Her fingers, disconnected from the rest of her body, would be tapping something out against each other.
EDITH (1997)
The sound of traffic gets louder when I close my eyes. I bet this is what the ocean sounds like. Our bedroom is like a cabin on a cruise ship. It used to be Dennis’s study and it’s so tight that if you’re standing in the middle of the room you have to make sure not to “talk like an Italian,” as our French teacher would have said—or you’ll jam your fingers against the bunk bed or the dresser or the paper lantern.
Mae is lying next to me on the bottom bunk. We’re scared to leave each other’s side. All night we take turns drifting in and out of sleep.
“It’s like we’re on a cruise ship,” I whisper to her, but she doesn’t open her eyes. She shakes her head and her thick, dark hair falls over her face. She’s like a little furnace when she sleeps. Her neck gets wet and her hair sticks to it. Her hair is just like Mom’s. When she turns away from me to face the wall, I comb it with my fingers and pretend it’s Mom lying there with me. Sorry, Mom. I’m sorry. We’ve been here for almost a week and the doctors still aren’t saying anything. They tell Dennis that it’s too early to know for sure. When I call, they tell me that they aren’t authorized to discuss her condition with me. They treat me like a little kid, as if I haven’t been the one taking care of her all these years.
Dennis still hasn’t told us when we’re going back. I don’t mind a break, but I’m on student council and on the homecoming and dance committees and the longer we stay here the more likely all that shit is going to be usurped. Plus, I miss Markus, and it’s only a matter of time before he gets usurped too, by one of the Laurens or worse.
I’ve asked Dennis, will we be back on the 3rd? The 4th? But he just smiles like an asshole and tells me how happy he is to have me here. I don’t know how much more I can take of him