The Centipede looks up at you like she wants to be hugged and you don’t hug your daughter. You don’t run to the sofa and hold her. You don’t believe her and you don’t know about Shortus and I can’t be the one to tell you that she’s projecting and she’s in a bad place right now—I don’t love her and she knows it—and she wants you to hate me and you don’t want to hate me and she picks up her can of spiked seltzer but the well has finally run dry. She slams the can on the table.
“Mom,” she says. “Can we please leave already?”
There is only one player in the game and it’s you. You fold your arms. “Nomi, honey, please stop crying. We’re not leaving this house. Not like this.”
There’s a foolproof way to make anyone cry: Tell them to stop. She’s bawling again now and I say your name and you growl at me—I said stay out of it—and then you growl at her. “Why the hell are you doing this? Why do you make things up?”
“Making this up? Mom, I forgot my phone and I came home and you saw him trying to kiss me. Are you blind?”
Your heart is beating so fast that I can feel it in my heart and your nostrils flare like RIP Melanda’s and you say it again. “Nomi, why are you making this up?”
She rubs her eyes. Part Meerkat. Part Centipede. “Mom. He kissed me.”
“I didn’t!”
You don’t look at me. You look at her. “Nomi…”
“Wow,” she says. “You believe him. Nice, Mom. Real nice.”
You tell her that you believe you. You trust your gut and you don’t think I would do that—I wouldn’t, but Seamus did, and your child needs you but you don’t know what I know—and you are blaming the victim, warning her about the danger of making false accusations and she springs off the sofa and the Meerkat is possessed by a barefoot Centipede. She throws her empty can at the wall and calls you a sicko because what kind of woman believes her fucking boy toy over her daughter? You storm by me and I don’t exist. Not right now. This is your Family Feud and I am powerless, locked out of the arcade, and you lash out at her. “Do not speak to me like that. We have to be honest.”
“Oh?” she snaps. “You want me to be honest? Well, Mom, honestly I think you’re a fucking sham. Most women believe all women and all you ever do is make excuses for every single piece-of-shit guy you drag into my life.”
“Stop it, Nomi.”
“Why? He’s dead. Dad’s dead!”
This is why we didn’t see the Centipede inside the Meerkat, because the Meerkat is like me, she stored all her pain deep inside where nobody could see it. You do that for eighteen years, you get good at it and this chasm was always here, it’s the reason RIP Phil was Philin’ the blues every night. The Meerkat hits below the belt—You feel sorry for yourself because you’re a mother and for that you can fuck off—and you hit back—You make it impossible to be your mother because you talk to me about nothing—and I sit on the sofa and all I wanted to do was make you happy and look at you now. You’re crying and she’s crying and you tell her it’s not your fault that he’s dead and you are right but she blasts you—Like hell it isn’t! You fucked his brother!—and you respond to the wrong part of what she said—Don’t talk that way about me—and you don’t look at me because you’re ashamed and there is no shame in our love and I want you to know it but I can’t go where you go, into your nest with your daughter. I am scared for our family and I’m supposed to be the father, the man of this house, but that’s a patriarchal thought and RIP Melanda would be right to tell me that it’s not about me.
It isn’t. I moved here to be good. I was good. I didn’t kill your cheating husband. I didn’t kill your lying best friend and I didn’t kill Seamus, the rapist. But I did make a mistake. I wanted to believe that everyone is like us, good, and in that way, I was na?ve. You were too, Mary Kay. Your daughter says that you ruined her life and that makes you cry and I can’t hold you, I can’t go to you and you blow your nose on your sleeve and you won’t allow yourself to look at me, to take the love that you so desperately need. Nomi is crying too.
“Nomi,” you say. “Why do you… why do you hate me so much?”
You are mother and daughter. You stop crying and so she stops crying and I remain where I am, wishing I had turned off Family Feud instead of muting it when I heard you come in.
She picks at the hem of her little shirt. “Well, you don’t care about me.”
“Honey, how can you say that? You’re all I care about. I love you. I see you.”
The Meerkat is so focused on you that she doesn’t point at me to say that you’re protecting me and this is good, I hope. This is healing. “You don’t see me. You’re blind.”
“Nomi.”
“What do you think I was doing all the time?”
“All the time… When do you mean? What do you mean?”
I remember a line from Veep, when the tall guy running for president gets his followers to chant: When are you from? When are you from? I fight tears—it’s not my place to cry, that’s the last thing you need—and the Veep man was right. We don’t come from places. We come from time. From traumatic moments that cannot be undone.
“Mom,” she says. “Why do you think I got all those UTIs?”
“Nomi, no.”
“Mom,” she says. “I read Columbine for you. I thought eventually you would force me to go to some shrink… and maybe if I talked to some shrink…”
“No.”
“He told me that you knew. He said moms know it all. And you didn’t.”
You clamp your hands over your ears like a child and I know it hurts. That bastard raped your daughter and you cry as if you are the one who got hurt because you hurt right now but she wants you to let her cry and she’s mad at you for that, screaming that it was your fault, that you let Uncle Seamus into your house, that you missed every sign that a good mother would see. I want to tell her to stop but how do you tell a teenage girl to stop talking when she’s saying what she needs to say?
She slaps you across the face and you hold your cheek in your hand and that was too much but at the same time the fucking two of you need to learn once and for all that life is what happens right now, not what happened years ago and cannot be undone.
I say her name, like a stepfather. “Nomi.”
She stops moving and Centipedes don’t do that. They don’t stop. You tell her to go downstairs where the two of you can talk in private and you think I don’t love you anymore and it’s the opposite, Mary Kay. I never loved you more. This is it, this is our Empathy Bordello and it’s one thing to dream about it but it’s another thing to live in it.
And you can’t do it right now. I feel it slipping away—New York in November, Thanksgiving—and I don’t know how to grab it because you don’t know that I know about New York in November, Thanksgiving. You rub your face—it stings where she hit you—and she pats her hand—it too stings—but you didn’t like that and you huff. “So that it, then, huh? You blame me for everything, but I got news, honey…” Don’t do it, Mary Kay. “The one you should blame for this whole fucking mess is your father.”