I heard my mother’s voice then, remembered lying next to her in bed when I was maybe eight or nine years old. She had been crying and I’d come into her room, long enough after the front door had slammed shut for me to know it was safe. I crawled up next to her and wrapped my thin, child’s arms around her, and she only let herself cry for another minute before she sniffed, wiped her tears on the sheet, and turned to face me. In the early morning light, her face was beautiful, the way some faces soften when sad, and she kissed my nose.
‘Don’t worry about me, Alice. I was just having a moment. He can go on to hell for all I care. Just another stupid man who thinks he has something over me. That I’ll let him treat me bad because of’—she waved her hand around the room, and I knew she meant this bed, this house, this town belonged to him, and another move was coming.
She railed against the man some more, a guy whose name or circumstances I can no longer remember, and by the time the sun came up, she seemed cured of him, wiped clean of their connection. It was fascinating to watch, how quickly she could put herself back together again.
‘That’s because we’re made of metal,’ she said, when I asked her about it. ‘These men think we’re such delicate flowers. They have no idea how strong we are, Alice. How much we can take. They never doubt we need them more than they need us.’
‘And it’s best,’ she said, some other day, ‘to keep them thinking that way.’
‘Tell me about your mother, Alice.’
Mr Jackson’s head is pressing down on my stomach, he is lying sideways across my body. Though I feel his breath catch with the question, I cannot see the expression on his face as he waits for me to answer him.
Nobody asks me about my mother. Not anymore. When it first happened, I had to talk about her. They made me talk about her, about finding her dead on the kitchen floor. Just to make sure I was okay. As if you could ever be all right after that. But then I moved in with Gloria and boxes were ticked and some other story came along much worse than mine. Soon enough, my story, her story, was no longer something anyone wanted to ask me about. Especially since I refused to share the kind of details people most wanted to hear. I stopped talking about my mother once I realised no one could answer the only question that mattered.
Why did she do it? After all the times she had put herself back together, what made my mom kill herself that day?
I’m silent against the back of Mr Jackson’s head. My fingers stop playing with his hair and hover somewhere unfinished between us.
He doesn’t turn to face me.
‘Tell me about her. Tell me what she was like, Alice. I would really like to know.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
I push him off me, draw my knees up to my bare chest. This is the first time I am the one to put distance between us, and now I wish for a wall.
‘Alice.’
I’m so used to him saying my name. But this is different. There is something so adult in how he says it. Something that reminds me of the man he is to students who don’t look like me. To them, he is an observant, exacting teacher. The kind of teacher who can turn a name into a command. I sense it, and if we were not naked here in his bed, I might have liked to give over to this safer version of Mr Jackson. I might have liked to open up the book of sketches I’m carrying within me, show him all the torn, damaged pages. But I can feel his skin against mine, the radiating heat of him, and I know these are not arms I can wrap around me. Not in the way of men who want to soothe. He does not get to change his role in my life now.
‘I don’t want to talk about her. About … it. I’m over being a charity case.’
‘I don’t think you’re a charity case, Alice.’
‘Sure, you do. Isn’t that why I’m here?’
It comes out harsher than I’d intended, but there’s truth in this accusation, too.
He moves his arm away. Sits up and doesn’t look at me. Just stares straight ahead for the longest time, as if measuring my comment word by word before he responds. When he does speak, his voice has an odd, flat sound to it, as if he is reciting lines from a script.
‘When I was eleven years old, I watched my mother die of cancer. Correction. I watched her dying of cancer. Slowly. For three shitty years. Nobody ever asked me about it. I asked you because someone should have asked me. It would have helped if someone had asked me. I assumed you’d understand this.’
I stare at Mr Jackson’s shoulder, the little muscle twitch that tells me how unprepared he must have been for my response. I want to climb right into what he is saying, I want to know everything, and tell him everything, I feel it all rushing forward in my mouth, but other parts of my body want to back away. To close the conversation down. My heart is jack-hammering; I can feel the pulse in my fingers, and that familiar metal taste in my mouth. It is the taste of my mother’s blood. Nobody knows I stuck my fingers in my mouth after they came to take her dead body away.