But that wasn’t her life, not anymore, and her eyes filled with tears. One step at a time, she told herself. She needed gauze and tape but doubted there was any in the house. There might be Band-Aids in one of the bathrooms, she reasoned, heading up the stairs to the bathroom Tommie used. In the second drawer down, she got lucky.
She pulled out a Band-Aid, but she needed both hands to open it, and blood splattered onto the counter. The wrapping, sticky and wet with blood, made the adhesive worthless. She tried again with another Band-Aid and got the same result. She tried again and again, failing each time, bloody wrappers and Band-Aids dropping to the floor. Finally, she got two of the Band-Aids ready, rinsed the blood from her hand and finger, and dried it using her shirt, squeezing tightly. She applied the first one, followed quickly by the second one. That gave her the time she needed to apply more, and it seemed to do the trick. Her finger throbbed with its own heartbeat as she went downstairs.
The living room and the hallway and the kitchen were wrecks, and the thought of having to clean it all and make the food and pack and escape and somehow find a way to start a new life was simply too much. Her mind shut down like an overloaded circuit, leaving nothing but sadness in its wake.
Exhausted, she went to the couch and made herself comfortable. Closing her eyes, her worries and fears faded away completely the instant she fell asleep.
Despite sleeping for hours, she woke feeling as though she’d been drugged. She forced herself upright, her mind working in slow motion, the room gradually settling into focus.
“What a mess,” she remarked to no one in particular, amazed again by the clutter spread throughout the room, the cabinet at a cockeyed angle, the wall half primed. She rose from the couch and shuffled to the kitchen to get a glass of water. As she drank, she felt the throbbing in her finger, the deep bruising ache. When she looked at her hand, she saw that the blood had soaked through the Band-Aids, staining them brown. It was gross, but she wasn’t about to undertake an attempt to replace them, any more than she wanted to clean the living room or the kitchen or the rest of the house. Or make sandwiches or slice carrots, for that matter. She had no desire to do any of it, at least until she felt a bit more like herself.
Instead, she went to the front porch. She turned from side to side, noting the ever-present farmworkers in the fields, but they were farther from the house than they had been the day before, working on another section of the crop under a grayish cloudy sky. There was a breeze, too, fairly steady, and she wondered if that meant it was going to rain.
Even though rain would complicate their escape, she couldn’t really summon the energy to care all that much; instead, she found herself lost in a memory of her mom. Her mom would get super tired, too, sometimes to the point where she’d spend two or three days in bed. Beverly could remember going to the side of her mom’s bed and shaking her, asking her to wake up because Beverly hadn’t eaten. Sometimes her mom would rouse and drag herself to the kitchen to warm up chicken noodle soup before retreating; other times, there was nothing Beverly could do to wake her.
As hard as those days were, though, they were nothing compared to the days that her mom cried and cried, no matter what Beverly tried to do to help. Beverly remembered being scared whenever that happened. Moms weren’t supposed to cry. But it wasn’t just the tears or the sobbing, choking sounds that bothered her. It was the way her mom looked, with her dirty clothes and hair poking out in all directions and the haunted expression on her face. She even moved differently, like every step she took was painful somehow.
Nor could her mom ever explain what made her so sad in the first place. It didn’t matter if Beverly cleaned her room or didn’t, or whether she played quietly or made noise; the blue days always came. That’s what her mom always called them. Blue days. When she got older and understood what feeling blue meant, Beverly assumed that she meant that figuratively; later, she began to think that her mom also meant it literally. Because that’s how Beverly was feeling right now, she realized—she felt as though she were slowly being enveloped in a dense blue fog. It wasn’t a pretty blue, either, like the sky or the color she’d painted Tommie’s baby room. This was a midnight blue, so dark and deep it seemed to be turning black at the edges, unwelcoming and cold and heavy enough to render caring about anything almost impossible.
“I am not my mother,” she repeated, but even then, she wondered whether it was true.
She wandered inside, trying to shake the idea that no matter what she did to get ready, she’d somehow make a mistake that would catch up to her sooner rather than later.