There was a quiet place at the center of me. A pool of black water frozen to a sheen. It was made up of the questions it was easier not to ask, the mysteries I didn’t bother prodding. I’d been letting it thicken as far back as I could recall. Something was moving beneath the ice now. Shifting, making the surface creak, turning it rotten.
You’re so chill, Nate told me once, approvingly. Nothing bothers you.
My dad, indulgently: What happened last night, that wasn’t like you.
And my mother. When she didn’t like the question I asked she pushed me back on the bed, rearranging my hands like I was her doll, like my body didn’t even belong to me. I hadn’t fought back. I made it so easy for her; I didn’t say a word.
I was done with that now. Even under the shower’s spray I kept my eyes wide open, so suddenly sick of secrets I couldn’t bear the dark.
CHAPTER FIVE
The city
Back then
I never really knew my mother. She died when I was two, and my dad wasn’t the kind to keep a candle burning. When I asked questions, he’d send me to the kitchen drawer where he kept a stack of old photos and a rubber-banded lock of her red hair.
So. A mother can be a photograph.
My best friend lost her mother even earlier. Fee came into the world and the woman who’d carried her stepped out. Death transfigured her into a dark-eyed martyr, their apartment the reliquary where Fee’s father tended to her traces.
A mother can be a saint, then. A ghost. A blessed outline that shows where she’s gone missing.
Sometimes she’s a stranger on a park bench, feeding her child from her fingers, the air between them so tender you could knead it like bread dough. Or a woman on the train, Coke in the sippy cup and yanking the kid’s arm until it cries. I’ve always liked to watch bad mothers.
A mother can be a paring knife, a chisel. She can shape and destroy. I never really thought I would become one.
There are things a daughter should know about the woman who’s raising her. If that woman had the courage. If she could say the words.
Let’s say you lie in bed at night and rehearse the things you’d tell her, if you could. This daughter of yours, infinitely unreachable and just across the hall. This deep into the disaster, what could you still say?
Where would you begin?
* * *
When I was five my dad lost his keys in the dark between the bar and our apartment. I was up on his hip, his breath painting beery clouds over the frozen air. We’d walked half a mile in the cold blowing in from the lake, him in his unzipped chore coat because he ran hot, me shivering in a Rainbow Brite windbreaker because he never remembered kids grow. It was always late November by the time I got a winter coat that fit me.
My dad’s good mood flipped like a card when we got to the street door and couldn’t unlock it. While he stabbed at the superintendent’s buzzer I wriggled out of his arms and started walking. Halfway back to the Green Man Tavern I swerved onto the black grass, plucking his keys from the hollow where they’d fallen.
When I was nine I put my fingers down a drain hole in the school washroom and got hold of a clasp I hadn’t actually seen, attached to a charm bracelet I didn’t know was there. Easel, candy cane, pointe shoe. I named each slimy charm before dropping the bracelet into the trash.
When I was twelve I walked home by myself one soft summer night. My dad was out and our apartment keys hung on a chain beneath my shirt. Up to the third floor, down the hall, then I stopped, staring at our closed apartment door. I heard nothing; there was nothing to hear. But quiet as I could I crept back to the street, then flew up the block to Fee and Uncle Nestor’s place. So it was my dad, not me, who opened the door an hour later to find the man in the shadows with a kitchen knife, his jeans unzipped. It was my dad who broke a brown-paper-wrapped bottle over his head and scared him away, leaving a path of bloodstains over the carpet that never washed out.
There were stories like this about my mom, too, what my dad said she’d called her guesses. But the way I described it to my best friend, Fee, the only one who ever asked, was that I could just feel things. Objects, places, the contours of them and how the air moved through. Think about standing in the center of your own room. Closing your eyes. Now feel the saturated tug of your diary beneath the mattress. The photo of your crush pinned to the corkboard among postcards and magazine pictures. The hidden place where you spilled nail polish and it stained the floor, so you pulled your bed a foot to the right.
That’s how I felt about the whole world. Or at least our little piece of it. We didn’t think it was weird, Fee and I. We didn’t even think it was special. Probably because she had her own thing: she always knew what people needed. Not their heads but their bodies. She was forever walking up to you with a glass of water, an apple, a bottle of Tylenol. She never stopped hassling my dad to eat a vegetable once in a while.