“That’s better,” I say, as she sinks back down.
“What the fuck do you want?” she hisses, panting fast.
“I have the antidote. I’ll give it you. I just want to know one thing.”
“What?”
She’s writhing against the cushions, the pseudoephedrine taking hold.
I stare at her, face still as stone, not a hint of sympathy.
“I want to know my father’s name.”
She lets out several irritated hissing sounds, squirming on the cushions. Her face is deeply flushed now, her skin sweating. Her breath grows more and more shallow.
“Fuck you,” she snarls.
“Suit yourself,” I say, standing up from my chair.
“Wait!” she cries.
Tears run down both sides of her cheeks, mixing with the sweat. She clutches the front of the hoodie, pulling it away from her chest as if that will ease the pressure.
“Tell me his name,” I say, quietly, relentlessly.
She’s groaning and writhing, pulling at the shirt.
“Tell me. You don’t have much time.”
“Arghhhh!” she groans, rolling on her side and then on her back again, thrashing around in the blankets, trying to ease the pressure any way she can.
I’m colder than ice. I feel nothing but the relentless drive to squeeze this secret out of her. The one thing of value she could tell me, but she always refused.
“Tell me,” I order, my eyes fixed on her face while she twists in a rictus of agony.
She makes a mumbling sound, drooling a little at the strained edges of her mouth.
“Tell me!”
She shakes her head like a toddler holding its breath, eyes slitted, hatefully obstinate all the way to the end.
“TELL ME!” I roar, and I slap her hard across the face.
The pain jolts her. Fear replaces stubbornness as she finally realizes I’m not fucking around.
“I DON’T KNOW!” she howls, her voice strangling in her throat. “I NEVER KNEW! Are you happy, you fucking cunt? I never knew who he was! I don’t even remember it happening.”
She rolls off the couch, shoving the coffee table with her hip as she falls, toppling the bottle of wine so it tumbles on its side and pours the liquor onto the floor with a steady glug, glug, glug.
I make no move to right the bottle.
I don’t touch my mother, either.
I watch her squirm and buck, her face the color of brick, her hands twisting into claws as she grasps at her chest.
Her mouth moves silently, her lips trying to form the word antidote.
I look down at her, pitiless.
“There is no antidote,” I say. “There never was. Nothing can save you. Just like nothing can change you. You are what you are … dead to me.”
I leave her lying there, twisting and croaking out her last breaths. I won’t even give her the comfort of my company. She can die alone, like she was always going to.
Instead, I carry both glasses of wine back to the kitchen and dump them down the sink. I wash the glasses and return them to the dishwasher, wiping my fingerprints off every surface I touched: the Dawn bottle, the faucet, the handle of the dishwasher, the interior handle of the front door … Every place I touched while inside the house.
By the time I’m finished, my mother has stopped moving.
I don’t bother to clean up the wine, but I remove my prints from the bottle, laying it back down on its side.
I put the drops directly into her glass. There won’t be any trace in the bottle.
I doubt they’ll even autopsy her body. The effects of pseudoephedrine are similar to a heart attack. Even if they run a full-panel blood test, the cornucopia of drugs in the house will muddy the waters. She was trying to kill herself long before I helped her along.
Leaving the house feels much better than entering.
The warm sun bathes my face, the fresh breeze reviving my lungs after the stale fug of the house.
A handful of cherry blossoms float across the lawn, blown from the trees in the neighbor’s yard. A single petal lands on my palm, before fluttering away again.
I feel as light as those petals, alive on the air.
I meet Cole in Yerba Buena, where the party is already in full swing.
INDUSTRY BABY – Lil Nas X & Jack Harlow
Spotify → geni.us/no-devil-spotify
Apple Music → geni.us/no-devil-apple
I’m showing my new series, The Other Gender. This one isn’t drawn from my past. It’s an examination of female empowerment through the iconography of the ages. I’ve painted gender-swapped versions of Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent. I’m showing the history of the world if women were the only species. Marilyn Monroe sings happy birthday in her see-through dress, dancing on the lap of a female JFK who smokes her cigar with all the same lust in her eyes, but a sense of playfulness too, mutual enjoyment.