“We both know that’s a lie,” she says.
She takes another drag and taps her long forefinger on the dwindling length of the cigarette. As she stares into the drain, I wonder if she is looking down it and seeing her youth and ambitions, her fantasies about who and what my father was, her excitement and her optimism, all of it long since masticated by time. She looks old, standing beneath the harsh lighting of a ceiling fixture that has no shade. She looks like a failure.
“I’m going to be okay,” I say forcefully. “I really am.”
As I stare across Nick and Sandra’s apartment at her, I become very certain that if anything happens to me, Tera Taylor’s brilliant, broken daughter, there will be no more annual subscriptions to any number of magazines that will distract her, and her never-ending supply of below-average boyfriends will do no better a job than they do now of giving her steady purpose.
If I commit suicide, I’ll also be committing murder.
Tera Taylor will be dead, too.
My mother shakes her head. “You have to understand… that I believed it happened because of the town we’re in.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I say.
She shrugs and continues to focus into the sink, into the drain. When she runs some water, I imagine her salt-and-pepper gray ashes melting down and disappearing.
She clears her throat. “I thought that you were driven… you know…”
“Crazy,” I provide. “You can say the word.”
“I don’t like to. It gives everything too much power. You’re not crazy, you’re just different.”
Okay, now I know where I get some of my magical thinking from.
“When you had to go away…”
“To the mental institution,” I supply.
“It was a clinic.”
“For people who are crazy.”
“Stop it,” she snaps as she looks over at me. “You don’t have to be so damned blunt.”
A broken bone is a broken bone, I want to say. Calling it an “ouchie” doesn’t change the necessity of a cast—or what happens if you can’t put one on the injury.
“When you went away,” she repeats firmly, “I thought there was a chance that you needed so much more than you were getting and that that was what drove you to…” She puts her lit stub under the faucet’s water, dousing the glow. “I thought you did what you did because you couldn’t stand the monotony. The lack of opportunity. The lack of challenge and engagement.”
No, I think to myself with a chilling realization. That is everything you feel about where we live.
That is everything that has ever made you consider the idea of killing yourself.
And you have, Mom, haven’t you.
I don’t say any of this out loud. I am rattled to my core that my mother might have visited the same desperate, desolate places I have, where pain is the only thing you know and you can see no way of getting free from it. My mother is supposed to be superficial. She’s supposed to float above the depths of life, riding on a raft made out of issues of the National Enquirer. She’s supposed to make snap, two-dimensional judgments about people and places and things, and smoke too much, and flirt too much, and walk a path that has absolutely nothing to do with my trail of spectacular suffering.
“A town like ours can kill someone’s whole life.” She crosses her arms and turns to me, a forty-year-old woman in a lunch lady outfit with two hundred dollars in the bank, a ten-year-old car, and a new boyfriend she’ll probably be supporting in another week and a half when he moves into our little house. “It can just eat you alive, and I can’t let that happen to you. You’ve got so many things going for you, and my job is to get you a toehold to something better. You’re nationwide smart, Sarah, not small-town bright. There are so many places you can go, so many things you can learn, because you’re that special.”
All I can do is stare up at her. I can’t remember her ever saying anything close to this.
And I’m so struck by her sincerity that I’m compelled to leave the couch and go to her, my body moving on its own with no explicit commands.
As I put my arms around her, she’s shocked, and I realize that I never hug her, at least not voluntarily. Any physical contact between us is her touching me and my bearing it because I must.
“It’s going to be okay,” I say as I hold on tight. “I promise.”
I speak the words strongly because I suddenly need them to be true. Both for her sake, and for mine. The pendulum has swung back to my wanting to still be on the planet, the to’ing and fro’ing part and parcel of my disease.
“Please,” my mother says in a voice that wavers, “don’t make me regret this Ambrose thing, I will never forgive myself.” She pulls away and grips my upper arms. “And you have to know, if you want to come home, you can. As much as I want you to have all of this, I’d rather you be alive. Anything else is so terrifying to me, I can’t think about it. If things are getting… out of control… you have to let me know. This is a lot to handle, for anyone, but especially someone like you. Being away from home, being in a different environment, you have to remember what Dr. Warten said. If you have any hallucinations, if you struggle to stay connected to the people and things around you, if you’re having suicidal thoughts or ones that spin out of control, we need to bring you back home. That was our agreement, remember?”
As her eyes implore me, she reveals, yet again, her powerlessness. As she lists all of the symptoms I’ve been having, I have my own powerlessness revealed to me.
I feel as fragile and ancient and worn out as she appears, and with this communion, a ghostly umbilical cord links us together, replacing in a metaphysical way the one that is long gone in fact.
I’ve been so busy judging her that I’ve missed the opportunity to know my mother. I’ve been so busy being crazy and getting taken care of by her that I’ve failed to recognize she requires tending to as well. I’ve been so focused on our differences that I’ve been blind to the fact that we are both broken in our own ways and that we need each other.
As these things are revealed to me, I recognize that of the many cogent and piercing insights I’ve had with regard to all manner of people up until this moment, these are the first truly adult thoughts I’ve ever had.
“Okay, Mom,” I say. “I promise to let you know if I need to come home.”
As I make the vow, I mean it, and not because I’m trying to snow her like I did Phil the Pharmacist. I feel like I owe her the integrity because she’s just shown me some of her own—and she must sense my resolve, as her relief is so great it changes the air temperature around us, taking the bonfire of emotion that roared and reducing its heat to a simmer of ennui.
Or so I guess. I don’t really know. Even though I’m on the front lines of this invisible, potentially catastrophic battle, I’m not the best person to judge the situation.
But I have reset things. And life will go on for a little longer. At least… I hope it does, I think to myself, when my mother and I step out of Nick’s apartment shortly thereafter. As the administrator takes her aside, I am left standing next to my RA.