“Soon,” Doreen promised, which was what she used to tell me as a kid. Soon could be anywhere from an hour to two days. “Go freshen up and I’ll make you a plate.” Doreen took Brian’s bags to the first-floor guest bedroom, and he followed, saying he couldn’t wait for a hot meal.
I’d moved into my older sister’s room after she graduated from college and got married. There were eight years between us, and while I didn’t have many memories of what my mother was like with her, their relationship intimated a sort of closeness and comfort that had been established early. Some part of me thought I could slip into her place and my mother may not notice. Of course, it didn’t work out that way, but I never forgot the trying, how it made me ache with confusion. What was I doing wrong?
I went into my mother’s room and shook one of her sleeping pills into my hand. I stepped out of my shoes and hung my coat in her closet, nuzzled alongside her pack of minks. I curled up without getting under the covers, my head at the foot of the bed, and fell fast asleep, thinking about how my parents would find me immediately when they came home.
* * *
I woke with my pulse gaveling my wrists. Someone was in the bed, touching me. I launched forward, tangling in the blanket by the footboard, wheezing and wild-eyed.
“It’s me!” my mother was saying. “Pamela, it’s me!”
She came around the back of the bed and hooked her elbows under my armpits, freeing me from the snarl of the comforter. My blouse clung to my back in a feverish sweat.
“What time is it?” I asked her in a drowsy voice.
“Eleven.”
“In the morning?” I cried.
“Shh, shh,” my mother said. “It’s nighttime, and Brian is sleeping.” She pointed at the Turkish rug, where, just below, his bedroom was located.
I looked at her properly then. The diamond-shaped peonies in her ears, the matching collar of the necklace. Fifty thousand dollars, her head was worth. She’d been out somewhere. A dinner. A party.
“You weren’t supposed to get in until tomorrow,” she said, a touch of defensiveness in her tone.
“But I found an earlier flight. I told Doreen to tell you.”
“I didn’t know,” my mother said, stroking my hair. It would not have been fair to call her a liar. Few things were worth remembering, in her world.
For weeks, I’d been a wave cresting, searching for a shore on which to break. I immediately dissolved into my mother’s arms. It had been so long since she’d let me hold her that I’d forgotten her smell: Lubriderm and lipstick.
“Come downstairs,” my mother said when I finally released her. “Doreen said you missed dinner. You’re so thin, Pamela.” I had noticed that my pants were fitting looser, that sometimes I went to bed wondering why I was so hungry because I’d had a burger for dinner, before realizing that was the night before. Each day seemed impossibly long, the permanence of the situation unbearable, and yet the details of my hours remained a complete blur in my memory. This would happen only one other time in my life. The spring of 2020, during the worst of it. I realized then that those years following Denise’s death weren’t unlike the shutdowns and the school closures and the unceasing confinement of quarantine. I was held captive by a virus that had been around a long time, that had finally mutated to infect me. Him.
* * *
I watched my mother set a bowl of soup in front of me, wondering if I was still dreaming. My mother was a very influential woman, platinum blond and buttoned up in a Halston shirtdress, something of a suburban snake charmer. You could go to her, shredded to pieces over some terrible hurt, and come away with hypnotized, drugged eyes, speaking in her same distracted lilt, as though nothing in life was worth so much bother. She was twenty-one when she married my thirty-five-year-old divorced father, and she was still throwing outrageous parties with her young friends where they turned up Elton John on the record player and baked midnight brownies that I brought to the neighbors in the morning, apologizing for the noise on her behalf. Your mom is a blast, Denise once said, and I’d burned with embarrassment for the both of us. It took my mother a year to remember that my best friend’s name was Denise and not Diane.
“Dad is at work?” I assumed.
My mother was looking around for the table linens but had no idea where they were. She swiped the dish towel off the hook, folded it, and set my spoon on top.
“He’s spending the night in the city,” she said. “But he made reservations for lunch for all four of us tomorrow.”