I feel the energy change. I see it swell in her glistening eyes. Her jaw is trembling, invisible strings tugging downward at the corners of her lips as she tries to hold it all in.
She proceeds to the dining room faster than I can catch her.
There’s a rectangular spot on the floor where the rug once sat. The color difference is stark, a path well worn around it from the footsteps of children once chasing one another. Andi isn’t staring at the worn wood on the perimeter, though. Her gaze snags at the center, where the cracks between the hardwood boards are darker than the other places.
I know what she’s looking at.
I know why she’s shaking.
She brings her hand to her mouth as a tear falls down her cheek, and she walks across the foyer to the living room entryway, then turns around to stare at the dining room again.
Her gaze jerks back to the basement door.
She bolts to it as if she needs to see the scratches again.
“We sat this chair under the knob every time she came over after the court decided to take away her rights,” Andi says, sounding almost out of breath. “Every time she… When she swore she was off the drugs and back on her meds. When she would yell that she just wanted to spend time with me, and when I wouldn’t go, when Dad and Tina would scream and fight with her, my mother would yell down to the basement—”
Whore. Stupid little cunt. You think you’re better than me. You're too good to see your own mother. I’m doing this for you, and you can’t speak to me? I kicked him out for you. You made me like this.
Why don’t you love me anymore?
One day, you’ll regret not having spent time with your mother.
I remember every fucking word.
Andi darts to the kitchen.
She goes around the bar and stares at the indention in the countertop again, her fingernail picking at the tear in the linoleum-covered block. “I was alone here when this happened,” she says. “I don’t remember why. I just remember answering the door. I remember her telling me that it was time to go with her, that the voice said it was time for us to leave this place. She said she was better, and we could be together without pain.”
Bile rises in my throat.
“I didn’t know she had a knife,” Andi goes on. “I didn’t know she meantawayaway.” She grabs the linoleum and peels it back. “I managed to get away from her as she came at me, and the force of her blow struck the counter so hard that…” Andi sniffs back her tears and shakes her head at the ceiling.
Her gaze snags on the hole in the wall, and she stretches toward it.
“This is where she punched the wall when Dad refused to let her take me for the weekend. God, she was so fucking high. I was only thirteen. He was terrified she would do something… Mrs. Lawry called the cops, but they were fucking useless. They werealwaysfucking useless.”
She looks twice at the dining room.
I can barely keep up with her as she stretches into it again.
In this room, I see her pain coming to a head. It isn’t just the memory of pain and fighting. It’s fury and regret and suffering. It slides into her eyes as she stands on the dark spot in the middle of the floor and then paces across the foyer to the edge of the staircase.
“I was right here,” she says through a strained voice. “I was right here when she…”
Emotion rises in every short breath.
It’s in her heaving chest, her slumping shoulders.
“I was right here,” she says loudly. “I was shouting back and telling her I was going to college whether she liked it or not. And she told me… she told me if I left her, it was confirmation that I never loved her, and there would be nothing left for her here. She blamed me. She told me I was the reason no one ever loved her again. That I had taken everything away from her the moment I was born. She said she was done. Tired. And I thought… I thought she was bluffing just like every other time. I told her to do it. I told her I never wanted to see her again.I thought she was bluffing. I thought she was lying. She’d threatened it so many times before that I just… I thought… And then she dragged that fucking knife across her wrists, and I…”
Her voice drifts as the tears catch up with her, as her breaths refuse to catch. Her entire body shudders and tenses—
Andi grabs a leftover lamp from the floor and hurls it across the foyer with a blood-curdling scream.
The lamp shatters onto the spot in the dining room where her mother had died. I jump back into the kitchen and walk through it to the living room, only to find that it’s no safer there than where I was previously standing.
Andi shouts.
