But something—guilt, perhaps, or obligation, or maybe that stubborn thread of daughterly hope I can’t quite bring myself to snip—makes me swipe to accept.
“Eliana?” she says at once. Her voice is high, thin, trembling. “Eliana, I need you to come over. Right now.”
I drop my pen. “Mom, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“Just—please. I can’t explain over the phone. But it’s important. It’s really, really important.”
“Mom—”
“Please, baby. I need you.”
I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose. “I’m on my way.”
I burst into her apartment expecting bloodshed and hellfire.
Instead, I get the same thing I always get when one of these calls comes through: a mountain of teary, snotty tissues, with my mother buried beneath it.
What’s missing, though, is the acrid stench of wine and self-loathing that usually accompanies this scene. I scour around as best as my eyes will let me, but I don’t see any emptied bottles of liquor.
Nor, I notice, do I see Rick.
“Mom?” I say gently. I go to the couch and settle down beside her. “Mama, it’s me. It’s Elly.”
She raises her face from where it was pressed into a throw pillow on her lap and looks up at me. Her eyes are red-rimmed from crying and her nose is raw and chapped from the tissues.
But the self-hating despair I expected to find is as absent as the booze. She looks almost… resigned? No, that’s not right. Calm? No, that’s not right, either.
Maybe it’s that she just looksquiet. As if the demons that have screamed in her head for her whole life have finally decided to leave her alone, and what’s left behind is silence. Not a happy silence, not a smiling silence, but a peaceful silence, if nothing else.
“He left, didn’t he?” I ask.
She nods and sniffles. “Yeah. Took all my jewelry, too, the bastard.”
There’s not a drop of venom in her voice, though. Just more of that sad but peaceful silence.
“I’m sorry.” I touch her hand. It looks so old suddenly. Have those blue veins always been there? Those liver spots? Has she always looked that frail and pale and fragile?
She laughs, the sound wet with tears. “You don’t need to be. It’s my own fault. You told me. Well, you tried to tell me. I didn’t want to listen.”
I shake my head as tears of my own start to crop up. “That doesn’t mean I want to see you get your heart broken, Mama. You know that hurts me, too.”
“I know, baby.” She pats my hand with hers and drags it into her lap. “I don’t always tell you this enough, but you’re a good daughter. My life hasn’t had many blessings, but God knew what he was doing when he gave you to me. I’m sorry I haven’t always shown that to you.”
“Mama, you don’t have to apologize.”
“Yes, I do.” She knuckles the tears out of her eyes. “I’ve spent my whole life looking for someone to save me and fix all the stuff in me that’s broken. And I put that on you, too, didn’t I? You had to be the grown-up when you were just a little girl.”
I don’t know what to say. She’s right, of course. But hearing her acknowledge it out loud feels strange. Like watching someone finally turn on the lights in a room you’ve been stumbling through in the dark for years.
“Rick leaving,” she continues, “it made me realize something: I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone else to make me happy. But that’s not how it works, is it?”
“No,” I whisper. “It’s not.”
She looks at me sidelong. “I want to try, Eliana. I gotta stop doing this to myself. Gotta stop doing it to you, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She squeezes my hand. “I think it’s time.”
