“But to be perfectly clear, the choice is ultimately yours.” Rachel’s gentle confidence reassures me somewhat.
“Yeah...”
“How about I give you the phone number of my colleague who is with Constance now? If you decide you want to see her, you can get the information from her. Then we can go from there, whatever you decide.”
My head aches and pounds, feeling like it would on a relentlessly humid day before a thunderstorm.
After Rachel gives me her colleague’s details, I hang up the phone and press it into the space between my eyes. Focusing on that spot of slight discomfort, one I’m choosing to cause and not receive unwillingly, seems to help. I think of Connie, or at least the latest version of her I have in memory, and transfer that image to a hospital bed.
Sympathy swells despite my impulse to shut my emotions down and get out of this bathroom without causing a scene. I imagine the similarities between where she is now and the picture that used to sit on her bedside table. Our first photo together, taken as she lay in a different hospital bed almost twenty-five years ago. She had been alone then, too, and only seventeen.
My thoughts hold on my mother until an unwelcome memory rises to the top of the pile. I was four years old, waiting on an empty school bus that had already made a second loop back to my street. Sitting alone with the bus driver and my kindergarten teacher, I remember thinking that they both looked at me with the same expression my mom had when I’d fallen out of a tree a few days before. I asked myself why they did that—I wasn’t hurt.
“Mommy didn’t mention any plans she had for today?” Ms. Brown had asked me.
“Nope,” little me answered.
“Do you know your grandma’s phone number? Or where she might work?”
“I don’t have a grandma. I have an uncle, but he lives on a big boat.”
“And your dad? Do you know your dad’s name, sweetie?” Ms. Brown was making me nervous, and I wanted my mom. Mostly so I could show her the artwork I’d made and ask if I had a dad like my friend Sara did. Sara’s dad seemed nice. Maybe, I had thought, he could be my dad too.
“Nope,” I answered.
“Okay, all right. Well, I think you and I are going to go on a little adventure today! Would you like to see where Ms. Brown lives?”
“Don’t you have a dog?” I asked.
“Uh... yes, I do.”
“I don’t like dogs. They’re stinky.”
“Well, how about we put him outside and the two of us can play inside?"
Ms. Brown had taken me back to her house for two hours before CPS workers arrived and placed me in emergency care.
I’ve read in my file since—the one I was “gifted” on my eighteenth birthday—that the police tracked Connie down a few days later. She was high, drunk, and angry to have been found. I bounced around foster care for a year until my mom proved successful enough in her sobriety that I was able to move back in with her. I knew she had worked hard for that. Counsellors, social workers, and teachers—they’d all told me how much my mom had worked to get me back.
I’ve never understood why they needed to tell me, as if any five-year-old should be grateful to be with their own mother.
As if I was a sobriety chip and not a human.
When Connie relapsed ten months later, my head was so filled up with forced gratitude that I felt worse for her than for myself. I should have been told I didn’t deserve to eat nothing but dryFruit Loopsfor three days straight—but I wasn’t. Instead, I felt sad for her. I still do.
Now, she’s brought another kid into this mess.
Determination fills my chest, and I open my eyes, bringing myself back into the fluorescent-lit bathroom and my adult body that shakes as waves of nausea cause goosebumps to spread. I know that I need to go see my mother. I won’t let my sibling go through what I did. I can’t.
CHAPTER TWO
I step out of the toilet stall and wash my hands. Once I’m positive I have scrubbed every last piece of public bathroom off me, I bring some cold water to my face. The water droplets run down into the neck of my T-shirt as I lean over the sink, bracing myself with a firm grip on either side.Do not throw up in a grocery store bathroom.I look at my reflection in the clouded mirror resting above the basin.
My mother’s eyes look back at me. Deep green with amber flecks. Thick, dark eyelashes and even thicker eyebrows. The women in our family were built to battle the elements, carry children on our backs, live through famine—survive.Strong brows, strong noses, strong bodies, strong hearts.Connie has written that on each of my birthday cards—the years she remembered.
I always thought it was a batshit crazy thing to write, but now the familiar sentiment is sort of nice. I became far less insecure about my soft-edged figure when I realised my body had evolved to hold weight and strength because of what my Polish lineage—on Connie’s side—had to survive.
My chestnut-brown hair is getting far too long, falling almost to the ends of my fingertips, but I like it that way. Mostly because my adoptive mother would hate it—it’s not practical. I tie it up now to allow my neck to breathe. Everything feels too close to my skin.
