“Gracie!” Mom snaps. “Suitcase. Now. We’re catching the six a.m. bus.”
“Why are we in such a hurry?” I ask as I reach under the bed and grab her suitcase handle. It slides reluctantly over the carpet, and I wonder what Mom’s stuffed in there to give the appearance of a clean room. Her soldering iron, maybe. That thing’s heavy as hell.
“I’m just ready to get out of here,” she says. “And I have an old friend in Portland I want to look up.”
“An old friend.”
“Yes, Gracie, Jesus Christ. I do have friends outside of this hick town.”
If she does, it’s news to me. The only friends she could possibly have that don’t live in Cape Katie are skeezes she hooked up with at Ruby’s.
“What about our stuff at Pete’s?” I ask.
“He’ll mail it to us! Now, for god’s sake, enough questions and open that up for me.”
To buy myself some time and try to figure out what the hell to do, I slowly unzip her suitcase. I flip the top open and suck in a breath when I see it’s not full of her soldering iron or jewelry materials or old magazines.
It’s full of bottles. Five of them. All Grey Goose vodka. Some of them blueberry flavored, some of them lemon, but all of them empty.
Is Maggie okay?
After you graduate . . .
“Oh, shit,” Mom whispers.
I glance up to see her frozen in front of me.
“I forgot those were in there.”
“You forgot . . .” But my voice trails off, shock replacing coherent thought. Standing up, I back away from the suitcase. All the liquor she drained in what had to have been the past couple of days, because she definitely didn’t flee Pete’s with a bag full of empty bottles. My back collides with the wall, but my eyes stay on those bottles. They almost look pretty, the geese flying free over the soft colors on the label.
“We’ll just leave them on the bed,” Mom says. She kneels down and starts emptying the suitcase onto the mattress, one-armed and one bottle at a time. They clink together roughly, so hard I’m amazed they don’t shatter. “Housekeeping will take care of it.”
For some reason, all I can think about are those bubbles Eva and I blew aboard Emmaline, the two of us viewing the world through tiny slivers of color. It was beautiful.
But it wasn’t real.
Each bubble eventually burst.
Each firework fizzled out.
Each lens got stripped away, and each girl saw the world like it was, all nakedness and reality and live action.
Where love gets all mixed up with duty and scared and lonely and no way out.
But escape comes in more than one form, I guess, because I help my mother pack. A voice whispers in the back of my mind, asking me what I want. What I need. What I should do. I don’t know any of the answers. So I keep loading up my mother’s suitcase with her things, good things like toothbrushes and clean underwear. If I don’t, who will? If I leave her now—?if I leave her ever—?how many more bottles will pile up in the next hotel room?
An hour later I get on a bus with my mother.
Portland is huge and beautiful. Cobblestone sidewalks under my feet, Portland Harbor shimmering under the afternoon sun just behind the red and blue buildings and steepled churches. If it weren’t for this knot of dread in my stomach, it would feel exciting, but it’s hard to get pumped up about anything when you’re not sure where you’ll be sleeping that night. When you can’t get your mind off a pile of empty bottles abandoned on an unmade hotel bed.
We wander the downtown area for a while, hauling our suitcases behind us, their wheels bumping into tourists and over cobblestones. Mom’s eyes peel through the streets. For what, I’m not quite sure. A watering hole, most likely. I follow her, numb and obedient like a puppy that’s been kicked in the side one too many times, relieved to still have something.
“What’d I tell you, baby?” Mom asks, her eyes sparkling as she lifts her hand to shade them from the low-hanging sun. “Isn’t this lovely?”
“Yeah” I hear a voice say. It takes me a couple seconds to realize it’s mine, the raspy, passionless tone so foreign in my ears. I glance at Mom to see if she’s noticed and barely react when it’s clear she’s found a new love, a new city, an entirely new world to throw herself into and around and before. Something almost manic glints in her eyes, in the slight curve of her mouth. Something wild and free. It would be completely captivating if it didn’t look all wrong on her face, a mask she shouldn’t be wearing.
“So who’s this friend you want to meet up with?” I ask.
