If she were alive—
—she’d answer.
My head fills with sloshing waves. I can’t breathe. I’m slipping into vertigo. Someone is saying my name. It’s not my mom. It’s not her.
I blink. I’m home.
The hallway is dim, and the air is stale with the scent of cigarette smoke. The light burned out last week. Every day since I’ve told myself I’d grab another on my way home from work. Mom doesn’t mind, but I do. There’s something about a dim house that makes anxiety rise in my throat like bile. A dim house means musty curtains and broken blinds and shadows to hide the trash left on the floor because neither of us had the energy to pick it up.
Today. I’ll write it on my hand. One of those Edison ones maybe. Class the place up a bit. Bring some brightness into our lives.
“Mom?” I knock on her door.
Normally, she’d have been up for hours by now. She texted me yesterday that she was going to bed early, so I’m not surprised she forgot to set her alarm. I’d leave without waking her if it were up to me. I’m finally making enough that she can take a day off here and there, but not enough that she won’t spend her day off feeling anxious about bills, groceries, and everything else on the endless list.
“Mom?” I wait a beat, then turn the knob.
Ripley wiggles into the darkened room like she hasn’t seen my mom in weeks.
The door catches on a pair of scrubs crumpled on the floor. I pick them up and toss them into the hamper. I’llhave to put a load in the washer before I leave so she has a clean uniform tomorrow. She says I don’t have to do her laundry, but, just like with the light, who’s going to do it if not me?
I look to the bed, expecting to see Ripley furiously trying to lick at her cheeks and my mom pushing her away. Instead, I find Ripley standing stock-still on the bed, body curved away from the figure lying under the quilt. Her tail is tucked under her tight.
“What are you doing?” I laugh at her.
I move to the bedside. I put my hand on my mom’s shoulder to wake her up.
What my hand touches isn’t my mother. It has her silhouette, but none of her warmth. Thisthing—this thing is stiff and cool to the touch. A buzzing sound like thousands of beating insect wings crawls into my head. Spots light up the darkness of the room.
Suddenly, my hand is knotted in Ripley’s collar and I’m watching myself pull her out of the bedroom. My mouth is moving, but what am I saying? The words are slurred, blending vowels into consonants, and spilling from chattering teeth.
“—have to leave her alone. Just let her sleep. She’s have—having a rough week. Have—have to let her sleep.”
My lungs stutter, and my face is wet. Phlegm coats my throat and the inside of my nose. I can’tbreathe. Ripley struggles against me, and I let go when I realize the collar is too tight on her throat and she can’t breathe either—
I’m on my knees in the dim hallway, running my handsover her neck, chanting, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” She’s shaking. I’m shaking. I crawl to the bedroom door and pull it closed with my eyes squeezed shut.
She’s tired. She has to sleep.
I’ll let her sleep. When she wakes up she’ll feel better.
The next thing I remember is opening my front door to the police two days later. One of my mom’s coworkers called them to do a welfare check when she didn’t come in to work.
My memories are liquid after that. Bits rise to the top while others sink to the bottom of a cool abyss. What I was able to gather: I’d found my mother dead in her bed, in our home, had a seismic dissociative episode according to the therapist I went to twice, and then just… didn’t tell anyone. I went to work. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t say anything all day long. I kept going to work and coming home until the cops showed up two days later.
While the cop was walking down the hall to my mother’s room, I drafted an email to Ellis telling him I had to take emergency leave because my mom was sick, and I didn’t know when she’d get better. I don’t remember writing this email, but I know I must have because it’s there in my Sent folder. I don’t remember texting Emma that I needed her to watch Ripley, but I did that too. Efficient and practical, taking care of everything that needs to be taken care of all the way to the end.
When a cop sat me down in an interrogation room, he asked if I didn’t tell anyone my mom was dead because I was the one who killed her.
I remember my mouth shaping words to convey that I didn’t notify anyone because shewasn’tdead. I also remember the look on the cop’s face—a mixture of pity and disgust—and the urge to smash his face into the two-way mirror until all his teeth tumbled out of his head.
I was so full of rage and so fundamentally unable to process it.
It’s just that I thought, one day, if I could just manage to make enough, if I could justbeenough, show her enough love, give her enough hope for the future, I could heal my mother. I could make up for everything she gave up for me.
I worked and worked and shrank and shrank with every bite the world took out of my flesh like I was some tasty little morsel that existed only to be consumed. One day, I thought, the world will stop swallowing down bits of my body. I just had to find a way to be enough before the world took a mouthful so big I couldn’t survive.
They let me go when the coworker who called in the welfare check, Janet, explained why she called in the first place. My mom slipped while giving a shower to a patient. She hit her head on the tile floor. The nursing home’s manager had acted like it wasn’t a big deal and sent my mom home to sleep it off.
