Sydney didn’t know how to answer, because she didn’t understand the question. “You mean, for how many years?”
Her mother sighed and closed her eyes. “Leave when you can,” she whispered. “There’s nothing for you in this place.”
Sydney wanted to scream at her. How could she leave? Hermotherwas here. Where would she go? If Sydney ever left, it would mean that her mother wasn’t around anymore, and that would mean she had died. And Sydney didn’t want to think about that.
“What about Dad and Matt?” she asked.
Her mother made a small sound in her throat. “Don’t stay for them,” she murmured.
Sydney could feel the frustration rising in her tired chest. She didn’t understand where this conversation was going. Her father existed mostly on the periphery of her life, true—a man she caught glimpses of whenever he staggered home after a twelve-hour shift, the smell of pigs’ blood clinging to every part of his body. The times he did notice her usually involved a drunken rage—once screaming at her for watchinggibberishand leaving the TV on a foreign-language channel, once lunging at herwith a knife for knocking over his beer, once slapping her at dinner when she said she wanted to know what was out there, beyond their town.
Why?He’d leaned against the table and pointed his fork at her.You’re too good for us?
She’d cradled her stinging cheek. Her brother Matt had snickered.
What a useless mouth to feed you are, her father had said.Just like your mother.
Existing in that town sometimes felt to her like being trapped in mud. But sometimes in the summer, when both Dad and Matt were out of the house and her mother came home early from work, she would take Sydney out for ice cream and pick a spot by the river where they could see freight trains crossing the bridge. It was Sydney’s favorite memory in the world, those warm days with the sound of insects buzzing around them, mosquito repellent sticky on her skin, and the thought of leaving that behind, of never again sitting by the river with her mother, a chocolate-covered spoon pressed against her tongue, was unbearable to her.
So to hear her mother saying this now—leave this place, leave Dad and Matt—felt a little like a rejection of her life. That nothing in this town had ever mattered to Sydney. That her father and brother weren’t worth staying for. That her mother was acknowledging something she had never acknowledged before.
Sydney swallowed hard and shifted against the hospital sheets. “Okay, Mama,” she said, because it was the only good thing to say.
Her mother nodded idly. Sydney couldn’t be sure that she would even remember this conversation, or if the drugs were dragging her into sleep. “That’s good,” she whispered. “Stay with me a little longer now. I’m cold tonight.”
Sydney nodded, her eyelids drooping. God, she was so tired. She knew Dad and Matt wouldn’t be coming here anytime soon—Matt was out with friends for the weekend, and Dad had extra shifts. But she couldn’t stay any longer without going home.
“I’ll just be gone a little while, Mom,” she heard herself say. “Then I’ll come back. I promise.”
Her mother didn’t answer. After a while, when it seemed like she’d drifted off, Sydney snuck quietly out.
It was snowing that night, and her boots crunched softly down the white street. The air nipped at her cheeks and stung in her chest. She’d started to feel the occasional spasms in her lungs over the past year, although she never told her mother about them. She never told anybody. Maybe if the secret stayed with her, the potential diagnosis couldn’t be real. If she pretended it was all in her head, then maybe it was, maybe she hadn’t inherited it.
Sydney had only been home for an hour when she got the call from the hospital. She could feel the floorboards beneath her creak, as if the house were shifting with her in grief.
I’m so deeply sorry to inform you that your mother has passed away…
The dream shifted several weeks into the future, after the funeral had passed. It was a cold enough day that school had been canceled, so Sydney went for a walk down the main street several blocks from her house. Her head was tucked like a turtle into the scarf wrapped thickly around her neck. A freak storm had left the world around her bitterly cold, encasing everything in a chrysalis of ice.
She didn’t really know where she was going. The wind swirled around her, cutting straight through her jeans and sending spikes of pain down her lungs.
Eventually, she ducked into the pharmacy to get warm. Several homeless people were clustered outside the sliding glass doors, savoring the heat that would momentarily waft over whenever the doors opened. They shifted as Sydney stepped in.
She wandered the aisles for a while, no money in her pocket, not really sure how long she’d be allowed to loiter before they told her to move along. Her heart hung in a low, constant state of grief, and hermind was elsewhere, far from this town. She could feel the pain stretch tight in her chest, her lungs still aching from the cold outside.
Over by the checkout counter, she could hear a family chattering away. Sydney peeked between the aisles and saw a teenage boy standing with his parents. His father placed a hand protectively on the boy’s shoulder. His mother leaned down to cup the boy’s face in her hands, her smile genuine, her face glowing.
As Sydney watched them, she could feel her anger rising, cresting over her sadness. She wasn’t sure why. They’d done nothing wrong. But the fury made the walls close in around her. She could see the pharmacy’s aisles narrowing, the cash registers fusing together, everything around her moving inward until she felt like she was being buried alive.
Tears stung her eyes. Maybe the boy had his own hidden pains. But maybe he’d also never known a day when his father waved a knife in his face, had never stood vigil beside his mother’s hospital bed. Maybe he already had plans for an entire future laid out before him, while Sydney slowly withered away in this place, cowering every time she heard her father step through the door, hiding from her brother so she wouldn’t have to endure his insults.
Leave this place,her mother had whispered to her.
But where could Sydney go? How would she get the money to leave?
And what did other people do to deserve love? A good life?
Was a life still worth anything? Did it still matter to dream big?
