Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

Are wagons really that hard to climb back onto? They don’t say fall off a skyscraper, fall out of a plane. It’s just a wagon.

  A single pill.

  On a loop, in my head, never ending: I told her to go. I told her to go.

  We haven’t heard a thing.

  Anyone would want a pill if they hadn’t heard a thing. Not Mae, but a normal person, maybe.

  At twenty-four hours, I got a second wind when some lady on CNN found her daughter alive in the hospital. She was in a coma, which is why no one knew her name and couldn’t put her on a list of survivors. So I decided both of my parents were in comas. All we had to do was go find them. Or maybe they were being heroes. Rescuing kids in trees. Huddling on top of floating debris. Calling out to rescue workers: Here! Over here! They are alive, and when they get back, they will write a memoir of survival and it’ll be made into a movie starring Hugh Jackman with a Boston accent, and Rachel Weisz, maybe, or that Greek actress Nia Vardalos.

  But then we are told that the coma theory is a long shot. At least for both of them. But Dad always says the long shot is the best shot. And then he starts talking science and I don’t understand him anymore, but my point is that they might be in a coma, but in a cave or a boat, right, not like in a hospital. And someone is taking care of them or, I don’t know, maybe Cynthia is right and there really are angels. She said she dreamed of one last night.

  Cyn’s curled up on the recliner in the living room, which I’m avoiding because she’s texting with all of Mom’s friends and students from their yoga studio and if one of them comes to the house and is all namaste I will cut a bitch. I really will.

  It’s night two, the second night after the wave, and when Gram and Papa arrive I feel a momentary sense of relief because they’re old and have wisdom and will know what to do. But their panic is so present, so palpable, that I’ve started avoiding them as much as I can. It’s hard watching old people try not to cry. Every now and then Papa will look around, as if he’s just realized where he is. “I can’t believe it,” he’ll say, shaking his head. “I just can’t believe it.”

  Mae’s not any better, but for different reasons. Every time I leave a room and come back in, she studies me, like I’m something in one of her labs. To see if I took anything.

  “Do you want me to pee in a cup?” I finally snap, around the forty-eight-hour mark.

  My sister is doing calculus homework—to relax, she says. This is why she’ll jump in a spaceship someday and go be amazing and never be scared and have all the answers and I will be here, forcing myself to get out of bed in the morning. If I’m still here.

  Because fuck here. Really. Fuck it.

  Mae cocks her head to the side, in that birdlike way of hers, eyes narrowing. Checking my pupils.

  “No,” she says.

  We don’t talk for the rest of the night.

  On day three, Mae and I start filling out a missing persons report for the International Red Cross.

  And it’s here, at seventy-two hours, that I realize something:

  The forgetting begins almost immediately.

  Nobody tells you that.

  The stuff they ask you about is the kind of thing they would ask when your missing person is probably not a person anymore. Otherwise, why would they want to know about scars and jewelry and tattoos—they say it’s so much easier to identify the body if the person has tattoos. Dad doesn’t have any tattoos. Nobody can remember which ankle Mom’s Om is on.

  We don’t have pictures of Mom’s feet. Why don’t we have a single picture of her feet? Her feet in the sand or on her yoga mat or propped up on the coffee table when she’s reading one of those murder mysteries she likes.

  “I think it was on her right ankle,” Mae says, scrolling through the yoga photos on Mom’s website. In all the pictures she’s wearing leggings that cover her ankles. “But it doesn’t matter because they’ll just be looking for a tattoo and see it and then—”

  “But what if someone else has an Om tattoo on her ankle?” I say. “I mean, it’s a common symbol, yeah? And the shape of her ears—are they serious? I don’t even know the shape of my own ears.”

  Mae rubs her eyes, then slides her hands down her face. “Birthmarks?”

  “Dad has that one on his back,” I say. “Remember that time Gram told him to have it looked at because she thought it was cancerous, and Dad explained, like, the entire history of skin cancer to her and she still made him go to the doctor?”

  “And she said it was shaped like Italy,” Mae says. “I remember that. Should I write it down like that? Shaped like Italy?”

  I nod, then close my eyes and try to remember my mother’s ears. I’m such a horrible daughter. What kind of person doesn’t remember what her mom’s ears look like? I mean, really? Did I ever even see her—like really see her?

  When we’re done, Mae takes the papers to Dad’s office to scan and send them to the Red Cross.

  It’s been over five months since I’ve slipped a diamond between my lips, and my body wants its Percocet fix. My bones hurt. My actual bones. Like growing pains. Like how it was in detox, back in March. My bones remember and they want and they whisper, begging, Please, Hannah, please.

  But I can’t. I told her to go. I convinced my mother she had to go on this stupid trip, and so I don’t get relief. I don’t get oblivion. I don’t get to fall off a wagon or a skyscraper or anything else because I don’t deserve to feel better.

  I killed my mother.

  I grab a glass of water and pull myself up the stairs, to where my parents keep the Advil, because maybe that will make my bones shut up for a little while. It’s the strongest thing I can give them. Our Venice bungalow is essentially a sober house. Mom and Dad stopped drinking at home in solidarity, and once I got back from detox and started the outpatient Circle of Sad bullshit, I never smelled Mom’s weed in the backyard late at night, when she thought we were asleep.

  I feel like I’m trespassing when I enter the master bathroom. For some reason, I feel them here more than in other places in the house. They were in a rush the morning they left, and so things are scattered on the counter: a tube of lipstick, a bottle of Brut cologne, Dad’s little silver scissors. I run my hand across the dry bar of soap in the shower—who used it last? Probably Dad. Mom likes to take her showers at night. A lump gathers in my throat, and I remember how Cynthia says that, according to Reiki, this means my head and my heart are having problems communicating.

  I open the cabinet, grab the bottle of Advil, but I’m crying again, the smell of them all around me, and the bottle slips from my hands and the pills go everywhere.

  I get on my knees, start picking them up, when I see it. Wedged under the sink, behind the toilet bowl cleaner.

  My mouth waters at the sight of that little orange bottle.

  Vicodin from when Dad got his knee surgery a few months ago, hidden so I’d never find it.

  My mind—it doesn’t think. It has no say as my body, as my hands, reach for that bottle, twist off the child safety cover: thirty pills—a whole month’s supply.

  This is almost like how it all started.

  Gram had left some Vicodin at the house after a visit. A year and a half ago. Weed wasn’t doing the trick anymore, making the sad go away, so I grabbed the bottle. Just to see if there was something that could help me feel better. About life. About being me.

  Because it feels like the universe keeps telling me to step aside.

  Mom’s always saying to read the signs, and I’m telling you, they are loud and fucking clear.

  People don’t want me. They don’t see me. Like, literally, I am invisible.

  When I stand in line, the cashier actually looks past me to the person behind me. When teachers pair everyone up, I’m always out in the cold and, later, when we’re halfway through the assignment, they’re like, Who’s your partner, Hannah? And I’m like, You tell me, bitch.

  Back when I had friends, when I cared about that sort of thing, I’d be sitting at a table in
the caf and they’d walk right by—not to be mean. There was always a moment when one of them would sit down and kind of look around and then shrug. After, they’d be all, Where were you at lunch?

  Back when I was online, I’d post things and get, like, two likes. Cool things—found poetry and the beach and Priscilla’s circus tats—but no one cared. It’s like everyone had cracked some code, some code of being seen, and I just couldn’t.

  There’s no place for a zero-followers person in this world. If you don’t exist on the internet, you don’t exist at all.

  Add that to real life, with Dad’s colleagues at every party being all, Oh, you’re the other daughter. I don’t know shit about astro-whatever, but I know this: Mae is this crazy-cool star like what you see on posters in science class, and I’m space debris orbiting her. You don’t see the debris. You can’t. All that light.

  And, okay, boo-hoo or whatever, privilege, first-world problems, all the things I’m supposed to say, but here’s the point: I’m fucking sad and I feel like a goddamn ghost, okay, and I’m sorry if that’s politically incorrect, I’m sorry if my invisibility comes with my own savings account and matcha lattes, but it’s mine, okay, it’s mine and it’s real to me, so just let me freaking have it. I know, I know that other people, so many other people, are invisible in ways that can get them killed or never have a good job or a seat at any table. I know this. But invisibility is a spectrum, like anything else. And I’m on it. So when some white kid in my Circle of Sad was all, white fragility, white tears, check your privilege after my turn, I was like, DUDE. Really? Really? So sad is just off the table for me. Like I can’t feel it. Or express it. I’m in a freaking therapy group, what the fuck? I’m just trying to explain, to explain how the entire cosmos is like flashing these neon signs about how I’m a worthless piece of shit and don’t you ever wonder what’s the point of you and maybe there’s no point at all?

  And I hear Micah tell me in March, when things were so bad: I can’t carry you.

  I had to get help, he said. I can’t carry you. I love you, he said. But. I can’t carry you. Sometimes, he said, you’re too much. I can’t carry you.

  I’m that astronaut, floating away to cowboy music.

  I had my first pill with Micah. Summer before junior year. A little over one year ago. We said it would be for special occasions.

  But it made me so happy. So we decided: weekends. Only on the weekends. We’d lie on the beach all day after he was done surfing or late at night. Percocet, mostly. Hydrocodone. Vicodin. Whatever he could get from kids at school who had the hookup. But he didn’t really like it. Preferred weed. And he didn’t like when I was on it. Said I was too out of it. And it made me not want to be with him. In that way.

  So we stopped taking the pills. He thought we stopped. But I wanted to go back to the moon. I asked around on the boardwalk—you can get anything there—and Priscilla, she got them for me. Percs, usually. Hydro sometimes. Oxy on a really good day. The money wasn’t a problem, since I had a job and whatever I made was for me to do with as I pleased. Plus I had tons of savings from all those big birthday checks from Gram and Papa. If you have two parents with good jobs who love each other and you, then being a junkie is the easiest thing in the world. I knew this. Even before I went to the Circle of Sad and that boy talked about what he had to do to get his pills. And the girl who couldn’t stop crying because she stole from her sister, who was a single mom on benefits. Spend enough time on the boardwalk and you see the kind of bartering people do for their diamonds.

  I took the pills at night, when I was alone. Not every night, at first. Usually when Micah had to work and we didn’t hang out and when I felt like I needed to get away from myself.

  I felt sad and the pills made me happy. Simple as that.

  But then a couple nights became every other night, then every night. By Valentine’s Day, seven months after stealing my grandma’s pills, I was on them all the time. It happened so fast. It’s not like I planned that. It just … happened.

  Mom and Dad weren’t idiots. They knew something was up. I’d failed most of my classes the first semester of junior year and stopped hanging out with anyone but Micah, stopped going to the bonfires he would have with the other surfers on the beach, and I lost my job at the coffeehouse because it was so hard to concentrate. To care.

  Mom thought it was depression, and she found weed and booze in my room around New Year’s, so that’s the stuff she thought I was into. I don’t think they imagined I could be such a loser. To pop pills after all those assemblies at school, all those years of drinking Mom’s homemade kombucha. I let her believe it was just booze and weed, just too much partying. I started going to Dr. Brown, who is about as fun as her name sounds. But after what happened at the clinic in March, I told Mom and Dad everything. There was detox, group after school, random drug testing, and Dr. Fucking Brown. I got sober. Got good. Even though I didn’t feel normal without the pills. Not right. Fuzzy.

  I did summer school so I could still start my senior year, graduate on time. Smudged myself with sage and went to Mom’s yoga classes. Told her to go to Malaysia because I promise I’m fine, it’s all good, and yes I’ll go to meetings and yes Cynthia can check on me and we all know Mae will watch me like a hawk even though she pretends not to. So Mom went. To Malaysia.

  You should totally go, Mom. I’m fine. I want you to go. You deserve a break.

  And now I’m sitting on my maybe-dead parents’ bathroom floor, thinking about stealing my maybe-dead dad’s Vicodin.

  I can see myself in Mom’s makeup mirror on the counter, and I tell that waste of space in the glass, “You don’t deserve them, you fucking piece of shit.”

  It is so hard to do what I do next, but I do it because I deserve to hurt. I deserve to have my bones grind and scream against one another.

  I told her to go. I deserve whatever’s coming to me.

  So I put the pills back under the counter, behind the cleaner. Where Mom and Dad will find them, all there, when they come home.

  I walk into the bedroom and I scream, loud and long and oh my God, oh my God—

  “Mom!”

  She is on the floor, wearing her favorite pale green yoga outfit, and she is in fish pose. She doesn’t move, doesn’t speak.

  “Mommy—”

  I stop halfway through my rush to her.

  My mother, my beautiful mother, is lying on the ground, just her back arched so that the crown of her head is resting on the blue rug we bought together two weeks ago, her upside-down eyes staring at the wall behind her. Her chest is still.

  I take a deep breath and I smell her, smell the roses. I smell the ocean.

  “Hannah?” Mae is pounding up the stairs and she bursts into the room, a meteor. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  Mom sinks into the floor. Disappears. A fish, swimming to the bottom of a sapphire sea.

  “Nah?”

  I shake my head.

  “What are you looking at?” Mae is staring at the carpet. But there is nothing there.

  “Mom can’t hold her breath,” I say.

  Even though I’ve already forgotten so much about her—the shape of her ears, maybe everything, I’m remembering this: We had a contest in the pool at the Cape last summer, to see who could hold their breath the longest.

  Mom lost.

  Fifteen seconds. That’s all she could do.

  Mae blinks. Her computer brain whirs, sifting through memories, until I see in her eyes she has found the one from the Cape.

  “Adrenaline rushes can produce surprising effects.” She steps closer. “Most moms can’t lift cars, but if their kid is trapped under one—”

  “The ocean is bigger than a car.”

  My mom is not coming home.

  I know this like I know my belly is empty.

  I turn and start to walk out of the room, but Mae looks around, her head cocked to the side.

  “What?”

  “Are you—are you wearing Mom’s perfume?�
�� she asks.

  I stare at the rug, willing her back, but she’s swum too far away.

  “No.”

  Please don’t take them both. Bring him home, I tell the universe, and I swear I will never use again.

  I won’t even bother making promises about what I’ll do if the universe ignores me.

  7

  Mae

  ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

  Earth Date: 2 September

  Earth Time (PST): 02:36

  The last time disaster struck, Mom made minestrone. That was when Hannah’s pregnancy test had two pink lines instead of one. At the time, I didn’t know about the test, I just knew something was wrong, because Mom was making soup.

  I didn’t find out about any of that until after they got back from the clinic. Mom, Dad, Nah—they were all weird about me knowing. Because my bio-mom had been a teen. One with a problem. Except hers was meth, and Nah’s is opiates. Same difference, at the end of the day. They thought it would be “triggering” for me. Mom’s word. What was “triggering” was the fact that I’d been left out of the loop. This big thing was happening, and nobody told me. Hannah was trying to get sober, like what happened woke her up, so I decided it was not of use to express my hurt, which seemed much smaller in comparison to her hurt.

  Emotions, really, are just fractions. You reduce them as much as you can, get to the essence of them, and sometimes you get lucky and they’re whole numbers in the end, or even prime numbers—which means they’re one thing now and so much easier to make sense of. Five, for example. Five is a natural number greater than one that cannot be formed by multiplying two smaller natural numbers and is therefore prime. Singular. I’m a five about that situation with the lines on the stick and all that came after. Five is just simply mad. I don’t want to be defined by my adoptedness—it’s just a part of me, not all of me. A fraction. But, for some reason, even the people closest to me have determined that being adopted bothers me. It doesn’t. Them thinking it bothers me is what bothers me.

  I’m still mad about all that. I’m still a five.

  Now that I’m in the kitchen, though, the mad turns to something else because I’m remembering better: the last time Mom made soup was a few weeks ago—Italian wedding. I forgot because she ended up giving it all to her friend who was sick. She never would say why she made it. That soup was the only one in our entire lives that she insisted on making alone. She wouldn’t let any of us in the kitchen, and she played Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” on repeat. I’ll never know what was hurting her or why she made Dad’s favorite soup without giving him a bite.