by Zoje Stage
“I never have anyone to talk to about this.” She refused to let herself cry, even as she wished for a mom like Wavalene and the routine comfort of an older woman’s wisdom.
“Being a mom can be a lonely job too, sometimes other people don’t see that. The child’s the center of your universe. And I think your idea to enroll her in school is a good one. But even though she’s on target intellectually … I know it’s disappointing, but sometimes the idea we have of who we want a child to be doesn’t fit with who they are. It might not be reasonable to expect Hanna to thrive in an environment of typically abled kids. Have you heard of the Tisdale School?”
She shook her head. “Alex would never accept enrolling her in a school for special kids.”
Mrs. Wade shrugged, impossible to ruffle. “Define ‘special.’ I’ve personally seen some very bright children with autism and other behavioral issues do very well at—”
“Do you think she’s autistic?”
As Mrs. Wade spoke, she leaned forward over her desk and wrote something on a piece of copy paper. “I think many things are on a spectrum, and our society is fairly unforgiving unless people fall into a very narrow range that they’ve determined to be ‘normal.’ I pass no judgments—and you and your husband shouldn’t either. You know your daughter isn’t less of a person for being different.” She handed her the paper. “Dr. Gutierrez is the principal there. Call him, tell him I recommended Tisdale for Hanna—we’ve known each other a long time. They’ll probably take her right away.”
“Oh my God, thank you so much.” The looping cursive spelled out a place of salvation, a phone number that glowed with promise, and the name of someone who might finally help. Take Hanna off her hands. “Thank you so much.”
“Sometimes the hardest part is seeing what’s right in front of you. But when you find a place that’s a good match for her needs I think the whole family will be happier, even Hanna.” Mrs. Wade escorted her to the door.
“I think we’ve been in some denial because she’s so smart.” The two women shook hands. “I can’t thank you enough for all your help.”
“Happy to do it. I hope it all works out for you.” She peered over toward the waiting area. “It was nice to meet you, Hanna.”
Hanna threw down the book she was reading and marched into the hallway. Catching up to her, Suzette strode along beside her as they plowed toward the exit.
“Good job. For once you performed in front of the right person. Worked out splendidly.”
She cast a sideways glance at her daughter, long enough to catch the uncertainty and worry on her face. Suzette grinned, amazed by the triumphant turnaround of their day. She’d call Dr. Gutierrez as soon as they got home. And she’d have to figure out the best way to discuss it with Alex. But if the Tisdale School would take Hanna—and it sounded most probable that they would—she’d let nothing get in the way.
Suzette thought of the prize looming ahead of her. Time. Rest. Peace. The return of her sanity.
HANNA
MOMMY MADE HER favorite lunch: a grilled cheese sandwich and apple slices sprinkled with cinnamon and the bestest vanilla almond milk. She ate at the table alone and watched Mommy in the garden, on the other side of the glass wall, pacing up and down as she talked to someone on the phone. When she came back in, she was even happier.
“We are so close, Hanna-Suzanna-Fofanna-Banana!”
Her happiness and high energy were abnormal. Mommy had turned into a balloon, and she wanted to pop her with a pin and watch her fizzle-fuzzle into nothingness.
She couldn’t figure out what she’d done wrong. The principal had looked genuinely scared when she’d barked at her, but Mommy left the school bouncing up and down. Was it a school for bad children? Had she played right into their hands? Never mind. She had a million more tricks to show them. She knew what adults liked and didn’t like: rabbit-like girls who kept still and never raised their voice were good; dragon-like girls who roared and stomped and flew and generated their own fire were bad. No one could make her stay at SunnyBunnyPooPooBridge if she didn’t want to.
After lunch, Mommy wanted her to do a page in her math book. She opened it and left a pencil in the crevice between the pages. Hanna liked doing math problems. They were like puzzles but not silly; numbers lived in a pure world of yes or no. But she also wanted to finish her special project, which she was counting on to erase Mommy’s upbeat mood. Not wanting to appear too eager, she took the book by a corner edge and slid it off the table. She put the pencil between her teeth and made a show of trudging up the stairs.
“Why, of course, Hanna, you may do your work in your room if you like. I’ll come up in thirty minutes and check on your progress.”
Mommy sounded like a robot who was about to overheat. It almost made Hanna laugh, imagining her frozen in place as wisps of smoke trailed from her ears. She’d start to melt from the inside and collapse onto her knees, eyes wide and dazed, as brain matter dripped from her nose. Daddy would come home and find her like that and realize Mommy had been a phony all along.
Once upstairs she hurried to her room and shut the door. She had thirty minutes before Mommy would come and check on her. She wanted to be ready.
* * *
Daddy had questioned the photo at first—“Why is Mommy naked?”—but Hanna simply shrugged and shut her eyes as she steepled her hands beside her ear in a gesture of sleep. Daddy shrugged, too, and printed the photo in black and white as she requested. Before leaving for Sunnybridge, she had trimmed away the white edges—from Mommy’s picture and the ones she’d printed in secret (they all knew Daddy’s password was BlueAndGoldForSweden). Now everything was ready for assembly, so she tore a sheet off the tablet of heavy paper on her easel and got down on the floor with her glue stick.
There were lots of pictures on the Creepy Photos website, but she’d rejected the ones where the people might be mistaken for alive. She liked the ones of the women in their coffins. Or lying stiff as a board on white fabric with lacy edges. In truth, she liked the dead children best, held in their mother’s arms, or in tiny coffins, or surrounded by living siblings who looked merely bored, not scared—as if death were so every-day-not-again-here’s-another-one. But she wanted Mommy to see only the other ladies, the other Mommies.
Some of them lay amid arrangements of flowers. Or among a gathering of relatives who wore funny old-fashioned clothing. Nobody smiled except in one, where the dead woman had a rectangular grin and empty, open eyes. She wished there was a photo of Marie-Anne Dufosset, all crispy after her burning, but cameras hadn’t been invented then. The text that accompanied the photos on the website said sometimes they were the only pictures a family might have of a loved one. People didn’t document their whole lives on the internet back then—that was news to Hanna—so instead they invested in postmortem photography. She wished she could see a dead person in real life. Even in black and white to match the other pictures, Mommy just looked like she was sleeping, not dead. But it was the best she could do.
She glued Mommy’s picture next to one of a particularly ugly woman whose eyes were so sunken in, the lids didn’t fit over the eyeballs anymore. Her mouth was a gash of thin lips locked in a permanent grimace with two wonky teeth sticking out. The woman was in such an advanced state of rotting that Hanna wondered why they’d waited so long to take the picture.
When she was finished, she wiped her gluey hands onto uneven remnants of paper, then folded them into wads and tossed them under the bed. She blew on all the tiny paper slivers until she got dizzy, but successfully corralled them with the other scraps and bits that she was hoping would transform, under the magic of night and nobody looking, into an UnderSlumberBumbleBeast. The glue stick and scissors went back into their designated cubby, and she made sure everything looked tidy and perfect. Finally, she set her masterpiece on the easel, where it stood in graphic black and white, its appearance in the room a new scream that could not be missed.
She sat on her bed and zipped through the easy peasy math
problems. Something tickled in her belly; she was so excited for Mommy to see her picture. She almost wanted to summon her. She could stand at the top of the stairs and shriek; that always worked. Mommy would come running, afraid she’d poked herself with the pencil (which she did once, just to test its sharpness), or gotten a paper cut, or found a bug with a thousand legs in the bathroom. Mommy hated those bugs more than anything. If they weren’t so stupidly fast on their thousand thin-as-a-hair legs she’d catch them just to see Mommy scream and flap her hands like she felt them crawling all over her body.
Wasn’t thirty minutes up yet?
She opened her door so Mommy would come right in. That’s when she heard her on the steps. She leapt back onto the bed and made herself look busy with schoolwork. It was hard not to grin or giggle.
“Need any help? Look at you, working so hard.” Mommy stood with one hand on each side of the doorjamb, like it was a frame and she was posing for a picture.
Hanna grinned so wide all her teeth showed. She shook her head.
“Got it all figured out?”
She nodded.
Then Mommy saw it. She crept over to the easel, her eyes like question marks.
“What’s this?”
Hanna made a high-pitched tittering noise in the back of her throat as her mother’s bugged-out eyes traveled over the pictures.
“Hanna, what is this?”
Mommy scanned faster and faster, taking in the fancy dressed corpses and the one that was different: her, naked, sleeping the sleep of death.
“Did you make this, is this why you were taking a picture of me?” Mommy didn’t sound happy anymore. Her voice sounded like someone was strangling her. “Why did you make this? Am I supposed to be dead?”
Hanna dragged a finger across her throat, then let her head loll as she flopped back onto the bed, dead.
“It’s not funny! Where did you get all these … Horrible … Why did you do this? Hanna? Hanna! Marie-Anne, goddammit!”
Hanna sat bolt upright, so happy to let her friend share in the credit.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Hanna crossed one leg over the other and folded her hands on her lap. An angel. Mommy’s teeth gnashed and she looked like a scream was snaking its way up her throat but got clogged in her mouth.
Mommy snatched the collage off the easel. For a second she looked about to rip it in half. But she stopped.
“You think Daddy’s going to like this? You think he’s going to be proud of you? I’m going to tell him about everything. Every fucking word you said today, the barking, this. Nails in your own coffin, little girl.”
Mommy was still shaking, but she held her head high and left the room. Hanna heard her go into the master bedroom and shut the door.
She pushed her lower lip against her teeth and chewed it. Had she miscalculated? Would Mommy really tell him everything? Would Daddy be mad at her? Such a thing was hard to imagine.
She got an idea. A so-good, brilliant idea. She threw off her yellow cotton cardigan and examined her arms. She gripped her right hand around her left forearm and squeezed. Her fingernails turned pink, and when she released her hand it left a faint white impression of her fingers. Then it faded away. But it was still a good idea.
She shut her door. Never mind Mommy’s threats; she knew Mommy would hide away until it was time to come out and make supper, make everything look normal for when Daddy came home. Hanna had lots of time to figure out the next part. And Mommy telling Daddy lots of crazy things would make it all even better.
A pair of tights might work. There were lots of tights, rolled up in a color-coordinated row in her dresser. She picked a thin stretchy white pair and wrapped it around her forearm like a tourniquet, pulling it as tight as she could. She pulled and pulled, straining with the effort, even after her poor left hand started to feel numb.
SUZETTE
CURLED FULLY CLOTHED in the dry womb of the tub, she could still see the collage—and its double—if she turned her head even slightly. It leaned against the bathroom counter in such a way that the mirror reflected it. Why had she left it there to taunt her? She reached up and grabbed a fluffy white towel and folded it into a pillow, intent on waiting. As she slid down deeper, the mirror and Hanna’s demented artwork disappeared from view. But she still felt herself slipping, regressing, becoming the pathetic person she never wanted to be who needed someone else to take the next step. It was Alex’s turn; he needed to do something. Hopefully it would work out better than when she needed her mother.
By the age of nineteen, she was used to taking the bus into Oakland alone for all her medical appointments, even to the surgeons’ office. Sometimes the open incision on her abdomen would start to heal over. Only it wouldn’t always heal from the inside. The fistula still wanted to drain and it needed the exterior pathway through her skin. Her doctor injected her skin with something that would numb it, and it hurt like a bee sting, sharp and sizzling. She didn’t really know what he was doing and was too intimidated to ask. Two years into her official medical nightmare (the years she suffered without being taken to a doctor conveniently didn’t count) and she never knew what anyone was doing. Things happened. And she suffered the consequences. With her skin numbed, he ran a scalpel through her closing incision, returning it to its gaping-maw condition.
It didn’t hurt, not really. After the initial surgery to let the fistula drain, something must have happened to the nerve endings all around the incision. When she was in the hospital they gave her morphine each time they changed the packing. That it remained numb was a mercy, as otherwise the process of stuffing it full of cotton would have meant years of excruciating pain.
So she let him cut her open, and then he folded over some four-by-four bandages and taped them on her belly. She went everywhere in a daze, having become accustomed to being a recluse, so it was neither surprising nor alarming when she bled through the bandages while sitting on the bus. She bled through her T-shirt, the blood dripping onto the waistband of her jeans as she walked home from the bus stop.
They kept a supply of four-by-four bandages in the living room, where her mother changed her packing twice a day as she lay on the couch. Suzette didn’t have enough hands to do it herself—she helped by holding the wound open—but it was just as well that she never had to look directly at her own separated flesh, or see how deep it went; the very thought was nauseating. They had a hospital vomit bin full of medical things—sterile jars of cotton packing, paper tape, scissors, tweezers. But as Suzette stood there bleeding, she couldn’t find any four-by-fours. It was late afternoon. Maybe if she was lucky, her mother was getting hungry and wouldn’t mind getting out of bed.
“Mom? Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m bleeding. We’re out of bandages.”
“I’ll get up soon,” she said in a groan, not even rolling over or opening her eyes.
Suzette changed out of her stained clothes and affixed a sanitary pad to her bleeding wound. She was quite proud of her resourcefulness. With a sketchbook and a head full of dark thoughts, she settled back in her room to wait. Her mother slept for another hour.
When she came home from the store with the supplies, Suzette lay on the couch, the helpless patient once again. When her mother took off the sanitary pad, the wound gushed a dark stream of blood that was almost black. Her mother, uncharacteristically, winced. The gaping wound took almost an entire bottle of the cotton packing—five yards—which her mother delicately tucked between her raw flesh with a pair of surgical tweezers. By then, it was more of an ordeal for her mother than it was for Suzette, and she was glad.
The next day her mother drove her back into Oakland, a scant half-dozen blocks from the previous day’s destination. Not for a medical appointment, but a treat. Sometimes her mother did that: offered wordless apologies in the form of a shopping expedition. It made Suzette aware that her mother knew, on some level, how much her drawing and dreaming meant to her. She let Suzette pick out anyth
ing she wanted at the art store. Professional quality pencils. Sketchbooks with paper in various sizes and textures. Then they went across the street for lunch at Alibaba’s, their favorite Syrian restaurant. Suzette got her usual, the cheese pie, and tasted bits of her mother’s hearty order of side dishes. She always wondered if they looked like a normal mother and daughter, sharing a day out. Or did people notice her mother never made eye contact with her, never initiated a single word of conversation. In her mother’s silences, in the fog she drew down like a blind, Suzette was left to ponder what thoughts consumed her days and nights. Did she have a vivid fantasy world? Or just endless moments of regret? Even amid her own suffering, Suzette never stopped feeling sorry for her mother.
Pushing herself up with her feet, she surfaced, like a periscope, over the edge of the tub. With a more focused viewing, she appreciated the merit of her daughter’s work: the pictures were neatly cut out, laid out in a balanced way, and glued with care. Maybe she should have just complimented her on a job well done instead of falling to pieces.
She launched herself out of the bathtub, huffing with annoyance. “I’m the adult!”
Snatching up the towel, she neatly folded it and put it back on the rack. Her daughter was just a little kid—she couldn’t really hurt her. And even if Hanna ever became violent, she could overpower her. Pouting in the bathroom was ridiculous.
“I’m the adult,” she told herself again. “I’m the mother—not the daughter.”
Her phone was downstairs but she knew exactly what she would do: message Alex a picture of Hanna’s collage. She tucked it under her arm and marched out of the bathroom.
She started for the stairs, but turned back and went to her daughter’s closed door. She fought a series of impulses. With her hand in a fist, she considered knocking. But then her features turned hard and mean and she drew back the fist like she wanted to punch something. As she exhaled, the anger left her and her hand fell defeated to her side. Maybe she should just peek in on her, make sure she was okay. Suzette spent years alone in her room, in pain. She couldn’t stand to think of Hanna in pain, alone, helpless to communicate her true needs.