by Sara Polsky
—
In art the next day, Ms. Triste doesn’t ask me where I’ve been for the last few afternoons. She just nods at me as I set up an easel next to my desk. A few minutes later, she stops by, peers down at my sketchbook, and offers a suggestion for how to change the angle of the drawing when I turn it into a painting. That’s another reason she’s my favorite teacher: she says her only job is to offer advice when we need it, and as long as we turn in our projects, she doesn’t really care when or how we get them done.
I’ve decided to paint a larger watercolor version of the sketch of my mother, blanketed by the equations in her hospital bed. She’s been in that bed for almost two weeks, and I know Dr. Choi plans to discharge her soon.
For the first time in a week, I concentrate on my painting until the bell rings, steadily sweeping colors across the page and checking the shapes I’m forming against my sketched rough draft.
But the end of class bell breaks my concentration, and I remember what I need to do next.
“Hey,” I say, stepping toward Natalie’s desk and trying to catch her attention. She’s looking down at her bag, stuffing things into it, and she doesn’t answer.
“Could I talk to you for a minute?”
She still doesn’t look up.
I shift, wait, count to ten in my head. Nothing.
“It’s kind of important.”
Natalie still doesn’t meet my eyes, but she lifts her head and steps to the side so I can walk with her. I don’t start talking until we’ve left school and are crossing the parking lot. I don’t want anyone else to overhear.
“When I ran out of the pharmacy the other day—” I take a deep breath. Start over. “The pharmacist knew me because I come in there a lot to pick up prescriptions for my mother.”
Natalie still hasn’t looked at me, but she slows down, so I’m no longer a half step behind her. Her head turns toward me, and I can tell she’s waiting for the rest of it. I haven’t explained enough.
“She’s been in the hospital since the beginning of the year,” I tell Natalie, just like I told James. “She OD’d on some of her pills.”
Now Natalie does stop, and I turn to face her. I tell her something I haven’t told anyone else. “I found her.”
I see her hear it, watch her eyes widen and her mouth open.
“I can’t even—” she starts. I wonder if she’s imagining it, what it would be like to find Claire that way. “I’m so sorry. That must have been awful.” She pauses. “That’s why you’re living with your uncle?”
“Yeah,” I say. I look down at the ground and kick a small rock away from Natalie’s tire. Then I realize all I did was answer her question, not acknowledge anything else she said. I nudge open that door in my head, just a crack. “It was awful.”
“I didn’t know how to explain it,” I add. “When the pharmacist recognized me. So I just ran out.”
We stand together as everyone else hurries past us, eager to end the school day. Then that really hits me: Natalie is still standing here. What I told her didn’t send her running. And maybe it won’t—maybe, when my mother comes back, I won’t have to give up the people I’ve found while she’s been gone.
When Natalie finally does move, it’s only to hit the passenger-side door of her car and pull it open.
“Come on,” she says and waves me inside.
—
“Will she be okay?” Natalie asks as she drives. “Your mom, I mean? I should have asked that before.”
I lean back in my seat, tired from all the confessions. “She should be,” I say. “Once they get her back on the right medications.”
I don’t have the energy to explain how complicated the idea of okay can be when it comes to my mother.
“I’m sorry I complained so much about my mom,” Natalie says after a few more minutes. “It feels petty.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her, even though I’ve thought the same thing a few times. “You’re allowed.”
She laughs. “Thanks,” she says a little sarcastically.
The car rolls to a stop in front of a house, smaller than Uncle John and Aunt Cynthia’s, painted a light purple color with black shutters. Natalie is out of the car and headed for the front door when I realize it must be her house.
“Hey,” I call after. “Can I borrow some of your paints—the ones you had in your trunk the other day? I’d like to use some for my English project.”
Natalie turns back. “There you go, using your trauma to get something from me,” she says, and I laugh.
“I moved them to the garage, and there are some other colors in there too. Take whatever you need. I’ll be inside.” Natalie crosses the lawn, keys jingling in her hand, and I step into the garage.
There are at least ten colors there, and I look over the labels, imagining how much fun it would be use to them all. But in the end I take just four, shades that we can easily mix to make others.
When I tote the cans inside, Natalie is sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, and Claire is standing across from her, holding an envelope. I’m afraid I’ve walked into an argument, given how annoyed Natalie and Claire seem to be with each other most of the time. But it looks like they’re actually just sorting the mail.
“Thanks,” I call out to get Natalie’s attention. I gesture to the paint cans. “These will be great.”
They both turn around, and Claire smiles at me and says hello. She tells me she heard what a great job I did on Trudy’s plans.
“You should think about architecture,” she says.
I smile politely and thank her. I’m not ready to think that far in advance. But I like that Claire sees something there.
Natalie hops off her stool and grabs her bag from the floor.
“Let’s go,” she says.
She leads me through a hallway lined with photographs, most of which I’m guessing Natalie took. Many of them are shots of her family, her parents and sister, and others are of nature, lakes and forest paths and leaves. They’re beautiful, but I understand what Natalie meant about not wanting these photos to be in the art show. Watching her walk ahead of me, with her boots and her pin-covered bag, she seems older than these pictures.
She stops at a bathroom, where she flicks on the light and directs me to sit on the toilet lid. She pulls a box of purple hair dye from under the sink, a comb from one of the drawers.
“I bought it anyway,” she says. “I was thinking a streak on the right side.” She’s tilting her head again, considering me through her invisible camera. “What do you say?”
And I think of my mother. How much she’d love to see me with purple in my hair and would probably urge me to go back and do the rest of my head. How it’s something she’d suggest in one of her letters to JKP. How I’d look different when she came home, new in this one way, but not in too many others.
Twenty-three
I’m about to leave Aunt Cynthia’s house to see my mother when I hear Leila turn down the music in her room, and a minute later my cousin is standing in the guest room doorway, tapping on the wood frame. She knocks rhythmically, so that she sounds like James playing the drums.
I stop in the middle of the room, in mid-stride toward the door. Even after our conversation yesterday, I’m surprised to see Leila here.
“Are you on your way to see your mom?” Leila asks.
I nod. “There’s still a little while before the end of visiting hours.”
Leila looks down. “Could I come with you? I want to talk to her about something.” Her voice is soft, unsure, the way I’d forgotten she could sound until yesterday. She holds up the hand that isn’t already on the doorframe, where she’s still tapping out a rhythm with two fingers, and shakes her keys. “I can drive.”
I wonder if she wants to talk to my mother about the things she told me yesterday, about that day in
the car and Aunt Cynthia’s rule that Leila couldn’t spend time around my mother anymore.
But it doesn’t matter exactly what Leila wants to tell my mother. It’s not my job to be her gatekeeper.
“Okay,” I tell her and follow her out to her car.
—
Once again Leila keeps the music low as she drives. She still hums along and we don’t talk at all on the way to the hospital. But the radio doesn’t seem like a weapon in a cold war—and maybe it never was. Instead of huddling against the door, I sit up straight and push the seat back.
When we get there, the nurse at the front desk smiles at me and hands over two passes for the eighth floor before I can ask for an extra. I take them and wonder whether the nurses who think I look like my mother can tell I’m related to Leila too. The thought doesn’t bother me.
As I lead Leila up to my mother’s room, it feels strange to hear another set of footsteps echoing mine through the quiet hospital halls. With each step—my squeaky sneaker, Leila’s boot heel, sneaker, boot heel—I have to remind myself that it’s her behind me and I don’t need to turn around.
We don’t discuss it out loud, but when we get upstairs, Leila hangs back in the hallway so I can talk to my mother first. I hesitate in the doorway and look back at Leila the way I always did when we were younger, waiting for a signal that will tell me what to do next. My cousin nods her chin toward my mother’s room. Go on.
Then she slides to the floor, her back against the wall, to wait for me. She tips her head back and folds her hands together over her skirt, looking more patient than I remember ever seeing her. And I’m surprised to realize I feel better, knowing she’ll be right out here the whole time.
I go inside.
—
I head straight for my usual chair at the side of the bed and plop down, legs out, toes pointed up and untied shoelaces dangling, like I’m posing for my own painting.
I’m watching my hands, which are twisting together in my lap as if someone other than me is controlling their movements, when my mother speaks.
“Sophie?” she asks.
And I realize I’ve been so preoccupied trying to figure out what to say next that I forgot to say hello at all. It isn’t particularly funny, but I’m nervous enough that I start to giggle anyway as I say, “Sorry, Mom. Hi. I’m right here.”
“What’s going on?” she asks. She doesn’t sound confused or anxious the way she has for the past two weeks, but gentle and curious. Curious about me and my knotted hands and nervous laughter, about the new purple streak in my hair.
Curious about me the way Claire probably is about Natalie; the way Uncle John is when he asks about my day.
Curious the way I usually am about my mother, but the way she, for the last two weeks, hasn’t been about me.
And so I lift my head and answer.
“The doctor’s going to be ready to discharge you soon,” I tell her. “He can’t know for sure just yet, but it seems like the new dosage on your medication is working, and he says you’re doing much better.”
Then I stop talking and grip the arms of the chair. I don’t even know whether I’m trying to hold myself in place or push my body up from the seat so I can dash out of the room. I just know I’m light-headed, like I might fall out of the chair if I don’t hold on. I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again and push the words out.
“But I don’t think you should come home just yet.”
I force myself to keep looking at my mother even though I want to drop my eyes to her feet, my lap, the floor, the trash can by the door. Anywhere else in the room. I force myself to keep talking.
“It’s really hard to be the one responsible for making sure this doesn’t happen again,” I say. I sweep my arm around at the hospital room to show what this is, as if my mother doesn’t know.
“You tried to kill yourself, Mom.”
I say it flatly. It’s just what happened, something we can talk about like any other fact we both know. But as I continue, my voice starts to shake, and I have to swallow and sniff to push back tears.
“I don’t want to come home on some other day and find you lying there like that again.” I think of eleven-year-old Leila opening the bathroom door and seeing my mother at the sink. She has a pill bottle next to her and a half-empty glass of water in her hand. She dumps a cluster of thick white pills from her other hand into the trash.
“I don’t want anyone to find you like that again,” I add at a near whisper. “But I can’t make sure of that all by myself.”
Finally, I give my eyes permission to look down. I trace my toes around a square of floor tile while I wait, the white tip of my sneaker squeaking against the linoleum. I’m thinking about our apartment, with the bedroom we share and the chair in the living room with the stuffing falling out and the kitchen with the brightly painted walls and cluttered counters and my mother’s art hanging in every room. Each time I’ve pictured the apartment lately, it looks smaller and more cramped in my memory. Like it’s shrinking with us standing in it, and as the walls close in around us, we have less and less time to decide how we’re going to get out.
When I lift my head again, my mother is staring at her blanket, fingers picking at threads that are already unraveling. I wonder if she’s been pulling at them when I’m not here, the way I do with the blanket in Aunt Cynthia’s guest room. Maybe she tells herself, like the imprisoned princess in a fairy tale, that she can get out of this hospital room as soon as she unravels her blanket down to a single strand of yarn. Does she stay awake at night, picking at it?
For a second I think I know what it’s like inside my mother’s head. She’s confused and woozy and guilty and wanting to make all of it—the moods, the medication, the parenting from her sixteen-year-old daughter—stop. Wanting to get out of this blank white hospital room and back to her colorful studio but terrified of what will happen once she gets there. Unable to remember that she’s made it through this before.
“I’m sorry, Sophie,” my mother whispers.
I shake my head in a that’s okay gesture. But she isn’t actually looking at me. So I clear my throat and say it out loud, even though it isn’t entirely true.
A few minutes pass—with her picking at the blanket and me sliding the tip of my shoe around the squares on the floor—before she raises her head and speaks again.
“So what should we do?” she asks. She doesn’t sound upset, the way I half expected she would. She doesn’t insist that we’ll be fine on our own again after a few days. She genuinely wants to know what I think should happen next.
I fight back a stab of anger at the fact that she’s the one asking me to decide. I try to ignore the little voice that still wonders, even though I know better by now, isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?
“I think we should ask Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John to help,” I say, surprised at how decisive I sound. “I’ve been staying with them since you’ve been in the hospital, and if it’s not a problem for them, maybe we should both stay there for a while once you’re out of here. The way we used to.”
My mother winces. “I’m not sure how your aunt would feel about that, Sophie.” She returns her eyes and hands to the blanket and resumes tugging on a thread. I know what’s making her anxious now.
“I know what happened,” I say quietly, and my mother’s eyes fly back to me.
“Five years ago, on that afternoon you were watching us and we were playing in your studio, you tried to overdose, just like this time. Leila found you in the bathroom while I was downstairs painting. She told me about it yesterday. I know Aunt Cynthia didn’t want you to stay with them again after that because she was worried about Leila getting hurt.”
I flip my palms up on the arms of the chair, an I’m-out-of-ideas gesture, before I say, “But I don’t think there’s anything else we can do this time.”
And then Ja
mes’s voice pops into my head, telling me I should let him know if he can do anything to help. And Natalie’s voice from earlier today, offering me a ride home.
My mother isn’t the imprisoned princess in a fairy tale. And neither am I. We haven’t run out of options at all. We just have to tell people what we need.
“I think it’s okay,” I tell her softly. “I think if we tell them we need help, they’ll want to help us.”
We sit there in silence, each of us waiting for the other to make the final decision. Usually it would be me. But this time I want my mother to agree, to help me make the choice. To understand that I’m not giving up on her, just calling in some backup for as long as we need it.
“Okay,” she finally says. “Let’s see what Cynthia and John have to say.”
“Okay,” I whisper back.
I lean over to kiss my mother’s cheek. I squeeze her hand once and wait for her to squeeze back in answer, to reach up and touch the purple in my hair. Then I leave the room, smiling a soft thanks at Leila as we switch places in the hall. I look on from the doorway as my cousin walks to the foot of the hospital bed, with what feels like a full minute between each clopping step of her boots on the floor. Before I turn away to take up my waiting spot outside, I see Leila stretch out her arms, palms down, over the blanket. She snatches them back, once, twice. Then, finally, nervously, she lowers her hands to touch my mother’s feet.
—
Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John aren’t home when we get back from the hospital, so I settle in the living room to wait for them, crossing my legs under me on one of the large puffy chairs. Now that my mother has agreed we should ask them for help, I’m full of an antsy energy, tapping my pencil on my chemistry book and jiggling my feet. After two weeks of keeping mostly to the guest room to avoid everyone in this house, I suddenly can’t wait to talk to them.
Leila goes straight upstairs, but I don’t hear her usual music come on, and a few minutes later she’s back in the living room with a book in her hand. She settles into the chair next to me and props her feet on the ottoman. She opens her book and I look back at mine, rereading a paragraph about isotopes I’ve tried to get through at least three times already. We don’t speak.