by Sara Polsky
I wait for the prickly tension from our morning car rides to settle over us, but it doesn’t come. And when Leila turns to me with a quick, sympathetic smile, as if she knows what conversation I’m waiting to have with her parents and how much I’m not looking forward to it, I realize why. My cousin is just trying to keep me company.
Now my eyes travel around Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John’s living room, which I’ve hardly been in since the day I got here, and I try to read the furniture and art and scattered coffee table books the way Uncle John might read the floor plan of a house, looking for clues to its owners’ lives. The way Aunt Cynthia probably reads the evidence for her court cases, trying to figure out each defendant’s motives.
The room is so neat it could have been lifted out of a catalog from a furniture store, the way all the rooms look in Aunt Cynthia’s house. The couch and chairs are the same distance from the fireplace on either side, the dark wooden coffee table perfectly between them, the paintings and photos carefully spaced out along the walls over waist-high bookshelves. The books on the table are full of glossy photos; the charcoal gray and yellow and cream in the carpet match the cushions and upholstery exactly. It’s nothing like the apartment I’m used to, where all the colors are bold but don’t exactly go together.
But when I look more closely, I start to notice signs that people actually use this room. One of the glossy photo books has slips of paper sticking out from some of the pages, as if someone bookmarked the places they most wanted to go or the pictures they liked best. There’s sheet music on a stand in the corner, turned to the middle of a song. The science fiction paperbacks on the shelves have creases down the middle from multiple readings, and a few are held together with rubber bands. On an end table next to the couch is a coaster with a mug still on it, a tea bag tag dangling over the side.
As Leila turns a page next to me, I close my eyes, let the image of the room I just looked at fade away, and open them. This time I see it differently, and so clearly I want to run upstairs for my sketchbook: my mother curled on the couch next to that teacup, paging through one of the books of photos, looking for ideas for paintings. Aunt Cynthia is next to her, a thick document forgotten on her lap while she reads the last pages of a novel. Me sitting cross-legged on the floor with my homework or my sketchbook and pencil. Leila at the music stand in the corner studying a song. Uncle John with his work spread out on the table in the next room, still close enough for a conversation.
The five of us, living here together.
—
Uncle John and Aunt Cynthia almost walk right past us, the smell of takeout wafting behind them from the kitchen, on their way to call us down for dinner. Then they see us and stop short, surprise flashing across their faces at the fact that Leila and I are sitting here, downstairs, together.
I’m expecting Uncle John to make a joke about it—who are you and what have you done with Sophie and Leila?—but it’s Aunt Cynthia who speaks first.
“We picked up some Chinese food,” she says, gesturing back toward the kitchen.
Leila stands up quickly.
“I think Sophie wanted to talk to you guys first,” she tells her parents. Then she gives me another sympathetic look and leaves the room before any of us can respond.
I smile ruefully and shake my head at her back. I bet Leila will never stop being like this, taking charge even when nobody asks her to.
I turn back to my aunt and uncle.
“I did want to talk to you,” I admit. Nervousness is buzzing through my body again and I shift in the chair, sticking my legs out and then pulling them back under me. “Is it okay if we talk before dinner?”
They both nod, and after a moment, they sit down together on the couch opposite me. They stare at me expectantly, and I wish one of them would pick up a book from the table and look at it instead.
“My mother’s doctor says she’s almost ready to be discharged,” I tell them.
Uncle John leans forward, looking concerned, but it’s Aunt Cynthia I’m really watching. My words travel across the room to her and she freezes in her seat. I recognize that response, her temporary paralysis, because it could easily be mine. I have the urge to tell her breathe.
“She’s doing much better on the new set of medications, and her doctor found a place nearby where she can have regular outpatient therapy. There might even be a center in the city where she can go for free if she’s approved for a research study.”
Aunt Cynthia shifts slightly across from me, the first signs of a thaw.
“But I don’t think I can take care of her by myself,” I add, the same thing I admitted to my mother this afternoon. “I can’t force her to take her medication every day and watch her every afternoon and make sure she gets to therapy while I’m also going to school and trying to have a job after school.” And getting ready for college the year after next. And having friends.
I can’t keep looking at Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John watching me. I drop my gaze to my book, my eyes catching random words—neutron, proton, noble gas—that I know I’ve learned but that, right now, are just bouncing off the outside of my brain without going in.
As difficult as it was to tell my mother that I couldn’t be totally responsible for her anymore, saying it to Aunt Cynthia’s stiff face and Uncle John’s anxious one is harder still. But I force myself to say it again, less tentatively this time, to make sure they know how serious I am.
“It’s too much for me to do all by myself,” I repeat, my voice insistent and clear.
But it’s not just that I can’t do it by myself. It’s that, for now at least, I choose not to. I choose to have my own life instead.
“And I don’t want to do it anymore,” I say. I look at Aunt Cynthia. “It’s like what you said, about how we shouldn’t put ourselves completely on hold for my mother. I don’t want to keep having to choose her over myself.”
Then, looking at my lap again, I tell them the rest. How Leila finally told me what she saw when we were eleven. What it was like for me to find my mother barely breathing on her bed that afternoon when I got home from school. It’s the first time I’ve described it out loud to anyone. Even when I was talking to Natalie, I didn’t tell her about the way I raced up the stairs and called my mother’s name and crunched over the cut-up catalog pages in the hallway as I hurried to the bedroom. The way her feet hung off the bed and her chest barely moved.
My voice isn’t distant and flat now; it shakes as I talk. But I don’t feel panicked the way I did in class the day after it happened, as the clock ticked and I imagined just what my mother might have been doing at that minute the day before. My heart isn’t racing and I don’t see my mother’s still body in front of me. This time I know that day is in the past. I’m just remembering it, not reliving it.
When I stop talking, finally, and look at my aunt and uncle again, Uncle John’s eyes are wide and Aunt Cynthia’s face is practically white. She’s holding her hands together so tightly in front of her that parts of them are turning white too.
I wonder for the first time if she’s a member of our club, the one Leila and I formed unofficially yesterday in my room. The club of people who’ve seen my mother with pills in her hand or spilling out of a knocked-over prescription bottle on the table next to her bed.
I can’t sit still any longer.
I push myself out of the chair and only just remember to grab my chem book before it falls to the floor. I stand there hunched like a monkey, holding it.
I have to ask.
“I wanted to ask you whether we could stay here, my mother and I, until she’s doing well enough to be on her own for longer,” I say. “I’m sure you want to talk about it before you decide, so I’ll just…” I trail off and take a step toward the doorway. I’ll just scram.
“Stop!” Aunt Cynthia’s voice rings out and I turn around. She looks surprised by her own forcefulness. I registe
r in a corner of my mind that Uncle John has gotten up from the couch and is moving toward the kitchen. He murmurs something about setting the table for dinner.
“We don’t need to talk about it,” Aunt Cynthia says, her voice softer now. “I mean, of course you can stay here. Both of you.”
“Thank you,” I manage. My legs start to feel wobbly under me and I fall back into my chair, overloaded with relief, embarrassment, and a strange feeling of defeat all at once. I’ve finally done it, finally allowed that desperate feeling I had in the hospital elevator, of not wanting my mother to come home, to win.
But it feels like a little bit of a victory for me too.
“You shouldn’t thank me,” Aunt Cynthia says. “It wasn’t right to cut your mother off like that. I didn’t trust her to be responsible for Leila anymore, and I needed to find a way to take care of my family and myself. But I know she didn’t do what she did intentionally.”
I think of how angry I got at my mother that day in the hospital, wishing she would ask me about my day, just once, the way I imagined a normal mom would. Even as the voice in the back of my head reminded me she has never been, and probably never will be, a normal mom.
“And it certainly wasn’t fair of me to do that to you,” Aunt Cynthia continues. “To leave you to look after her by yourself when you were only eleven. I’m impressed by how well you’ve handled it. But you’re right, you shouldn’t have had to do it at all.”
She pauses for a moment before she adds, “I’m so sorry, Sophie.”
Guilt.
That’s part of what’s kept us all in our separate boxes on the sitcom screen for the past five years, kept us from picking up the phone. My guilt whenever I catch myself thinking that I want to have my own life. Leila’s guilt for telling on my mother; Aunt Cynthia’s after she decided to leave me to watch over my mother on my own. My mother’s guilt, when she’s aware enough to think about it, about the ways we’ve all had to rearrange our lives around her.
“It’s okay,” I tell Aunt Cynthia softly. I sound calmer and more grown-up than I feel.
We stand up at the same time and look at each other across the living room. I feel like the wall between us has lost a few more rows of stone and mortar. We’re both tall; maybe now if we stand on our tiptoes, we can reach over the top.
Aunt Cynthia and I nod at the same time, a silent agreement that we’ll try to do better from now on. I think of a few lines from the poem Leila chose for our English project. The dark thought, the shame, the malice. Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Okay, I tell my guilt and embarrassment and defeat and relief. The door’s open. Come in.
Aunt Cynthia walks to the bottom of the stairs and shouts up to Leila. “You can come down now. It’s all clear!”
It’s the kind of thing I might have expected Uncle John to say, but not Aunt Cynthia. And my surprise must be obvious on my face because when she turns around Aunt Cynthia actually laughs. It’s a sound I haven’t heard from her in years, except for the day I stood outside my mother’s hospital room and eavesdropped on her visit. Her laugh then was sad and slightly hysterical at the same time, but this one is just a natural laugh, ringing and surprised.
And even though a part of my brain is thinking this is weird as I follow Aunt Cynthia and Leila in to dinner, I start laughing too.
Twenty-four
“Just pick a room and paint,” I tell James, trying not to sound impatient. “Use your fingers.”
“But what’s it supposed to look like?” he whines, drawing out the words, because he knows it will annoy us. “I don’t know what I should be painting.”
I snort audibly. James is lying on his stomach on the floor, and Leila and I roll our eyes at each other over his head.
“Stop making fun of me,” James says, without looking up. He’s still whining.
We’re sitting in front of one of the house models from Uncle John’s office, which he gave us as soon as we explained what we wanted to do. The paint cans from Natalie’s garage are arranged around us, along with other colors that Leila, Aunt Cynthia, and I picked up from my mother’s studio. While we were there, we brought back some of her paintings to hang up in the guest room and in Uncle John’s office, which he decided to turn into a temporary bedroom for me. He insists he doesn’t have to bring as much work home now that I’m helping him out.
Through the wall, I can hear my mother’s classical music in the guest room, and I picture her there painting, surrounded by her finished work the same way she is in her studio at home. My mother spending her afternoon painting counts as a normal day. Later I’ll go in there and sit in the corner, and she’ll turn to me every so often and ask my opinion on a color or a section of what she’s working on.
“The whole point is that it’s not supposed to look like anything in particular,” Leila tells James. “You can do whatever you want as long as each room looks different.” She doesn’t make an effort to keep the exasperation out of her voice as she dips her pinkie into the deep red paint and dots it across the white wall of one of the house’s rooms. Dip, dot, dip. A few drops splash onto the trash bag we’ve put on top of the carpet.
“Exactly,” I agree. “Here, just pick some colors and see what happens.”
As I reach for the black paint and mix in enough white to get a medium shade of gray, I recite the lines to myself. Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. The words crowd of sorrows make me think of a flock of dark birds swooping in.
With a few calm, quick swipes, I cover another room in the gray paint. Then I use black and blue to make dark birdlike shapes, really just arrows, on the walls. I take a tiny wooden table from Leila’s piled stash of old dollhouse furniture and snap off two of the legs. I glue the now uneven table and those two sorry wooden stick legs onto the floor of my gray room. It looks like a wind has blown through and scattered the pieces.
Next to me, James finally grabs the orange paint, swirling it carefully with yellow on one of the paper plates we’re using for palettes. When the orange is a little lighter but there’s some yellow still visible, he starts to dab the mixture on the floor of our miniature house. Then he adds more yellow, dots and stripes and tiny suns with slanting rays.
“It seemed like it could use something a little more cheerful,” he says, shrugging. He’s right. The house looks more balanced now, with a bright strip between Leila’s angry red and my sorrowful gray.
And the orange-yellow swirl on the floor seems to wake all of us up. Suddenly, we can’t grab the paint fast enough, blending and spattering and using the ridges around the edges of the plates to add waves and textures to the plain colors in some of the rooms, making the purple and green and maroon walls look like oceans at high tide. We scatter Leila’s old dollhouse furniture, whole and broken, everywhere. We stick beads and dried pieces of macaroni to the walls like we did on art projects in kindergarten. The whole time we’re laughing and wildly waving our arms. James dabs me with paint, red and then blue, and I return the favor. I catch Leila looking at us, a grin on her face, her eyebrows raised at me as if to say see?
After a few more frantic minutes of painting and gluing, we all sit back at once and survey our work.
“I think we’re done,” Leila says. She sounds surprised and maybe a little bit proud.
James and I nod. Every room has been painted, the guest house ready for all of its new arrivals. We’ve already decided that Leila, with her singer’s voice, will read the poem to the class. James and I will explain our project.
James pops the lids back onto the paint cans, gathers the torn pieces of our paper plate palettes into the trash, and stands to go.
He looks at me from the doorway as he says, “I have to get ready for tonight, but I’ll see you both later.”
As Leila and I finish clea
ning up, picking macaroni pieces out of the carpet, I glance at the book next to me on the floor. It’s still open to the Rumi poem, and I scan the now familiar words. I’m not sure I agree with the last lines, about welcoming the joy, meanness, and sorrow into our houses-slash-lives because they’ve arrived for a reason, to teach us something, “a guide from beyond.” If that’s true, why does my mother have to be part of the lesson? I’d rather think that her illness is a random genetic accident.
But as I look at the house the three of us painted, I still think the first part of the poem is right. The only thing we can really do with these unexpected visitors is open the door and welcome them in.
—
The doorbell rings for the first time when I’m halfway through setting the table. Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John almost never use their dining room, but they insisted I use it tonight, Aunt Cynthia climbing onto a step stool to get the fancier glasses and silverware from the backs of the cabinets.
Now she hurries into the dining room in her usual neat after-work clothes and grabs the bundle of knives and forks out of my hand.
“Go open the door,” she says, waving me away. “I’ll finish putting these out.”
When I open the door, James is standing on the front porch, wearing khakis and a button-down shirt, holding a white casserole dish.
“See, I promised I wouldn’t bring pizza,” he says before I have time to tease him about it. “There are some vegetables in that, though.”
I stick my tongue out at him and he laughs, not at all offended.
He follows me into the kitchen, where my mother is helping Leila roll out the dough for a piecrust. I stop just inside the doorway, not sure if I need to reintroduce James and my mother. Should I have told my mother that James knows why she was in the hospital? She agreed when Aunt Cynthia and I asked if we could have a dinner to welcome her back. But I’m not sure she realizes that everyone knows where she’s back from.