“It sounds really good, Mom.”
She came to kneel in front of me, her hand on my cheek. “Baby, it won’t always hurt this much. I know I never taught you any decent ways to deal with losing someone you love, and all I can say is, you have hope. He’s—” She stopped, her face tortured.
“He’s still alive,” I finished for her.
She nodded and stood. “Do you think you can help with dinner?”
I shrugged, but I followed her to the kitchen and set the table. As we ate, she asked, “Do you mind my going on and on about this? I don’t want to make you feel worse, but I’d like to think I can help take your mind off Miguel, at least for a while.”
“It’s OK,” Really, it was. While most of me cried silently for him, a small part of me rejoiced for her. Finally her world was going good, and I wouldn’t let myself resent it.
After she sang her way through a sink full of dishes, she called Elaine to tell her the good news. Even on the phone she couldn’t sit still but danced around the room. I heard her say, “Thanks, I’m proud of me, too,” while she bounced on her toes. She sounded like a little kid, and I found myself smiling for a few seconds until I realized I hadn’t told her I was proud of her. Should I? But I couldn’t decide if it would be true or not.
While she talked I sneaked to my room. My bed was a mass of cold, tangled sheets, the blanket a twisted snake reaching for the floor. I lay across it on my stomach and reached for the tiny pile of letters I kept beside the pillow, letters I’d written to Miguel. I had no idea where he was, no idea how I could ever send anything to him. But I couldn’t stop writing them. When I held them against my heart, I felt closer to him, closer to our love. Because he loved me, and I’d never told him I loved him. Not out loud. I told him over and over in the letters he never got to read.
After a while I wiped my eyes and got a new sheet of paper. I told Miguel how much I missed him and about Mom’s promotion and her excitement. I told Miguel I needed him, and how kind Jackson and Shannon and Lucy, in fact, nearly everyone in the youth group, had been. I begged him to come home.
And then I crumpled the letter and threw it in the trash, because what good was it? Even if somehow I could get it to him, he couldn’t do what I asked, could he? He couldn’t put his mother or himself in danger, just because I wanted him. Still, after a few minutes I rescued it. I smoothed it out, folded it, and slipped it into an envelope. It held my heart, and I was not going to throw my heart away. And these letters were my only connection with Miguel now. Writing to him kept him close. No matter how pathetic I felt I had to keep them.
I stroked my cross. I hadn’t taken it off again, even for the shower. Please, keep him safe. Bring him back soon. I need him. You know how much I need him.
The next day Shannon took me aside during our lunch break. “Have you heard anything?”
I shook my head. Mom had made a lunch for me and had made sure I tucked it in my backpack before I left for school. But I didn’t know what was in it and didn’t care. I ate when I felt so dizzy I thought I’d fall over but not until then. Eating was just something that kept Mom from taking me to the doctor.
“Aidyn, everyone’s so worried.”
“He’ll come back when they catch his dad.” I hoped. But how would they even know? Did someone know where they were? Why wasn’t that someone me?
“Not so much about him. I mean, we are, but we’re more worried about you.”
I shrugged.
“You’re really depressed, Aidyn. I think you should go talk to somebody. Jackson goes to the Alateen meetings, and we thought if you went—”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with Mom’s drinking!”
“But it would be someone to talk to. Or go see Lucy. She really does care.”
I shook my head. “I want Miguel.”
“I know but—”
I stood up and threw my full brown sack in the trash. “It’s nice everybody’s so worried, but there’s nothing anyone can do.” I walked away then turned back. “Why didn’t anybody care all those years when I was depressed because of Mom? I didn’t act much different then, did I? But no one noticed.”
“People noticed, Aidyn. You just…you never let anyone get close. And we didn’t know how bad things were. I guess that’s just—I’m not making excuses. That’s just the way it was.”
And Miguel was gone. He might never come back, and that was just the way it was, too. The way it was stunk.
That night Mom didn’t say one word about her new job. Only when I’d watched her pace the apartment for nearly an hour did I notice her agitation. She hadn’t acted like this since the week after she’d quit drinking, and panic filled my stomach. Did she know something about Miguel? Or had something gone wrong at work?
“Mom, didn’t you start that job today?”
She nodded.
“Mom, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”
“Oh, baby, nothing’s wrong.” She finally came to sit next to me on the couch, snuggling into the hollow it had grown to hold us. “Yes, I started. I got to meet the man, but—”
“What? Is he a creep or something?”
“No! No, he’s—I know him, that’s all. He was—Aidyn, do you remember Daddy’s best friend?”
“Yeah.” I bent my head. “Doug, wasn’t that his name?”
She nodded. “Doug Sharpell. He’s the one I’m doing this job for.”
“I remember he deserted us after Dad died.”
“He didn’t. His job transferred him to France. He tried to keep in touch for a long time.” She looked away. “I suppose I pushed him away as much as I did everyone else. But he wanted to help us.”
My mind filled with long-ago memories. I remembered playing mouse in Doug’s beard and opening presents he’d bring me. I still had some of those things, I thought, things that hadn’t really reminded me of him but only of a sense of him. Of him and Daddy, as though he’d left his ghost with me.
“That’s kind of weird, meeting him like that.”
“Not really. He knew I’d started working for Toni, and he went there to find me. Things just…sort of escalated and now—”
“Now you’re working for him.”
She jumped up, pacing again to the hall and back to me. “Aidyn.”
“Mom, you’re creeping me out.” But wasn’t that better than sheer misery? “Don’t you want to work on his house?”
“His garden. Yes, I do, but things get complicated.” She bit her lip. “Too much has changed, and I’m scared. I’m not the same person. I still haven’t told him—maybe Toni has.”
“Oh. You mean because you’re an alcoholic?”
She nodded. “He asked me out.”
I closed my eyes. Mom, dating? She’d just started being Mom again, and now this? And what about Daddy? I saw him in the hospital, Mom bending over his bed, gripping his fingers as though that could keep him with her.
“Aidyn, I’m not even sure I can do this. As soon as I tell him, he may just—I’m no prize, I know that.”
I thought of the letters I’d written to Miguel. I needed him to hear how badly I hurt. I needed him to care. Mom cared, a lot of people cared, but it wasn’t the same, and it didn’t fill the hole Miguel had left.
Daddy’s death left that kind of hole in Mom, and she’d tried filling it in the most horrible way, pouring thousands of bottles into it. And now there was Doug.
I remembered sliding into the bed beside her, how she’d hold me, and we’d both cry. I swallowed and opened my eyes. “I think you should go.”
She stared at me, astounded. “You do? But—”
“I think you should tell him everything, and then if he still wants to go out with you, you should go.” Where did this wisdom come from? Some wise child I’d never before heard from? And what advice would this wise child give me?
I looked up. “Are you going?”
She smiled. “I think so.”
“Good.”
Her face relaxed
and she sat with me, rocking the way she does when she wants to comfort me.
But I couldn’t make myself feel any better. I struggled through a fog of confusion while I went to classes and came home to hours of lonely misery. Shannon invited me to a hundred things with her, but I turned them all down.
Finally she said, “OK, fine, stay home and sulk! When you’re ready to start living again, let me know.”
But that would be when Miguel returned home, and then I wouldn’t need her.
On top of my own misery, I felt something else hanging over my head, something huge and black and so far, nameless. I tried to tell Mom, and we talked for a long time about it. She thought sure it had something to do with Doug. He and Mom had scheduled their first date for the Friday after Thanksgiving. Mom was nearly in a frenzy, trying to deal with her excitement and my depression at the same time.
“That’s not it, Mom, I swear. I want to be happy for you.”
“Is it Miguel? Are you afraid he’s in trouble?”
I shook my head. Where my heart touched on Miguel was only emptiness. This thing threatened my life.
“You’re scaring me, too. Creeping me out.” I could tell she wanted to make me laugh.
“No. Mom, will you just stay here with me tonight? Can you stay home from your meeting this once?”
“Of course, baby. I can go tomorrow. Anyway, I brought some projects home from work. We can work on those.”
“We? I don’t do so good with plants,” I told her. But she dragged me to the table anyway and dumped out bag after bag of surprises. Miniature pumpkins, shining gourds, sprays of oak and ash, pussy willows, eucalyptus already crumbling at the edges, dried berried clinging to brittle stems.
“These won’t keep until next year and when I was packing them up I thought of how we used to make things together. Wreaths, that sort of thing. Do you want to call Shannon?”
“No, that’s OK. She’s probably out with Jackson, anyway.” And still mad at me.
As we worked, we talked again of what I’d begun to think of as “my” obsession.
“Mom,” I finally said. “I’m not getting any closer to figuring it out and talking about it is making me shake. Can we change the subject?”
I thought sure she’d bring up Doug, but instead she talked about the gifts we were making and who we’d give them to. “I promised Toni a wreath and a basket, and of course there’s Elaine and the Donaldsons.”
“And Doug?” I teased.
“If I see him before Thanksgiving, sure.” But her cheeks stained pink, and I knew she hoped she would. “And we’ll take one with us when we go to your grandmother’s for—”
“No!” I grabbed Mom’s arm. “We can’t go. That’s what’s been bothering me.”
Mom frowned. “Your grandmother? You haven’t seen her since July. It’s only fair—”
“Not to you.”
She shook her head. “I know what you’re thinking. They always have plenty of booze, and I shouldn’t be anywhere near it, but I can handle it. Trust me, OK? I have to learn to live in a world that includes something I crave and can’t ever touch. Other people have done it, and so can I.”
“Mom, please, can’t we stay home for the day? I don’t care if we have tuna sandwiches, anything but going to Grandma’s—” I should have known, I should have remembered sooner. What was wrong with me?
“It’s a tradition,” Mom said.
“Why don’t we start a new tradition, just you and me? And Doug! Mom, we could invite Doug.”
“He’s going to his sister’s up north. Baby, I don’t see what you’re worried about. I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t want to go. Mom, please.”
“I don’t understand. Why not? They’re Daddy’s family. They have a right to see you. And we have a responsibility to them, too.”
“I don’t care.”
“Aidyn, I promise, I’ll be fine. Come on. Let’s deliver our gifts and then I’ll treat us to dinner, OK?”
But the black dread hovered over me. As we got home again with our bags of fast food, the phone rang. Mom grabbed it, and I saw by her smile she thought it might be Doug. Instead, she frowned. “Roy?” A pause, then, “Oh, no. No! Why?”
I moved closer and leaned against her. She crossed her free arm, listening, whimpering. Who was it, and what was wrong? Doug? Miguel? When she hung up she closed her eyes and swayed where she was. I led her to the couch and took off her coat. She pulled her hat across her face to her lap and stared at it, limp in her hands. “That was Joyce’s husband.”
I relaxed. Joyce, Mom’s drinking buddy. She hadn’t mentioned her in weeks, and whatever Roy told Mom couldn’t matter.
“She’s dead.” Mom covered her face with her hands and shook, but when she straightened, I saw no tears. “Her funeral was Monday, and he just now thought to tell me.” Her words slurred.
“Mom.” I sat next to her and tried to get her to stop rocking. “I’m sorry.” Just because I hated Joyce, hated what Mom was like around her, didn’t mean Mom wouldn’t miss her.
“She took a bottle of pain killers and mixed it with whiskey.” Mom finally focused on me. “She stopped talking to me. She said I was trying to reform her. If I’d known I could have—I’ve taken her to the hospital to get her stomach pumped before.”
I hadn’t known that. So much of Mom’s life since Daddy died I didn’t know, but it was stuff I ought to know. I’d been living with her, after all.
“I should have called her,” Mom said. “If only—”
“You couldn’t have stopped her. She did it before, didn’t she?”
“And I saved her then.”
No matter what I said, I couldn’t get Mom to admit Joyce’s death hadn’t been her fault.
By the next morning some of Mom’s shock had worn off. Her eyes were puffy from crying and she still wore the haunted fear in her eyes. But she packed up the dessert she’d made to share with Daddy’s family and drove there with steady hands.
“Mom, we really don’t have to go,” I told her. That phone call had fueled my dark cloud of fear. “Nobody would blame you—”
“I can’t keep running away. I’ll be fine.”
As soon as we walked in the door Grandma started gushing. “I called everyone else,” she whispered, but so loud that the guys crowded in front of the televised football game heard. “We all want to help poor Beth so much. So everyone agreed we’d give up our little dinner drinks, just for today.”
“That wasn’t necessary.” Mom’s lips pinched, and I wondered if Grandma could tell how angry Mom was.
But some of my dread abated. Without temptation, Mom would be safe. I walked into the hallway behind her, trying to catch sight of her face. Was she mad because Grandma was so condescending, or because she’d removed the booze from easy access? With the mood Mom had been in all day, it could have been either. I found myself twisting my hat until Mom took it and hung it up over my coat.
“You might have been right,” she said.
“We could go home,” I whispered.
She shook her head then led me into the kitchen where two of my aunts and a cousin were cooking.
All the adults acted glad to see us and exclaimed over how much I’d grown and how pretty I’d gotten. I rolled my eyes whenever I heard that. Everyone but Grandma carefully avoided any mention of Mom’s sobriety. I got the idea they were embarrassed. But what was worse, admitting she was an alcoholic and trying to quit, or actively being that alcoholic?
I wandered out of the kitchen for a while. My cousins had dubbed Grandma’s house “the shrine”, and it was—a shrine to my father. His picture hung in every room, and this year she’d added a table with candles and fresh flowers arranged on it, along with cards he’d drawn in grade school. Back in the kitchen, I listened as Grandma’s voice grew louder and more slurred. I tried to catch Mom’s eye, but she spent most of her time staring at her hands or the potatoes she was peeling.
So much for Grandma’s no-lit
tle-drinks rule. She must have had bottles stashed in every room. She staggered out of the kitchen so often I thought she’d wear a hole through the old linoleum. I leaned on the door between the dining room and the kitchen, the roar of the game like a cushion behind me, the disorder in the kitchen in front of me. I didn’t know what to expect, but I wanted to be close to Mom. I wanted to be able to pull her to safety if I had to. When Grandma dropped a bowl of creamed peas on the floor, the kitchen exploded.
Aunt Lena, Dad’s sister, started. “Crap, Mother, I thought we weren’t supposed to be drinking here.” She glared at Mom.
“We’re no…we’re not. Sshh!” Grandma tried to cover her mouth with her finger, missed, hit her ear, and winked.
“Isn’t it nice to know you’re not the only drunk in the family?” Aunt Lena hissed at Mom. I wanted to spit on her.
“She’s your mother,” Mom said. “Why don’t you do something for her?”
“What?” Lena barreled up and got in Mom’s face. “What do you suggest? Some hospital where she can dry out? What?”
“How about some compassion?” Mom looked around, met every eye that was on her. “This is a rough day.”
“Made even rougher by our enforced sobriety.”
The volume of the TV went down and one of my uncles said, “Sshh.” I took a step toward Mom.
Once started, Aunt Lena couldn’t seem to stop. “I don’t blame Mother for drinking, not at all. I just wish you’d have had the courtesy to let the rest of us drown our sorrows, too.”
Mom’s face went blank. She put her hands behind her as though feeling for the edge of a precipice. I grabbed her and dragged her to the door, shoved her into her coat, and slapped her hat on her head. And then I turned and called my aunt a name that insured no one would mind that I never came back to that house again.
“We shouldn’t have come,” I told Mom. “But it’s OK. We’re going now.”
“Don’t start, please,” Mom whispered as she fumbled for her keys.
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