Chapter 15
Emma is throwing up.
I know because I can hear her, but I can’t open my eyes.
I can’t look at what I’ve done. I can’t face how Emma looks at me now that she’s seen me kill a person.
Hands shaking, I feel along Leah’s side until I touch the outline of a phone in her pocket.
I take it and move away so I don’t have to see when I open my eyes.
I laugh when the phone lights up and opens when I swipe the screen. Lucky.
My eyes hurt from straining to focus on the phone. There’s something wrong with me.
It takes hours, years, a century to make the phone work. When I do, I laugh again, triumphant.
I can do this. I can do this.
What am I trying to do?
I have to call someone.
I have to call my mom.
No, no, I can’t. But why not? I don’t remember.
“Lou, the phone.” Emma’s voice is wet and choked.
I see my index finger dialing her number. It’s a path pressed into the earth that I could follow in pitch black. I know it better than my own.
It’s too hard to hold the phone up, so I curl on my side and cradle it on my cheek. It rings. The sound lights a stuttering flame of hope in my chest. Emma says my name again. I ignore her. I’m getting help; she doesn’t need to worry.
It’s good I’m calling my mom now. She’ll know what to do.
The line rings and rings and rings and in the background Emma asks for the phone, but I can’t give it to her because this will save us, I know it will. The mechanical voice asking if you want to leave a message comes on.
That’s fine. She’s probably asleep. Bleary-eyed and slow to get her glasses on. It’s late. It’s so late.
I redial. It rings and rings and then the message again. My heart thumps hard.
One more time. It’s the third call. It’ll work. She’ll answer.
Her voicemail message is an echo, an endless ripple in my head. I want to call again, but my fingers are numb.
Why wouldn’t she answer? Why wouldn’t she pick up the phone? After it rang once and she didn’t know the number, maybe not. But three times? Even from another phone she knows what it means. She knows it means I need help.
She always answers or calls me back right away. If she’s alive she’d find a way to answer, to get in contact, to—
Oh.
Oh.
If she were alive—
—she’d answer.
My head fills with sloshing waves. I can’t breathe. I’m slipping into vertigo. Someone is saying my name. It’s not my mom. It’s not her.
I blink. I’m home.
The hallway is dim, and the air is stale with the scent of cigarette smoke.
The light burned out last week. Every day since I’ve told myself I’d grab another on my way home from work.
Mom doesn’t mind, but I do. There’s something about a dim house that makes anxiety rise in my throat like bile.
A dim house means musty curtains and broken blinds and shadows to hide the trash left on the floor because neither of us had the energy to pick it up.
Today. I’ll write it on my hand. One of those Edison ones maybe. Class the place up a bit. Bring some brightness into our lives.
“Mom?” I knock on her door.
Normally, she’d have been up for hours by now.
She texted me yesterday that she was going to bed early, so I’m not surprised she forgot to set her alarm.
I’d leave without waking her if it were up to me.
I’m finally making enough that she can take a day off here and there, but not enough that she won’t spend her day off feeling anxious about bills, groceries, and everything else on the endless list.
“Mom?” I wait a beat, then turn the knob.
Ripley wiggles into the darkened room like she hasn’t seen my mom in weeks.
The door catches on a pair of scrubs crumpled on the floor. I pick them up and toss them into the hamper. I’ll have to put a load in the washer before I leave so she has a clean uniform tomorrow. She says I don’t have to do her laundry, but, just like with the light, who’s going to do it if not me?
I look to the bed, expecting to see Ripley furiously trying to lick at her cheeks and my mom pushing her away. Instead, I find Ripley standing stock-still on the bed, body curved away from the figure lying under the quilt. Her tail is tucked under her tight.
“What are you doing?” I laugh at her.
I move to the bedside. I put my hand on my mom’s shoulder to wake her up.
What my hand touches isn’t my mother. It has her silhouette, but none of her warmth. This thing—this thing is stiff and cool to the touch. A buzzing sound like thousands of beating insect wings crawls into my head. Spots light up the darkness of the room.
Suddenly, my hand is knotted in Ripley’s collar and I’m watching myself pull her out of the bedroom. My mouth is moving, but what am I saying? The words are slurred, blending vowels into consonants, and spilling from chattering teeth.
“—have to leave her alone. Just let her sleep. She’s have—having a rough week. Have—have to let her sleep.”
My lungs stutter, and my face is wet. Phlegm coats my throat and the inside of my nose. I can’t breathe. Ripley struggles against me, and I let go when I realize the collar is too tight on her throat and she can’t breathe either—
I’m on my knees in the dim hallway, running my hands over her neck, chanting, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” She’s shaking. I’m shaking. I crawl to the bedroom door and pull it closed with my eyes squeezed shut.
She’s tired. She has to sleep.
I’ll let her sleep. When she wakes up she’ll feel better.
The next thing I remember is opening my front door to the police two days later. One of my mom’s coworkers called them to do a welfare check when she didn’t come in to work.
My memories are liquid after that. Bits rise to the top while others sink to the bottom of a cool abyss.
What I was able to gather: I’d found my mother dead in her bed, in our home, had a seismic dissociative episode according to the therapist I went to twice, and then just …
didn’t tell anyone. I went to work. I didn’t say a word.
I didn’t say anything all day long. I kept going to work and coming home until the cops showed up two days later.
While the cop was walking down the hall to my mother’s room, I drafted an email to Ellis telling him I had to take emergency leave because my mom was sick, and I didn’t know when she’d get better.
I don’t remember writing this email, but I know I must have because it’s there in my Sent folder.
I don’t remember texting Emma that I needed her to watch Ripley, but I did that too.
Efficient and practical, taking care of everything that needs to be taken care of all the way to the end.
When a cop sat me down in an interrogation room, he asked if I didn’t tell anyone my mom was dead because I was the one who killed her.
I remember my mouth shaping words to convey that I didn’t notify anyone because she wasn’t dead. I also remember the look on the cop’s face—a mixture of pity and disgust—and the urge to smash his face into the two-way mirror until all his teeth tumbled out of his head.
I was so full of rage and so fundamentally unable to process it.
It’s just that I thought, one day, if I could just manage to make enough, if I could just be enough, show her enough love, give her enough hope for the future, I could heal my mother. I could make up for everything she gave up for me.
I worked and worked and shrank and shrank with every bite the world took out of my flesh like I was some tasty little morsel that existed only to be consumed.
One day, I thought, the world will stop swallowing down bits of my body.
I just had to find a way to be enough before the world took a mouthful so big I couldn’t survive.
They let me go when the coworker who called in the welfare check, Janet, explained why she called in the first place.
My mom slipped while giving a shower to a patient.
She hit her head on the tile floor. The nursing home’s manager had acted like it wasn’t a big deal and sent my mom home to sleep it off.
While she slept, her brain bled.
And then she died.
She was probably already dead when I got home from work that night. I’d stayed late to work on a report for Ellis. She was already in bed by the time I walked in the door.
Must have been a long day, better let her sleep, I thought when I found her door closed. So that’s what I did.
“Subdural hematoma,” the coroner said.
“Criminal working conditions,” Emma told me.
“She’s sick. She just needs rest,” I told everyone who asked.
There’s a sound. It’s soft, pitiful, and made by something small. It’s me. I’m crying,
“Emma, my mom is dead.”
My voice is so slurred with tears and whatever was in that water that I can barely understand myself.
She must understand me because she responds. “I know. I know. I’m so sorry. Lou, I need you to give me the phone. I need you to do that for me. Please do that for me.”
The phone? The phone. Everything is heavy and loose. I’m a water balloon sloshing across the ground. My stomach jumps and I think I might throw up.
Emma’s face is wet and her eyes bloodshot. She’s already got her arm stretched across the carpet, like it’s been that way for a while. I push it toward her. The phone slides, slides, stops just out of her reach.
She makes a frustrated, angry sound and reaches out to it with her foot.
A tentative voice calls down the stairs, “Leah?” just as Emma makes contact with the beaded chain attached to the phone’s case.
The voice is unbelievably congested, which makes me laugh. It’s Greg!
Greg’s talking to another person and the other person is talking back. Emma has the phone to her ear and she’s talking too. The only sound that makes sense is the feet thumping down the stairs.
I flop over to watch. There are legs standing in front of me. The legs belong to a man. The man crouches. He’s close enough that I can smell the spice of his cologne, feel the intense focus of his stare.
Ellis regards me. He’s wearing a crisp white T-shirt while the other people wear maroon scrubs. His hair’s in a low ponytail and there’s a streak of dirt on his cheek. I think, absurdly, He looks good. Smells good too, like pine. It was really nice when I thought he was going to save me.
Emma is yelling, furious and frantic as a hissing cat. Abruptly it cuts off. The room feels empty without her voice in it. No, that’s not right. It’s not the room that feels empty.
It’s me.
There used to be a point to me.
Ellis rests the back of his hand on my forehead. He’s warm, and it makes me want to cry.
“Aw, Lou. What are we going to do with you?”