Twenty-Three
We started rotating Mom’s check-in schedule a year ago after we realized Noah and Madison were carrying too much of the load.
Mom hates when it’s my turn.
It’s not the check-in itself because she doesn’t fight the others on the rotation. There’s just something about her youngest daughter playing nursemaid that she can’t sit comfortably with.
Dad’s out of the house today, so it’s just the two of us.
“Mom?”
I take the stairs two at a time, ignoring the familiar burn in my left hip, and follow the quiet rustle of paper to the end of the hallway.
My old bedroom.
Mom is sitting cross-legged in the middle of my bed, though it hasn’t truly been mine for eight years. A cardboard box rests open beside her, old photographs and folded letters spread across the blanket.
For one terrifying second, my mind conjures every catastrophic scenario at once. Then she looks up, her eyes clear and present, and the panic drains from my chest as fast as it hit.
“Hey,” I say, stepping into the room. “You scared me.”
“Sorry, baby. I heard you call, but I got distracted.” She pats the spot beside her. “Come sit.”
My room has remained frozen in time since I moved out at eighteen.
Same pale yellow walls. Same window seat. Same faint water stain on the ceiling from the roof leak Dad never quite finished patching.
I was the second one out the door after Noah, desperate for my own space, and nobody had much reason to redecorate after that. It became storage, the way most childhood bedrooms eventually do.
I ease myself down beside her. “How are you doing, Mom?”
She cups my face in both hands, her thumbs brushing over my cheekbones as she studies me the way she used to when I was small and running a fever.
“How are you doing?” she asks softly. “I’ve been worried about you.”
“I was here three days ago.”
“I know.”
“So the worry window is pretty small.”
She gives me a faint smile, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
I nod toward the mess covering the bed. “What are we looking at?”
Her hands drop into her lap. “Old photo albums. I found the box in the garage. Your father was going to get rid of it. Can you imagine?”
“Scandalous.”
She pulls a velvet-covered album onto her lap and opens it. “Look. Noah’s christening.”
I lean over her shoulder.
Baby Noah is red-faced and furious in the arms of a much younger version of Dad.
Mom turns the page.
Madison at five, missing both front teeth and glaring at the camera.
Then Piper at two, completely covered in spaghetti sauce.
We wade through a dozen pages like this, and for a while, it’s easy. The two of us lean into each other. She narrates moments I don’t remember, but I pretend I do.
Then she reaches past the albums and into the bottom of the box. She pulls out a small square wrapped in an old, faded pillowcase.
Something in the way she handles it makes me sit straighter.
She unwraps it carefully.
It’s a canvas painted in vivid color. Abstract shapes begin to resolve the longer I look, until I can make out the suggestion of an infant cradled inside curved lines of light.
“Noah’s,” she says softly. Her finger traces the edge of the canvas without quite touching the paint. “I made this the week we brought him home.”
“You painted this?”
“I painted one for each of you after you were born.” She sets it aside and reaches for another wrapped square. “After each of my babies, I felt so full. Like there wasn’t a container big enough to hold the feeling, so it had to go somewhere.”
The second canvas belongs to Madison.
Fierce, layered reds. Burnt orange. Thick, confident strokes crowding almost every inch.
“That looks about right,” I say.
Mom smiles. “She was remarkably bossy for someone who’d been alive for four minutes.”
“Still is.”
Piper’s is next.
Her canvas is softer. Pale yellows and blush pinks, with a faint restlessness at the edges. The brush seems to have moved on before the paint underneath had time to settle.
Madison once told me those years were closer to the edge than any of us realized.
The blazing energy behind those colors, the late-night painting sessions, the music turned up loud enough to vibrate the floorboards—all of it carried another name beyond what I’d grown up calling Mom’s creative streak.
I don’t remember it as a crisis. I remember Fleetwood Mac blasting through the house at eleven at night, my mother barefoot and paint-streaked, laughing as she pulled me into a dance in the kitchen while Dad pretended to complain about the noise.
I remember being handed a brush I was far too young to handle, told to make a mess, told that messes were allowed here, that this was the one house in the world where nobody would ever scold me for painting outside the lines.
I was six. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
It took me years to realize it was also the sound of my mother’s mind unraveling.
She pulls out the final canvas. I know, even before she unwraps it, which child this one belongs to. The math only leaves one place to land.
Mine is noticeably smaller than the others.
Muddy brown-gray swallows most of the canvas. Near the center sits a pale shape that might be a swaddled infant, surrounded by jagged lines pulled taut around it.
The others were held, but this one looks contained.
I stare at it.
“That was after you,” Mom says quietly.
“I can tell.”
She watches the painting for a long moment, her thumb hovering above the surface.
“I was officially diagnosed right after Piper. There had been signs for years, but that was when a doctor finally attached a label to it. Then I got pregnant with you. We hadn’t planned it. Your father and I had agreed after Piper that we were done.”
I swallow.
“I was still trying to find the right medication. Still trying to understand what my own brain was doing to me.”
She sets the canvas carefully on the blanket.
“I don’t remember painting this one the way I remember the others, but I remember feeling like I was underwater.
” Her voice gets quieter. “I remember looking at you in your crib and knowing I was supposed to feel something enormous. Knowing I loved you because you were mine, but feeling like I was looking at my own baby through a thick sheet of glass.”
I’ve heard this story before. I know the shape of it.
But I’ve never had the evidence sitting in my lap.
Different illnesses, I think.
Same instinct. Hide the worst of it before anyone else has to carry it.
That realization frightens me more than the painting.
“Mom—”
“Let’s not.” Her hands move faster now as she reaches for the old pillowcases. “Let’s not dig up the past today, Ro.”
I catch her wrist before she can wrap mine. “Can I borrow it?”
She looks at me. “What?”
“My canvas.” I lift it carefully from the blanket. “Can I take it home for a little while?”
Her brow furrows. “Why?”
I look down at the dark paint. “I think…” I pause. “I think I might be able to use it for my show.”
“Rowan, honey, it’s not…” Her mouth tightens. “It isn’t like the others.”
“I know.” The lie comes easily. “That’s what I like about it. The way you layered the darker tones. It gives me some ideas for a new piece.”
I don’t tell her that every time I stare at that tiny, pale baby trapped beneath layers of dark paint, my chest aches.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe I need the pain.
She watches me closely, searching my face for the truth, but I keep my expression neutral.
“If you want it,” she says. “It’s yours anyway.”
I turn my head toward the window and blink hard until the sting in my eyes subsides.
When I look back, she’s already closing the box.
∞∞∞
The medication cabinet sits above the refrigerator, secured with a small combination lock. The only person who doesn’t know the combination is sitting in the living room.
I spin the dial until it clicks open on the final digit.
Inhaling a steadying breath, I stand there with the door ajar.
It’s the same private ritual every time I have to do this.
Water first. Then I count the pills into my palm, lock the cabinet again, and carry everything into the living room.
“You shouldn’t have to do this.”
She offers some variation of that sentence every week.
“I hate that my youngest child has to dole out my medication like I’m a toddler.”
“You’re not a toddler.”
“I just wish things were different.” An edge creeps into her tone. “I wish for once someone would let me manage my own medication.”
“You know why we don’t.”
“I am not a child, Rowan!”
Her hand moves before I realize what she’s doing, knocking the glass from mine.
It catches the corner of the coffee table and shatters, sending water and glass across the rug.
“Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.” She’s already moving forward, reaching for me and the mess at the same time. “I didn’t mean—Rowan, I’m so sorry.”
“Mom, don’t move. There’s glass everywhere.” My hands are shaking as I lower myself to my knees and start gathering the larger pieces. “It’s fine. I promise. Just let me clear this up.”
“I shouldn’t have raised my voice at you.”
“You’re allowed to be frustrated.”
“Not at you.”
I keep my attention fixed on the glass because if I look at her, I’m not sure I can keep it together.
“Never at you,” she whispers.
I set the last large pieces of glass on the coffee table and reach beneath it for the dustpan.
“I’ll get it,” Mom says.
“I’ve got it.”
“Rowan, please.”
“I know you can do it.” I glance up at her. “Please just let me.”
She doesn’t argue again.
By the time I’ve swept the smaller pieces into the dustpan, my composure is beginning to fray, and I have nowhere to put any of it.
Mom waits until I sit back before reaching for me.
“I’m so sorry, Ro.”
She takes my face in both hands, just like she did upstairs, but this time there are tears in her eyes. One slips free as she leans forward and presses a long kiss to my forehead.
“I’m sorry, baby.”
Something tells me she isn’t just apologizing for the broken glass.
I don’t ask.