by Katie Wu

When I was four, my father was in a car accident that left him in a coma. My mother would later say it happened before lunch, but it took her the afternoon to figure out how to tell me. I found out after dinner he probably wouldn’t be home that night, or the next. I was four and dumb, so I made very little of it.

The next day, the doctors declared him brain dead. My mother packed me a peanut butter banana sandwich and we drove to the hospital. For the next five hours, the two of us waited for him to die.

My mother didn’t cry. She set out my favorite coloring book and sat at my father’s bedside. I couldn’t find any crayons so I folded boats and airplanes out of paper towels and the nurse on call brought me a juice box. Before we left, my mother unclasped the turquoise necklace my father had given her on their wedding day and tucked it into her pocket. I hugged my father’s sleeping body, and we slipped out the door.

On the way home, my mother told me that my father was going somewhere, and I shouldn’t be scared, or sad, because it was a place that we all ended up going to someday. It was just something everyone and everything did eventually, sometimes without even really realizing it at all.

Like the bathroom? I said.

My mother looked at me in the rearview mirror. Her gray eyes fogged like storm clouds. Yes, in a way.

I pictured my father perched on top of a giant toilet, waving down at me from the rim of the seat. I knew he was dead. I thought I understood. He had been in a car accident, he hadn’t made it.

And what was more, his exit strategy wasn’t interesting, wasn’t unique. My four-year-old brain was full of battling knights and race cars and dragons and Krakens of the sea, and my father the hero had died in the same beige sedan that drove me to and from school five days a week.

I stopped crying after a few weeks. It was hard to know what I was crying for, anyway—missing him was missing runny strawberry ice cream days in the summer, missing having someone to vault me up to catch snowflakes on my tongue on Christmas morning. Isolated events. Piecing the rest of him together was difficult, and so hard to separate from my mother, who was now suddenly her own person. It wasn’t long before my memories of him frayed at the edges, became weightless, lost in the shuffle of everything else. And before I knew it, my father was a brief appearance—a guest speaker in my childhood schooling. He’d come and gone painlessly, and here I was on the other side.

It was basic arithmetic. My father was a subtraction, one less, and that was the end of it. Death, his death, it wasn’t fair. Just final.

*

It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday evening and my suitemates are in the third hour of a marathon round of video games. I’m sitting on my bed waiting for the phone to ring.

My phone’s had poor reception all night, which gives me hope. There’s a chance Sarah has called, and I didn’t pick up, which breeds hope that she’ll have found me less desperate. The downside is, there’s a chance Sarah has called and I didn’t pick up.

“Okay, okay—I’m winning this time, twentieth time’s the charm,” Christian says with finality. From his other side, Blake passes me a beer. It’s room temperature, and flat. “Dude, she’s not going to call.”

I scowl. “She might.”

Gavin laughs. “Ten bucks says she won’t.”

I don’t take the bet. I’ll lose. “Fuck you.” On cue, my phone rings. I scramble for it, upsetting my beer onto the couch. It seeps into the cushions and the seat of Christian’s pants, but everyone is too absorbed in the game to notice.

But it’s not Sarah. It’s my cousin Juliet, whose number I have only by the sheer coercion of family obligation. I let the phone ring a few times, then answer cautiously. “Hello?”

“Tom!” Her voice is chipper and grating. “Long time, no talk.”

I get off the couch and cross the room, eliciting loud protests from the guys when I walk in front of the TV. Juliet squeaks. “What’s going on?”

“Hang on for a second,” I snap, shutting the door behind me as a muffled roar rises from the group.

Now that I’m in the hall, I don’t actually know where I’m going. So I walk into the bathroom.  It’s a mistake. Half the urinals are already housing the remains of several condoms, floating on the brackish yellow surface like pale dead codfish. It smells like piss and vomit. I head for the sinks, turning the tap on and off as Juliet clears her throat. “You good?” She sounds irritated.

“Yeah, sure, what’s up? I’m kind of busy, I’m waiting for another call…” I’m being an ass, but the remnant probability of Sarah, and sex, is enough to trump Juliet, who I’ve spoken to maybe twice since we were nine. She’s simple. She likes Dawson’s Creek. Poor thing never stood a chance, landed with a dipshit name like Juliet.

“Tom, your mom passed away.”

The faucet is leaky. I wriggle the taps on both sides, hot and cold, but the water continues to run in frantic little dribbles down the drain.

“Tom, did you hear me? Your mom… she’s dead.” Juliet repeats it slowly, carefully, enunciating her vowels.

“I heard you. Yeah.” It makes sense. She hasn’t emailed in a few days. A couple weeks, maybe.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” Juliet says. She keeps saying my name, like some kind of rote incantation. “We were… Dad and I were visiting, you know, since it’s near the holidays and we figured she should be with family…” She stops abruptly and clears her throat.  “Not—not that I mean you had to have been there, ‘cause like, you’re in college and that’s important and stuff…”

I look at myself in the mirror, expecting to see something different than I normally do. Death—the death of a parent—it’s supposed to change you. Be shocking, numbing, life-changing. But in the mirror, it’s just me. Same reflection as always. I need a haircut.

“… She had a seizure this morning and just didn’t wake up.  I know this is really hard to hear.”

“It’s okay, Juliet,” I say. “She was sick. It was… coming.”

“I guess,” she concedes, not bothering to conceal her relief at not having to console me. “Yeah. You’re right.” She pauses. “Still, sorry,” she adds as an afterthought.

Thanking her for her condolences feels silly, so I say nothing. My hands aren’t wet, but I dry them anyway. I scrub the mirror with my paper towel. Still, nothing’s changed.

Juliet’s voice crackles through once more. “So… what are you going to do now? With the cabin, I mean.”

“The cabin.” Our old summer home, where my mother moved six years ago after she stopped being able to walk on her own. It was bad timing; I was feeling temperamental and maladjusted, so I decided to go to boarding school in Massachusetts. To compensate, my mother hired a full time nurse to help her around the house.

“Are you going to sell it? Because we, the family I mean, could really get a lot for it.” Juliet clears her throat for emphasis. “You know?”

I stayed away most summers, finding excuses in flashy internships and pre-college programs. When I did go back, it was hard to make it seem like home. And every time I did, my mother was weaker. I’d boil her tea, help her bathe, bring her the morning paper. She started weeping for no reason, getting anxious over small things. Last Christmas morning she was afraid of me: she’d forgotten who I was. But most days she would just stare out the window, folding little doves out of napkins and pushing them over the sill.

“Or you could keep it, I guess,” Juliet says, taking my silence for disapproval. “It’d be cool. You know. Tom’s Cabin. Ha, ha.”

“What?”

“You know—like the famous book, or movie, whatever… about the slave…”

“You mean Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

“Right, yeah, that. Whatever.”

There’s a pause. I hear Juliet suck in her breath. “So are you going to sell it?”

I hang up.

Same grimy floor, same desecrated urinals. There’s loud music churning in the hallways, screams and drunken karaoke from the floor below. I head back to my room. The door opens with an arthritic creak that I don’t remember being there the last time I used it. Christian, Gavin, and Dan are eating tortilla chips, apparently on a well-deserved break from the battlefield.

Christian fishes his game controller out of the salsa and mutes the game, which is back on the welcome screen. “Well? Are you getting laid?”

I hesitate. Blake has taken the controller from Christian and is scraping salsa off the buttons with a tortilla chip; Gavin is picking his nose. I think, they’re not mature enough for this. “It wasn’t Sarah.”

“Ten bucks!” Gavin crows, reaching up for a high five that no one reciprocates.

I don’t have to tell them. I do anyway. “My mom… she’s not doing too well.” They look at me, unsure. Gavin’s hand sinks downwards. “What I mean is she’s dead. So, I’m probably going home.”

There’s a sharp silence. Then,

“Fuck, man.”

“Dude, you okay?”

“I’m so sorry, man.  That’s really… awful.”

Christian claps me on the shoulder, awkwardly, delicately, like I might shatter.

I sit back down. The room is much quieter now; the chip bowl is empty but no one’s calling for a refill. Gavin hands me another beer without meeting my eye. This time, it’s freezing.

*

I decide to take the rest of the semester off and book a flight home. In a duffel, I pack three boxers, two shirts, a toothbrush, a razor, my phone. Enough for a weekend trip; it’s how long I’ve convinced myself I’ll stay.

It’s a two-hour train ride to the shore, then forty minutes on a bus to reach the cabin, which sits at the edge of a national woodland preserve. Prime real estate that was a stretch to rent as a summer home and a near fortune to purchase. But my mother had wanted to die here. She at least saw that far.

Through the tinted windows of the train, everything looks sharp and bleak. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve come back, but with the seasons moving fast this year, it looks like no time has passed at all. Outside, the grass has already turned its flaming November golden, tousled like the hair of a child by the thick, rattling wind.

The bus leaves me at the edge of the preserve, and I walk the final quarter mile to my mother’s home. The cabin sits on a little cliff, tucked behind a grove of old pine. It’s a beautiful spot, really. You can see the sea, the forest, the speckled white beaches shedding coats of sand into the foaming surf. I pause for a moment to look at the ocean. Its surface is shimmering, motionless, thin and taut like the skin of a drum. Above it, the air smells like salt and sand and seals. Home. Kind of.

I know when I open the door, Addy will be there. I’ve been waiting for myself to be nervous about this fact, but it hasn’t yet hit me. It’s been years since I’ve really let myself think about her.

She was twenty, four years my elder, when we hired her sister as my mother’s full-time nurse. When her sister decided to get her M.D., Addy, who’d gotten her own nursing degree by then, took over. During the day, she cooked, cleaned, changed my mother’s bedpans, wheeled her from room to room. She was efficient and cheery, which was enough for my mother. What’s more, she expected only minimal contributions—boiling water, loading the dishwasher, reading the paper to my mother—from me. I skittered around my mother’s illness while Addy cleaned up after the both of us.

We became friends, at first only out of convenience. The age difference was a little crippling; the matter of her employment made things worse. But we somehow managed to push it aside. Looking back on those years, I can barely comprehend how Addy pulled it off—how she made me laugh, how she made me forget I was an angsty kid with a sick mom and a crappy attitude. She was, in a way, a blessing.

She also had fantastic tits.

There’s a key we always keep under the mat. For emergency purposes. It’s a stupid place to keep it—the first place anyone trying to break in would look—but it’s there all the same. It’s cold and grimy on one side from the hard earth, clean and neat on the other, which faced the nylon doormat. I open the door hesitatingly, like a stranger. Addy’s at the sink. She watches me shut the latch behind me; she heard me coming.

I take a breath. “Addy.”

She smiles, sadly, as she must. “Tom.”

*

That night, we make soup. Or rather, Addy makes soup while I stand uncomfortably behind the stove and tell her stop, you really don’t uh have to you know, cook for me, because. She’s wearing jeans and a green blouse just tight enough to reveal the slight outline of her bra beneath the cotton. I am incredibly—uncomfortably—aware that I am still attracted to her.

She ladles out a bowl for me, nervously. It’s an old recipe of my mom’s—a fish stew she made for me a lot when I was little. You could say it was a comfort food—something I’d always have after a rainy day at soccer practice, on snow days when we’d snooze in front of the television. It’s been years, but the minute I see it, I know it hasn’t come out right. The smell’s off, the color’s too light. I don’t tell her this. I hardly care.

“I know it’s not as good as your mom’s, but… I figured you might be missing it. I remember you loved this stuff.” She smiles, a careful quarter of a smile that casts a fleeting shadow on her jaw. She’s unsure. Not embarrassed; she won’t be, even if it’s inedible. Addy doesn’t really do embarrassed.

I laugh, a little more dryly than I might have intended. “Thanks, but I think I’ve been over it for a while. She hasn’t made it since I was twelve.”

Addy shrugs and dips a spoon into the pot. “All the better for me, then. Maybe you won’t notice the difference.” She sips at the spoon, cautiously, puckering her bottom lip, and gives me a reassuring smile. “God, I always tried to cook like your mom, but I could never pull it off.  Anyway, like I said… I just wanted this place to feel like home for you again.”

We eat in silence. The soup isn’t my mother’s, really, but it’s not bad—in fact, it’s pretty good. Just different. I watch Addy, sneaking glances as she studies her bowl. I haven’t seen her in almost three years, the summer before I left for college. She hasn’t changed; even her hair is the same dark auburn, parted on the left, always worn down. I remember wanting to sleep with her, badly. That feeling isn’t gone, but it’s lighter now, a little more inconsequential. We’ve barely spoken since I walked in the door three hours ago. I didn’t let her hug me, and I don’t think she was expecting me to.

“Tom—how are you doing?” She asks it abruptly; I can tell she’s been waiting for the right moment. This still isn’t it. She glances at me cautiously, then tries to make amends. “I—it’s a dumb question. Obviously, shitty.” She hesitates. “Your mom was fine, I mean, she’d been doing really well… there was this one week last month where she was lucid almost the entire time. She talked about you a lot. And you know, she was always so happy when you called, or when you emailed.”

I frown, scrape my spoon over the little gritty puddles at the bottom of my bowl. “I should’ve more. Emailed, I mean.” My mother had written me at least twice a week, every week I was away from home. Every time she was lucid she would want to call or write. They were long, heartfelt emails about the cabin, the beautiful sea, how she wished I were here with her to enjoy life. I wrote three line responses, always the same thing with mildly different wording: hi, I am good/healthy/fine/happy, glad things are fine back home, miss you write again soon, love tom. College, books, girls—they seemed out of place in that conversation. Not because they were trivial, though they were. Just distant. My mother had always been a completely separate sphere of my life, and it seemed perverse to violate those boundaries, even for the sake of typed intimacy.

“No—I mean, she knew you were busy.” Addy looks prepared to mop up a torrent of gushing tears, and I feel suddenly bare. It’s a tight, ugly sensation in my chest that I immediately despise.

“I’m fine, Addy, really. You don’t need to do this.”

“Talk to you?”

“No. You don’t have to give me unnecessary compassion. It is what it is. I’m sorry she’s gone. But I’m okay.”

She looks at me, waiting for me to recant my words. A flicker of something—relief, maybe—passes over her face when I don’t. Her eyes meander over to my mouth.

“Oh—Tom, you’ve got some soup on your—” She reaches over, almost instinctively, and dabs my chin with her napkin. And it’s this—the physical contact, the maternal gesture—that makes something in me snap. I flinch away from her, pushing off from the table so sharply that I send my silverware clattering to the floor. Flecks of soup spatter the rug, seeping like brilliant crimson blood into the little fibers wound tight beneath my feet.

I look at Addy and feel a powerful, insatiable need for her. To lay my head on her chest, let her run her fingers through my hair. I want to fuck her, but even more so, I want to watch her pleasure herself, run her hands down her stomach, between her legs—her perfect body, unblemished by disease or death or sorrow.

I shut my eyes and take a breath. Addy’s staring at me like a cornered cat, eyes wide and cautious. I stand, and a shudder runs through my body like a sip of something unexpectedly frozen. “Sorry,” I say. I walk out of the kitchen, down the hall, into my old bedroom.

*

My mother is undressing herself in front of the mirror. I watch her from the doorway, timidly, as she unbuttons her blouse. I am seven years old.

Her face is slate; nothing moves but her eyes, quick and flashing like the scales of a fish. She examines her breasts as they appear over the descending collar of her shirt, touches the outline of her bra. Her collarbone is prominent, highlighted in the light. I have pictured my mother naked, innocently—simply as a comparison to my own nakedness in the tub or between changes of clothing. Girls and boys are different. But I do not expect the wrinkles, the pale white skin beneath the brilliant blue of her blouse.

I came looking for her when I woke up and found her bed empty. But this creature I have discovered is not my mother: everything I see before me is foreign, pale pink and soft like a molting creature from the sea. I am petrified and enraptured all at once. Do not move, my feet say. I cannot move myself.

She finishes unbuttoning, but does not remove, her blouse. Next, she slips quietly out of her loose tan slacks and sits, legs tucked beneath her, on the floor. She looks small: in this position, she is nearly my height. And though she thinks she is alone, her arms still twitch forward subconsciously to shield her body.

She continues to examine herself, shyly. Her hands touch each part of her body at least once, a soft, lingering brush of the fingertips, as if making contact with tabooed artifacts. Her eyes rage, and I am afraid she will cry, as she has not dared to do since the funeral.

For a moment, she pauses, hands pasted to her stomach. I feel myself unfreeze a little; I picture her getting dressed, coming to find me spying at the door. But as I watch, she unfreezes as well. With her eyes trained onto the ground—as if she is scared to look—she extends her right hand in front of her, as if reaching out to someone in the mirror I cannot see. She stares at her fingers, at this mysterious person on the other side of the glass, watching, waiting.

It’s slight at first. I don’t even notice until she inhales sharply. A mild quake in her fingertips, juddering up through her wrists. She snaps her hand back into a fist as if burned, clutching her hand to her bare chest. The folds of her blouse cave in around her like a shielding cloak.

With a gasp of defeat, my mother buries her face in her hands, not crying, not even making a sound—just shielding her eyes. Almost immediately, I feel my own discomfort, seeing my mother sick, seeing my mother vulnerable without her permission. I think of my mother laughing, of my mother holding hands with my father. Mother brave, Mother strong, Mother whole. The scared woman in the room, huddled before the mirror, violates any notion of have yet formed of parenthood. And I realize for the first time what it’s like to feel a little older.

The heat burns back into my legs; I scuffle out of the doorway and slip away before she can notice I’ve even snuck in at all.

*

I decide not to hold a service. My mother’s only living family other than me is Juliet and her drunk father, and it hardly seems worth it to bring them out here just to haggle over a selling price for the cabin.

Addy and I bury her in a cemetery that overlooks the sea, just as she wanted. I see my mother’s face once before it disappears beneath the coffin lid, gray and set like a photograph. I cry for the first time since her death, but they feel like an involuntary front. I am disembodied, watching some disheveled doppelganger of myself weep in an ugly suit I fished out of a closet at the last minute. I wonder when the tears will end, how they even began. As an incentive for sorrow, I try to think back to some happy memory of my mother and me, but all there I get is a whining tightness in my chest that squeezes once, twice, and leaves me just as I was. By the end, all I’ve managed to come up with is relief that it’s finally over for the both of us.

As her coffin descends into the earth, I feel there’s something else too, a weighty soreness at the back of my head that I suspect is the beginning of grief. But I don’t know grief. And because I can’t quite place it, the emotion doesn’t bother to linger.

 

On the way home from the cemetery, I ask Addy to stay for a few days, to help me sort out my mother’s affairs, what’s left of them. I offer to pay her, but she scowls in disgust and I don’t push the matter.

“Let’s just start with her bedroom,” I suggest the minute we’re back. I feel hollow and I don’t like it. If I come across a picture of my mother and cry, I might get to feel a little more human again.

Addy stares at me. “Are you sure you’re ready? We just buried your mom like, half an hour ago.”

“Yeah, no, I’m fine,” I say, nodding vigorously. I feel cartoonish. “Let’s just start, get this over with.”

We begin with the bedrooms. When she moved here permanently, my mother quietly claimed the guest bedroom that overlooked the far side of a little ocean cliff. The master bedroom, where my parents used to sleep when we spent summers here, hasn’t been lived in for nearly two decades. Now it’s a storage space, jammed to the corners with boxes and rolled up rugs and odd ugly furniture that didn’t belong.

“Jesus,” Addy whistles. “What are you going to do with all of this?”

I laugh bitterly. “What else? Get rid of it. I mean, what would I do with it? I don’t want it.”

“Okay,” she says carefully. She picks her way through the room as if wading through a reef and pulls a large box off the shelf. “But this stuff… it was your parents’ life. You should at least take a look at the family stuff before you sell it all.” She peels the yellowed tape off the flaps and peers inside. “I mean, god. Look at this stuff—this is old. It’s valuable.” She sets the first box down on the floor and reaches for the one next to it.

“Addy,” I say helplessly, “It’s all useless stuff, don’t…” But it’s too late. Out comes a set of beautiful long-stemmed candles, a set of first edition books that look like they could be from the 1800s, some willow-patterned china, a beautiful set of silver spoons that I recognize from my grandparents’ old home, and my mother’s turquoise necklace. Addy immediately takes the necklace out of its casing and runs her fingers over the turquoise, eyes sparkling. “Wow, Tom. Was this your mom’s? It’s so beautiful. I don’t know why she didn’t wear it more often.”

I scuff my heels crankily against a small box at my feet. “My dad gave it to her,” I mumble. “She stopped wearing it after he died.”

Addy’s face crumples. “Oh, that’s so sad. It must have hurt so much, seeing it just sitting there in its box…”

“Yeah, I bet,” I cut in. I crouch down to open the box I’ve been kicking as noisily as I possibly can, peeling the tape off in a loud, slow screech. I just want her to stop talking. I don’t know why my mother stopped wearing the necklace. For all I know, she didn’t even like it. Maybe she only wore it to please my father, and then after he croaked, it was goodbye to marital obligation.

“Oh, wow, Tom—this box.” Addy hops over the wall of cardboard between us and reaches into the box I’ve opened. In my surly tantrum I haven’t even bothered to look inside; it’s filled with notebooks and yearbooks and photos of my parents from when they were young. There’s even one of me as an infant. I look like a slimy, pink little alien shaking its fists at the camera.

Addy grabs my baby picture and bursts out laughing. “My god. This is great. I want this one—I’ll keep it and tell people this was my boss taking a shit.” I can’t help but smile too as I try to pry the photo out of her fingers. Addy rolls away from me, holding it out of reach, and grins back at me victoriously. Her eyes are a late autumn green. My heart pounds a little. I want to pull her face closer and kiss her, but I don’t, I won’t, not over a box full of dead mommy and dead daddy. I drag my eyes away from her, down to my nails, which I start to pick at guiltily.

“Whatever, screw you,” I say, forcing a laugh. “What else is in here?”

With my photo safely stashed in her bag, Addy dives back into the box and pulls out a photo of my mother and father. They look to be about in their early twenties, maybe a few years before they got married. With his arms around my mother’s waist, my father looks confident and happy; he hasn’t shaved in days.

Addy reaches back to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear, like my mother is doing in the photo. Other than that, they look nothing alike. Addy’s hair is a straight caramel brown, my mother’s still rich and yellow, whipping around her head as she laughs. She seems mildly embarrassed by the photograph: her other hand is waving the camera away. My mother used to always laugh like that—like she was surprised at her own joy. It only made her laugh harder.

When Addy laughs, she is always sure.

“God, they look so young,” Addy murmurs, running her fingers along the frame of the photograph. “Your mom’s gorgeous, Tom. You should keep this.” She slips the photo out of its frame. Someone, probably my father, has scrawled on the back: “Pearl Beach Aug 83.” They were twenty-five. Addy’s age. I don’t recognize my parents like this, and the thought of keeping the photo seems disruptive to memory. I take it anyway, just to make Addy smile.

We spend the next three days straight moving boxes, clearing a path to the older stuff in the back. Piles appear in the living room, organized by year and utility. Most of what we find is typical: old plates and silverware, photos and textbooks, cassettes and a radio, boxes and boxes of eighties clothing. But we also come across a box of funny hats and waste an afternoon in front of the bathroom mirror, only making things worse when Addy drags over what looks like the costume set from Grease.

Being with Addy makes things bearable. The heaviness and confusion of everything seems so much more distant when I talk to her. Because in spite of everything, she’s still a tourist here. She cared for my mother, but her affection was necessarily muted by hierarchy. For Addy, this death and this house are all just a part of passing through this shit town. Being with her makes it easier to take everything less seriously. The lighter perspective is foreign, almost abrasively so, and it’s refreshing.

If I’m brave enough to consider my mother—consider her absence—all I come up with is shallow, frustrated confusion. My mind has emptied all but two of its beakers, and someone keeps siphoning water out of the Addy beaker and dribbling it into my mother’s. A careful, steady dilution: my feelings, whatever they are, towards my mother diminish as those for Addy—platonic, romantic, whatever—grow more and more concentrated by the minute.

It’s easy to settle back into the old familiar of our friendship. It’s not sex, or any kind of intimacy. But it’s a relief to not feel like I need it.

*

The night we finally finish, Addy and I get drunk. We unload a box of fluffy pillows with artsy fruit patterns on them and sprawl out on the porch with an assortment of alcoholic beverages we unearthed from the corners of the cabin: red wine, a few beers, and, unfathomably, an ancient bottle of rum.

We talk for a while, mostly about nothing. Addy puts her head on my shoulder. “What are you thinking about?”

I stare at the lights from the next city over flickering across the ocean water. “I don’t know. Everything. Nothing. All that shit, in those boxes. I can’t tell what year I’m in anymore.”

Addy laughs thickly. She’s a messy drunk. “You need to get out of this house.”

“Uh huh. And go where? The post office? Or the movie theater in, in, fuck, it’s like three towns away.” I feel wonderfully foggy. It’s amazing, not having to think about what I’m saying.

“No, no, let’s go… out there.” She points to the darkness before us, stretching into the glinting woods.

“There?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Okay.” I get up and follow her, stumbling down the porch steps. She waits for me at the bottom, grinning. Then, almost gracefully, she peels off her jeans and her top and sprints down the path.

“Hey!” I call after her. My voice echoes off the trees, and I run after her, tripping over myself until I’ve caught her around the waist.

We strip off the rest of our clothes and streak into the woods, howling like animals. The dirt is sharp with pine needles and rocks beneath my feet, but soon we’re running fast enough that it hardly matters.

We are insane, inhuman. The shame I should feel dies in some fiery hole in my chest, replaced by the thrill of abandoning civilization, of letting loose every ugly dark confused emotion I’ve had in the past week. Fuck death, fuck misery. Fuck everything.

We reach a ledge, barely catching ourselves in time. The surf rages below us, spraying the rocks with brilliant, heady white foam. We heave in gulps of air, collecting salt on our tongues. I grab Addy’s hand and drag us to the very edge. My toes grip the rock; it’s sharp, a true edge that cuts into my joints. I can see all my knuckles going white.

“Do it,” I say.

“What—”

“Do it, jump!”

“No!”

“Together, on three, we’re jumping, one.”

“You’re crazy—”

“Two.”

“Tom.”

“Three!”

“Fuck!”

“Fuck!”

We scream together as we launch over the edge. “FUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKKK!”

The water slams us unforgivingly, smacking our flailing limbs. I go under, far deeper than I’d been sober enough to expect. When I break the surface, a wave smashes against the side of my head and I gulp in mouthfuls of freezing, powerfully briny water. To my left, Addy resurfaces, shrieking and laughing. “Oh my god, oh my god!”

We throw our heads back and wail into the night, screaming until we’re hoarse—because it’s freezing, because we’ve each swallowed a pint of filthy ocean water, because my mother’s dead and we’re fucking alive and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

I catch my breath, abruptly sobered, and swim clumsily in Addy’s direction. She waits for me, treading water evenly beneath the inky waves. My arms snake around her—she’s naked, we both are—I’ve barely understood this properly. We’re human again, sentient, but it’s too late and too useless to be self-conscious.

I stare unabashedly at her, the curve of her waist, the space between her legs. Her body is every bit as beautiful as I could have imagined.

Addy wriggles out of my grasp, splashing me. She curls her legs back into her body and dives forward. I catch her by the shoulders and she wraps her arms around my neck, laughing and spraying my face with water. I pull her in closer and kiss her hard. She melts into me, pressing herself up against my chest, legs kicking fast in the churning water. I run my fingers up between her breasts, skimming her collarbone, feeling the faint beating of her heart chiming dissonantly against the sound of the surf.

My hands are inept in the water. Somehow I muster up the courage to trail my fingers down her back. Heat churns through my blood and I tread water more confidently, making the two of us more easily buoyant. Addy sighs into my mouth, and I’m braver, brave enough to run my hands forward, over her hip, down a little trail to rest on her thigh. But as if on a trigger, she gasps and pulls away sharply, sending a rush of salty water into my eyes and mouth.

“Oh god, no.” She shakes her head, swimming away from me in fast, pumping strokes. “No, no. Bad idea.”

“Addy, wait,” I say helplessly. I don’t follow her, but she’s stopped only a few feet away.

“Tom, we can’t.” She’s catching her breath and her sentences are clipped and rushed. “We’re drunk, and we’re out in the middle of the ocean… your mom just died, you just left school, you’re not thinking clearly…” She trails off.

I stare at her dumbly. Her hair, stained black by the water, fans around us, a shimmering vacuum. We’re both breathing hard. We’d forgotten to fight the current and drifted closer to shore. I can see the edge of the cliff we jumped off of, a triangular point cutting into the sky above us.

I want to say, I’m fine. I want to say, you’re making a mistake. But instead, I just keep looking at her, and she gazes back at me with pitying eyes.

Finally, she says, “I’m sorry, Tom.” And that’s it.

She swims away from me in a contained breaststroke, her bottom bobbing in and out of the water. I want to scream after her, tell her she’s a bitch, tell her I’m furious about being left buck-naked in the ocean with my last set of clean clothes strewn god knows where in the forest. It’s my own damn fault. I feel stupid, sick, guilty, like a kid caught crapping in the pool at grandma’s birthday party. The humiliation is crippling. It’s all I can do to keep treading water in the thrashing waves, keep myself afloat against the current. Give myself a moment to catch my breath.

*

After my father died, I spent nearly every night of the next year in my mother’s bed. I lay awake beside her, listening to her snore lightly under the covers. I wondered if she noticed the difference, now that it was her son next to her and not her husband. A lighter weight, less contact. There was simply less of me; it made it easy, to forget.

Sometimes she would have nightmares, ones that would make her seize and writhe. It terrified me to see fear in my mother. I would shake her until she woke, tell her she’d been dreaming again. Each time she would emerge as if breaching the surface of a pool, breathing in thick gulps of air. She would stare at me as if for the first time. I was foreign to her in those moments; I would wonder if she dreamt of my father, of his death, of hers or mine.

But then, as if I had been the frightened one, she would spend the next half hour stroking my hair and singing me back to what I convinced her was sleep. Most of the time she’d simply doze off, fingers still entwined in the soft hairs at the nape of my neck. I would lie there for hours, bathing in the static of her touch, staring into the darkness of our broken home.

*

I wake up the next morning with cottonmouth and the ghost of a hangover. The night before comes crashing down on me and I curse under the covers. I figure I’ll have to face her sooner than later, and drag myself into the hallway with the resignation that I’ll act as normal as possible and hope she catches on quick.

Addy is reading Rebecca on the couch with her bare feet propped up on the coffee table.

“Good book?” I say.

She starts, banging her heel against the table. “Oh—uh, yeah, yeah it is.” She smiles cautiously. “Your mom gave it to me. It was her favorite.”

“I know,” I say, annoyed that she assumes I don’t. My mother’s favorite book. It belongs on her nightstand, where it’s been ever since I can remember—or with me. Not with Addy, never with Addy.

Addy gives me a reproachful glance, then looks me over and raises an eyebrow. I’ve forgotten to put on pants.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Addy. Part of me is still angry, but I’m not sure at what anymore. I try and place the feeling. It’s not the sex, or lack thereof, that much I know. But beyond that, all I have is a displaced anger rocketing around inside my head. Addy has barely looked up from my mother’s book. Until now I haven’t realized how much I expected her to apologize, at least be as wretched and uncomfortable as me. The casual interaction I’d pictured before now seems silly and naïve; her indifference rakes at me. I snatch at a few of the boxes in the living room, going for a particularly heavy one that I half hope will fall and make a lot of noise.

“I was thinking I’d make French toast when you woke up,” she says cheerily. “I forget, do you hate French toast? You hate something. Belgian waffles?”

I shove my hand in the box and rattle it around. It’s the expensive heirloom box with the books and the spoons and the candles. But it’s not really clunking in the way I want.

“I’m hungry, though. What do you think? I can just make pancakes. Everyone likes pancakes, right?” Addy shuts her book at looks up at me. “What are you doing?”

I pull the box off its pile and begin to sort through its contents. The books. The candles. The willow-patterned china. My mother’s necklace, in its velvet case. The spoons are missing.

“Addy, where are the spoons?”

Something flickers across her face. “What?”

“The spoons, Addy. The silver spoons that were in this box yesterday.” I dig through the box more vigorously, now just for the hell of it; I know they’re not going to appear. And I’m starting to have a sneaking idea of where I’ll find them. “I put them in here myself, next to these books, and my mom’s necklace, and these candles. Where are they?”

“I don’t—I don’t know, Tom—”

“You took them.” I say it simply. She doesn’t meet my eye. “So.” My voice gets louder, angrier, and I let it. I storm over to where she sits, still holding my mother’s copy of Rebecca. “Where the fuck—” I grab the book out of her hands and hurl it across the room. It lands with a wet smack in the sink, catapulting a dirty spatula onto the dining table. “Are they?”

I storm into the kitchen and start to tear drawers open. I’m hardly looking where my hands go, and it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Whatever I touch I fling aside. Things break and it feels incredibly empowering. I go to the door and fling Addy’s coats aside, kicking them away from me with my feet. I am insane, running around the room throwing things in the air screaming about spoons. Addy has followed me, and stands behind me with a sad little pitying look in her eyes.

And I know. I go to the couch, grab her bag, tear it open. The spoons, still in their worn wooden case, are inside. I wrench them out and fling her bag into the fireplace, where it lands in a smothering puff of ash.

I turn on her. The anger has built on itself productively within me, multiplying, dividing, running its spawn to my hands. I undo the clasp of the box and the spoons spill onto the floor. “Why did you take them?” I ask her, evenly. My voice wavers. I want so badly to scream again.

“Tom, calm down,” she says.

I laugh crazily. “Calm down. Calm down—you stole from me. To, what, make some extra cash? What were you going to do, run out of here and never come back? Make a fortune off some ancient dessert spoons that my grandma ate pudding with?”

She doesn’t look afraid of me. I hadn’t expected her to. She says, “Come on, Tom.”

I shake my head. “No. Why did you take them?”

She just looks at me, her green eyes glinting. They don’t look so charming now, pained and pitying like this; they look false, bland.

I pick up the case and hurl it against the wall next to me; it splinters and cracks down the middle. Addy winces. “Are you that pathetic—you’re stealing from a dead woman now?” I snarl. The words echo painfully in the room. It’s the first time I’ve said it to her face—dead, dead, deaddeaddead.

“Tom,” she says evenly. “Don’t overreact, okay? It’s not like you would’ve done anything with them, or…” She hesitates before continuing.  “She’s gone, Tom, and none of that stuff in attic—none of it—seemed like anything you cared about.”

I stare at her, trying to decipher what she means.  She’d always idolized my mother in a strange way; she was both a caretaker and a daughter, both sides of the relationship my mother had failed to forget with me.  It’s as if she was peeling me open and picking out the parts of me that still tie me to my mother, as if they never belonged at all.

“Besides,” she says, more coldly this time. “This isn’t just about the spoons, and you know it.”

She catches me so off guard I almost forget to be angry. “What?”

“I didn’t sleep with you. I’m sorry. You were hurting, and I left you vulnerable, but—”

“Christ, Addy, you can be so self-centered! This has nothing to do with that!”

She gives me a look. “Come on, Tom,” she says again, coaxingly. I feel like an insolent child, being scolded gently for asking for an unreasonable amount of ice cream after dinner.

I look at the spoons, languishing between us. They’re tiny and fragile, hardly even appropriate for stirring sugar into tea. The stem of one is already chipped and bent. Pretty, worthless things.

I grab the broken case and clench it hard in my hands. Little flecks of wood embed themselves in my skin like little teeth; I squeeze harder, force them into my blood. I want to hurl the case at Addy, smash her skull in, watch her scream—anything to wipe that look off her face. I’m in control. She doesn’t get to pity me—fuck her, the spoons.

I hurl the case, banking it left. Its trajectory is headed far from her, but Addy squeals and ducks all the same. The case smashes against a decorative urn over the mantel and it shatters across the floor, pinging against the hardwood like the plucked keys of an untuned piano. Dust settles across the floor, eerily ashen; the urn was empty, but I can’t help but feel as though I’ve actually tarnished the remains of the deceased. Addy eyes are fixed, unblinking, on the fragments of ceramic scattered at her feet. For the first time, she looks afraid.

And I can’t help it. I laugh. I laugh at Addy and her fear, at the ruined kitchen and the things I’ve strewn across the floor, broken against the wall. I laugh at my own cowardice, at my mother’s death and how little it really changed things at all, at how I can’t even accept my own morality and how it clashes with bravery and sorrow. I stumble over to the box of precious things, still gasping with laughter, and pull out my mother’s necklace.

Now Addy looks completely petrified. As I approach her, she takes a few lurching steps backwards, as if afraid I’ll attack. I give her a twisted smile and hold out the necklace, free from its case. “Take it.”

“What?” Her voice is small. I’ve never seen her unsure before—meek, cowering. But I no longer feel empowered. Just tired. And I realize I don’t care.

“Look, I broke your prize.” I laugh again, haltingly this time. “Go ahead. Take this. Wear it, sell it, I couldn’t care less.”

She continues to stare at me, worried I’m baiting her.

“Honestly. Take it.” I shake the necklace, and the turquoise clinks plaintively at her.

“I, I couldn’t,” she says uncertainly. But her hand is already inching unconsciously towards mine. I see her fingers flex with yearning.

I shake my head in frustration. “Yes, you can. I’m entirely sure that you can.” I toss the necklace onto the table. It hits the wood with a clack and slides to the opposite site, dangling innocently over the edge. The stones waver back and forth, as if it’s considering whether or not to take a plunge. “Just take it,” I say wearily. “And leave. Please.” I put my hands up. I concede. “I really, really don’t care.”

She does the easy thing. Slips the necklace into her pocket, takes her things, walks out the door. She leaves the spoons, broken and sullied amidst the fractured remains of the urn.

She shuts the door quietly. And I know she won’t think of me again.

*

I wake up in my mother’s bed at five in the morning. It’s freezing, and the room is wonderfully warm, but I pull on a coat and head outside. The ocean is like glass in the early light, almost fiery in the way it shines. From the porch, I exhale, watching my breath fog, then dissipate over the lawn.

I walk to my mother’s bedroom window. From the outside, the room still looks well lived in—as if my mother will come take her place at the window any moment. At my feet, there’s still a small pile of seven paper doves, cracked and yellow from the dew. They never made it past the crabgrass, beaks tipped down into the dirt in a display of defeat.

As the wind picks up, three of the doves tumble forward, haphazardly, onto the toes of my boots. Their little wings beat against my laces, crinkling from the force. I pick them up. The first two are larger and more impressive than the third, their wings more carefully constructed, their tails and beaks folded meticulously to perfect points. They looks a couple weeks older—more grayed, more chapped from the wind and rain—than their partner, which more resembles the confused first product of a child.

These two I release first. The wind whips them up and they part from each other almost immediately. The doves careen upwards, bucking back and forth in the currents, billowing over the steely water. It’s only a few seconds before I lose sight of them, drawn into the thick creamy white of the rising sun.

From between my fingers, the third dove rattles thinly in the wind, as if desperate to join them. I press it flat and slip it into my coat pocket, exchanging it for the cabin key. Addy still has hers, but she won’t be back. This one was my mother’s. I walk back around the house, slowly, careful to tread on the same path I took before, until I reach the front door. The key is still warm from my palms as I slip it under the mat, leaving everything just as it was before.

 

 

Tags: Katie Wu, Volume 6 Issue 1