The Mother's Promise(7)
“After everything I’ve done for them, he turns around and tells me to give Audrey some space! He says she needs to get used to being alone with the baby. Can you believe it? I’m the grandma! Every girl needs her mother around when she has her first baby.”
Alice wondered if she had a point here. She would have loved to have had her mother around when Zoe was a baby, but she died while Alice was pregnant. Seven months from diagnosis to death.
“Audrey had said nothing of the sort, obviously. That’s how I know he’s interfering. She would have told me if she wanted time alone.”
“Would she though, Mary?” Mrs. Featherstone asked.
“Of course she would. She’s my daughter. Mothers and daughters don’t have secrets. They have a soul connection. Right, Alice?”
Alice stood, a limp lettuce in her hand.
“Anyway, I told him he had no right to tell me what to do with my own daughter—no right at all—not after the way I’ve supported them,” Mary continued before Alice could speak. “Emotionally not to mention financially. I actually have a good mind to cut them off. See how they’d do then! Audrey, she’d be lost without me. She couldn’t function…”
The lettuce rolled off Alice’s hand, onto the floor, landing with a thud.
“Alice?” she heard Mrs. Featherstone say. “Alice? Are you all right, dear?”
Mothers and daughters don’t have secrets.…
She’d be lost without me.…
She couldn’t function.…
Alice wanted to respond but she couldn’t make her mouth comply. She took a breath and tried again, but all at once it hit her—a profound sense of horror. She caught her reflection in the window. Her arms were wrapped around her middle and she rocked like a woman going mad.
6
Ten minutes before lunchtime Zoe put up her hand. The class had broken into groups to discuss an assignment, so there was a general hum of noise in the room, which made it slightly more bearable. Still, with her hand in the air, she felt under a spotlight, onstage. Like a thousand bugs were crawling on her.
“Yes, Zoe?” Mr. Crew said when he finally noticed her. It had taken at least a minute, which wasn’t even close to a record. She made it easy for people to not know that she existed.
“Can I use the restroom?” she said in a small voice.
Mr. Crew tapped his ear as though he were trying to shake something loose. “I’m getting deafer every year. What did you say?”
“The restroom,” Zoe repeated, mortified. “I need to go.”
It was the catch-22 she dealt with every day. She could use the bathroom at lunchtime with a bunch of people right outside the door (torture), or put up her hand and ask to go during class (also torture). Some days she’d do neither and instead wait until she got home. But today she really needed to pee.
“There’s ten minutes until lunchtime, Zoe,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Can’t you wait?”
A few kids glanced up from their desks. Zoe shrank down in her seat. “Uh, no,” she whispered. “I can’t.”
He rolled his eyes. “Fine. Go ahead.”
She could feel everyone’s eyes on her back as she walked out. She could also hear their thoughts. Why is she so weird? Why does she blush so much? Why does she always need to pee? For the zillionth time Zoe yearned to be invisible.
She used the stall at the end, the one with the sink inside so she didn’t have to look in the mirror as she washed her hands. She’d taken to avoiding mirrors ever since she’d reached puberty and her breasts had failed to get the memo. Mercifully, she hadn’t fallen victim to the cruel acne that resided on every second teenager’s chin and nose, but she had been cursed with an abnormally large forehead, something she’d hoped was all in her mind until last week, when she’d dropped five bucks in the cafeteria and someone had called after her, “Yo, forehead, you dropped your cash!” When she’d asked Emily, “Do I have a giant forehead?,” Emily had frowned and said, “I mean … you do have a bit of a Rihanna thing going on. But it’s cuuute!” Emily once called a pimple “cuuute,” so Zoe wasn’t reassured.
Zoe walked ridiculously slowly back to class. The bell would go any minute and she could live without the spectacle of walking in again. At these kinds of times she yearned for a Klonopin. Just one sweet tablet to make everything—if not okay, better. But the problem with anxiety was that you worried about everything, including taking medication. What if the pills made her do strange things, what if she became addicted? The debate had culminated in a full-blown panic attack two weeks after the Klonopin had been prescribed, as she stood in the bathroom, bottle in hand, debating whether to take it. (Since then the bottle had remained in her bathroom cabinet, for emergencies.) Therapy had ended in a similar way—hello? One-on-one conversation; it had made Zoe so anxious she’d forced her mom to let her discontinue it over a year ago.
And so she steeled herself.
Lunchtime was, hands down, the worst part of Zoe’s day every day, but today was made crueler by the fact that Emily was meeting her in the cafeteria rather than at the stairs where they normally met. Zoe felt absurdly self-conscious as she slunk through the hallway. Was she walking too slouchily? Too straight? Was her fly undone? Her T-shirt tucked into her undies? Were people looking at her giant forehead? It was bad enough walking in with Emily, but going alone was a kind of torture.