Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(44)

My mother holds my hand in the hospital bed. This is not a private hospital room fragrant with roses. Rows of bodies are being resuscitated all around us—thin sheets hanging between each one. We look at each other, knowing. There is no coming back from this. This time is different.

Back home, my Auntie T offers to adopt me. She shows me a website for Wylie High, in Abilene, Texas. You’ll have me and your cousins there, she says. You’ll make friends. You just have a year and a half left of high school. Think about it, she says. We have a nice church, and great hamburgers.

I’m not leaving her, I say.

I tell my father about this offer, hoping he’ll take me to live with him in New York.

You could like Texas, he says. Jesus people can be nice. Maybe you could use some nice.

The doctors send my mother home with pamphlets for treatment centers. They all look like hospitals to me—hospitals with palm trees, and yellow doors, and smiling people on lawn chairs. Be the best that you can be! one pamphlet reads.

Back at home, my family preps me on the speech I am supposed to give. You’re the only one who can do it. They will stand behind me while I speak, they say, and I am supposed to lie. I open my mother’s door and approach the bed. The room is dark, but I still walk around The Spot, as I will call it for the next twelve years, until this house burns down.

MomMom, I say. I need to tell you something.

She nods. She doesn’t speak. She knows what’s coming—we’ve been through this before. I can barely see her in the dark like this, just the shine of her pupils. I can hear her jade ting against her Hawaiian name bracelet.

I’m moving to Texas. I’m enrolling in Wylie High. I’m going to go to church, I say.

She nods.

I need to leave you, I say. I can’t be alone anymore.

She nods. I wonder if she believes me.

It hurts, I say. I tap a finger at my heart.

I know, she nods. When you hurt I hurt.

No one can hurt you the way a mother can. No one can love you the way a mother can.

My father and I drop her off at a treatment center later the same day. We walk through the yellow doors and say our good-byes as doctors take her vitals, ask her to open her mouth for a fat popsicle stick. This is the first time I check my mother into rehab, though it won’t be the last. The next time will be just after my father dies, and I’ll be wearing his monogramed shirt; I’ll sit in the seat he takes right now as he sandwiches my mother’s hand in both of his, saying, You’ve got this, baby.

When the doctors ask her to announce her drugs of choice, my mother lists them off, quietly. Embarrassed, I think. She rubs her arms like she’s freezing, rocking back and forth. It is a long list. I feel guilty being in this room. This part of her life is both mine and not mine.

My father doesn’t say much on the way home. I watch his steady hand on the wheel, the gold recovery bracelet he wears now—a new ruby on the triangle for each year he is clean. Three by now. I’m sorry I left you with this, he says. I didn’t know what to do.

It’s okay, I say.

I’m not solid yet, he says. Not well enough to see it. To be around it. He begins to cry, and shakes his head in a quick thrust, like a horse shooing off a fly. I can tell this hurts, and I know he’s been struggling. I know it by the way he picks up the phone when I call him sometimes. The drag of his voice when he says, I’m just tired, really, and his anger when I don’t believe him. I’m working so hard, but it’s so much fucking harder than you could ever know, he says, once he confesses to one drink, maybe two. And I hope you’ll never have to know it. He always hangs up on me.

In the car, I say, I think you’re solid, and I’m so proud of you.

Proud? Well—

It’s okay, I say.

I’ve got to head back to New York, he says, but I’ll be back for Christmas.

That night, after my father takes off, I call The Senior. I ask him to score the best drugs he can find. After I smoke and swallow everything he gives me, I leave his house and drive into a ditch off a road in Weston, Florida. I fall asleep like that, behind the wheel, in this U-shaped ditch, the rain patting my windshield. By morning, nobody has found me.

Where’s your mom? my half brothers want to know. They flew in to meet our father in Florida for the holidays.

With her family, in Texas, I say. She’s been gone two weeks.

We’re sitting on the gray couches in my Grandma Sitchie’s living room, smearing liver on crackers. Cousin Cindy is on the back patio, screaming into her phone, smoking. I would strangle her for a cigarette.

And she just dumped you on Christmas? the older one says.

Sucks, says the younger one.

I don’t like Texas, I say.

My father and brothers watch television all day long in Grandma’s living room. They exchange Hanukkah and Christmas gifts. A new phone with a twenty-four-hour sports radio, a wooden backscratcher—So you can stop using the spaghetti spoon, Pops. My father gives all three of us wads of cash.

I miss my mother. The hand-pressed paper over her presents, origami wrapped. The bows that shed glitter in a purple mist. She writes cards for every gift, writes cards for every person she’s ever met. Her writing, those loops and crosses—I love you to the moon and back—I miss her.

Here, says my older brother. My girlfriend gave me this to give to you. It’s a bag of Sour Patch Kids. Merry Christmas.