Mothered (67)

Their home, which had once been a hubbub of activity—a thousand things to do and not enough hours or hands to do them—fell into an uncomfortable stillness. Mommy stopped rushing around impatiently and didn’t bark at Grace to do even the most basic chores. After work her mother didn’t collapse on the couch for a quick nap; she’d just sit there, staring at whatever Grace was watching on TV. Wherever Mommy ambled through the house, Grace found wet footsteps: the temperature inside was too warm for someone made of ice.

That went on for a while. Neither of them spoke much, especially to each other. They went about their business—Grace to school, Mommy to the nursing home—and lived like roommates. When her mother worked later shifts, Grace cooked supper. When her mother worked earlier shifts, Grace got herself up and ready for school. Eventually they emptied Hope’s bedroom and turned it back into a dining room.

Her mother started talking about selling the house when Grace was a junior in high school.

“I don’t want it anymore. Do you?”

Grace shrugged and shook her head, knowing her mother had grown up there too. A horror grew inside Grace, the awful possibility of never being able to get away from one’s childhood home. Such a failure might curse a person’s chances of ever reaching adulthood.

“When you’re done with high school, I’ll sell it.”

“Okay.” The house was full of ghosts; leaving the house forever became the beguiling reward for getting through high school.

“And maybe move away,” Mommy added.

“Okay.”

“You’ll want your own place, won’t you?”

Yes, Grace wanted her own apartment, even if it was a tiny room in a sweltering attic.

In those last couple of years together, she remembered her mother always being on the far side of whatever room they were in, a distance between them greater than was possible given the square footage of their house. If Grace came in and her mother was already home, she’d see her dollhouse figure a hundred yards away in the kitchen. Or if Grace came downstairs and her mother was on the sofa, it was a raft bobbing away on a CinemaScope ocean.

Her mother got Grace settled in her tiny attic apartment and paid for her training at the Pittsburgh Beauty Academy, and then completed her disappearing act. Watching Mommy drive away wasn’t so different from how it had been when they’d lived together in the house; her mother had long been a hazy silhouette, always receding. Finally they were in different homes, in different states, and perhaps as Grace was free to claim her adulthood, her mother could finally thaw and become a person again. They did well without each other, a fact Grace wouldn’t deny.

She dreamed of emptiness, of falling, of drifting through outer space. It was a troubling dream, cognizant of the cosmic void, of the improbability of any sort of rescue or reprieve. She feared it would go on forever. Until suddenly it became difficult to breathe.

I’m out of oxygen.

But that was silly—she didn’t even have a space suit.

Her lungs heaved, desperate to draw in air. But when she opened her mouth, the only thing she sucked in was cloth. Something was pressing down on Grace’s face so hard she couldn’t even open her eyes.





42


Her heart jolted, strong and arrhythmic, like a lifeless patient under shock paddles. Grace had an awareness of impending death—and even if it was a dream, she no longer trusted that to keep her safe.

Her thrashing hands connected with another pair of hands—the ones pressing the pillow to her face. Grace started kicking and writhing. She pulled at her attacker’s wrists, praying her bitten-down nails were long enough to gouge skin. Finally she got her legs untangled from the sheets—and pulled her knees up and kicked with both feet. Her attacker took a stumbling step backward, and it was enough for Grace to push the pillow off and roll away.

She nearly tumbled off the other side of the bed, gasping and heaving, blinking against the brightness of the overhead light.

During the brief duel she’d had a single impulse: to fight for her life. Now, one leg on the bed, one leg off, she sucked in air and identified her assailant.

Jackie. Her mother. Winded, hair disheveled, gripping the pillow in both hands.

“What the fuck are you doing?” It came out raspy. Grace’s throat was sore—had she been screaming? Paralyzed by shock, she tried to process what was happening. The why of it. The what-the-fuck of it. The lingering possibility that she was still asleep.

Her mother tossed the pillow aside, smoothed back her hair, rubbed her wrists where Grace had grabbed them. She sat with one hip on the edge of the mattress, as if she might tell a short bedtime story.

“Did you just try to kill me?” Grace got to her feet on the far side of the bed, ready to flee. She kept her eyes on Jackie, unsure how fast her mother could move.

“No hon, I was just smothering you.” She said it in her nice, good-mother voice.

“What the fuck’s the difference?” Grace was tempted to call nine one one. But as she ran the scenario through her head—insisting to a dispatcher (then a police officer and maybe a doctor) that her nearly seventy-year-old mother had tried to suffocate her, and maybe poison her, after infecting her with night terrors—she knew it was a lost cause. Jackie would be the composed one, the rational-sounding one, as she paraded out Grace’s known defects: a liar, a catfisher, a sleepwalker. And her pièce de résistance, her claim that Grace was a murderer of disabled sisters.