Nothing to See Here (69)

“You’re welcome,” she said.

“Madison’s husband,” I said, “he’s—”

“I don’t want to know,” she told me.

“Well, the kids, Bessie and Roland. Something you need to know—”

“No, I don’t need to know,” she said. “I won’t keep you from what you want to do, Lillian. I’ve never kept you from what you want—”

I huffed, my turn to interrupt her.

“You do what you want, but just let me have my peace,” she said after a few seconds.

When I looked over at her, she seemed so old, even though she was only forty-seven, and I knew that sometimes she adopted the mannerisms and posture of someone much older to avoid having to do things that she didn’t want to do. If I’d been a man, if I’d been handsome, she would not have been reading a magazine about coastal living and yawning. I think, maybe, if I’d been anyone other than her daughter, she would have acted differently, but I made her feel old, because I was hers.

I stirred the pasta, started putting hot dogs in a pan.

“I never pictured you with kids,” she said. “You didn’t seem the type for it.”

“That makes two of us,” I replied.

“We’re so hungry!” Roland shouted from the attic.

“Let ’em come on down,” my mom said, indicating the table. She stood up and filled four plastic cups with water.

“Come down!” I shouted up at them, the rickety house letting sound shoot through the walls and floors, and then they were thumping down the stairs.

“Hi!” Roland said, again waving to my mom, who took her magazine and pulled her chair over near the window.

I heated up the hot dogs, nearly burning them because I was also straining the macaroni, and then I mixed everything together in a pot. I got some plates and served them.

“Don’t you want some?” Roland asked my mom.

“I guess so,” she replied, and she pulled her chair over to the table. She took a bite and nodded. “It’s good,” she told me. She always liked it when I cooked for her, whatever it was.

“You’re quiet,” my mom said, pointing her spoon at Bessie.

“I’m a little tired,” Bessie replied.

“She’s cute,” my mom said to me, her spoon still fixed on Bessie, who brightened a little.

“We’re on a trip,” Roland announced, wanting my mother’s attention.

“For how long?” she asked. I wondered how long it had been since she’d talked to a child. To anyone.

“We don’t know,” Roland said. “It’s hard to tell.”

“Just for a little while,” I told the table, not hungry, pushing my food around my plate.

“We don’t stay anywhere for very long,” Bessie admitted.

“Well,” my mom said, “it’s better than just staying in one place for your entire life.”

“I don’t think so,” Bessie said, looking at me now, like she wanted me to say something, but my mind was somewhere else, not in this house. This happened a lot, where my body was right here, in the house where I’d grown up, but my mind was hovering just outside it, waiting to see what it was that I was going to do.



After the kids fell asleep, I was still too keyed up to do anything. Being back in this house, in the attic, felt like sliding down the biggest slide in the world, just an utterly cosmic joke. I tried to imagine my life before this summer, all the times I moved out and then moved right back. I had been so smart, and then when things didn’t work out exactly how I’d hoped, it was like I pushed that curiosity way down inside myself. I’d wasted so much time.

I’d check out books by Ursula Le Guin, Grace Paley, and Carson McCullers. And then I’d hide the books from view when anyone walked by because I was afraid someone would ask me about them, like they might think I was showing off or trying to be someone that I wasn’t. There were times when I felt feral, like I hadn’t gotten the proper training right when it mattered, and now I was lost.

And here I was, and now there were these two children, their arms wrapped so tightly around me that I could barely breathe. And maybe, now that I had them all to myself, now that we didn’t have the safety of that house on the estate, I worried that these kids had missed that opportunity, too, that they were lost. And I wondered if it was cruel to pretend that there was anything I could do for them. I knew there would come a time when I had to give them back. And, god, they would hate me. For their entire lives. More than their mother. More than Jasper, even. They’d hate me because I’d made them think that I could do it.

I pulled their arms off me, and they muttered, their bodies so sweaty in this humid attic. I rearranged the fans so they were closer to the kids, and then I walked downstairs, the steps creaking and squeaking loudly, until I saw my mom on the sofa in the living room. She wasn’t watching TV or reading or doing anything. She didn’t even have a drink. She was just staring into space.

Not long after I’d come back home after being kicked out of Iron Mountain, we were in the driveway, my mom about to take me to school. And when she started the car, smoke began pouring out from under the hood, this terrible grinding sound. More smoke. I ran to the house to get some water, and my mom used some rags to protect her hand while she popped the hood. I ran back outside with a pitcher of water sloshing around, and now the engine was on fire, the flames reaching pretty high. And I stopped a few feet from my mom, who was just staring at the fire, with that same look on her face that I was seeing now. It was like she could see something inside the flame, some prophecy. Or maybe she could see the span of her life up to this point, how she got to this moment, standing over her ruined car.