Our Crooked Hearts(9)

I took a breath. “Who did you think I was when you walked in today?”

She flinched. Her face stayed smooth, but her shoulders jumped. “Ivy, you’ve got white hair and a fat lip. I didn’t know what I was looking at.”

There was a recklessness in me, rising. I lifted my hands, arranged them in the unnatural way she’d held hers in the front hall. It made my fingers prick. “What,” I asked her, “does this mean?”

She lunged. Her knee came down on the bed and she was above me, squeezing my fingers in hers, forcing my arms to my sides.

“Don’t,” she said, her voice steady. “Do not.”

Her right hand on my left was smooth and manicured, her left hand on my right patchworked with the scars she never talked about. And that was just the secret you could see. I made a sound in my throat, where bitterness burned like an aspirin pill. She heaved herself back off the bed.

“Ivy,” she whispered. Her eyes were wet. I waited as her mouth worked itself over unsaid things, her expression shifting like a slots machine. And I watched as she went away from me, back inside herself, gone.

“Good night,” she said, and closed the door.

After she left I tried to cry, but I couldn’t. I stared at my windows instead. When they were bright black squares I sat up. The house was quiet, Hank off somewhere and my parents across the hall, sleeping or watching two different shows on two separate iPads. Midnight came and still I felt too hollow to sleep.

Downstairs I crouched in front of the open refrigerator, forking leftover noodles into my mouth. When I stood, swinging the door shut, something caught my eye through the window.

Someone was out there, among the herbs growing at the fence line. A stooped figure that stayed a while, troubling the dirt, and became my mother as it rose. She dusted her hands over the knees of her jeans before walking back toward the house.

Some instinct sent me swiftly across the kitchen, onto the basement stairs. Through the crack between door and frame I watched her pad softly to the sink. Her back was to me as she washed her hands, then filled and drained a water glass twice. She was still turned away when she collapsed, head dropping onto her folded arms, and let out a cry. Just one, pressed into her skin.

I stood on the step, the basement’s cold breath on my neck, fear pricking at the backs of my knees. When my mother straightened it was with the sprung snap of a folding knife. Her face as she left the kitchen was set, her eyes a leaden blue. I waited behind the basement door until I was sure she was gone.

The backyard smelled wild, fermented crabapples and wet rosemary and the pungent soil my mom bought by the sackful. I took a trowel from a coil of hose and brushed through the mint plot, where black flies big as thumb joints hovered when the sun was out. When I reached the place I’d seen her brushing the dirt away, I got on my knees and started to dig.

The trowel hit metal a few inches down. It took a while to unearth it: a screw-top jam jar buried vertically in the dirt, empty but for an inch of sludge at the bottom. I held it to the moonlight. Earth, dried herbs, enough blood that I could identify it by the drops adhered to the glass. Stirred into the mess was a piece of broken mirror and a curl of white paper.

From a distance I observed the contents of the jar and the thudding of my own heart. Then I shoved the jar back into the ground and covered it, tramping over the soil until it looked the way she’d left it.

I went straight from the backyard to the shower, no idea what I’d say if she stepped out of her room and saw my dirty knees, my raw fingers.

I was breathing too fast. My vision sizzled, my head felt helium-light. Not because I was scared of what I’d dug up from the garden, but because I wasn’t. The discovery should have felt alien, appalling. It didn’t. It chimed in grim accord with the feeling I got when she arranged her hands just so, and the certainty I had glimpsing the rabbit’s tooth in her palm.

There was a quiet place at the center of me. A pool of black water frozen to a sheen. It was made up of the questions it was easier not to ask, the mysteries I didn’t bother prodding. I’d been letting it thicken as far back as I could recall. Something was moving beneath the ice now. Shifting, making the surface creak, turning it rotten.

You’re so chill, Nate told me once, approvingly. Nothing bothers you.

My dad, indulgently: What happened last night, that wasn’t like you.

And my mother. When she didn’t like the question I asked she pushed me back on the bed, rearranging my hands like I was her doll, like my body didn’t even belong to me. I hadn’t fought back. I made it so easy for her; I didn’t say a word.

I was done with that now. Even under the shower’s spray I kept my eyes wide open, so suddenly sick of secrets I couldn’t bear the dark.





CHAPTER FIVE



The city

Back then

I never really knew my mother. She died when I was two, and my dad wasn’t the kind to keep a candle burning. When I asked questions, he’d send me to the kitchen drawer where he kept a stack of old photos and a rubber-banded lock of her red hair.

So. A mother can be a photograph.

My best friend lost her mother even earlier. Fee came into the world and the woman who’d carried her stepped out. Death transfigured her into a dark-eyed martyr, their apartment the reliquary where Fee’s father tended to her traces.

A mother can be a saint, then. A ghost. A blessed outline that shows where she’s gone missing.