The Break(47)

“You know, it’s funny,” I say as Lila gets sleepy on my boob. I run a finger along her cheek to wake her, and then I take a deep breath like the lactation consultant taught me to do to perk her back up enough to finish the feed, but these tricks don’t work as well as I need them to. Lila is already sleeping, her beautiful red lips an oval against me. “Oh, Lila,” I say, exasperated. “Please wake up.”

My mother lets out a girlish laugh. I look up to see her staring lovingly at the both of us. “What is it?” I ask.

“When you were little,” she says, “I couldn’t wake you up for the life of me. You fell asleep at the breast every time.”

“I did?” I ask with a smile, the first time I’ve ever felt lighthearted about the feeding issue.

“Oh yes,” my mother says.

“So what happened?” I ask my mom. “Did I lose weight? Did you have to take me to the doctor?”

My mom shakes her head. “It was different back then,” she says with a wave. “We didn’t have so many appointments like you all do now.” She’s crystal clear, and I wish it could always be this way. “You woke up around six or seven weeks. And you stayed a skinny little thing no matter how much I fed you.”

I think of my mother back then, likely surrounded by her friends supporting her. Her own mother was gone, but my dad’s mother adored her and always sided with her any time she argued with my dad, which was often. My grandma lived with us on and off for years. And then when my dad was killed, my grandma sort of lost it (understandably) and disappeared for months. We saw her again only once, and then she died the year after. Tragic, my mother always says with a shake of her head, which I took to mean that in a way, we lost both my dad and his mom on the night he was murdered.

“You saw Dad’s friend flee out the back, right?” I ask. I’m not sure why this is what I start with when I already know it to be true, but it seems a good, easy starting point.

My mom is taken aback, which doesn’t make sense when she was the one to bring it all up. “Y-yes,” she stammers, which sets me on edge. I don’t want to push her into something that stresses her, if stress is indeed a trigger for an episode. “I saw a midsized man streak across the lawn,” she says.

“But they were all average sized,” I say about my dad’s friends. Not a notably tall or short one among them. Not a sober one, either. They were all drunks back then. And since that night, one got sober, and no one sees him anymore.

“Yes, that’s true,” my mom says. I notice for the first time that her gray button-down shirt is askance, the buttons all wrong. It makes me sick to think of someone else supervising her shower and selecting her clothes when she can’t. But what can I do? Even if Gabe wanted to try my mom living with us, I’m not sure I could safely care for her, especially now that Lila’s here and I can barely take care of the two of us.

“The cops were so convinced it was Johnny who did it,” my mom says, talking about the one who got arrested for it, but there’s no life in her voice.

“I remember Johnny,” I say easily, like his name isn’t weighted with death and betrayal. He’s the one who eventually got sober. When my dad was alive, Johnny was my mother’s least favorite of them all, the one who steered them to darker places: vandalism one night, petty theft another, arson a year later at a bar (payback for the owner forbidding them to enter). They were never convicted of anything.

We always assumed it was one of my dad’s friends who came to steal the diamond watch. First, because they’d all been out with him that night, so every one of them knew he had been rip-roaring drunk and unlikely to even wake up when they slipped inside our house to get the watch, and they all knew he never remembered to lock the doors when he came in from a bender. And second, because my dad’s friends were the only ones who knew he kept the watch in an opaque blue vase. Don’t ask me why he told them his hiding spot; I’ll never understand that. I assume it’s because he considered them his brothers, but even family can turn on you—everyone knows that. And none of them ever came forward with anything to help the police solve the crime. They all came to the funeral parlor with bloodshot eyes and heads dipped low. I remember that old Catholic church that smelled like oil and secrets, and the way my dad’s friends wore ill-fitting suits and didn’t sing along to the verses even though they’d heard them every Sunday since before they could speak. I remember how everyone at the funeral stared at me—his young daughter—like they were trying to discern if I would ever be okay.

On the day my dad died, he cleaned the watch in front of my mother, and it was gone when the cops searched the house. The cops surmised (as best they could; I suppose it was a guess, really) that the single stab wound was inflicted out of self-defense. The lead detective told us it didn’t look as if the perpetrator came there to kill him; more likely, he’d come to steal the watch, and when my dad found him midrobbery, my dad went after him, and the man stabbed him and fled.

“Sometimes I wonder how much you remember about your dad, about what he did to me,” my mom says carefully.

I almost say, And to me, too, but I sense she’s trying to get at something other than the things I know about, so I shut my mouth and wait. But she doesn’t say anything more, and so finally, I say, “I remember him doing things to us that were so terrible, yet so subtle, they were hard to put a finger on. Do you remember that cookbook we used to love to make pastries with? Do you remember how he used to hide it?” He always hid things that might seem unimportant to anyone other than my mom and me: rosary beads, children’s books we loved, the form she was supposed to sign and send into my kindergarten. He mind-gamed her (and me) in small but distinct ways that reminded us that he was the boss. He’d hide my mom’s checkbook and berate her for not paying an electric bill; he’d brush by her too quickly, knocking her off balance and mumbling a near-gleeful apology. Sometimes he didn’t speak to her (or me) for days, only to drown us in a deluge of words when he finally opened his mouth to apologize, gaze watery, forehead creased.