What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(14)

My mother puts her hand to her chest, where the sunglasses should be, like I’ve just cursed, and my father shakes his head.

As the silence grows, I leave.

—

I was a child prone to hysterics. Every cut was a deep wound that would surely keloid and scar me for life, every playground slight an unforgivable infraction that merited a meltdown. I also took to stealing, a habit that saw me disinvited from many of my schoolmates’ homes, so that I spent most of my free time playing in the salon/furniture shop my mother ran. I often wonder if I turned out the way I did from all those hours of inhaling turpentine and hair spray. When things were slow, my mother and her assistant, Obiageli, would curl my hair into elaborate dos. There exists a picture of me grinning as though showing off all my teeth would save the world, hair curled and fanned around my head like gele. Obiageli had persuaded my mother to powder my face, aided by my accompanying tantrum that’d worn down her reluctance. I resemble a Texas debutant turned trophy wife flanked by my exhausted-looking mother, because above all else, I was exhausting. My father was posted in Algiers by the oil company he worked for, and many times, until Udoma, it was just my mother and me. My childhood hysterics eventually congealed into an off-putting self-centeredness that was the topic of my mother’s and my last conversation, eight years ago.

After my mother died, I spent a few months in a place where they spooned food and medication into me. My father and I have never spoken of the state he found me in, Alabama, to which I had run away, home to The Ex I’d promised never to see again. Nor have we spoken of the state he found me in, catatonic after a handful of pills, curled in a moon of vomit. But when I came to, I was in a hospital and he was there and I just knew things had to get better. I was twenty-two.

It had taken me a year and a half to get my shit together and then five years to complete a master’s in technical communications that should have taken two. I’d lived at home until a year ago. But after years of feeling like an exposed nerve, I’d finally myelinated. I still had trouble holding a job and worked the parts table at a pipe supply a few days a week. Sometimes even those few days would be too much and I’d disappear. But those absences became less frequent as things got better and I began to be a person again. And now she just shows up, la-dee-dah ho-hum, like it’s not a big fucking deal.

—

I resume my search for the photograph. I avoid my old room, still the cyclone of a mess I left it in. If it’s in there, it will never be found. I head to Udoma’s instead, where it’s neat as a catalog. I start with the closest chest of drawers, as uncluttered as the room, every sock and panty folded into a tidy square. It’s easy to see that the picture isn’t here. I reach my hand into the drawer and scatter her things anyway. I’m moving on to the next drawer when Udoma sighs in the doorway. I ignore her and continue digging. I can feel it coming upon me, the unfurling of myself until all that will remain is a raw center. I have to find the picture. I have to.

Udoma stills me with a hand on my shoulder. She hugs me from behind and I am once again taken by her intuition. It was like that growing up, too, starting after we moved to Houston when she was only five and I was seventeen. She’s always been able to sense my mood, what it needs, and contort herself to fit that need. Now she whispers: “Why can’t you let me have this? Please let me have this.”

But I can’t.

“She’s supposed to be dead.”

Udoma flinches at the word.

“Don’t you have questions?”

“I don’t care. You shouldn’t care either. You were so unhappy when she . . . left. How can you be upset that she’s back?”

I face her. She is dressed in the uniform required by the Christian high school she attends. I’ve never asked her if she really believes, wary of introducing yet another complication into my story—adding unbeliever! and sinner! to psycho!—but she’s always seemed so sure about everything, so accommodating of fate in a way that eludes me. I envy her that sureness. I envy her the uncomplicated relationship with our mother, where Mom was just Mom and not yet a woman with whom she disagreed. I retreat to avoid answering and run into my mother in the doorway.

“Have you girls seen my sunglasses?”

My answer to Udoma’s question has sucked the moisture from my throat and I move past her, unable to speak. Udoma murmurs something and my mother murmurs a reply and they no doubt begin a touching conversation I will never be a part of.

Downstairs, my father has fallen asleep on the couch, a glass of wine and his cell phone on the table in front of him. I wonder what my mother said when he poured it, as he’s been a teetotaler since before I was born. He looks larger than I’ve ever seen him, as though inflated with glee, and he snores loudly, the soundtrack of my youth. I notice it then, a grimy white corner peeking out of his phone case from a slot meant to house credit cards. I lift the case and run to the small guest bathroom, locking myself inside. I grip the white corner and slide it out.

The photo has been folded, then folded again, so that it accordions open to reveal a red-tinged couch and the edge of a large speaker that serves as an end table. My mother, who should be standing in front of the couch, is missing. In the corner, so small I almost miss them, are the sunglasses she searches for, almost off frame.

A sob gurgles in my throat. I sit to steady myself and my right leg bounces a nervous jig. I remember our last conversation.