Burn Our Bodies Down(3)
I sit up, rub the sleep from my eyes, and fumble for the lighter on my nightstand. The day’s already too hot, my sheets sticking to my legs.
“Let’s go,” Mom says. “I’m running late.”
Her hair damp from a shower, dripping onto her lilac work shirt. She’ll leave the windows down in the car and it’ll be dry by the time she gets to the funeral home.
“Sorry,” I say. “Okay.”
The flame jumps up, stands steady and stark. My hand used to shake when I did this, but it doesn’t anymore. No nerves as I hold the fire to the wick until it catches. No fear as I let the lighter go out, lean in to feel the heat on my skin.
This is the part that matters to Mom. Watching me. On good days it comes with a kiss to my temple, with her favorite rule whispered in my ear. On most days it comes with nothing at all. Just the feeling that this is a test, somehow, and I’ve only barely passed.
“All right.” She gets up, firelight gathering under her chin. “Go back to sleep.”
She leaves the candle on my nightstand. I lie down, turn my back to it. One of these days it’ll burn us both down. I don’t even know if I’ll care.
It’s late, full morning when I wake up again. Don’t bother checking my phone—my data’s run out, and besides, nobody’s looking for me. Now that school’s out I have nothing to do, and nobody to do it with. Too many days laid out in a line. Nothing to put inside them. It used to be Mom would take me to work with her. She’d stick me under her desk and I’d watch her stomach move, watch her suck it in whenever the phone rang. The gaps between the buttons of her shirt, the paleness of her skin and the wrinkles pressed red into it. For a while that was what I thought of when I pictured her. That shadow and curve, and the smell of the funeral home, like powder, like roses, like dust.
I get to my feet. I can hear the kettle whistling. Just faintly, but there, and when I lean out my door I can see through the living room to the kitchen. Burner still on. She must have forgotten to turn it off. I can picture her rushing, gulping down a cup of weak tea, no breakfast because she bought all the wrong groceries. Shut my eyes, ignore the pang in my chest.
I love her so much more when she’s not here.
Our fight yesterday wasn’t new. We’ve had a hundred just like it, and we’ll have a hundred more. But I still feel sick after every one, still find myself trying to wring something out of this town that will qualify as amends, since I know I’ll never get them from her. Not that there’s much to get out of Calhoun, either. Why Mom chose to settle us here is beyond me, but I think I’d say that about anywhere. There’s never been one minute Mom’s looked like she was somewhere she wanted to be.
I shut off the burner. Get dressed quickly, pull on some shorts and a T-shirt, braid back my hair. For a moment I pause halfway through it, think of the gray wings at my temples, think of how easy they’ll be to see. Mom doesn’t like it like this. But I’m doing enough for her already.
I slide on my sneakers and head downstairs, a breeze slipping up from the open door off the street. Still, the heat, with a pulse and a cling, and my hair’s collecting sweat by the time I’m out on the street.
We live above an empty storefront tiled in a too-bright teal, the word Entrance on the door all that’s left of the signs that used to hang there. Most of Calhoun is like that, with gaps where life used to exist, where time has just stopped. Next to our building is a barbershop, open for business like always, with absolutely nobody inside, also like always. Across the street a warehouse stands empty, the windows broken, the brick striped with graffiti. I find my favorite one as I pass by—you’re already dedd, it tells me in a neon-pink scrawl—and keep going, my eyes nearly shut against the sun.
I’m heading for what passes for the center of Calhoun, one block back from where the highway cuts through. Town’s empty this time of the morning. Even Redman’s diner is quiet between meals, with just one customer propped up at the counter staring into a cup of coffee. I kill time there some evenings, if Mom looks close to the end of her rope. Watch my classmates come in and out, smoke ringing their shoulders, their eyes bored and wanting.
Most of them live north of town, where the houses are spread out, lawns sprouting between them. When we were younger, some of those kids were my friends, and I’d spend afternoons on their couches in front of their televisions, eating their food. But then they’d ask where I lived, and I’d think of my house, with its cloying smell and its empty fridge, and it would be over. Now I see those same faces in class, see their preowned cars parked outside the movie theater that’s barely holding on, showing movies from half a year ago.
The woman who owns the theater is our landlord, but we haven’t seen her in a few months and Mom’s stopped paying rent, which is just as well. The more money she keeps, the less likely it is that she’ll notice I’ve been stealing some.
Not for fun. I never spend it, never even look at it. Just tuck the cash inside the envelope I keep under my mattress and try to ignore the twist in my gut as I think of ways to leave Mom behind, as I imagine what she’d do, how she’d wake up to an empty apartment. Would she look for me? Or would she finally be able to relax, because maybe that’s what she was after all along?
It’s not like I haven’t tried to leave before. I get close. Sometimes I even get out the door, never mind that I’m only seventeen, never mind another year of school on the horizon. But then I hear it—Nobody but you and me. Like a curse we can’t shake. So I stay with Mom, because she’s all I have, because she says this is where I belong, and maybe it’s spite or maybe it’s love but I can’t really tell them apart anymore.