Bad Mommy(53)

She was busy on the opposite side of the kitchen, her head bent over tea bags and cups. I listened to the clinking of the china for a moment before I spoke. “Fig,” I said. “What is Darius’s cologne doing in your bathroom?”

She stilled, her hand hovering over the kettle. When she turned around, there was a smile plastered on her face.

“Darius’s cologne?”

“Yeah, the bottle of 212 I saw up there.”

She turned back to her tea making. “Oh, it belongs to George. I found it under the sink. We were at Nordstrom a while back and someone was giving out samples. He loved it, bought it right away. I didn’t know Darius wore that too.” She turned back to her tea making while I pondered her words. I knew for a fact that Nordstrom didn’t sell that cologne. In fact, I ordered it for Darius from an online website that shipped from Europe. She was lying. Why?

Chills crept up my spine. Was it Darius’s cologne? Oh god. I took the tea with shaking hands. I’d been the one to buy it for him years ago. It definitely wasn’t mainstream and it was hard to find.

“You okay?” Fig asked, cocking her head to the side. “You’re shaking like me after chemo.” She laughed. A distraction! Good.

“Yeah, I’m worried about my dad. Have you had a doctor’s appointment lately? What are they saying?”

She did what she did every time someone brought up her cancer, she wouldn’t make eye contact. She’d stare at the ground and try very hard to not answer your question.

“You know … same ol’, same ol’…”

“Well, are your test results coming back clean? Are they finding anything we should be worried about?”

“There’s always something, she said. But, I’m fine. I deal. I’m mostly not okay, just trying to survive. I think about death a lot…” Her voice dropped away as she stared into her tea. If I weren’t so used to this I would have fallen for it. It was a brilliant diversion tactic and she used it in almost every situation. You became so distracted worrying about her that you completely forgot your question wasn’t answered.

“Are the tumors benign?” I tried again, something more direct.

“I have more tests next month.”

“To find out if the tumors are benign?”

She shrugged. I looked at my watch.

“I have to go,” I said. “Thanks for the tea.”



When I got back to the house, I locked the kitchen door. I never kept it locked, something Darius was always on me about. He’d say, Someone can just come right in here and…

And what? I’d say. Because no one wanted to say rape out loud. I knew he was right. I was just being stubborn. But, I didn’t lock the door because I was afraid of rapists, or the robbers. I locked it because I wasn’t sure what exactly was happening. What I’d allowed into our lives.

When I was a little girl, everything hurt me. My mother called me tender heart, my father would often pull me into his lap as I sobbed after glimpsing a homeless man. Neither of them sheltered me, I think they wanted me to see. When I inquired as to the purpose of suffering, they’d say the same thing: because people are flawed and nothing is fair. I looked for the cracks in people after that, the things that made the world an unfair place. I wanted to avoid those kinds of people in case I became flawed and unfair as well. And there it was, my very own crack. I was looking for the flaws in others and that was unfair when I had so many myself. I looked instead for that which was good, and lovely, and pure. You could find it if that was your focus, and all of a sudden, when you looked at people you saw why they were worth loving. I was a cause kid, and though I had many causes from the age of six to sixteen, the one closest to my heart was the friendless. Yeah, you can sit with me. And everyone did because people want someone to sit with. Soon people were sitting on me. Shit gets heavy, you know? Especially when people realize you’re willing to carry their weight.

The best way to deal with this was to become friendless. No, you can’t sit with me, I like sitting by myself. So, I did. For a while anyway. People can smell kindness on you even when you act like an asshole to scare them away. Darius was the first person I gave a seat to, he called me on my bullshit so I had to. Once that happened, others came, but this time they didn’t try to sit on me. I shifted back into the friendship zone somewhat awkwardly. No one seemed to notice. By the time Fig moved in next door, I’d allowed the little girl with a cause back into my heart. I let her sit with us. I wanted to take some of her burdens and let her know it was okay.

But, this wasn’t normal. What I’d seen next door wasn’t normal.

I pulled out my phone to call Darius. It rang once, twice, and I hung up. It could be in my head, all of it. I was a fiction writer; maybe I was bored and exaggerating details in my mind. Maybe I was crazy, that was entirely plausible, but then my mind drifted back to that day in the park, the songs I’d found on her Spotify when I’d decided to take a look. Things I could no longer ignore even if I wanted to.

I pulled up her Instagram account, scrolling through the pictures, looking for what Darius had tried to tell me about so many times. What Amanda and Gail had pointed out. I’d ignored them, not because I didn’t see the similarities myself, but because I didn’t care. We were all copycats, weren’t we? We saw celebrities wearing high-waisted jeans and then we wore them. Our friends listened to music that we immediately downloaded and became obsessed with. We were a generation of see it, want it, take it. But, this—this was different. More sinister. I scrolled all the way back to the first picture she posted, two years prior: grainy, beige photos—somewhat depressing. Not a biggie, most of us had a rough start to Instagram. Around the time she moved in next door, her Instagram style changed dramatically. She’d changed the style of her layout to match mine, enlarged white boxes around her pictures. She copied the angles too—half of Seattle’s Ferris Wheel captured in the top right corner of the photo, the fruit stands in Pike Place Market, a close-up of radishes I’d taken, sunsets, a photo of a shirt I’d seen in a department store, a yellow building we’d taken family pictures in front of, jellyfish from the aquarium. It was all there, and each of her pictures were taken days after mine. But why? And did she realize she was doing it?