I
My life has faded to floating bits of black and white, but I remember the minutes with Jack in color, in a vivid haze of red and yellow and blue. Sensory things. The sound of his voice. The smell of him, like a forest in winter. I can see him lying beside me with the moonlight on his face. His hand holds mine, and I’m warm all over, despite the cold. I can feel his breath on my skin.
I don’t forget these things.
I told Jack to stay away. He’ll make you hurt, I said. He’ll take what matters most. He’ll do it with a smile and then he’ll smoke a cigarette.
Jack didn’t listen.
But I get ahead of myself. I go to the end when, to understand the truth, you have to start at the beginning.
* * *
When Jack opened the door, Mom wasn’t sitting in the rocking chair by the stove. Her rainbow blanket formed a barren heap on the rocker, except for a tattered corner that slunk down to the worn carpet. She wasn’t in the kitchen either, staring glass-eyed out the window above the sink, all bone and skin in her frayed pink nightgown. Cold clung to the house’s scant walls and crouched in dim corners where sun never hit. She’d let the fire go out. She never did that. Not even in one of her dazes.
In his mind, a steel clamp tightened.
He kicked snow from his boots and slung his backpack off his shoulders and hitched it over the peg of the kitchen chair. He took out his earbuds to see if he could hear her upstairs, but he couldn’t. She hardly ever left that rocker these days except to use the bathroom. Once she’d have greeted him at the door when he got home from school, but that was in another time.
“Mom?”
He stood there listening for an answer, and one didn’t come. Wind blew at the windows and rattled down the stove flue. He needed to get a fire going. If they had no fire, they’d be bad off. Matty would be home from school soon. Mrs. Browning let the second graders stay after and shoot hoops in the gym, but only for a while. He needed to get supper going for Matty. Night coming.
Still he just stood there and listened for her.
Snow melted under his boots and made puddles on the linoleum. He took off the boots and socks and lined them up by the cold stove out of habit. When he looked back toward the rocker, he saw the pill bottle on the table. The cap was off and most of the little round pills inside were gone. In the beginning, some doctor in town said the pills would help her rest from the pain after she got hurt, but that all happened a long time ago, and from then on she got the pills any way she could. Now she slept in the rocker day and night and didn’t greet him at the door or eat or take baths or say things that made sense.
Wind, or something else, rustled upstairs. He went to the stairwell and stood looking up. The light dimmed halfway and shrank to darkness at the top.
“Mom?”
She had to be up there, in the bathroom. Maybe sick again from taking too many. He climbed the creaking carpeted stairs and flicked on the hall light and waited. No sound. A gust of air along the roof.
He crossed to the bathroom.
He imagined he’d find her hunched by the toilet throwing up, eyes sunken in cups of livid shadow, or standing in front of the mirror, starving-thin, like a crumpled paper doll. But she wasn’t there.
Bathroom empty. Rose-pink porcelain.
Octagon tile, dingy white.
He thought of her lying somewhere outside in her nightgown with the life seeping out of her into the frigid snow. Stop it, he said to himself. She’s okay. Somebody came and got her and maybe took her to the store. That’s all.
But this was a lie. Of course it was.
He left the bathroom and stared at the closed door at the end of the hall, and that door got bigger as he looked at it. Only one room left in the house, and she wouldn’t be in there. No, she never went in that bedroom. Not since they came in the night and pulled Dad from his bed with them both still in it and hauled him away.
No. That room was a grave. And she wouldn’t go in.
He put his hand on the doorknob and turned it.
She was hanging from the ceiling fan. A belt was coiled around the fan’s downrod and cinched around her throat. One of her frail hands twitched.
He tore to her and raised her up by her legs, but she was limp all over. Beneath her lay a wooden chair on its side. He let her go and shoved the chair up and stood on it and lifted her but her head lolled forward. Her eyes didn’t blink. Oh God. He yanked on the belt and the fan shuddered. Plaster dusted his face. Please, he thought.
Oh, dear God, please.
He lurched down and rattled through the dresser and found Dad’s hunting knife and unfolded the blade and got on the chair and hacked at the leather. Slash the strap, find a notch, and saw. Dammit. Oh, dammit damndamn. When the leather broke he caught her by the waist, but she fell sideways out of his arms and thumped to the floor. The chair tipped and sent him sprawling. He dropped the knife.
Text copyright © 2021 by Cory Anderson
