38
AMELIA
Eight yearsold
Lillian and I huddled on the couch together as we watched my mother, pacing and pacing, pulling at her hair.
She had a pattern to her pacing, a spiral that started in the kitchen and wound through the living room, around the plywood coffee table, past the thrift store recliner, and back to the kitchen again.
Each lap, she picked up speed until she was almost running, the way a horse gets wild when it senses an earthquake before the ground shakes. She wore a bathrobe over her jeans, the tie dragging like a noose.
Lillian sat beside me, knees tight to her chest, sweatshirt sleeves pulled over her fists. She watched Mom with the blank stare of a goldfish, as if by being still enough, she could erase herself from the room.
I tried to copy her, but I kept peeking at the clock, counting the seconds between each time Mom muttered “fuck” or clapped her hands together.
She didn’t look like herself; her skin chalked out and her mouth gone slack, cheeks hollowed like the pieces of apple left too long in a lunchbox.
Her hair, usually stringy but at least tamed with a comb, stuck out in all directions. Sweat shone on her temples, and her hands kept wringing, wringing, wringing until I thought her knuckles might snap.
That morning, the milk in the fridge was sour, but Mom poured it anyway, filling three glasses and setting them on the table so hard the liquid sloshed out and puddled under our cereal bowls.
She hovered behind us, lurching from foot to foot, as if the floor was a trampoline and every muscle in her calves was fighting to make a break for it.
Lillian took one polite sip of her milk before sliding the glass away. Mom saw it, nostrils flaring, and smacked the edge of the table with her palm.
“Drink it.” The voice was half-broken, but it made me flinch all the same. “I paid for it. Don’t waste.”
Lillian didn’t move. I took a gulp, let the sting of it curdle in my throat, and swallowed, eyes watering with the aftertaste. I was never sure what would happen if I didn’t obey her, but I knew exactly what would happen if I tried to argue.
Mom sucked hard on a cigarette, even though she was trying to quit.
Mom wasn’t like this every day.
Sometimes, things got good for a an hour, or a few days, like a game show host had spun a secret wheel and landed on ‘Functional Mother.’
There’d be pancakes, or at least the promise of them, and she’d hug us with the force of a wrestler, her heart pounding so loud I thought it might knock her out from the inside.
But lately, it was all pacing, all the time, and she had that look people get when they’re climbing out of their own skin but can’t quite make it.
She was trying to quit, or trying to do better, or trying to murder the urge inside her, but whatever it was, it made her cruel in a new, twitchy way.
Instead of screaming, she’d get quiet and stare at us like she was waiting for us to mess up.
Instead of hitting, she’d go into these long, tight silences where she pressed her palms to her eyelids and counted backwards, muttering math that never ended.
Lillian called it “brain lock.” I didn’t know what to call it except broken.
Mom swore this was the last time. She had a plan—she was always saying she had a plan—and this time it meant peppermint tea and cold showers and taping the number for the hotline to the fridge in four places.
I would find her sometimes in the kitchen at night, breathing into her hands, eyes red as if she’d been sandpapered. She’d light a Parliament, then stub it out after half a drag, then light another.
The kitchen filled up with the ghosts of almost-smoked cigarettes. I watched her every time, memorizing her routine so I would know what kind of mother I was going to get the next morning.
Lillian said it would pass. “It’s just a chemical thing,” she promised, like she was some kind of doctor. “Her body just needs time to catch up with her brain.”
But I didn’t believe her, because her hands shook just as badly as Mom’s, and sometimes I caught her looking at the clock for hours, lost in a spell I couldn’t break.
We both had our private panics, but our own separate Doomsday clocks, ticking the seconds until Mom went nuclear.
