Page 133 of What We Burn

My mother is across the table and her hands are on my face before I’ve registered her moving, cool palms, thumbs at my cheekbones, and she’s close, so fucking close, her eyes locked on mine.

“Look at me. Milo. Look at my face.” Her voice is low and even and absolutely in command, and my eyes snap to her because they always do, because that voice is the first law I ever learned. “Breathe. In through your nose. There. Again.”

The static doesn’t stop but it stops climbing. The fragment slides back under whatever trapdoor it crawled out of. My hands are shaking on the table.

“When did you last take your pills?” she asks. Not a question I can dodge.

“I—” I have to think, which is its own answer. “They make me feel weird.”

“Milo.”

“I’m fine, Mom. I’ve just been busy. The case, Sage, I haven’t⁠—”

“You need to take them.” Each word is its own sentence. Her thumbs are still on my face. “I don’t care what the side effects are. I care that you don’t start going off the rails just because you want to be a hero.”

“It’s not that bad. I’m managing.”

Her eyes narrow. “Managing is not the same as doing well. You remember what happened last time you stopped, don’t you?”

I do. I fucking do. My jaw twitches. “It’s not like that anymore,” I say, a shred too loud.

“Milo.” Her fingers tense on my skin. “Look at me. You need to take care of yourself, or you can’t take care of your girl. Or anyone else who depends on you.”

I can’t hold the eye contact, so I look at the mug on the table.

“Okay.”

“Say it. Say you’ll take them.”

“I’ll take them.”

I won’t take them. I’m a fucking zombie when I take them. No personality. Wasting eight hours every day on sleep.

“When?”

“Tonight. I’ve got them at Holden’s.”

She holds my face a moment longer, reading me the way she reads everyone, except there’s nothing performed in it now—just a mother checking her son for cracks. Whatever she sees lets her breathe. She presses her lips to my forehead, hard, and sits back down, and the distance she puts between us is deliberate, careful, like she’s stepping back from something that nearly tipped.

“Your father isn’t a story you need,” she says quietly. “There is nothing back there that helps you. Some doors you leave shut because there’s nothing behind them but a long way down. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah.”

I don’t push. I never push, and now I remember why the wall is there even when I can’t remember what it’s walling—because every time I get close, the floor tilts and the carnival starts and my mother’s face goes white like it just did.

We never talk about my father.

Outside, the garden sits in the dark.

I look at it through the glass for a second too long, and my mother says, gently, “I’m going to bed. Take that food home to your girl. Take your meds. And lock up on your way out.”

“I will. Night, Mom.”

She presses a kiss to the top of my head and disappears down the hall, leaving me alone.

The house settles. I sit at the kitchen table with a Tupperware of chicken parm and a Post-it note in Mom’s handwriting:

For my future daughter-in-law. Tell her to eat. She’s too thin. Love, Mom. P.S. Tell the big one I said hello.