Inside, all the lights are off. I flip on the kitchen switch and watch cockroaches skitter across the counters, into the spaces between the crusty stove coils. Shoo shoo, I say, ignoring them, making my way to the fridge for a drink.
Usually my mother’s food combinations are contained in a bowl or a Tupperware, but this is different. There are chunks of chicken everywhere—smeared in peanut butter, most of the pieces raw. The chicken is on the shelves, in the drawers, slugging down a bottle of orange juice.
I go to my mother’s room. The lights are on, the TV blaring a special on country music. She’s lying sideways across the bed; her fingers are playing an invisible piano.
Mom? You okay?
Okay, she says. Need sleep.
You need some water?
My eyes sting. I am used to this by now, used to knowing that I will never be used to this—that this part of her will never not break me, that this may be the rest of our lives. The two of us here, in this house, waiting for my father. The chicken.
Goodnight, I say, and close the door.
I pick up my portable landline and call Beth.
What’s up? she says. It’s sure been a while. How’s that tongue ring?
Got caught, I say. But I’m sadly still alive. I am shimmying my pants off, kicking out of my heels. I count the cigarettes in my purse. I keep the pack inside a dirty sock, in case my mother ever looks. Six left. I’ve changed into pajama pants and a sweatshirt when I say, I miss you, Beth. We used to do so much stupid stuff together.
We sure did, she says.
Tell me a story, I say. What’s new with you?
Beth is telling me about her family and the Tradewinds Christmas light show, her father and his new house, a new dance move she learned from her cousin when I hear the crash. The crash sounds like wood splitting. Furniture, I think, but there is also a nauseating, thick-sounding thump. The sound feels like it takes forever. It breaks into its own syllables. By the time Beth says What the hell was that? I realize that I’m already opening my mother’s door. Next to her bed, my mother’s body is ragdoll twisted on the tile floor. The nightstand came down with her—she must have tried to hold on to it. A pool of syrupy black blood begins to inch out around her hair like a halo, until it finds thin, straight paths on the grit between the tiles. Red foam swells out from between her teeth.
I hang up the phone. I am on my knees, bending over, staring at the eggshells of her eyes, afraid to touch her. There are no pupils, no screams. Her body convulses like it’s being shocked, or like it’s the trout my mother once helped me catch when I was a child. I caught it in a pond in North Carolina with a single kernel of corn. The way it flopped in my hands as I pinched the hook from its mouth—the way I just wanted to throw it back into the water where it could breathe, survive. Please, please, Mom, make it stop shaking like this. All that hurt for a kernel of corn.
It doesn’t even feel this, my mother had said to me. Animals are resilient like that.
The paramedics will not let me ride in the back of the ambulance with my mother. You sit in front, they say. Ride shotgun like a big girl.
The way they’re treating me, like a child, is comforting. I want to stay curled up like this, in this dark seat, for the rest of my life.
So brave, the driver says. Not even crying.
Is she going to die? I ask. I don’t hear the sirens. The traffic lights whip by. Blowing the reds is not as exciting as I imagined it could be.
I don’t know, he says. I can’t tell you that.
I want to crawl into his lap. This man. I want him to take me home and feed me.
I have my own waiting room in the hospital. It’s a tiny room with a closed door, with bars of light so brilliant they ache behind my eyes.
Do you have another guardian? somebody says.
I have a grandmother, I say. My mother’s stepmom. She lives nearby. They call her.
After my grandmother arrives—She fell, grandmother. She was sleepwalking—a group of men ask to speak to me alone. My grandmother leaves the room.
Unnatural, is what I hear first. She fell unnaturally. The way she fell. Your mother. Twisted. Backward. Unnaturally, the way the nightstand was. The way her arm was. Her neck. Does your mother speak English? Your mother’s not responding. Does your mother speak Chinese? Who is your mother? Did you want to hurt your mother? Do you love your mother? Were you mad at your mother? Are you in trouble at school? Where is your father? Did you strike your mother? Your feet, they say, your feet are covered in blood. Why didn’t you call sooner? We’ll get you some shoes. How long had she been like that? Skull fracture, they say. Are you sure you love your mother? Who were you on the phone with? When did you hang up? Unnatural, they say. Is she taking anything? On any medication?
No, I say.
Are you sure? This could be life or death, sweetheart.
I imagine police tape around my house, twitching in the wind. A stranger’s gloved hands finding the bottles of pills, the potions, opening the lids, photographing my mother’s clothes. I imagine them handcuffing my mother in her hospital bed, the way she would wake up, confused, bandaged, screaming for me. I imagine them sending me to live with a family that is not my own. I have protected my parents for as long as I’ve been alive. If someone comes after them, I have teeth.
Is she going to die? I ask.
Depends.
My mother, I say. She just fell.
After my grandmother tells the doctors the truth—opiates, drug addict, overdose—words I had never before associated with my parents because none of us had ever said them aloud, because there was never a name for exactly what this was, after my family in Texas drives through the night to clean out my house, after my father arrives two days later (something I will never—even after he dies—forgive), after the doctors pump her stomach and stitch up her scalp, after intubation, my mother wakes up from an induced coma. My family lets me see her in the intensive care unit, but they ask that I do not speak to her. We need to discuss next steps first, they say.
My mother holds my hand in the hospital bed. This is not a private hospital room fragrant with roses. Rows of bodies are being resuscitated all around us—thin sheets hanging between each one. We look at each other, knowing. There is no coming back from this. This time is different.
Back home, my Auntie T offers to adopt me. She shows me a website for Wylie High, in Abilene, Texas. You’ll have me and your cousins there, she says. You’ll make friends. You just have a year and a half left of high school. Think about it, she says. We have a nice church, and great hamburgers.
I’m not leaving her, I say.
I tell my father about this offer, hoping he’ll take me to live with him in New York.
You could like Texas, he says. Jesus people can be nice. Maybe you could use some nice.
The doctors send my mother home with pamphlets for treatment centers. They all look like hospitals to me—hospitals with palm trees, and yellow doors, and smiling people on lawn chairs. Be the best that you can be! one pamphlet reads.
Back at home, my family preps me on the speech I am supposed to give. You’re the only one who can do it. They will stand behind me while I speak, they say, and I am supposed to lie. I open my mother’s door and approach the bed. The room is dark, but I still walk around The Spot, as I will call it for the next twelve years, until this house burns down.
MomMom, I say. I need to tell you something.
She nods. She doesn’t speak. She knows what’s coming—we’ve been through this before. I can barely see her in the dark like this, just the shine of her pupils. I can hear her jade ting against her Hawaiian name bracelet.
I’m moving to Texas. I’m enrolling in Wylie High. I’m going to go to church, I say.
She nods.
I need to leave you, I say. I can’t be alone anymore.
She nods. I wonder if she believes me.
It hurts, I say. I tap a finger at my heart.
I know, she nods. When you hurt I hurt.
No one can hurt you the way a mother can. No one can love you the way a mother can.