I pictured us in her bed under her polka-dot covers, whispering secrets, falling asleep tangled with each other, and then I realized I was imagining me and Marian. She, escaped from her hospital bed, asleep next to me. The hot purring sounds she made as she curled into my belly. I’d have to sneak her back to her room before my mother woke in the morning. High drama in a quiet house, those five seconds, pulling her down the hallway, near my mother’s room, fearing the door might swing open right then, yet almost hoping. She’s not sick, Momma. It’s what I planned on yelling if we were ever caught. It’s okay she’s out of bed because she’s not really sick. I’d forgotten how desperately, positively I believed it.
Thanks to the drugs, however, these were only happy recollections now, flipping past my brain like pages of a child’s storybook. Marian took on a bunnylike aura in these memories, a little cottontail dressed as my sister. I was almost feeling her fur when I roused myself to discover Amma’s hair brushing up and down my leg.
“So, wanna?” she asked.
“Not tonight, Amma. I’m dead tired and I want to sleep in my own bed.” It was true. The drug was fast and hard and then gone. I felt ten minutes from sober, and I didn’t want Amma around when I hit ground.
“Can I sleep over with you then?” She stood in the streetlight, her jean skirt hanging from her tiny hip bones, her halter askew and ripped. A smear of blood near her lips. Hopeful.
“Naw. Let’s just sleep separate. We’ll hang out tomorrow.”
She said nothing, just turned and ran as fast as she could toward the house, her feet kicking up behind her like a cartoon colt’s.
“Amma!” I called after. “Wait, you can stay with me, okay?” I began running after her. Watching her through the drugs and the dark was like trying to track someone while looking backward in a mirror. I failed to realize her bouncing silhouette had turned around, and that she was in fact running to me. At me. She smacked into me headlong, her forehead clanging into my jaw, and we fell again, this time on the sidewalk. My head made a sharp cracking noise as it hit the pavement, my lower teeth lit up in pain. I lay for a second on the ground, Amma’s hair folded in my fist, a firefly overhead throbbing in time to my blood. Then Amma began cackling, grabbing her forehead and nudging the spot that was already a dark blue, like the outline of a plum.
“Shit. I think you dented my face.”
“I think you dented the back of my head,” I whispered. I sat up and felt woozy. A blurt of blood that had been stanched by the sidewalk now seeped down my neck. “Christ, Amma. You’re too rough.”
“I thought you liked it rough.” She reached a hand and pulled me up, the blood in my head sloshing from back to front. Then she took a tiny gold ring with a pale green peridot from her middle finger and put it on my pinky finger. “Here. I want you to have this.”
I shook my head. “Whoever gave that to you would want you to keep it.”
“Adora sorta did. She doesn’t care, trust me. She was going to give it to Ann but…well, Ann’s gone now, so it was just sitting there. It’s ugly, right? I used to pretend that she gave it to me. Which is unlikely since she hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you.” We began walking toward home, the porch light glaring from the top of the hill.
“She doesn’t like you,” Amma ventured.
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Well, she doesn’t like me either. Just in a different way.” We climbed the stairs, squishing mulberries beneath our feet. The air smelled like icing on a child’s cake.
“Did she like you more or less after Marian was dead?” she asked, looping her arm into mine.
“Less.”
“So it didn’t help.”
“What?”
“Her dying didn’t help things.”
“No. Now keep quiet till we get to my room, okay?”
We padded up the stairs, me holding a hand under the crook of my neck to catch the blood, Amma trailing dangerously behind, pausing to smell a rose in the hall vase, cracking a smile at her reflection in the mirror. Silence as usual from Adora’s bedroom. That fan whirring in the dark behind the closed door.
I shut the door of my own room behind us, peeled off my rain-drenched sneakers (checked with squares of newly cut grass), wiped smashed mulberry juice off my leg, and began pulling up my shirt before I felt Amma’s stare. Shirt back down, I pretended to sway into bed, too exhausted to undress. I pulled the covers up and curled away from Amma, mumbling a good night. I heard her drop her clothes to the floor, and in a second the light was off and she was in bed curled behind me, naked except for her panties. I wanted to cry at the idea of being able to sleep next to someone without clothes, no worries about what word might slip out from under a sleeve or pantcuff.
“Camille?” Her voice quiet and girlish and unsure. “You know how people sometimes say they have to hurt because if they don’t, they’re so numb they won’t feel anything?”
“Mmm.”
“What if it’s the opposite?” Amma whispered. “What if you hurt because it feels so good? Like you have a tingling, like someone left a switch on in your body. And nothing can turn the switch off except hurting? What does that mean?”
I pretended to be asleep. I pretended not to feel her fingers tracing vanish over and over on the back of my neck.
A dream. Marian, her white nightgown sticky with sweat, a blonde curl pasted across her cheek. She takes my hand and tries to pull me from bed. “It’s not safe here,” she whispers. “It’s not safe for you.” I tell her to leave me be.