“Did she ever leave him?” Lore asked.
“In a sense,” I said. “She died when I was seventeen.”
Lore blinked. After a moment, she said, “Mami passed last year. You think it’ll be easier once they—and you—get to a certain age. But it just makes you feel like a little girl again, looking for her around every corner.”
We were quiet. How unexpected to have found this commonality: We were both daughters, after all. Motherless.
“How did she die?” Lore asked.
There was a disarming bluntness to Lore’s questions, a slicing away of the bullshit that usually fills a conversation. It was unsettling, though also, if I was being honest, exciting.
I swallowed. “Childbirth.”
Lore looked surprised, no doubt doing the math. It had been an unplanned pregnancy, at forty. An even greater shock than my mother’s age, and mine—almost seventeen—was the fact that my dad, who’d been sober for almost two years by then, had recently relapsed, again. I couldn’t imagine how she’d let him touch her in that way. Was it before or after the time he’d elbowed her into the corner of a side table with such force a lump swelled like an orange on her thigh?
He went back to meetings, stopping drinking. And she got anemic, her lips white until she swiped them with tinted lip balm—Burt’s Bees, the faint smell of peppermint. She leaned her whole body against his when he helped her off the couch, eyes closed against the onslaught of dizziness. He kissed the top of her head, held her for as long as she needed.
By the time she was eight months along, he had five months of sobriety. He cooked every meal, reminded her to take her iron supplements, walked her to and from the bathroom. Once, I went into their bedroom to ask if I could spend the night at a friend’s house. The murmur of their voices over the shower, my father saying, “It’s okay, Lisey, I’ve got you.” I imagined my mother’s veined belly distended and slick between them, my father running a washcloth along her back, and couldn’t bear it. How could she trust those hands?
My father had called me again and again that night. He followed with texts: Come home now. Not much time. Cassie, please. At hospital. It’s happening. CASSIE COME NOW! I pretended I hadn’t seen them. It was probably a false alarm. And if it wasn’t, I didn’t need to hear my mother panting and moaning, the dutiful husband slipping ice chips between her chapped lips and reminding her to breathe the baby down, the way they’d been practicing. The whole thing violently and inviolably intimate.
When I finally arrived at the hospital, the room was dim. My father was slumped in a chair beside the bed, head in his hands on the thin hospital mattress. His shoulders shook, but he didn’t make a sound. The new baby, born three weeks early, yowled like an injured cat from his clear plastic bassinet. Behind that there was only silence; it felt wrong, the sense that something essential had been shut down, like a house without electricity. The machines beside my mother were black, their cords disconnected.
I inched closer. “Mom?” I touched her forearm. Her skin was cool. Her eyelids thin as parchment paper, still as marble. “Mom?”
My father looked up, his gaze unfocused. “She’s gone.”
“What—”
“She hemorrhaged.” He ran his hands over his face, pulling them away wet with tears. “Placental abruption, they called it.”
“No.” I shook her, and the hospital gown slipped off one pale shoulder. I readjusted it, shook her harder. Her head lolled to one side, horrifying. “Mom? Mommy?”
“Cassie, enough!” In one fast motion, my father reared up and reached across her body—that’s what it was now, a body—to grab my wrist. I yanked it away, stumbled backward. A sob winding up my throat as my father collapsed back in the chair. “She thought it was back labor,” he continued, faint, as if he hadn’t just crushed the small tendons right at my pulse point.
They’d rushed to the hospital, he said—all those anxious texts, me ignoring them at a party I hated, pretending to drink Natty Light from a Solo cup, a sourness I could still taste. The pain had circled around to her abdomen. Then, without warning, before the fetal monitoring tubes had even been attached, a gush of blood. “It happened so fast,” my father said. He’d looked around, wondering where the sound had come from—a bursting bag of IV fluid, maybe. The blood must have been everywhere. I stared at his boots, the toes now darkened to black.
A wail ripped out of me as I finally collapsed against my mother. My tears trailed her cheeks, pooled in her ears as I begged her to please, please come back. For so many years I’d hated her for staying—and now she was gone. Permanently, irrevocably gone.
The baby was crying, too, high and hysterical, struggling against his flannel hospital swaddle. His eyes, shiny with antibiotic ointment, still balled shut, as if he couldn’t bear to look at the world he’d come into.
The baby. My new brother. Andrew.
We brought him home after a few days in the hospital. My mother had already filled dresser drawers with neatly folded onesies and zip-up playsuits, prewashed in Dreft baby detergent. The leg holes of those onesies gaped around his tiny thighs. His arms and back were covered in dark, downy hair, his skull as soft as bruised fruit. He was otherworldly, not quite human. A creature that didn’t belong in the outside world.
It was my summer break, and I insisted on keeping Andrew’s bassinet in my room. My father was too wrecked with grief to protest with any conviction. I fell asleep to Andrew’s grunts and woke up every other hour to warm his formula at the kitchen sink. I used the horseshoe-shaped pillow someone had given my mom at her baby shower, leaning against the headboard of my bed as I eased the plastic nipple into Andrew’s searching mouth. I was the one who ran a washcloth over his body before his umbilical stump blackened and fell, the one who cried as I removed the last remnants of sticky white vernix from his skin, feeling as though I were erasing my mother from his body. I watched YouTube videos until I figured out how to strap him to my chest with the long yellow piece of fabric my mother had bought. I took him to the library for story time, where he mostly slept, and for long walks around the neighborhood, naming the world for him. I was the one who saw his first smile, the first time he pushed up to his elbows, the first time he rolled over. All those tiny monumental achievements that only reminded me of his utter helplessness, his total vulnerability.
I considered taking Andrew with me when I left for UT in August. But I was only seventeen, and his sister, not his guardian. Even if I was granted custody, I’d need an apartment instead of staying in the dorm, and a real job, not work-study, to pay for rent and day care. It seemed impossible. I thought about staying. I really did.
Or maybe that was just something I needed to tell myself.
I’d sobbed as I held Andrew in the driveway. “I’ll be back soon,” I whispered in his seashell ear, kissing the silvery moon of his cheek. “I promise.”
Andrew’s whole head glimmered blond in the sun. His eyes were shifting from gray to green, like our mother’s. They were wide and watchful as I passed him to our father, as if he knew.
My father stared down at him, almost dazed. He wore his wedding ring. His shoulders were pitched forward after years of working on airplanes. He did not look like a violent man.
But if he started drinking again—which was almost certain with the grief, the stress—how would he deal with Andrew’s witching-hour screams? Would he even get up when Andrew needed to eat at night? Where would his anger land, without my mother or me there to catch it? All it would take was one hard shake, one drop to the floor. Every instinct to protect my baby brother screamed inside me.
I left anyway. I chose my future over Andrew’s safety. And I had continued to do so every day since.