Can’t I go home with you? I have shifts at work all this week.”
“No, you don’t. I called in for you already. And it wasn’t a scratch, Lauren.”
Now she’s not meeting my eyes at all.
She looks like she’s about to burst into tears. She turns from me in the chair to survey the common room we’re sitting in, this sad space meant for sad people.
Blinds block out as much sunlight as possible,
and
puke-and-blood-proof
couches and chairs covered in scratches aim away from one another, making it possible for a dozen people to sit in this room at once and not have to talk to one other person, which is a miracle in furniture arrangement. A large woman guards the common area from inside an adjoining office. The window between her desk and the rest of the room has a shutter over it that can be closed, so if the place falls to chaos, she can abandon ship and blockade herself in.
A boy shuffles past the common room just in time for my mom to see him— how both of his arms are covered in the kind of bandages that cover just my left forearm—and how slowly his legs move, barely lifting off the floor as he inches down the tiled corridor. He walks like he’s been filled with cement.
Maybe that’s what’s in the pills they make us swallow here. Carefully I lift my arm to see how heavy it is, and then with a thunk I watch it drop back down onto my lap, the way a sack of cement might drop.
When my mom turns back in my direction, a perfectly positioned beam of sunlight from between the blinds catches her in the face. It lights her up as if someone in the clouds has aimed a spotlight down to reveal something of significance to me.
Pay attention, it says.
My mom’s beauty mark again. Just like the other night, it’s on the wrong side of her face and I’m left wondering.
Am I looking at her in a mirror? Has my memory gotten dislodged and confused?
Or is this woman—this beautiful woman with the mark on the wrong cheek, the one who keeps nervously touching me, the one who locked me away supposedly for my own good—is this woman even my mother?
I want her to speak. I need to hear her voice. Then I’ll know.
She sighs. She says, “I’m so sorry I made you feel like you couldn’t come to me, Lauren.”
For a second I think she called me Laura, like I swore I heard the nurse call me the other night. But no. No, she knows my name, and she’d never make such a simple mistake as that. It won’t be so easy.
I’m second-guessing myself again. I’m not sure who she is now: the one I know and have always known, or someone pretending to be that person, trying to trick me. I decide to take careful stock of her tattoos, but she’s wearing a sweater, and the sweater strategically covers them up with overlong sleeves and a bulky turtleneck that doesn’t allow even a peek of vine to be seen. Of the birds on her neck, only two can be made out, the last two closest to her ear.
Should I ask her to take off her sweater? To undress and prove herself to me?
Then I remember how I tore off her shirt in the bathroom the other night and how frightened she seemed of me after, like I’d attacked her with claws out and teeth bared, ready to rip into her skin. I remember the sight of her chest. Her breasts. Her ribs. Her stomach. And I hang my head, ashamed.
“What?” she says. “Tell me what you’re thinking, honey.”
“You should probably go,” I say. “I’m having weird thoughts right now.”
“Like what weird thoughts?”
“I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Are they telling you what to think?”