A minute later Sean and I are sitting side by side on the couch in my living room, waiting for my mother’s ancient 45-pound laptop to boot up.
“Looking at porn on this thing must be a bitch,” Sean says.
“Hello, Ellie.”
I turn around. My mother is standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, in her bathrobe, drinking juice.
Oh shit.
“Mom,” I say. I can feel the blood rushing to my face.
She rubs her eyes, half smiles at me. I can’t tell if she’s smiling because she didn’t hear Sean’s porn comment, or because she did. My mom is a mystery sometimes. “I haven’t seen you in days.” She glances at Sean and raises one eyebrow. Sometimes she’s not a mystery at all.
“I’ve been sleeping at Amanda’s,” I say.
“Oh,” she says. “You’re sure they don’t mind you over there all the time?”
“They don’t.”
“Okay.” She nods, as though we haven’t had this conversation dozens of times before.
And then my mom just stands there, not even acknowledging the fact that there is another person beside me on the couch. She’s not being intentionally rude, she just doesn’t understand things like this sometimes. Like how people act. How people are supposed to act.
Sean stands up finally. “Hi,” he says. “I’m Sean.” He sticks out his hand.
My mother just stares at it. She looks him up and down. Then over to me on the couch. Then back to Sean. “Hello,” she says, awkwardly. “I’m Ellie’s mother.”
I put my hand in my pocket and touch the drawing, but I know I can’t show it to her. I wish I could.
“I thought you were working tonight,” I say.
“My schedule changed. I did an overnight last night instead. Got home an hour ago.”
“How were the babies?” I ask. I turn toward Sean. “My mom works at the neonatal ICU at the hospital.”
“Wow,” Sean says. “That must be crazy.”
“Preemie twins tonight,” she says. “Sixteen weeks early. They’re stable for now. But it’s hard to say what might happen later.” My mother shakes her head. There is a special kind of exhaustion my mother always carries around. It radiates off her. When I haven’t seen her for a few days, it’s all the more obvious. Being around it, I catch it, like a flu. It makes me feel like someone is sitting on my chest. It makes me want to go outside, somewhere light and loud with lots of other people.
“That’s awful,” I say.
“That’s life, I guess,” my mom says. And she shrugs and lets out a sigh.
When I was younger I would always beg her to take me to work, imagining all the cute little babies I’d get to play with, but she would never let me come with her. Once, when I was nine years old, Nina showed me a picture on the Internet of a tiny preemie, seventeen weeks early. “Mom worked with this baby,” Nina had told me. Its head reminded me of an apricot—small and covered in downy little hairs, and soft looking. Its tiny arms and legs as thick as my pointer finger. The baby’s skin was so translucent I could see each vein swirling underneath. According to the article that the picture was attached to, the baby only survived for three hours. Looking at this picture and knowing this filled me with an almost unbearable sadness that I didn’t understand at the time. I was sad not just for the baby, but for everyone in the entire world. This baby reminded me of something that we are all born knowing, but that if we’re lucky, we forget—the world doesn’t make sense, things just happen, often without any reason, and life isn’t fair, it was never supposed to be. I understood my mom in a different way after that.
“I guess I’m going to go back upstairs now,” she says. I watch her walk away in her bathrobe, clutching her mug.
“Hey, Mom?” I call out. For a second, one brief second, even though I know better, I consider telling her what’s really going on.
“Yeah, Ellie?” My mom turns back. Her shoulders are sagging slightly.
But I can’t tell her. I’m not going to. And I’m not sure if it’s for her sake, or for my own.
“Good night, Mom,” I say.
“Good night, Ellie,” my mom says. And then she’s gone.
“Your mom’s pretty cool,” Sean says. “Didn’t even mind that you have some random dude sitting here on the couch?”
“I’m not sure if ‘cool’ is the word I’d use exactly,” I say. “But thanks.”
“Better than my mom,” Sean says. He’s smirking. “Who is insane.”
I look down. The laptop’s finally booted up. Only when I hear the door to my mom’s room creak shut upstairs do I start typing.
I do a search and go to the bank’s website. It loads slowly, a picture of a man and a woman, sitting at a computer, each with a cup of coffee, smiling. My heart is pounding.
I click on customer login. There’s a tiny link under it.
Having trouble logging in? Forgot your username or password?