After school on Tuesday, I didn’t walk home; I headed in the direction of my mom’s old apartment. It was on the other side of Main Street, where the houses were a little smaller and the tenants were more rough around the edges. After she’d left when I was seven, she’d moved into a one-bedroom apartment that smelled like bleach every time I went over to visit on Saturday afternoons. My dad would drop me off at her door, only leaving when he was sure I was safely inside. From there, I had five unsupervised hours with her.
She was never genuinely happy to see me. At the time, I hadn’t noticed, too blinded by my own excitement to pick up on the subtle signs. She'd turn on the TV, plant me on the couch, and then go in the other room and talk on the phone or flip through a magazine—anything to avoid me.
A year or two into our Saturday afternoon visits, there was a knock on her apartment door. I was coloring in the living room and even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to, I peered over. There was a man standing at the threshold, pressing the door open with his hand. A cigarette hung between his lips and a scar stretched from his eyelid down to the top of his lip. Small scabs were littered across his cheeks and chin. They looked like the scabs I got when I scratched too much at a mosquito bite. I wondered how he could have managed to get so many bites just as he bent down to grip my mother’s neck in his hand.
His cigarette fell to the floor, burning ash into the fake wood as I jumped up to stop him. I wanted to scream at him to leave her alone, but she waved behind her back, warning me away. I clenched my fists, trying to think of what to do. The phone was in the kitchen and I couldn’t figure out a way to sneak past without him noticing.
I stood scared and frozen in the living room as he bent low and whispered something only she could hear. She pleaded with him, begging for more time. Then as quickly as he’d arrived, he unwrapped his hand from my mother’s neck and left. When she shut the door, I swiveled back to stare at the TV, trying to pretend like the last few minutes had never happened. I picked up my crayon and tried to make my hand stop shaking. She walked into the living room and turned the TV off. The screen faded to black as she told me she had to leave. I asked her over and over again where she was going, but she ignored me as she gathered up my coloring books and shoved them inside my backpack. I wanted to yell at her for crinkling the pages. I wanted her to stop pushing me out the door.
I cradled my toys and snacks in my arms as she gave me orders to sit at the curb of her apartment complex until my dad came to pick me up. Then she disappeared inside her old red car. There was a giant dent on the back, near the bumper; I stared at it as she pulled away. My bottom lip quivered as the car got smaller and smaller in the distance, but I couldn’t cry. If I cried, someone would think I needed help and my mom would get in trouble.
I had to be a grownup.
For an hour, I sat on the cement with my coloring book unopened on my lap. Any time someone would walk by, I’d tell them that my mom had run back to the apartment to grab something so they wouldn’t think I was alone. I was thirsty, but I didn’t want to finish my Capri Sun; I wasn’t sure how long she’d be gone.
When my father arrived a few hours later, I tried to lie and say my mother had just left, but he wouldn’t listen. He was in an absolute rage to find me alone and locked out of my mother's apartment. I begged him not to do anything, but that was the last time he let me go see my mom for a visit. The court rescinded her visitation rights without contest. I wished I knew what had pulled her away from me that day, who or what had been more important than her flesh and blood.
I walked along the sidewalk and then stood across the street from her apartment complex. The building had been worn down when she’d lived there, but it’d become condemnable in the years since. Trash littered the ground and most of the windows were duct-taped and boarded up. Weeds had claimed ownership of the yard a while back but no one seemed to mind. My hand itched to clear them out, but there was no point. If no one cared that they were there, no one would care when they were gone.
I was about to cross the street to get a closer look when I heard my name.
“Lilah?”
I turned to find Trent standing outside of a house a little farther down the street. He was at the top of the stairs, holding the screen door open and narrowing his eyes in confusion. It took me a second to connect the two worlds. I hadn’t noticed her apartment the last time I’d been at his house.
“I forgot you lived over here.”
He nodded and let the screen door slam closed behind him. We met in the middle of his sidewalk and then turned toward the direction of my mom’s old apartment. We stared in silence for a moment and then he spoke up.
“What are you doing on this side of town?”