“It’s a school night,” he said finally. “We should all get to bed.”
But I didn’t go to school the next day. In the morning Dad was out—he left a note saying he was taking care of errands and getting groceries. There was nobody downstairs to make sure I actually left to catch my bus. I checked the garage; Mom’s car was still there.
She was upstairs in bed, facing away from me. I could tell she was awake.
“Hey, Mom.” My mother turned, tightening the blankets around her. She looked up at me with eyes like a little bird’s, uncertain and fearful.
“Are you okay?” I said. It was obvious she was not.
She shook her head. There seemed to be nothing to do but get in bed next to her and crawl under the blankets. She curled toward me until our foreheads touched. I fell asleep like that, and when I woke up, my mother was no longer in bed, but my hair was wet, and there were dark patches on her pillow. She’d been crying. I crawled out of bed to look for her.
Mom was downstairs, leaning on the counter with a mug between her hands, peering into the hot chocolate.
I knew she’d heard me come down, but she didn’t turn around. It was like she wanted me to notice the little orange bottle wrapped in its pharmaceutical label, perched on the edge of the counter.
“What’s that?” I said, glancing at the pills through the orange. I had a strange sense of déjà vu—as if I’d seen her just like this before, standing next to a prescription bottle, her body shaped with defeat and gloom.
Or was it a vague memory, forgotten until now?
Mom knew what I was referring to. She didn’t look up. “That is my new life.”
I went and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, set my temple against hers. “If they can help, then it’s a good thing. It’s a good life.”
I waited to feel her nod, but she never did.
At one in the morning a text came buzzing through my phone, and I realized I’d failed to respond to any of Axel’s messages over the last seventeen hours.
Hey, I texted back.
Are you okay? What’s going on?
I sighed and texted, Can I come over?
Of course
I had to sneak out of the house, which was easy enough. When I cut diagonally through other people’s yards, it only took five minutes to run to Axel’s, even with the snow ankle-deep.
In his basement, he slumped down on the couch next to me. “So what happened?”
“Ugh.”
I fell over sideways so that the top of my hair was grazing the side of his thigh. It occurred to me that if I had shifted my body differently, I could’ve put my head right in his lap. Would that have freaked him out?
He gently nudged my shoulder.
It was easier to talk with my eyes focused on the little dots of light on his keyboard, the giant headphones lying in a puddle of cords. I didn’t have to look at Axel. I didn’t have to see his reaction.
I told him about going to the hospital. I told him how I found Mom in bed in the morning, and how in that moment it felt like I would be guilty of something if I just left her and went to school.
I didn’t use the word depression, which had been thudding around in my skull all day.
“But I still don’t get it,” he said quietly. “Why did she call nine-one-one?”
I shrugged, which made my head bump against his leg. I could feel the static gathering in my hair. “I don’t know, either.”
I mean, I could have speculated. I didn’t really want to.
“God. I’m so sorry, Leigh.”
I let my eyes fall shut.
When I woke in the morning, I was still on his couch. A quilt was draped over me. I sat up slowly. Axel was asleep, curled up on his twin bed in the back corner. I watched his body swell and fall with each breath.
A cyprus-green pang struck me between the ribs. He’d removed himself from the couch. We could’ve fallen asleep touching, but he didn’t let that happen. I guess it would’ve been weird.
But maybe really nice.
I stood up and stretched. Axel’s watercolor pad leaned against the music stand on his keyboard. My fingers itched for it. I loved seeing his paintings. Sometimes he’d let me flip through, and he’d explain how each bold stroke or swirl of color was going to translate to a solo bassoon, the trill of a piccolo, arpeggios on a Spanish guitar.
I picked up the pad and thumbed through to find paintings I hadn’t seen yet. The edges flew by too fast, landing on a page in the far back that was heavier and thicker than all the rest—
Here was a photograph, old and a little bent, glued in place. It took me a second to puzzle out who the four people were—I was too used to thinking of Axel’s family as just him, Angie, and their dad. This was the Moreno family back when it was still whole, before Axel’s mother walked out.
Sometimes it was easy to forget that Axel’s mother existed; so much of his face came from his father. I wondered if that bothered him. If he felt like the lack of his mother in his own features made her seem too easily erased.
Here, in two dimensions, they looked so happy. But then, didn’t everyone, in pictures? That was almost the point, wasn’t it? To be able to look back and see yourself smiling, even if the camera had shuttered and clicked while you were standing there thinking about all the things that were wrong?
Axel’s mom grinned with teeth that were slightly crooked. Her black hair fell in messy waves around her shoulders, and she wore an emerald dress that flattered her curvy hips. She looped arms with her husband. He stood awkwardly to the side, a couple inches taller than his wife, but shrinking inside a striped button-down that was a little too big.
Beside them: toddler Angie squeezing a plush elephant, and Axel in a plaid shirt, gazing up at his mother like she was the only thing in the world he needed.
I heard the rustle of sheets too late. Axel rolled out of bed, and I didn’t have time to hide what I was holding. I turned toward him, suddenly feeling like I shouldn’t have touched anything in the first place.
His eyes landed on the sketch pad. He sighed.
I knew that sigh. It was the sound of him deciding to forgive me.
“I’m sorry,” I said immediately. “I realize I shouldn’t have now, but I didn’t think you would mind—”
Axel waved away the rest of my sentence and squeezed his eyes shut through a yawn. “You shouldn’t have. But it’s fine.”
I nodded, my cheeks burning a little.
“I just found that the other day,” he said, coming around to sit on the couch.
I sat down next to him. He smelled like sleep.
“You mean the photograph?”
“I don’t even remember when it was taken,” he said. “But I remember that dress. She called it her power dress and only wore it for special occasions.”
“How old do you think you are?”
Axel looked over my shoulder. He stared at the photo for a while. “Maybe six? It was probably a year before she left.”
“Could you tell?”
“Tell what?”
“That she was going to leave.”
Axel sat back and let out a long, slow breath. “I don’t know.”
“Did it seem like your parents were falling out of love?”
His fingers traced the edge of a cushion that had begun to fray. “I don’t know.”
I slid down on the couch so that I was lying on my back, my legs forming a bridge over the cold floor. “I know emotions are all internal and whatnot. But I just wonder if it’s visible on the outside. You can tell when people are falling in love. So there must be a way to see if people are falling out of love, right?”
Axel slid down so our eyes were at the same level. “Maybe, I guess.”
“Do you think people can be in love but also unhappy?”
“Yes,” said Axel, the most solid answer he’d given in a long time. “Definitely.”
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