The stairwell is dark, and it is even darker in the large room beyond. It’s a combination den and dining room with a kitchen running in a strip along the back wall. It only has windows on one side. They run in a narrow horizontal line up by the ceiling, and it’s been raining on and off all day. The sun is behind a thick blanket of clouds. I peer into the dim light, seeking her.
I have been mostly happy here, in this small span of time.
She is sitting on the sofa. She’s been drinking wine, the purple Kool-Aid-colored kind that comes in a big jug with a round ring for a handle. I can smell its thin, acidic tang. A juice glass sits on the coffee table, a few bright dregs staining the base of it. She’s holding a cigarette that has burned down to the filter and died without her noticing, a tube of untouched ash perched between her fingers.
I set my backpack down by the front door, and Kai starts at the sound. She sits up straight, and the long ash breaks and crumbles. The big pieces fall and scatter down her front, while some dusty bits drift slower in a gray and weightless haze. Her eyes seek me and find me, tearstained and sweaty from the exertion of beating Candace. Her eyes meet mine.
I think she tried hard not to believe Candace. Maybe she succeeded, but not all the way. She reads the confirmation on my face. The truth has such a power to it, and it’s already been spoken in this room.
There is a beat, a single breath that lasts a century, and then there is nothing for me in her expression. No thought, no feeling. Her eyes roll slowly in their sockets, past me, to look into the darkness of the stairs behind me.
The world’s very tilt changes. I feel it. The whole planet shifts under my feet. The ground is water, and the ocean is the sky. Everything that was once moored now floats. I am drifting, too, helpless in a sea of stories with no current and no wind.
“Mama,” I begin, but she talks over me.
“Oh, hello, baby,” she says. Her eyes have become chips of green rock. Her pale face shines, expressionless, like carved marble glowing in the darkness. “Do you want a piece of fruit?”
“Mama,” I start again. “I’m—”
“There’s bananas, or I think there’s still an apple,” she says, cutting me off again.
She notices the filter in her hand and sets it in the ashtray, which is already bursting with a hundred stubbed-out Camels. When we first moved in, there was a dank green basement smell, mossy and thick. Now, the whole place reeks of stale smoke. She brushes at the scattered ash that’s graying out the colors of her skirt, then gets a new cigarette from the pack and lights up. Her gaze slides over me again, and this time it settles on the kitchen.
“Kai,” I say, urgent.
I want for her to come at me. I need her to. She could slap me, hard and openhanded, as many times as I slapped Candace. More. She could squeeze me tight enough to shove the breath from me. I want her to scream and flail, to be a raging storm. I want her to be anything that has a chance of being over.
I step into her line of vision, but it is as if I am a moving spot of Teflon. Her gaze slides away, unable to pause or stick. She gets up, weaves her way to the stripe of kitchen on the back wall, and starts cutting up the apple for me.
I don’t remember my mother ever looking straight at me again.
I’m sure she must have. There had to be times when, by sheer chance, her gaze and my body intersected. It was not a large apartment. But in my memory, her eyes wore out the air around me, year after relentless year. To an outside observer, I doubt that much would have changed, but I knew. I’d been locked outside her story, and the longer I stayed out, the more guilt and fury worked their way under my skin like backward shrapnel, slow-digging their way deep into the meat of me.
So I remade myself into a creature built to plague her. Paula the slut, the scrapper, the petty criminal, the rebel. I’d come home at four A.M., stinking of boy and beer, and still she looked just past me. She never told me to be any different, the jagged scrape of a thousand guilt and fury slivers rasping on my bones became background music, an ever-present hum. Once I moved to Indiana, I remade myself again: the woman who made good to spite her mother. I let my checks tell that tale for me. The amount on them growing larger with the years, but asking the same angry question. Six months ago, she finally answered: I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning; death is not the end. You will be the end. We will meet again, and there will be new stories.
Classic, cryptic Kai, speaking just off point, her words sliding over me and past me like her gaze. Why couldn’t she say, Hey, sorry, but I’m dying, and I’m coming to Atlanta. Do you want your little sister?