Diego kept his hands in his pockets as we walked up the stairs, like he didn’t trust himself not to touch me. “Do you want me to drive you home? Your mom might not freak out with me there.”
The offer was tempting, but Diego’s presence would only delay my mother’s wrath, and time had a way of concentrating her anger. “I’ll walk.”
“Try not to get abducted.”
“Funny.”
We lingered at Please Start. Diego sat on the rusted hood and traced lines in the dirt, while I kicked at the gravel on the side of the road. Maybe we were both thinking about that kiss on his bedroom floor. I certainly was. Making out with Marcus had always felt like a race to the finish line, but with Diego I felt like I’d already won.
? ? ?
The house felt lonely inside. Mom’s car was parked in front of the duplex, but it didn’t feel like anyone was home. Nana wasn’t on the couch, and it looked abandoned without her sitting on it, reading while she watched the twenty-four-hour Bunker live feed.
“Hello?”
Smoke drifted into the living room from the kitchen, a spectral finger beckoning me onward. Mom sat at the kitchen table, still in her uniform, the black apron stained with salad dressing and other unidentifiable food particles. She looked a little like a slug herself, flabby and limp, leaning on the table with her face buried in her hands. The only sign of life was the lit cigarette smoldering between her fingers.
“Mom?”
“Sit.” She took a hard drag from her cigarette, the cherry flaring, and lit the end of a new one off the old before stubbing it out. I chose the seat across from her, hoping to stay out of arm’s reach. “I can’t do this with you, Henry. I need you to be okay.”
I’d expected anger, rage. I’d come to the table, garbed in heavy plate armor capable of deflecting my mother’s barbed and poisonous words. I was not prepared for this. The emptiness of her voice. “Mom—”
“I put Mother in a home.”
“What?”
Mom sucked on the cigarette like it was the only thing anchoring her to the world. “My mother is sick and I put her in a home, my oldest son dropped out of college to have a baby out of wedlock, and I can barely gather the strength to get out of bed in the morning. I need you to be okay.” Mom looked me in the eyes, but I didn’t see my mom anymore. I saw a woman struggling and failing to hold the tattered shreds of her life together. “Are you okay, Henry?”
After the first abduction, my mom sent me to one doctor after another. She never believed the various diagnoses—she hadn’t believed I was being abducted by aliens either. When they said I was depressed, she refused to let them medicate me. When they said I had avoidant personality disorder, she told them I just hadn’t learned to be comfortable in my own skin. She didn’t believe the psychiatrists, she didn’t believe in aliens, but she always believed in me. Through everything, she held fast to the notion that I didn’t need help, that all I needed was time to figure out who I was. I’m not sure if she was right, or if I would have been better off on pills or locked up in a mental hospital, but her belief in me was absolute. If I told her I was still being abducted, that I’d been fooling around with the same boy who attacked me in the showers, that the world was ending and I could prevent it, but that I wasn’t sure I wanted to, it would have destroyed that belief, and it was the only thing holding her together.
I reached across the table and rested my hand on hers. I’d never labored under the false notion that my mom was infallible. I knew that my mom was a human being, frail and confused, but I’d always thought she was just a little less confused than everyone else. She wasn’t, though, and that’s the moment I knew it.
But in the end, it wasn’t her belief that kept me from telling her the truth. It wasn’t her frailty. It was the certainty that we’d all be dead in sixty days. It was the knowledge that none of our choices mattered, that all our pain and all our suffering would end with the world, and we’d be free of those burdens. No faulty memory, no baby, no shitty job, or dead boyfriend. Just the perfect peace of nothingness. That’s what I believed.
“I’m okay, Mom.”
5 December 2015
Audrey’s bedroom hadn’t changed much in the year since I’d seen it last. More pictures of Jesse were framed and hung on the walls or arranged on her desk and nightstand and dresser, but it was still the pink, obsessively organized room where I’d spent dozens of afternoons and evenings hanging out with her and Jesse.
“Are you even studying?” she asked without looking up from her chemistry book. “If you’re not going to do the extra credit for Faraci, you need to ace every test between now and the end of the term.”
My book lay open in front of me, still on the same page I’d opened it to an hour ago. The science was easy; it was concentration that eluded me. “When the world ends, grades won’t matter.”