It is so hard to do what I do next, but I do it because I deserve to hurt. I deserve to have my bones grind and scream against one another.
I told her to go. I deserve whatever’s coming to me.
So I put the pills back under the counter, behind the cleaner. Where Mom and Dad will find them, all there, when they come home.
I walk into the bedroom and I scream, loud and long and oh my God, oh my God—
“Mom!”
She is on the floor, wearing her favorite pale green yoga outfit, and she is in fish pose. She doesn’t move, doesn’t speak.
“Mommy—”
I stop halfway through my rush to her.
My mother, my beautiful mother, is lying on the ground, just her back arched so that the crown of her head is resting on the blue rug we bought together two weeks ago, her upside-down eyes staring at the wall behind her. Her chest is still.
I take a deep breath and I smell her, smell the roses. I smell the ocean.
“Hannah?” Mae is pounding up the stairs and she bursts into the room, a meteor. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
Mom sinks into the floor. Disappears. A fish, swimming to the bottom of a sapphire sea.
“Nah?”
I shake my head.
“What are you looking at?” Mae is staring at the carpet. But there is nothing there.
“Mom can’t hold her breath,” I say.
Even though I’ve already forgotten so much about her—the shape of her ears, maybe everything, I’m remembering this: We had a contest in the pool at the Cape last summer, to see who could hold their breath the longest.
Mom lost.
Fifteen seconds. That’s all she could do.
Mae blinks. Her computer brain whirs, sifting through memories, until I see in her eyes she has found the one from the Cape.
“Adrenaline rushes can produce surprising effects.” She steps closer. “Most moms can’t lift cars, but if their kid is trapped under one—”
“The ocean is bigger than a car.”
My mom is not coming home.
I know this like I know my belly is empty.
I turn and start to walk out of the room, but Mae looks around, her head cocked to the side.
“What?”
“Are you—are you wearing Mom’s perfume?” she asks.
I stare at the rug, willing her back, but she’s swum too far away.
“No.”
Please don’t take them both. Bring him home, I tell the universe, and I swear I will never use again.
I won’t even bother making promises about what I’ll do if the universe ignores me.
7
Mae
ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit
Earth Date: 2 September
Earth Time (PST): 02:36
The last time disaster struck, Mom made minestrone. That was when Hannah’s pregnancy test had two pink lines instead of one. At the time, I didn’t know about the test, I just knew something was wrong, because Mom was making soup.
I didn’t find out about any of that until after they got back from the clinic. Mom, Dad, Nah—they were all weird about me knowing. Because my bio-mom had been a teen. One with a problem. Except hers was meth, and Nah’s is opiates. Same difference, at the end of the day. They thought it would be “triggering” for me. Mom’s word. What was “triggering” was the fact that I’d been left out of the loop. This big thing was happening, and nobody told me. Hannah was trying to get sober, like what happened woke her up, so I decided it was not of use to express my hurt, which seemed much smaller in comparison to her hurt.
Emotions, really, are just fractions. You reduce them as much as you can, get to the essence of them, and sometimes you get lucky and they’re whole numbers in the end, or even prime numbers—which means they’re one thing now and so much easier to make sense of. Five, for example. Five is a natural number greater than one that cannot be formed by multiplying two smaller natural numbers and is therefore prime. Singular. I’m a five about that situation with the lines on the stick and all that came after. Five is just simply mad. I don’t want to be defined by my adoptedness—it’s just a part of me, not all of me. A fraction. But, for some reason, even the people closest to me have determined that being adopted bothers me. It doesn’t. Them thinking it bothers me is what bothers me.
I’m still mad about all that. I’m still a five.
Now that I’m in the kitchen, though, the mad turns to something else because I’m remembering better: the last time Mom made soup was a few weeks ago—Italian wedding. I forgot because she ended up giving it all to her friend who was sick. She never would say why she made it. That soup was the only one in our entire lives that she insisted on making alone. She wouldn’t let any of us in the kitchen, and she played Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” on repeat. I’ll never know what was hurting her or why she made Dad’s favorite soup without giving him a bite.
Dad calls Mom’s soup habit soup meditation. No matter how stressed Mom is about whatever is making her pull out the soup pot in the first place, by the end she’s calm. Relaxed, even. Able to see the problem clearly and know what to do about it. Nah calls it Mom’s cauldron, like the soup pot is for divination and spells.
I say she’s just found another way to work the problem.
When you’re making soup, all you need to think about is chopping and pouring and slicing and stirring. And you can’t mess it up, not really. It’s not like baking, where you have to consider thermodynamics and its effect on various chemical compounds. Baking is science. Soup—maybe soup is art. To make it, you have to engage the right side of your brain. Your imagination. And you need to use all five senses, not just sight. You give the left side of your brain a break—the logic part of it. Wait. WAIT.
MY MOTHER IS A GENIUS.
I am just now realizing: The reason we make soup when there is a crisis is because soup is a creative act that engages your imagination, allowing you to work through the tangles of a problem and connect new, heretofore unseen dots. MAKING SOUP IS LIKE EINSTEIN PLAYING THE VIOLIN.
He was always carrying around “Lina,” as he called all his violins, and Dad wrote a whole paper once on the connection between musical theory and quantum theory and showed that part of why Einstein’s mathematical equations are so elegant is because, when he was stumped, he’d play music, which would open up new channels in his brain. New pathways to work the problem. Dad joked that we should give partial credit of E=mc2 to Bach and Mozart.
Maybe because none of us play instruments, Mom found another way to open up all those channels in our brains. And how sneaky of her, as usual, not to tell us she’s doing it.
I miss her.
It’s the middle of the night on what is now technically day five, and I left Hannah asleep on Mom’s side of the bed, her head resting on Micah’s chest. His arms are around her like he can shield her from the world, and maybe he can. Maybe love can do that sometimes. Hide you. I wonder if Riley would be here if he hadn’t had to move a million miles away. Then again, he returns seventeen percent of my emails, so I suspect he would not, in fact, be here.
The kitchen is chilly, but I open the window anyway to let in the salty smell of the air and Mom’s garden scents: basil, rosemary, lemon. I pull the big soup pot out of the cabinet. It’s after two in the morning, but that never stopped Mom. I press PLAY on the old stereo Dad installed on top of the wine rack, and suddenly I am back in the only church I ever liked being in. The Tallis Scholars, singing in Latin, a cappella. I remember Dad putting the CD in here just a few days before they left for Malaysia. He’d been making his famous egg bake, a breakfast casserole that Mom says will give all of us heart disease. There’s half a tray of it still in the freezer. He’d made extra so we could eat it while they were gone. Knowing that egg bake is here when he’s not scoops something out of my insides.