At school, Lily’s survival was my survival. By fifth grade, I was an expert at protecting her, taking out hall passes to check on her at recess, skipping my own recess to patrol her lunch. I’d tackle any kid in any grade who called her a name, flailing my fists until I ran out of fight or a teacher split us up. Once I threatened to throw one of her bullies into the river that ran through downtown Wheatsville—a glorified creek, really, but I’d seen a mob movie while my mom was at work one night and thought it sounded cool. I was suspended for “violent behavior,” and the school counselor recommended therapy.
My mother was furious. She threw my conduct sheet down on the table and said, “Can’t you just hold it together a few more years, Mac?”
But in the end, she was the one who fell apart.
* * *
When I was eleven, my mother disappeared for a week.
Since the car was gone, too, I assumed she had left for good. Strange that it had never occurred to me that she could leave, since my father had done it. But, three years later, that tragedy seemed unavoidable, even a little romantic. Besides, he had left us with her; she had left us with no one.
I didn’t panic. Lily would be able to tell if I panicked, and then someone would find out we were alone in the house. I didn’t know what would happen next, but I knew it would be bad. That our mother might be hurt, even dead, was a thought I didn’t allow, because it would make no difference to our current situation. I dropped it down a well so deep, even I couldn’t see the bottom, and I turned off my feelings like turning off a tap. It was strangely easy to do, so easy I barely noticed I was doing it. Every morning, I got Lily up and took her to school and dropped her off at class, and every evening I threw a frozen pizza in the oven for dinner like nothing was wrong. I even learned how to run the dishwasher.
On the fifth day, we ran out of frozen pizzas. I went into my mom’s room, which I’d been avoiding, to look for cash.
I started with the curio boxes that crowded her dresser, a collection of crystal shells, porcelain hearts, and beveled, brass-seamed mirror boxes, all covered in dust and grime from neglect. I’d long ago exhausted my curiosity about them, but now I opened them all one by one, just in case, and peered inside. Next, I searched the dresser, from the top drawer with its stretched-out bras the color of graying skin to the bottom, where an emerald-green bathing suit I recognized from my mom’s old pageant pictures lay folded neatly under heaps of faded bikinis with rotting straps. I unfolded it, and out dropped a fuzzy black box with my mom’s diamond studs nestled inside. She’d stopped wearing them around the time my father left.
I put the diamonds in my ears and watched them twinkle like little stars. Then I took them off and put them in my pocket. It wasn’t like she needed them now.
* * *
On the seventh day, Lily refused to take her bath. She allowed herself to be undressed while the water ran, but when I cut the faucet off, she stood shivering next to the tub, feet cemented to the mat.
“Lily, it’s bath time,” I said, keeping my voice deliberately neutral. “Get in.”
“No.”
Things could always get worse. What would happen if kids started smelling her on the bus? Eventually a teacher would notice and tell someone in charge, and we’d be taken away.
“Lily, you have to. Please.” Tears prickled in my eyes. I blinked angrily at them, knowing they’d only make things harder. I could almost feel Lily shudder as one escaped and raced toward my chin.
Her jaw set. “I don’t want to.”
I tried to make myself breathe deeply. Lily is my sister, I reminded myself, and then, Lily’s survival is my survival. “What’s wrong?”
“Mom does bath.”
Breathe. “I do bath now.”
“Mom does bath.”
“Mom isn’t here right now.” I said it as gently as I could.
She stared obstinately at the door. “Mom does—”
“When I was eight, I did my own bath,” I snapped, the compulsion to cry suddenly shoved aside by a feeling like a balloon swelling in my chest, about to burst. It was rage, the same rage I had vented on the playground in kicks and punches at the kids who made fun of Lily, now directed at Lily herself. Rage at her immovable flesh, her insurmountable will, her blamelessness. Rage at the dwindling pile of pennies in the change dish and the rubbery ground meat I’d microwaved for dinner in a frozen block, its cold center bleeding all over the plate, and finally, rage at the thought of what would happen if Lily refused to bathe tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Some part of me watched from a distance while inside me the balloon grew bigger and bigger, pushing against my rib cage until I thought it would crack.
Powerless to stop myself, too exhausted to try, I took a step forward and put out my hand with no plan for what came next.
Just then I heard the front door open and shut.
“Mom does bath,” Lily said, smug.
The woman who appeared at the bathroom door barely looked like our mother. Her week of absence had turned her the color of bruises, purple around the eyes and yellowish everywhere else. The skin sagged around her scrawny elbows and too-prominent collarbone as if she wore someone else’s cast-offs. She stared at us unseeing for a moment. Then she began to sob, and the bag of bones rattled to life. I drew back as she threw her arms around Lily, who politely ignored her tears.
When Mom released her, Lily stepped into the bathtub without a word. I watched numbly as they began to perform the evening ritual of bath time, thinking only that it was over. There would be no more raw meat for dinner. Although it was only eight o’clock, I went to bed and fell asleep instantly.
Sometime later that night, I awoke to the sound of my mom on the phone in the next room. I listened for as long as I could keep my eyes open.
“I tried to stop on my own, I swear, but the pain was so bad. I thought, I’ll just take enough to get through work every day and I’ll get it somewhere else, anywhere but the clinic . . . I don’t even know what that guy gave me, Karen. I swear, I didn’t know how long I was gone.” Odd, dry sobs, like a record skipping. “I need help. I’m drowning, I’m drowning, I’m drowning . . .”
The words went on and on, and then I was asleep again, no longer in bed, but back in the bathroom with Lily, trying to get her into the tub, stuck in the moment right before my mom came in. This time, I shoved Lily as hard as I could. Her eyes went wide and she fell backward, her head hitting the porcelain with a crack. Then she was underwater, not in the bathtub, but in the river, her hair waving all around. Beneath her, in the murky green depths, a forest of dead men planted in concrete reached up their arms.
* * *
The clinic didn’t press charges for the stolen opioids, but my mom’s job was gone for good, her license suspended. The court ordered outpatient rehab, a caseworker for home visits, physical therapy, pain management classes. Everything’s mandated but an income, she cracked sourly. How’re you supposed to get that.
A girl on the bus whose mom worked at the same clinic said all nurses have aching backs, but they don’t all become drug addicts. Every day for weeks, she hung over the back of the seat in front of me and told me about the cancer patients who had died in pain because my mom shorted their IV bags. I just stared out the window.