“Do you think they made it?” Micah asks quietly.
I stop breathing. There’s a long pause. Too long. Remember: Mae knows all the things.
“Ask me at ninety-six hours,” she says.
Four days. In the modern world, if you can’t contact someone within that amount of time, you are incapable of contacting them.
“But what’s your gut feeling?” Micah says. His voice is so hopeful, so broken.
I can imagine the look on her face. “I need more data.”
my mom is terrible at holding her breath.
Death Tarot Card
4302 Seaview Lane
Venice, CA
6
Hannah
I think I might fall off the wagon again.
Preferably today. Preferably now.
Are wagons really that hard to climb back onto? They don’t say fall off a skyscraper, fall out of a plane. It’s just a wagon.
A single pill.
On a loop, in my head, never ending: I told her to go. I told her to go.
We haven’t heard a thing.
Anyone would want a pill if they hadn’t heard a thing. Not Mae, but a normal person, maybe.
At twenty-four hours, I got a second wind when some lady on CNN found her daughter alive in the hospital. She was in a coma, which is why no one knew her name and couldn’t put her on a list of survivors. So I decided both of my parents were in comas. All we had to do was go find them. Or maybe they were being heroes. Rescuing kids in trees. Huddling on top of floating debris. Calling out to rescue workers: Here! Over here! They are alive, and when they get back, they will write a memoir of survival and it’ll be made into a movie starring Hugh Jackman with a Boston accent, and Rachel Weisz, maybe, or that Greek actress Nia Vardalos.
But then we are told that the coma theory is a long shot. At least for both of them. But Dad always says the long shot is the best shot. And then he starts talking science and I don’t understand him anymore, but my point is that they might be in a coma, but in a cave or a boat, right, not like in a hospital. And someone is taking care of them or, I don’t know, maybe Cynthia is right and there really are angels. She said she dreamed of one last night.
Cyn’s curled up on the recliner in the living room, which I’m avoiding because she’s texting with all of Mom’s friends and students from their yoga studio and if one of them comes to the house and is all namaste I will cut a bitch. I really will.
It’s night two, the second night after the wave, and when Gram and Papa arrive I feel a momentary sense of relief because they’re old and have wisdom and will know what to do. But their panic is so present, so palpable, that I’ve started avoiding them as much as I can. It’s hard watching old people try not to cry. Every now and then Papa will look around, as if he’s just realized where he is. “I can’t believe it,” he’ll say, shaking his head. “I just can’t believe it.”
Mae’s not any better, but for different reasons. Every time I leave a room and come back in, she studies me, like I’m something in one of her labs. To see if I took anything.
“Do you want me to pee in a cup?” I finally snap, around the forty-eight-hour mark.
My sister is doing calculus homework—to relax, she says. This is why she’ll jump in a spaceship someday and go be amazing and never be scared and have all the answers and I will be here, forcing myself to get out of bed in the morning. If I’m still here.
Because fuck here. Really. Fuck it.
Mae cocks her head to the side, in that birdlike way of hers, eyes narrowing. Checking my pupils.
“No,” she says.
We don’t talk for the rest of the night.
On day three, Mae and I start filling out a missing persons report for the International Red Cross.
And it’s here, at seventy-two hours, that I realize something:
The forgetting begins almost immediately.
Nobody tells you that.
The stuff they ask you about is the kind of thing they would ask when your missing person is probably not a person anymore. Otherwise, why would they want to know about scars and jewelry and tattoos—they say it’s so much easier to identify the body if the person has tattoos. Dad doesn’t have any tattoos. Nobody can remember which ankle Mom’s Om is on.
We don’t have pictures of Mom’s feet. Why don’t we have a single picture of her feet? Her feet in the sand or on her yoga mat or propped up on the coffee table when she’s reading one of those murder mysteries she likes.
“I think it was on her right ankle,” Mae says, scrolling through the yoga photos on Mom’s website. In all the pictures she’s wearing leggings that cover her ankles. “But it doesn’t matter because they’ll just be looking for a tattoo and see it and then—”
“But what if someone else has an Om tattoo on her ankle?” I say. “I mean, it’s a common symbol, yeah? And the shape of her ears—are they serious? I don’t even know the shape of my own ears.”
Mae rubs her eyes, then slides her hands down her face. “Birthmarks?”
“Dad has that one on his back,” I say. “Remember that time Gram told him to have it looked at because she thought it was cancerous, and Dad explained, like, the entire history of skin cancer to her and she still made him go to the doctor?”
“And she said it was shaped like Italy,” Mae says. “I remember that. Should I write it down like that? Shaped like Italy?”
I nod, then close my eyes and try to remember my mother’s ears. I’m such a horrible daughter. What kind of person doesn’t remember what her mom’s ears look like? I mean, really? Did I ever even see her—like really see her?
When we’re done, Mae takes the papers to Dad’s office to scan and send them to the Red Cross.
It’s been over five months since I’ve slipped a diamond between my lips, and my body wants its Percocet fix. My bones hurt. My actual bones. Like growing pains. Like how it was in detox, back in March. My bones remember and they want and they whisper, begging, Please, Hannah, please.
But I can’t. I told her to go. I convinced my mother she had to go on this stupid trip, and so I don’t get relief. I don’t get oblivion. I don’t get to fall off a wagon or a skyscraper or anything else because I don’t deserve to feel better.
I killed my mother.
I grab a glass of water and pull myself up the stairs, to where my parents keep the Advil, because maybe that will make my bones shut up for a little while. It’s the strongest thing I can give them. Our Venice bungalow is essentially a sober house. Mom and Dad stopped drinking at home in solidarity, and once I got back from detox and started the outpatient Circle of Sad bullshit, I never smelled Mom’s weed in the backyard late at night, when she thought we were asleep.
I feel like I’m trespassing when I enter the master bathroom. For some reason, I feel them here more than in other places in the house. They were in a rush the morning they left, and so things are scattered on the counter: a tube of lipstick, a bottle of Brut cologne, Dad’s little silver scissors. I run my hand across the dry bar of soap in the shower—who used it last? Probably Dad. Mom likes to take her showers at night. A lump gathers in my throat, and I remember how Cynthia says that, according to Reiki, this means my head and my heart are having problems communicating.