Katherine Brown<\/strong><\/p> *** \n\n The earliest tangible memory I have of my mother was inside her closet.\n *** \n\n It must have been around age eleven when is started to assume responsibility for my mother. When she and I moved back to New Hampshire without my father, I suddenly became aware of the depths of her illness. The decision was based on an ugly ultimatum that left our home sundered, broken. My mother would either leave, with me, or she would shoot herself. It apparently wasn\u2019t the first time she had made a similar threat, but my father had tried to shield me. \n \/\/\/ Departure Katherine Brown 2 Weeks Before. She reaches out and slaps me. Her hands are cold, the skin stretched tight over the blue marbling of her veins. My body recoils before I can register the hand mark on my cheek. Soundlessly, I run my thumb across my jaw. My mother\u2019s lips are a hard, thin … <\/p>\n
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2 Weeks Before.<\/em>\n
She reaches out and slaps me.\n
Her hands are cold, the skin stretched tight over the blue marbling of her veins. My body recoils before I can register the hand mark on my cheek. Soundlessly, I run my thumb across my jaw. My mother\u2019s lips are a hard, thin line. She didn\u2019t look particularly shocked or emotional.\n
\u201cWhat was that for?\u201d\n
\u201cYou have to fucking listen to me.\u201d\n
My hand drops to my side and I stumble backwards. Okay, Okay, Okay<\/em>. It is the only word I can come up with and it sloshes back and forth inside my skull. Maybe if I tilt my head, the word will leak out of one ear and leave me completely empty. Okay, Okay<\/em>. This is okay<\/em>.\n
\u201cYou didn\u2019t have to slap me.\u201d I say this but the words feel hollow. Something to fill up the space between us.\n
\u201cGo back.\u201d\n
\u201cYou want me to drive all the way to Dale City for some sauce.\u201d\n
\u201cYOU FORGOT IT.\u201d\n
\u201cJesus.\u201d I clench and unclench my fists, trying to pull together the threads of my mother\u2019s mind. I imagine them, blood red, thrown across the room like confetti. A down cycle. Down. Down. Down. My mother is unspooling in front of me, vibrating with anger, and I feel like I am the one going crazy.\n
\u201cJust fucking leave. Just go.\u201d\n
My stomach growls, an unwanted interloper that dares to make itself known. She\u2019s sitting on the bed, the sheets twisted around her. The plastic bag of food is perched precariously around her exposed ankles.\n
\u201cOkay.\u201d I hold out my hands, a pacifying gesture.\n
I want to scream, but instead I silently shuffle backwards. It\u2019s slow progress because of the dog shit and the trash around my feet. Okay, Okay, Okay<\/em>. I don\u2019t know what this is: a mantra, a bleak attempt at self-reassurance. My mind feels cloudy as I reach for the door handle. Thank God, it\u2019s still there. A way out.\n
It\u2019s just me and her in the apartment. My father has always orbited around us, inevitably crashing into our lives. On and off, on and off. But for now, as I rest my knuckles against my eyelids, it\u2019s just the two of us. The door screens her from view, but I know she\u2019s just staring ahead, blinking in confusion.\t\n
She won\u2019t even eat the food that I\u2019ve given her: steaming yellow rice with peas and carrots, cheese pupusas wrapped in oily parchment paper. I will wait for her head to droop, her face slack against the dirty sheets. Make sure she\u2019s finally still. That\u2019s when I will find her food all dried up, clumps of rice and dehydrated vegetables. The reason I was punished. Of course, she will have no recollection. She never does, living in an acrylic world where all the paint bleeds together. But I always remember. Each memory hovering like a beating pulse, a dull throbbing that continues to light up the insides of my cheek.\n\n
My mother, when I was four, had crawled under her desk while she was working as a triage nurse in Alexandria, Virginia. For much of my childhood, I imagined the scene in detail because this was the very beginning of the end. I see my mother, her chin curled against her chest, and my father scooping her up as though she were weightless. Over and over again, I see the television screen throbbing with news of the DC Sniper, my father\u2019s calm procession across the lobby. I see him later standing at the gate of my preschool, dusk burning around his shoulders. It will be the first of many apparitions, strangers waiting to take my hand. Your mom\u2019s in the hospital. \n
She retreated into her closet, suddenly and inextricably agoraphobic, and never would return to work again. The closet had a sliding paneled door. She wedged two desks on either end, one for me and another for herself. There were soft string lights that floated above us like dragonflies, silently hovering over our heads. My mother sketched, her forearms freckled with marker ink. What I remember, so distinctly, was that my McDonald\u2019s burger, nestled in crinkled yellow and red paper, had onions. Onions! The fact that my mother\u2014her hair wispy around her ears, dark shadows running under her blue eyes\u2014was undone, hidden in a closet, didn\u2019t faze me. What startled me was the ubiquitous presence of the onions, strongly fragrant, that scattered over my burger bun.\n
My beautiful mother no longer wore mascara and blue eyeshadow to work.\n
Her face had become pale and drawn, almost unrecognizable to me. No one ever thought to sit beside me, at such a small age, and tell me that they didn\u2019t have a clue what was wrong with her. Closets and McDonald\u2019s Happy Meals slowly transitioned to my mother sprawled in her bed lost in a haze. Orange pill cannisters and endless hospital hallways converged like an optical illusion. The truth was, there was no simple answer explaining how the walls of mother\u2019s mind began to crumble. You could blame a lot of things: trauma from her time in the Air Force, brain injury, a lack of empathetic medical professionals. The hardest truth to swallow, by far, is the simple fact that I lost my mother before I ever really got to know her.\n
She looks a lot like me.\n
Sometimes I take this for granted, because after seventeen years of being with her, I had run away and slipped into other people\u2019s families. And while a hairdresser or a grocery clerk might not notice that I didn\u2019t share feature with those around me, it was obvious to me. I have my mother\u2019s strong jaw, the same shade of hair that has since turned iron grey. The same exposed veins in the same freckled flesh.\n
Mostly, the resemblance scares me.\n
In the few pictures I have managed to recover, I tower over my mother. My arms are skeletal, hanging limply at my sides. I have angled my body so that it doesn\u2019t really connect with hers, but you can see the desperation in her eyes to inch closer. These pictures are deceitful. They show flashes of an up cycle\u2014the way she\u2019s outside, her expression lucid, her eyelids heavy with mascara. She still looks pale, her face dappled with shadow. Her cheeks are round and discolored, as though someone has smudged the photograph. She smiles.\n
In the pictures that I have salvaged, it\u2019s my freshmen year of high school. So she still has most of her teeth, but by the time that I will leave, she will lose all of them. It\u2019s actually her worst nightmare:\n
\u201cI wake up and I see myself with all my teeth gone. Just\u2026gone.\u201d\n
In the film bank of my memory, she tells this to me over and over, leaning over our apartment sink. I distinctly remember watching her fingering her canines, as though they would immediately slip out of their sockets. They were aligned straight and white in her pink gums, unlike mine. (I imagine that I take after my biological father in this sense\u2014maybe we both have the same gapped teeth, unyielding, long limbs, green eyes. All anomalies that I don\u2019t share with the rest of my maternal family.)\n
But when I see my mother for the last time, in my senior year, she will have a broken, chewed set of dentures. Time disfigures her smile into a leering pumpkin grin. It will haunt me, staring at those dirty, broken teeth. Because her worst nightmare came true.\n\n
One Month Before.<\/em>\n
The sun splits across my dashboard, burning the back of my eyelids. I cant my head to avoid the glare, blindly feeling for the car\u2019s visor. \u201cShit,\u201d I mutter, pressing my foot to the gas. I am already dressed in my work uniform, bleach stained and reeking of old fried chicken. It\u2019s not like I\u2019m late, but I like getting to work early so I can sit in stillness before standing on my feet for eight hours. Beside me, my bag drops with an ugly thunk<\/em>. I have been awarded a scholarship to attend a writing workshop in Falls Church and now all my notes are sprawled across the passenger side.\n
It\u2019s August. The collar of my polo sticks to my neck as I switch lanes. I feel like I am swimming in my stiff, belted uniform. But in this moment, even baking in the waves of hot, stinking air, I am at peace. Someone honks behind me and I don\u2019t even bother to give them the bird. Then, inextricably, she calls me.\n
I have not seen my mother in a week.\n
She often vanishes, this time retreating to Prince William Forest. When I was a sophomore, she left me alone in the apartment for over three months when she drove to New Hampshire on a whim. Junior year, she went to camp in Shenandoah. When I sliced my foot open, I had to call the Park Rangers in order to contact her, only to have her scream at me for disturbing her peace. The hospital staff didn\u2019t want to treat me because I was a minor. But I have come to love these periods of peace, of silence. I had hoped that I would have a couple of more weeks alone.\n
My heart lurches when I recognize her number.\n
\u201cKatherine.\u201d\n
\u201cYes?\u201d I search her voice automatically, just as I have learned to hunt for the scent of cheap vodka seeping out of my father\u2019s pores. I can map out whether it\u2019s an up cycle or a down cycle from the slur of her words, the cadence of her voice.\n
\u201cWhere are you? You have to come now. NOW. Do you hear me?\u201d\n
\u201cI can\u2019t, mom. I\u2019m on my way to work.\u201d I clench my hands around the steering column until the veins gleam iridescently, pushing up against the skin. This can\u2019t be good<\/em>.\n
She ignores me: \u201cWear black, Kat. All black. Do you have a black hat, baby? I don\u2019t want them to see you.\u201d\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d Again, the wave of hysteria. I taste metal in the back of my mouth.\n
\u201cI saw them again. Last night. And they took me and no one will believe me. But we are gonna catch \u2018em together, I set up cameras.\u201d\n
This is new. Mostly new. My mother\u2019s down cycles have always been predictable. I would count down when I started to notice the signs, the way she would start to make impulse decisions and retreat into her bedroom, sleeping all night and day. I would wait for it to pass, when she would emerge from her room, somewhat functioning. I would sit with her while she went to bingo or went on massive spending sprees. Then I would quietly try and figure out her credit card balances, go to the grocery store and make sure she had soft foods to eat. Cottage cheese, boiled eggs, yogurt.\n
A few times she had hallucinated, but I had always credited it to medication. When I was thirteen and her voice had suddenly turned husky, another personality had emerged to talk with me. That had been the first time, terrifying me. But I could tell no one, because she had seizures the week before. I had seen her slowly start to twitch, and then, in slow motion, crash into the side table lamp and slump on the floor. I had cradled her head, pushing aside the shards of glass, until the shakes stopped.\n
\u201cIf you tell, then they will take away my driving license,\u201d she had said when I told her what had happened. \u201cThen what? How will I drive you to school, or to the grocery store?\u201d That was the way it went: there was no one to tell when these things happened. If you tell, if you let them know, if you say anything\u2026<\/em> I had enough scares with CPS. It wasn\u2019t that I was scared to be separated from my mother. I was scared what would happen to her if someone stopped watching out for her. Who would monitor if she was breathing, if she choked on her pills, if she didn\u2019t pay her credit card balance?\n
\u201cKat? When can you come here? Are you on the way?\u201d\n
I hang up and try to breathe deep. A coldness creeps over me, spilling down my neck and pinching my shoulder blades together. I do what I always do when something like this happens: assess. Will she come to my work, to pull me out? My mother has no sense of boundaries, of the severity of her accusations.\n
Finally, I decide I will let this pass. Eventually, she will wear herself out and sleep. After all, there has always been an up cycle to replace a downer, always. Lately, it has taken longer and longer for my mother to come back to me. It never occurs to me that maybe she won\u2019t resurface again.\n\n
Why he watched us leave is beyond me. My father probably was too exhausted, too drunk, to want to stop us. I never blamed him for this. He had married into this perfect, little family: my mother and me, a two-year old little thing with sprigs of honeysuckle hair. The story goes that I reached for him, smiling, and that was it. All my father had ever wanted was the chance to have a family. He didn\u2019t know that were ticking time bombs: my mother was already cracking from the inside, out.\n
I knew, on some level, that my father\u2019s strength had begun to ebb the day he carried my mother out of the medical lounge. I had grown up with the sag of his shoulders and his sad, wet eyes. The window of his sobriety was surprisingly short: he would come home from work, wrench his tie off, and take me grocery shopping. While he cooked, he drank bloody marys from white Styrofoam cups. The top of his lips was stained red from the putrid tomato juice, his hands shaking while he chopped and saut\u00e9ed. He kept his vodka on the porch, where my mother couldn\u2019t see. Once he passed out on his recliner, there was no reaching him. I would just curl up beside him, listening to him breathe, pretending he was there with me.\n
The first night in New Hampshire, it rained hard. My mother, maybe afraid, slept close to me on an army cot. I stared at the dark profile of her face for a while, realizing that I couldn\u2019t pull her out of her preternatural slumber. The house could be burning, and there she would remain: breathing through her mouth, lips open, her face stippled with shadow. I tried to call my father, listening to the endless ringing and shallow recording of his voice. It was in that moment that I realized what it really meant for him to be drunk. He was totally inaccessible to me. I couldn\u2019t simply reach over and shake him awake.\n
Feeling alone, my thoughts collapsed into warm, salty tears. Eventually, I had the painful realization that my tears wouldn\u2019t wake my mother, wouldn\u2019t bring her back to me. The rain lashed against the windows, blurring my view of the roof shingles and the muddy lawn. I would learn to slip away, just as both of my parents did, when these feelings threatened to eclipse me.\n\n\n
Days Before.<\/em>\n
I am sick.\n
It\u2019s mid-September and the hallways feel stifled, the air is still heavy and pregnant with moisture. I ran out of cold syrup a few days ago, but I can\u2019t buy anymore because I\u2019m not eighteen. There\u2019s two mental countdowns drilled into my head: the day I\u2019m a legal adult and graduation. I\u2019m not sure what\u2019s more pressing at this point. The wave of initial back-to school sickness passes for most, but I keep getting more and more sick.\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t look so great.\u201d\t
I’m perched on one side of the black lab tables, watching my feet skim the floor. I get to school as soon as the custodians unlock the door, then I make my rounds to the teachers who arrive early. Mrs. Ahrens, who never actually taught me, looks up from her keyboard. She hands me a tissue.\n
\u201cWeird that you haven\u2019t gotten any better. Did you go to the doctor\u2019s?\u201d\n
I can\u2019t go to a doctor\u2019s without a legal guardian, but I don\u2019t say this.\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just stress.\u201d I shrug my shoulder, accustomed to lying to well-meaning adults.\n
\u201cYou know, senior stuff.\u201d\n
There are half-moon indentations in my palms. Perfect impressions of my fingernails. The truth is, people are starting to notice.\n\n\n
Leaving.<\/em>\n
I wake up to the sound of her moaning. It\u2019s maybe eleven at night, a few hours after my shift ended at work. Shit, shit, shit<\/em>. She\u2019s trying to climb the ladder of my loft bed, but doesn\u2019t have the strength. Through the thick darkness, I can make out the shape of her at the bottom rung. Her body sags against the cold, black metal, crouched in thin bars of moonlight. I\u2019ve never seen her like this.\n
\u201cKat,\u201d she cries.\n
\u201cGo back to sleep.\u201d The words come out as a half-audible croak. I had almost lost my voice at work.\n
\u201cGod…Katherine<\/em>.\u201d\n
\u201cWhat the hell do you want?\u201d I prop myself up, trying to feel bigger than I am. Sometimes, when she gets like this, I have to be mean. Loud. But it\u2019s hard when my bones feel hollow with sleep, my voice a raft that keeps slipping away from me.\n
\u201cShadow…figures.\u201d She\u2019s talking slow, an awful slurring. \u201cCan\u2019t. Sleep.\u201d\n
My head screams. I just want to sleep so then I can wake up, go to school. Closing my eyes, I try and imagine myself sitting cross legged in the hallway. I can see the checkered linoleum, cool to the touch. For a minute, this stills the hammering in my chest.\n
There\u2019s a loud crashing sound and she\u2019s back on the ground. It\u2019s hard to believe that this is my mother. I once loved her, I know this. But now all I know is disgust, black and acrid in the back of my throat. And for the first time in my life, I\u2019m scared of her. I\u2019m terrified of what I\u2019ve become, exhausted and brittle and uncaring. Or maybe I care too much.\n
My mother crawls back to my door, and then collapses against the threshold. She\u2019s been saying things, but I can no longer distinguish words. I touch my hot cheeks, only to realize that I\u2019ve been crying, too. Quickly, I climb out of bed and stagger to the door, turn the lock. I have never locked myself in from my mother. A moment later, I can hear her weakly pounding against the wood. Crying harder.\n
\u201cPlease, just leave me alone,\u201d I whisper. I have given up all pretenses of being mean. I want to fold up in on myself, to become very small. There\u2019s the sound of her throwing her body against the door and then more crying. I drag myself to the closet and curl up on the carpet, hands over my ears. The sound of her, broken and ragged, slices through me. I just want it to be over already, for her to sleep it off. When was the last time she slept? When was the last time she was cognizant? I suddenly can\u2019t remember.\n
I wake up to the shrill sound of the fire alarm.\n
For a minute, panic forks its way across my skin like cold water. White light flashes from the corners of the room. My dog whines from my feet, pacing across the covers. His ears are up, just as shocked as I am. I tuck him under my arm and slip out of bed, sniffing to see if I can smell smoke. I think of all of the electrical wires, tangled and hidden under the rising trash in our living room. Images of embers, tongues of flame, fill up my vision. But I move quickly, not one to panic. I\u2019ve had too many brushes with ambulance sirens and hospital monitors to really be scared. All I can think of is how I am going to move my mother. She is so much bigger than I am, especially if she\u2019s unconscious. And there\u2019s no way that I can ask for help.\n
\u201cMom?\u201d\n
The apartment is dark and silent, aside from the screeching fire alarms. I pivot my dog in my arms, straining to hold onto him and find the light switch. As usual, I am horrified to see the conditions that I live in. My room is my sanctuary–a recent one, too, since I used to share a room with my mother. The rest of the apartment is a sprawl of trash that I carefully work my way around. I continue to scan the living room, where my mom has been sleeping because her room is too uninhabitable.\n
In my confusion, with the throbbing white lights screaming behind me, I don\u2019t notice that there is pounding at the front door.\n
\u201cPolice!\u201d\n
I run to the door, unbolting it as fast I can. I am face to face with officers, their faces grim. I can see neighbors streaming out behind them, collecting like flies at the edge of the wallpapered hallway. They stare at me, at the police, at the white flashing alarms.\n
The men push into the apartment and start looking around. One turns to me, a familiar look in his eyes. \u201cWe were called because there was a suspected intruder.\u201d\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d\n
\u201cIs there anyone else in here?\u201d\n
\u201cNo, it\u2019s just me. I can\u2019t find my\u2026\u201d And then I stop. Peering across the officer\u2019s shoulder, I can see her, incoherent with her fear. God, she did this.\n
The officers exchange looks. I am very familiar with their disbelief, their annoyance.\n
\u201cIs that your mother?\u201d\n
I nod because my voice might betray me. One officer says something into his radio and then talks to the other officer, who goes to talk with my mother, or maybe the building superintendent. Embarrassment makes my cheeks hot. I immediately turn, because I can\u2019t just stand here. I can\u2019t look at her anymore. The officer follows me, because he has to take a statement.\n
\u201cI\u2019m sorry, she\u2019s not very present at the moment.\u201d I stop. \u201cAnnmarie Wagner. My mother.\u201d\n
\u201cOh.\u201d He scribbles something on his pad. I have to keep moving to disguise how badly I am shaking. She really was so lost in her hallucinations, that shadow men were creeping through the apartment, that she left me. She left me to be discovered by police and roaring fire alarms. It\u2019s maybe four in the morning, but I stuff books into my backpack, determined not to take in the officer\u2019s expression: pity, anger, annoyance. But what he says next makes me freeze.\n
\u201cDo you live here?\u201d\n
It\u2019s just a routine question. After all, this is my bedroom and these are my books. My dog calmly regards me as I zip my bag shut. This is going to be okay. I\u2019m okay<\/em>. I don\u2019t even realize I\u2019ve spoken until the words are already out:\n
\u201cNo. No I don\u2019t live here.\u201d\n
The officer nods and leaves. I grip the railing of my bed to steady myself with one hand. Okay, okay, okay<\/em>. The familiar mantra is like warm air flowing through my lungs. The alarm shuts off and the sudden silence echoes in my head like a phantom drumbeat. My other palm is still on my bookbag, frozen. The blood rushes in my ears, a loud cacophony that is really just my breathing. I rummage through the closet and grab some clothes.\n
No. No I don’t live here. Not anymore.<\/em>\n
I run out into the night, past the other residents who are slowly streaming back into the building in confusion. It\u2019s not until I\u2019m sitting in the car that I finally open up my phone. I have nowhere to go; I have never asked for help. Never considered leaving. Who am I supposed to contact? The only people I can think of reaching out to, my friends, have never glimpsed into this side of my life.\n
Outside, there\u2019s a warm, gentle breeze that envelopes the car. I crack open the windows, thinking that maybe I can smell oncoming rain. Inside the car, the screen lights up my face, casting it a bluish color. This decision is larger than I am. It fills me with a kind of determination, a kind of hope, that I have never experienced before. Not since the moment when I was eleven and realized how truly alone I was.\n
Is anyone awake? I\u2019m in trouble. Please.<\/em>\n
I don\u2019t wait for a response, just pull away from the parking space. I let the predawn darkness settle around my shoulders like a blanket.
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Katherine Brown is finishing her undergraduate at the University of Mary Washington and plans to pursue an MFA for nonfiction. Her work gravitates around the exploration of family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/oxmag\/files\/2020\/06\/42tan.png\")
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