All I’ve ever wanted, as a mother, is to be needed. The first few years of your child’s life, no one is more important to her than you, not even her father. That biological imperative demands to be satisfied, over and over and over. And then your child turns ten or twelve or eighteen, and suddenly you’re no longer critical. How are we supposed to cope? We mothers give up everything for our children, until they decide they don’t want our everything anymore.
Isn’t it just like a daughter to blame all her shortcomings on her mother? Whether it’s limp hair or a penchant for lying, every character flaw is our fault, not theirs. Naturally, all our daughters’ best traits have nothing to do with us. What other traps does she have waiting for me behind closed doors? She has this wretched house rigged for my demise.
I put Adam in his bassinet, leaving him in his snowsuit. It couldn’t hurt to get his body temperature up, for his cheeks to look a little redder than normal. The baby begins to whimper. Maybe he needs a diaper change.
I walk down the hallway to the bathroom. Out of habit, I try Rose Gold’s bedroom door handle. Locked, as always.
Opening the cabinet under the sink, I pull a diaper from the box of Luvs. Adam cries louder. I rush back and change him. He keeps crying. I try burping him, rocking him, distracting him with toys—all of it on maternal autopilot. I need him to stop so I can make a plan. I need a minute to think.
He quiets down before I resort to putting him in the backyard.
I glance at the baby in my arms. I can’t leave Adam behind with Rose Gold, not if she’s become this unhinged. There will be time to take him to a doctor later. Besides, a new doctor in a different state won’t know my name or recognize me. Why wouldn’t she believe the story of a grandmother raising her grandson alone after a family tragedy?
I pick up my phone and search for flights out of Chicago. Where will we go—California? Maine? Montana? I have only ever lived in this godforsaken town. Maybe I should book the next outbound flight, no matter where it’s going.
“Hang on a minute, Patty,” I say, trying to calm down. “Think it through now. You’re the logical one. She’s the emotional one.”
I check my watch: four fifty-eight p.m. Rose Gold is supposed to be home from work in forty-five minutes. I need more of a lead than that. If I take Adam, Rose Gold will move mountains to find him. He and I will never be at peace.
This would all be so much easier if she just . . . disappeared.
Out the window, snow has begun to fall. Christmas is eight days away. Neither Rose Gold nor I have decorated the house. We’re the only ones on the block without red and green lights lining our roof. No doubt she expected I would take responsibility for this year’s festivities. She took everything I did for granted—the hand-cut snowflakes, the miniature-scale village, the Kolaczki cookies I bought from the Polish bakery. I worked tirelessly, every year, for her.
I squeeze Adam, relieved I’m not in this alone. We can’t go anywhere until Rose Gold comes home from work. I swivel my recliner toward the front door.
For now we wait.
20
Rose Gold
November 2016
The stone-faced security guard at Mordant Correctional Center tapped the dotted line with his pen.
“Need you to sign here,” he said, glaring.
I signed the form, then pushed the clipboard back toward him.
“Have a seat. Someone’ll take you through.” He gestured to the row of plastic chairs behind me. I caught a glimpse of the gun on his belt. I wondered what it would feel like to shoot someone.
The prison was quieter than I’d expected—or at least the reception area was. I was the only person waiting. I stared at the ugly linoleum, feeling the guard’s eyes on me. I hoped I’d be taken through soon.
It had been over a year since my dad turned out to be the worst. I hadn’t spoken to Alex or Phil in just as long. I’d tried to make new friends at work, but none of my coworkers were interested, so I’d opted to start watching all the Oscar Best Picture winners instead. I’d also begun drawing in my spare time. To my surprise, I was actually good. Not saying my artwork will end up in a museum or anything, but my renderings of Dad’s bones breaking on a medieval torture rack were shockingly realistic. I had a gift for sketching faces.
By then I was close to having enough money to get my teeth fixed, to being someone who beamed, hands at her side instead of blocking her mouth. After my teeth, I planned to start saving for a down payment on a house. Every day at Gadget World, I reminded myself what I was working toward.
Still, watching my savings account grow couldn’t occupy all my free time. One year after Dad blew up at me at Anna’s soccer game, I realized I was miserable. I had learned the hard way that our parents didn’t have all the answers. We wanted them to. We believed they did for the first couple decades of our lives, depending on the parents and how good they were at covering their asses. But in the end, discovering our parents were mere mortals was no different than finding out about Santa and the Easter Bunny.
Now every day was the same: wake up, go to work, eat dinner in front of the TV, watch a movie, sketch, go to sleep. After the Gillespie family had ostracized me, I told myself I didn’t need them to be happy. I bought a fern, named her Planty, and told myself she would be more than enough company.
Then my coworker Brenda, the one who used to tease me about visiting Phil, didn’t come in to work one day. Or the day after that, and so on. No one knew where she had gone, until weeks later, when Scott gathered us in the break room before the store opened. He said Brenda had been diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. A month later she was dead. Her four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son were motherless.
I had never really been friends with Brenda—she had kids, was in her thirties; we were in different stages of life—but I couldn’t stop thinking about all those afternoons in the break room with her hooked up to that breast pump. Now she was gone. I would never talk to her again. This was the first time someone I personally knew had died. It sounds stupid, but Brenda’s death made me realize I wasn’t going to live forever. If I didn’t like the way my life was turning out, no one else was going to fix it for me. I had to do something. I needed to go back to the beginning, back to the first wrong turn—which meant going back to Mom.
When I had gotten the restraining order against her, did I truly believe I would never see or speak to my mother again, for as long as we both should live? Maybe I liked to think so during fits of anger, but the honest answer was: no, of course not. I had permanently cut other people from my life for less, but none of them was my mother. Mom still held the key to so much information I wanted: her childhood, my childhood, and most of all, why?
The one-word anthem pounded in my ears when I woke up in the morning and lay in bed at night: why? Why? WHY? I needed her to explain, to tell me the truth, to say she was sorry.