I turn to my mother.
She’s pretending to be drunk again, eyes half-closed as she sways in place. Refusing to look at me.
Randall lets me return to my room.
I collapse on the bed. Crying so hard that I’m sick, that I’d puke all over this bed if I’d eaten any of that spaghetti.
After twenty minutes or so, I hear them having sex. My mother sounds like an excited chihuahua and Randall grunts like a buffalo.
I hold my pillow over my head, still sobbing.
Hours later, long after dark, my mother brings me a glass of milk.
I’m shaking so hard the bed frame is rattling.
“I need more medicine,” I croak.
I hate it, but when I don’t have it, the withdrawals are even worse.
“It ran out,” she says.
She keeps the bottle in her room. We both know there were thirty pills in it when we refilled the prescription earlier this week. She might have sold them to Leslie, but more likely she’s been taking them herself. She thinks they help her lose weight. Randall has been pinching her belly, telling her she’s getting fat.
“Call the doctor,” I beg. “I can’t wait two weeks.”
“I already called,” she says, the edge of frustration in her voice giving her away. “They won’t refill it early.”
I turn my face toward the wall, still shivering and shaking.
I can feel her sitting behind me, sullen and quiet. My mother knows what Buttons meant to me. But at the same time, she can’t ever be at fault. So it’s impossible that burning him was wrong.
“Randall was pretty mad,” she says at last.
That’s her version of an apology. Shifting the blame squarely on someone else’s shoulders.
“You could have hid him,” I hiss.
That’s not allowed. No one can be a victim except her.
“You know what he would have done to me!” she snaps. “But you don’t care about that, do you? You don’t care about anyone but yourself. You’re selfish. So fucking selfish. You’re the one that made him angry! You think I like coming home to that?”
She goes on in that vein for some time. I stay facing the wall, ignoring her.
She hates being ignored. When she can’t get a response out of me any other way, she falls silent to regroup.
Then, her voice low and soft and entirely sober, she says, “It was just an old bear.”
Now I do turn and face her. She’s wearing a Sailor Moon nightshirt that belongs to me. Her bare legs are tucked under her, below the short hem. In the dim light, she looks young again. Like my earliest memories of her: more beautiful than the prettiest princess in a fairy tale.
Her beauty has no effect on me anymore.
“That was all I had from my father,” I accuse her.
Her snort jolts me.
“That bear wasn’t from your father.”
I stare at her, too numb to understand.
She nods slowly, the edge of her mouth quirking up. “It’s true. I told you that so you’d shut up about him. He didn’t leave you any bear—why would he? He didn’t give a fuck about you.”
I turn back to the wall, waiting for her to leave.
Late in the night, when I know they’re both sleeping, I creep out of bed and rescue the ruins of Buttons from the fireplace. I want to bury him, but not in Randall’s garden. Instead, I walk the six blocks to Percy Park and dig a hole under the rose bushes with my hands.
Then I trudge back home, feeling a level of misery so heavy that I might be standing on the bottom of the ocean with nine thousand pounds of cold, black water on every inch of my skin.
I don’t know what hurts me more—the destruction of my bear, or the loss of the one tiny connection I had to my other parent.
I used to imagine my dad might be thinking about me. Looking for me, even. I hoped he’d take me to a lovely house in some other state. Maybe he’d let me have a kitten. I’d go to school where nobody knew me, where no one knew my mom.
My mother won’t tell me anything about him. She relishes the secret that only she knows, that I can never discover unless she tells me.
Enough time has passed that I no longer think he’ll come find me.
Still, the bear meant something. He meant my father had loved me once, if only for a moment.
I don’t even have that anymore.
When I lay down in bed without Buttons, I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been.
I think to myself, there are 1794 days until my eighteenth birthday.
That’s when I can leave. When I can run far, far away from here.
In school, we learned that fish brought up from the deep pressure of the ocean will explode when they come up into lighter water. They can only stand what they’re used to.
I’m leaving either way. Whether I swim or burst.
Assuming I can survive 1794 more days.
6
Cole
The next morning, I wake much earlier than usual, long before the sun is up.
Mara sleeps heavily beside me, exhausted from relating just one of the countless ugly stories from her childhood. I’m sure she could tell me one like that every day for a year and never run out.
I’m filled with an anger that sickens me, that makes my muscles shake.
I’ve never been furious for someone else before. Never felt this need to right the scales. To wreak vengeance on their behalf.
The fact that Mara’s mother and stepfather have never been punished for their rampant child abuse is an injustice that rankles like a spike jammed in my side.
The only time I’ve killed for someone else was when I spiked Michael Bridger’s drink, drove him home, and left his car running in the garage. Even then, I was telling Mara the truth: it was mostly for myself. I was tired of Sonia showing up to work puffy-eyed and exhausted, distracted by streams of calls and text messages from her fuckwit ex and his rapacious lawyer.
Maybe an infinitesimal portion of pity influenced my decision. If so, it was unconscious.
I’m a selfish person, I always have been. I’ve always been alone. No one was going to look out for my interests but me.
Even now, the things I do for Mara are really for me. I like the way she looks dressed up in gorgeous clothes. I like watching her eat ice cream. I like the way she melts under my touch. I like that I have the power to further her career. It feels just and right when she gets the attention she deserves because she’s fucking talented and her art is far more interesting than the shit turned out by commercial-minded egoists like Shaw.
Everything I do for her binds her closer to me. I want her dependent on me, so she can never leave. So she never even wants to.
Mara is distracted by everything beautiful, everything interesting.
I have to be more interesting, more useful to keep her attention.
When I have her focus, her energy surges into me. She fills me with life.
I can’t lose her. I can’t go back to numbness and boredom.
Which puts me in a dilemma.
I want her parents punished.
But Mara is vehemently opposed to revenge. She doesn’t even want to kill Shaw, which has locked us in a bizarre three-way stalemate.
I hate how she binds my hands. And yet, I know Mara’s stubbornness. Her boundaries are not where they should be, but they do exist. If I cross a hard line with her, I risk severing the fragile ties between us. She’ll bolt and I may never capture her again.