ONE

Summer 2015

There’s a picture of Mother Teresa that hangs on our living room wall where a television would go if we could afford the kind of television that hangs on the wall, or even a home with the kind of walls that could hold a television.

The walls of a trailer house aren’t made of the same stuff walls in a normal house are made of. In a trailer house, the walls crumble beneath your fingernails like chalk if you so much as scratch at them.

I once asked my mother, Janean, why she keeps a picture of Mother Teresa on our living room wall.

“The bitch was a fraud,” she said.

Her words. Not mine.

I think when you’re the worst of people, finding the worst in others becomes a survival tactic of sorts. You focus heavily on the darkness in people in hopes of masking the true shade of your own darkness. That’s how my mother has spent her entire life. Always seeking the worst in people. Even her own daughter.

Even Mother Teresa.

Janean is lying on the couch in the same position she was in when I left for my shift at McDonald’s eight hours ago. She’s staring at the picture of Mother Teresa, but she’s not actually looking at it. It’s as if her eyeballs have stopped working.

Stopped absorbing.

Janean is an addict. I realized this around the age of nine, but back then, her addictions were limited to men, alcohol, and gambling.

Over the years, her addictions became more noticeable and a lot deadlier. I think it was five years ago, right around when I turned fourteen, when I caught her shooting up meth for the first time. Once a person starts using meth regularly, their lifespan shortens drastically. I Googled it in the school library once. How long can a person live with meth addiction?

Six to seven years is what the internet said.

I’ve found her unresponsive several times over the years, but this feels different. This feels final.

“Janean?” There’s a calmness to my voice that certainly shouldn’t be present right now. I feel like my voice should be shaky, or unavailable. I feel somewhat ashamed at my lack of reaction in this moment.

I drop my purse at my feet as I stare intensely at her face from across the living room. It’s raining outside and I haven’t even closed the front door yet, so I’m still getting soaked. But shutting the door and sheltering my back from the rain is the least of my concerns right now as I stare at Janean as she stares at Mother Teresa.

One of Janean’s arms is draped over her stomach and the other is dangling off the couch, her fingers resting gently against worn carpet. She’s a little swollen and it makes her look younger. Not younger than her age—she’s only thirty-nine—but younger than what her addictions have made her appear to be. Her cheeks are slightly less concave and the wrinkles that have formed around her mouth over the last few years look as if they’ve been smoothed out by Botox.

“Janean?”

Nothing.

Her mouth is hanging slightly open, revealing yellow slivers of chipped and rotted teeth. It’s like she was in the middle of a sentence when the life slipped out of her.

I’ve imagined this moment for a while now. Sometimes when you hate someone enough, you can’t help but lie awake in bed at night, wondering what life would be like if that person were dead.

I imagined it differently. I imagined it would be much more dramatic.

I stare at Janean for another moment, waiting to see if she’s just in some kind of trance. I take a few steps toward her and then pause when I see her arm. There’s a needle dangling from the skin just underneath the inside of her elbow.

As soon as I see it, the reality of the moment slips over me like a slimy film and it makes me nauseous. I spin around and run out of the house. It feels like I’m about to be sick, so I lean over the rotten railing, careful not to put too much pressure on it so it doesn’t buckle beneath my grip.

I’m relieved as soon as I get sick because I was beginning to worry about my lack of reaction to this life-altering moment. I may not be as hysterical as a daughter should be in this moment, but at least I feel something.

I wipe my mouth on the sleeve of my McDonald’s work shirt. I sit down on the steps, despite the rain still pummeling down on me from the heartless night sky.

My hair and my clothes are soaking wet. So is my face, but none of the liquid streaming down my cheeks is tears.

It’s all raindrops.

Wet eyes and a dry heart.

I close my eyes and press my face into my hands, trying to decide if my detachment is because of my upbringing or if I was born broken.

I wonder what kind of upbringing is worse for a human. The kind where you’re sheltered and loved to the point that you aren’t aware of how cruel the world can be until it’s too late to acquire the necessary coping skills, or the kind of household I grew up in. The ugliest version of a family, where coping is the only thing you learn.

Before I was old enough to work for the food I buy, there were many nights I’d lie awake, unable to sleep because my stomach would be cramping from hunger. Janean told me once that the growl coming from my stomach was a ravenous cat that lived inside of me, and the cat would growl if I didn’t feed it enough food. Every time I got hungry after that, I’d imagine that cat in my belly searching for food that wasn’t there. I feared it would eat away at my insides if I didn’t feed it, so sometimes I’d eat things that weren’t food just to satisfy the hungry cat.

She once left me alone for so long, I ate old banana peels and eggshells from the garbage. I even tried eating a few bites of stuffing from inside the couch cushion, but it was too hard to swallow. I spent most of my childhood scared to death that I was slowly being eaten from the inside by that starving cat.

I don’t know that she was ever actually gone for more than one day at a time, but when you’re a child, time feels stretched out when you’re alone.

I remember she’d come stumbling through the front door and fall onto the couch and stay there for hours. I’d fall asleep curled up at the other end of the couch, too scared to leave her alone.

But then in the mornings following her drunken return, I’d wake up to find her cooking breakfast in the kitchen. It wasn’t always traditional breakfast. Sometimes it would be peas, sometimes eggs, sometimes a can of chicken noodle soup.

Around the age of six, I started to pay attention to how she worked the stove on those mornings, because I knew I’d need to know how to work it for the next time she disappeared.

I wonder how many six-year-olds have to teach themselves how to work a stove because they believe if they don’t, they’ll be eaten alive by their internal ravenous cat.

It’s the luck of the draw, I guess. Most kids get the kind of parents that’ll be missed after they die. The rest of us get the kind of parents who make better parents after they’re dead.

The nicest thing my mother has ever done for me is die.

 

Buzz told me to sit in his police car so I’d be out of the rain and out of the house while they retrieved her body. I watched numbly as they carried her out on a gurney, covered with a white sheet. They put her in the back of a coroner van. Didn’t even bother taking her in an ambulance. There was no point. Almost everyone under the age of fifty who dies in this town dies from addiction.

Doesn’t even matter what kind—they’re all deadly in the end.