I feel the charged heat of my mother’s body near mine. It is the last time I am alone with her,
though neither of us knows this yet. She exits the highway. The sun is so bright I can feel it
through my closed eyelids. She speaks: 

“It’s just that I want the best for all of you, you know you all just have your character flaws.” Our silence makes the air heavy, compresses us as if we are deep underwater, near those hot sulfuric vents covered in tube worms. I open my eyes. 

“It was just a card.”

“You’re all just too self-focused, if you just listened more...” I am silent.

 “You know I could always tell you were more sensitive than the others, you were like me, you didn’t need to be hit.” A low roar fills my ears. She wants me to absolve her. If I do, I will not exist.

I say “that’s my bus.” She reaches for me, her eyes bright green and glossy, their corners
wet. 

“Just smile for me, be happy. I just want you to be happy.” I stiffen my back, hug her, and
get out.
*

I am eighteen months old, in neurosurgery. There are many lights above me, many faceless
adults in strange clothes. Beyond the lights it is very dark. I am alone in the eerie hum and thud
of machines. I wonder if they will eat me. I hate all of these people. I want them gone. The air
smells of astringent disinfectant and powdered gloves. Everything is strange and shining metal.
Then I am back with Mom. 

“I stayed awake for you, all 12 hours. Look at your face, it’s all swelled up, like a prize fighter. You were on your face so long.”

We go home. We live in a big house next to the ocean. There are thousands of rooms, many layers of decks that surround it, and many doors. Inside and outside are mixed up. I cannot seem to find my mother in the house. My head has healed. Now there is a smooth U on the back of my skull where the flesh was pulled back. I worry that something has taken her from me and I will be lost forever. I go outside and the marsh grasses grab and cut at my legs. I wade in the water and it forms white anklets of salt, the ocean imparting itself. All around the house is thick scrub, wind toughened shrubs that hold themselves close to the earth. They grab at me and try to take me into the ground with them.

When I finally get to her she is not glad to see me. 

“Why are you so nervous? Why can’t you play like your sisters? I cannot sleep ever since your surgery. You know that.” 

My relief is contaminated. There is a black goo oozing out of me. I leave black handprints all over her. I never guess right. I need her too badly. I need her in the wrong way, but I don’t know what is the right way. I forget that I shouldn’t need her like this until she reminds me. I hold her leg, her hand pats my head heavy and quick, as if holding back a slap. I try all the time to look for her less. I want her to notice how long I can go without needing her.

*

It is my first communion. The smell of candle smoke, incense, and the breath of many hungry
people has condensed into a big cloud that lingers, swirled by the slow ceiling fans. The heat
wraps me, I feel sweat under my silk dress. She tells me: “you can feel the presence of God in
the Eucharist, it’s what makes us different as Catholics. We know it’s really God.”

Walking up the aisle, I feel lighter. Golden light pours from my chest. I float above everyone. The world softens. It is impossible to fall. Even stone would cradle my body.
I am kneeling at the altar and the priest is placing it in my hand. Is it candy? It is small and pale
and soft like candy. The priest places it on my tongue, just like my sisters do when we play Mass.

Now it is clinging to my tongue. My mouth is full of dried leaves, old hay. Now I am at the back
of the church and still waiting. I descend, the world hardens. Mom smiles. “Now you understand.” I smile so she will smile back. I am sinking into the earth.

At home Mom cuts quiche and puts it on a thin paper plate. It leaves grease spots and the middle is wet. The plate keeps bending and spilling quiche over and over–I cannot get a hold of it, I cannot get fed.

I run away to the yard. I talk to the salamanders in the neighbors pond. I grasp their wet bodies in the tannin-stained water. Their voices are very small: You will be fine, so long as she never finds out that you didn’t feel anything. They’re right. God and our guardian angels tell her everything that we think. The grass is dry and my feet are bare. The salamanders swim away, their perfect tails make long S’s as they fade into the darkness. Back home there is cake, vanilla with whipped cream and berries. She looks very happy. I should look happy too.

*

My younger sister sits at the table. She has been here for years. She cannot move until she eats a mushroom. Mom watches, and I know that none of us can move either. She means for us to see this. My sister tries to leave the chair and Mom grabs her arm, twisting it, pulling her back. Mom’s face stays the same, but now her arm becomes an old woman’s, with long yellowed
fingernails and bright blue veins that map her tendons and bones. She smiles. 

“I just think of the orphans that followed me around in the famine camps in Ethiopia, how they’d give anything to have your food. I always thought I should have brought one back.” 

My sister relents, drops a large slice of gray mushroom into her mouth. Instantly she vomits onto her plate. The yellow-gray puddle spreads, covers the table, then the walls, and then the ceiling. I feel it drip from my fingertips. I am still. Mom is covered too, I watch it drip from her hair onto her cheeks. She does not seem to see it. She says, “well, you finally tried it.”

*

I hop from square to square on the concrete outside church with my sisters.

“Step on a crack and break your mother’s back.”

“Step on a line and break your mother’s spine.”

I land on a crack and I am relieved. It doesn’t matter now. I already did the thing that would
break her. I look at a far off square and decide to jump to it in one leap.

*

I watch many clocks. They surround me. Little digital ones that blink red, a looming dark wood
grandfather clock, crisp black and white analog clocks that flick the seconds away. I must see the even-numbered times, like 8:42. If I can see all these even numbers together then I will feel better.

We are still unpacking our new house. She is angry at us again. “No one helps me. You are all
ungrateful. All you do is sit around and play all day. You don’t pick up after yourselves.” One of
the clocks says 6:21. If I can stay still until 6:24, then this yelling will be over. The numbers will
make her nice again.

There is a digital alarm clock next to my bed that glows bright red in the dark. Its light reaches
into the furthest corners of the room. It is bright but gentle: my pupils don’t have to grow or
shrink, the light knows exactly what I need to see and adapts itself. I am cold, and it becomes a tiny sun and warms the tips of my fingers. It says 4:28. I can move and do four hours of school
work before everyone else wakes up. I can spend the day cleaning like she wants us to.

At the top of the stairs the moon turns the maple leaves’ shadows into schooling silver fish. In
the early morning dark, a huge buck deer grazes on our lawn, lit white under the moon. I can see each whisker on its nose. The blades of grass are dusted with frost. The ice condenses the sugar in the grass, making the dark green tips sweet like the maple sap that comes at the end of winter.

At a desk I make careful lines on graph paper and only occasionally sneak to see the answers in the back of the textbook. This is not cheating; it’s just being self-sufficient. Now, when everyone else is eating breakfast, I do the laundry. While the clothes swirl, I spray Windex on a bathroom mirror. The air smells like Pine-Sol and hot water. My body is changing – suddenly the peach fuzz is wiry dark hair. I get up again in the dark, but now I cannot see the buck anymore.

It is another morning. More lines on graph paper. Math I don’t really understand, but I copy
anyway. Mom wanders in. “I could not sleep, how long have you been up?” I feel exposed, I
cannot hold myself together anymore. “Just a little while.” I try so hard not to, but I begin to cry. There is just so much to do. 4:28 is so long before the sun rises. “You don’t have to do all this.”
But who else will do it? I go back to my bed and sleep as sunlight begins to pour through the windows.

*

My body is sore every day. My joints hurt. When I see myself in the mirror, my arms and legs are longer. I am seeing a doppelgänger, a strange and distinct body that is almost mine. My muscles are so tired, they must be too small to carry me. I have a cold that won’t go away.

It is time for swim practice again. It is always time for practice. The clock says 5:31, a bad time.

Mom’s feet are heavy, angry on the steps. I listen to my sisters’ breathing. We are all in a bed
together, maybe this will stop the fighting. The bare mattress has glossy plastic threads that
squeak under my fingers. 

“You cannot bring shame to the family by being late. Get your suits on.” 

Then I am out of bed, but my older sister isn’t. I know what will happen and then I am right. Mom pulls her onto the floor. 

“When I say jump, you say how high.”

The road shines like a slab of polished obsidian. It is unseen ice. Mom says:

“Offer it up. You can take all the pain you feel in swim practice and give it to God for someone else. I offered up all of my suffering in childbirth. I consecrated each of you and gave you to God so you would be protected.”

The cold chlorine makes my head feel light, as if detached from my body. My throat stings as I
take in a little water with each breath. I decide I won’t offer it up. Nothing happens. Underwater everything feels quiet, my limbs are held weightless. Outside goes from black to gray to pink. On the way home a deer holds itself still in the road, turns gold, and then leaps away, to the side of a snowbank it could not see.

*

Cut grass tinges my fingers green. As I mow the bees always seem to linger on the white clover
buds too long. I worry I have sucked all of them into the blades.

I am falling while lying on a cushion. My body sinks deeper and deeper, but then I hear her
footsteps. She is walking too fast. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Jim and Martha are coming over for dinner, nothing is ready yet, why are you reading? What
are you doing?”

I stand up and feel my feet, sore against the old floorboards. There are nails that keep popping up, you need to walk slowly or they catch the skin of your foot.

I begin washing dishes. The tower of them stretches to the ceiling, onto the floor, out the
window. Strange aged liquids pool under them. I know the sponge will leave a musty rotten
smell on my hands that soap cannot get out.

“Where are your sisters? Why did you let them leave?”

Her jaw clenches. The air grows hotter.

“Why do you all let the house look this way? I shouldn’t have to ask. What did I do to deserve
children like this?”

A knot forms in my stomach and tightens. It presses the back of my throat and moves upward,
squeezing my brain from the inside. Her words deposit a worm inside me that grows until it
crawls out of my open, unspeaking mouth. None of us will look at her. I want to save her, to hold her, but I know that will enrage her. I squirt soap and more soap on the musty sponge until I feel it run down to my elbows, sticky slick and smelling chemical blue, exactly how it looks.

“We love you Mom, we appreciate you.”

My sisters repeat it.

“We love you Mom, you’re such a good Mom.”

“We just got distracted, we love you.”

My oldest sister ruins it.

“Why did you invite them for dinner? You didn’t even tell us. We don’t want to have people
over.”

Mom walks over and slaps her. There is a big white patch on her cheek where mom’s hand
landed. I turn around and look at Mom, try to tell her with my eyes that I love her, to hold her
and steady her.

“All of you must do better. All of you should be working like this all the time. When I say jump
you should say how high. Always.”

Now all the time is running out. She leaves. My older sister has gone back to cutting chicken.
The other two are staring hard into the salad they’re preparing. My hands suddenly cannot hold
onto anything, it’s all too covered in soap, too slippery. This is because of them.

“You know if you didn’t say that she wouldn’t yell.”

“Whatever, you’re just trying to be better than all of us.”

Then the gravel crunches as the neighbors arrive. Where is Mom? It is too dangerous to look for her.

A younger sister goes downstairs to open the door.

“Hi! So nice to see you. Come up, don’t worry about taking your shoes off.”

Mom comes back into the kitchen. Her face is blank but her footsteps are softer. She seems
smaller, as if all the extra air she was holding in evaporated with her yelling. She smiles as she
hears them coming up the steps.

“Oh, come on in, this is no trouble at all. I love to do casual things like this.”

I look down and see the worm that left my body wriggling on the floor. It is moving forward, its body flexing intently toward my mother.

*

Mom’s sister and her family are not coming for Christmas this year. One of their daughters is in
treatment after she attempted suicide. Mom’s body has suddenly grown to fill the entire room.
She stoops down, the ceiling suddenly too low for her. 

“You know she never listened to me, she just medicated all of her kids. I was your rock, I was always around so you could have a secure base of support.” I pat her arm. I am so lucky to have her as a Mom. For some reason I cannot speak, but it doesn’t matter, I am with her. 

“The church is right about suicide. It is the most selfish thing you can do, that’s why it’s a mortal sin.” Her face is the size of a boulder. I jump into her open mouth and feel whole.

*

I call her on a quick-darkening afternoon, walking out of class. I have to end the call before she
wants to. I don’t know what will happen if I don’t.

“Did you go to church this weekend?”

“No, I haven’t been going.”

“Why do you do this to me?”

I am already outside my dorm. The air is nipping at my bare ankles. I wrap my arms around
myself. The last bits of dark blue sky are falling into the horizon. I bite the side of my nail and
taste the sweet iron of blood. I suck on the wound I opened.

“I love you. It’s just one thing, it’s just Mass.”

“You hate me. You don’t think you need God.”

“I love you.”

Her voice doesn’t match mine. Mine gets smaller and sadder and hers gets angrier. Suddenly the phone is not in my hand. A perfect copy of me has appeared to my left. Her nail beds are pure and unbitten, unbloodied. She has the phone now. She smiles as she speaks. 

“You’re right. You know me so well. Thank you for praying for me, I feel it.” My mother loves my doppelganger, she tells her: “You always listen, you always need me.”

Now my boyfriend is on the phone.

“Why do you talk to her if you feel like this after? Every time you feel like this.”

“I can’t just ignore her, she’s my Mom!”

My blanket is bright pink and yellow, the flowers smile at me, each one has the face of my happy ghost. Everything is covered in frost. I wish I did not exist. A huge dark orb fills half of my
room, an oil slick spinning into a whirlpool. The force of it tugs at my ankles like a tide. The
grease of it coats the soles of my feet. My mother’s voices emanate from the center of it. 

You belong here with me. I love you. You are terrible. You make my life horrible. How can you do this to me? You’re so gifted. No one understands things like us. You and I are sensitive, special. You’re so cold. You’re a slut. I wish you weren’t born. I hate you, don’t leave me.

I step back from the pool and the voice grows fainter. My feet are on clean green grass. I am
losing her and it feels good. The goodness and the distance condense into tears.

*

The light in our apartment is crisp. Lemon Lysol and hot afternoon sun baking white bathroom
tiles. They are original, chipped, the grout coming loose between them.

“Happy Mother’s Day! Did you get the flowers I sent?”

“Yes, they’re beautiful, thank you. Did you know the basis of regeneration in our bodies is vitamin C? When I look back on my life I didn’t have a lot of this information on vitamins now, it would have helped me so much.” She doesn’t mention the flowers. They were some of her favorites, black-eyed Susans, dianthus, amaranth. I chose the right ones, but she does not say anything. The walls suddenly seem to grow, I shrink and the world balloons. A low buzz fills my ears. My breath catches in my chest. My tongue swells in my throat, a slight nausea. The tiles come apart and a big black space opens beneath them. I must stand on my little island of tile so I don’t fall.

“We all started the Linus Pauling Vitamin C therapy diet recently. He got the Nobel but everyone ridiculed him. His mother died of the things the book says. Everyone made fun of him and he tried to save her.” What is she saying? The tiles tilt under my feet, too uneven to balance on, an iceberg flipping over after breaking off as a shard. Her voice becomes a hum. I must tell her about everything I eat, take the tablets she recommends, so I can help her and the rest of the family, then she will really talk to me.

*

We go a long time without talking. I have the same daydream all the time. I am standing on one
side of a huge glacial crevasse, with blue light that refracts and shimmers down through a
massive gap into navy, and then, black blankness. My parents stand at the other side, waving at me pleasantly but doing nothing. I run to the edge about to jump and then stop myself from
sliding in, and they just keep waving and smiling, as if we are neighbors passing each other in
the grocery store. The gap, the distance, the danger, is not a problem to them. They are
comfortable on their side, comfortable with what they see. I cannot get to them, I can’t get them to me.

*

She does not talk to me. She talks to my sisters in her kitchen instead. The terracotta floor in the room is freezing cold. Frost glitters on it.

“We just don’t know what to do. She won’t even talk to us so how can we know what she
wants?”

“Exactly. Remember we tried to talk to her and she wouldn’t just come home and explain.”

“I have been praying and God has shown me we just need to stick to our values, she will come back.”

My mother does not look sad, she looks intent. My sisters watch her and their faces follow hers, just a second later. The ice from the floor grows, and the frost spreads to the walls and then the ceiling, and then grows into icicles that fill the room. Their faces look blue in the light that bounces off the dark ice.

In bed she cries to my Dad. 

“Why did she leave?” She has a terracotta rosary that smells of rose oil. Her hands warm the beads. Her fingers are spotted with scars. 

“Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” She offers it up. It is easier for her to talk to God than me.

*

The time without speaking stretches on. My boyfriend and I are in a museum. There is a solid
door with a sign: James Turrell. Meeting. 1980–86/2016. Light and space.

I open the door and my eyes can’t take in the sunlight. My pupils widen and the room emerges.
A large room, with benches stretching along each of the four walls, and a precise rectangular
hole in the ceiling, totally open to the sky.

The room is half full. There are couples, some friends giggling, a man scribbling fast into a
notebook. Everyone must look at each other, everyone must be seen. The door opens and you
cannot tell who has entered until they have already joined you.

We sit and the benches fill up. The room warms, from the sun and from all the bodies close to
each other. We linger. Matt rests his head on my shoulder. I smell his hair, Dove soap and warm skin. Time slows. We sit and stare up at the sky, a big square of blue, and sometimes wisps of clouds glide over us. The angle of the shadows changes, they slither over the opposite bench, stretch themselves across faces and bodies.

My skin feels every molecule of air. As if so many nervous systems in one place are connected
by their electrical charges.

Some people leave. Those of us remaining watch them leave, watch others change position,
watch the sky together. This is how church is supposed to feel.

I see my mother young, coming into this room, waiting for a child, and then me, emerging from
that impenetrable, inscrutable door.