When I stepped out of the shower the morning of my seventeenth birthday and grabbed a towel to dry off, I could faintly hear my mother crying in the next room. I could barely make out what the noise was at first so I pressed my head against the thin wall to try and hear it better. Once I did, the sound was unmistakable.
I shouldn't be listening to this. Feeling guilty, I pulled my head back from the wall. There was a wet imprint of my ear on the plaster, its light blue color having turned dark as evidence of my eavesdropping. Oh great. I tried to wipe it clean, rubbing the rough surface of the plaster with my towel. The chafing noise the fabric made against the wall sounded loud in my ears, and I stopped. The mark remained despite my efforts. I turned away from it then to look at myself in the mirror; I had to sidestep to the right so its reflection was no longer visible before I could put in my contacts.
Emerging from the bathroom a few minutes later, I threw a sideways glance into the kitchen where my mother was sitting. Give her a second to compose herself. You don't want to embarrass her, I told myself as I walked straight ahead from the bathroom into my bedroom.
I sat on my bed quietly and put on my socks, listening carefully to the noises coming from the other room. The toes of the socks stuck out from where they had been folded inside each other, and I tugged them free. I don't hear her crying anymore. I rolled each sock up meticulously from toe to heel to get rid of any creases before I pulled the socks over each of my feet. Maybe I better give her another few seconds just in case.
I glanced around my room at the posters that covered my wall while I put on my five-year-old sneakers. The top of one poster in the corner by my window had fallen down in the night; it drooped over itself like the dog-eared page of a book. I knelt on the end of my bed and leaned over close to the wall where it hung to attach it firmly, pushing hard on the gummy substance in the corners to try to get it to stay. It's not going to hold. This is the third time it's fallen. I need to get some new Plasti-tak and hang it up again. I climbed off the bed and started to walk out of the room, glancing back at the gigantic picture of Colin Baker standing at the TARDIS console. I oughta just take it down. He's my least favorite Doctor anyway.
My mother sat at the kitchen table calmly as I came in to make myself some breakfast. I didn't speak to her at first; she was staring blankly at the back door. I tried to see how she was doing without really looking at her, sneaking peeks at her out of the corner of my eye as I got a bowl from the cabinet. As I stretched to get the box of cereal from the top shelf, I noticed that she was no longer weeping directly, but her eyes were still bloodshot, like she'd been up all night. For all I knew, she had been.
I set the gallon of milk down hard on the table, and that got her attention. She turned to look at me and forced a smile to her face. "Happy birthday, Honey."
"Thanks, Mom," I said. I poured the cereal into the bowl in silence, then realized I had forgotten my spoon. "Oops."
"I'll get it," my mom said. She turned around in her chair to the drawer behind her.
"You don't have to; I can-"
She cut me off. "I'm right here." She reached into the drawer and pulled out a spoon. "Here."
I took it from her. "Thanks."
She half-smiled at me, as if she was preoccupied with something else, and turned back towards the back door. She had left the drawer open.
I looked at the door, then back at her, as I chewed my food. "Geez, Mom. You look…" awful, depressed, lonely "tired."
She acknowledged my comment with little more than a nod and said, "I've just been thinking about when we build onto the house this summer. I think I'd like to get rid of this door."
"You mean get a new one?" My mouth was full of Cap'n Crunch and my words came out a garbled mess.
"I mean take out this whole wall. If we did keep this door, or put in a new one there, it would block the pantry. But if we replaced a large part of this wall with a sliding glass door…" The thought ended there.
"That would look nice."
She looked at me for a second. "Do you think?" I nodded as she turned back to the door. "I think it might. I think it might."
I could see the words repeating themselves a third time in her head. A drop of milk dribbled from between my lips and started to roll down my chin. I crushed it with my thumb like a bug and brought it back to my mouth, dragging the thumb up the same path the drop had traveled down and then across my lip quickly.
She whipped her head around to face me suddenly and caught me staring. I averted my eyes by turning back to my cereal, but she did not acknowledge my staring. Instead words started pouring out of her rapidly. "Dan told him that he wished he would hurry up and die. He's said it before too, told him that he needed to get on with dying. That's why he came to live up here last year, 'cause Dan wanted him to stop getting blood transfusions, wanted to call in Hospice already. Can you believe that? Hospice? When he was doing so well at your birthday party last year?"
"Oh?" I shoveled spoonfuls of cereal into mouth with my head facing the bowl, hardly even wanting to glance up at the woman who was letting free this barrage of emotionless speech. This woman is not my mother.
"Then one day while I was there with him and your grandma, Dan was cursing, as usual. Dan always used to curse in front of your grandma because it annoyed her so much. Dan got a kick out of it. That day Dan said the f-word and then he said, 'Oops, I'm not supposed to say that around you, am I?' to Grandma. He said it like that, faking sincerity and embarrassment. And your grandma said to him, I couldn't believe it, she said, 'I don't fucking care what you fucking say.' Can you believe that? Grandma? I've never heard my mother say a bad word in my entire life." She laughed then, finally looking from me to the cereal where I was hiding my gaze.
Neither have I. I chuckled a little with her until she went on.
"He always wanted them to get along." The words were coming slower now, as the barrage was trailing off to a light drizzle. "He once wrote me a letter saying that he hoped they weren't still fighting over his deathbed." She laughed again, this time unconsciously.
I swallowed a mouthful of cereal that had barely been chewed, the hard edges of each unfinished bite cutting into my throat as it went down. "Oh?"
"Yeah. Yeah." She stared at the door again and stopped talking. I kept eating. When she spoke again almost a minute later, it startled me. My bowl was half-empty by now. "So are you going to go see Kelly tonight when you get off work?"
Oops. Guess I forgot to tell her. "Umm… no." I drew the words out slowly so she would understand.
She turned to me with concern on her face, but the concern was just a mask for something else. "She broke up with you? Oh, I'm sorry, Honey." Her eyes were fierce with sympathy, but I could see behind the barrier these condolences had put up to the grief that really lay behind the wildness in her eyes.
Not wanting her to misunderstand, I met her gaze and said, "Actually, I broke up with her."
"Oh." The untamed emotion disappeared, and I could tell she was stifling her desire to ask why. "But… oh. Well… oh well." All at once she seemed worried, relieved and angry, but then it all washed away quickly when she looked towards the door. "Sliding glass would look nice here," she muttered under her breath to herself.
I was finished with my cereal, so I stood up from the table. I drank what was left of my milk over the sink, staring at the clock that hung over the sink and listening to it tick. I was waiting, bracing myself for what might come next. When the words came pouring forth again moments later, I was ready.
Mom said, "He made me a promise before I left, when he was still coherent. He promised me that after he died he would come back as a white dove to let me know that everything was OK, that he was OK."
Reincarnation? I thought to myself incredulously as I whirled around to confront her. I wanted to look her right in the eye then, to ask her point blank if she really believed that was true, that he would come back as a bird to reassure us.
She was turned and facing the door still. She wouldn't look at me and she said nothing.
"Oh?" I said. I couldn't think of anything else to say.
"Yeah," she whispered. "Yeah." She stared at the door. Yeah, I heard her say a third time, in my head.
I heard my dad coming down the hall then, humming to himself with oblivious glee. "You say it's your birthday," he sang as he entered the kitchen. "It's my birthday too, yeah."
Thank goodness. He stepped up to the fridge next to me and opened the door as I returned his singing. "You say it's your birthday!" I sang loudly. "We're gonna have a good time!"
"Well," he said, pulling an apple out of the crisper and taking a bite as he released the refrigerator door and close on its own, "you're seventeen now. Just one more year until I can legally kick you out of the house."
"Thanks, Dad," I said, rolling my eyes. I glanced back at the clock over the sink and for the first time saw what it said. Crap, I'm gonna be late. "Gotta get going. You going to give me your present for me now or after school?"
Now it was my dad rolling his eyes. "Present? We're paying for your car's registration and license plate. That's your present," he scoffed.
"Thanks a lot," I replied. "So does that mean I can take it to school today then?" My eyebrows raised and I grinned at my dad, nodding my head.
His expression was more serious than mine. "Your mom just drove it up here. It's low on gas, probably needs oil too…"
I interrupted him before he could say no. "Come on! I can get gas before I go to school."
"I don't think so. I've got to take it up to the DMV to register it."
"But-"
"I said-"
"Let him take the car," my mom said from her seat at the table. We had almost forgotten she was even in the room, and we both turned to look at her. She was still looking at the door.
Dad came in close to talk to her in confidence. "You said you wanted me to clean it out before he drove it," he said quietly. "Just in case there was more of what your father found…"
"It'll be alright," she said, turning back to look at him, then at me. "He'll be alright. It's his birthday." She smiled then and turned back to Dad.
"I don't think that's wise. What if the school-"
"He'd want him to take the car today." These words ended all discussion.
My dad turned back to me then and said, "Tomorrow you have to wake up and take it there yourself then."
"That's fine," I said as I ran to my room to get my books for school. I have to get up early tomorrow anyway.
I didn't think about anything my mom had said before; it had all rolled off my back by then. I didn't wonder what my grandpa might have found in the car. I would later find out it was a half-empty package of rolling papers, left there by Dan a few days before when he and some friends smoked weed in the garage while my mom and grandma were in my uncle's bedroom watching over him. Instead I just scooped up the blue plastic Wal-Mart bag I had sitting on the floor in my room and floated out of the room.
I barely waved a goodbye to my parents in the kitchen as I went out the front door, but as I left I heard my mom speaking softly, to herself or to my dad I couldn't tell. She said, "'See you later.' That's all I said to him before I left."
I ignored them, and as I got in my car, I sang, "You say it's your birthday. Well, happy birthday to you." I started the car and headed off to school still humming the tune to myself.
