We leave the Florida Orange box for last.
Lydia cranks out the blade on the box cutter and goes to slit the
packing tape, but I stop her before she can. I lay a hand on her shoulder,
feign exhaustion. How many times have I watched Roger commit this
act? Slice the tape open like vivisecting a frog and pull out the innards
of his meticulously crafted world? A perfect Christmas village, complete
with homes and people and fake cotton snow: a beautiful testament to
his attention, his love of tiny details. “Mimicry,” he’d say, holding up a
perfectly scaled balsawood house. “The talented kind.”
“Let’s leave it for another day, Lyd,” I suggest. “I’ll start supper.”
And turning to Amber, “Are you staying the night, hun?”
Amber nods her assent and Lydia moves toward her, grabs her
hand to lead her away.
I watch as they disappear, notice the smooth knuckles of my
daughter’s hand tighten around Amber’s wrist. I see the pressure there,
soft but sure, and I close my eyes. I count to ten.
MOTHER BURIES HOLE IN CHEST, USES KITCHEN
FLOUR.
When we go to bed, I lie awake for hours. I lie there and I
remember when she used to wake in the middle of the night and call out,
her voice timid in the dark, raspy, like she couldn’t find it all the way. I’d
hear it as if from the long end of an underground tunnel, bouncing off
the walls, slowly propelling its way toward me, small-like, fighting depth
and space to puddle at the shore of my ear; leak in. It wasn’t the same for
Roger. He slept solid, bump on a log, oblivious mouth slack-jawed and
open, that thin line of drool seeping out like a spider’s thread. Not me.
When she called, my body responded before my mind woke up proper
and there I’d be, stumbling down the hall, shoving my toes flush between
the carpet, following that thread, the thread of my name growing bigger
in the dark—my name then, Mommy, soft and sweet and peeping out
from under the crack in her door like a ground frog, the squishy kind,
a summer peeper. I’d get the lavender bath beads from behind the toilet
and crush them in my fingers. I’d rub the gel behind her ears, making
circles on the soft skin there until she fell back asleep. It happened often
enough that I wondered, sometimes, if she was dreaming bad or not.
Maybe she got to love that lavender smell as much as I did, the feel of
it—cool, comfortable, home.
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