The Night Country

10

Eleven missed calls from Ella, starting just after midnight. Four voicemails, a screen full of texts.

It was half past six a.m. when I got home, and she was waiting at the kitchen table. A mug of coffee by her left hand, a filled ashtray and sprawled-out copy of Magic for Beginners at her right, like a goddess with her attributes. She’d never smoked in this apartment before. The scent of coffee and cigarettes in a dim kitchen sent me down a wormhole to the past.

She took me in. My chin and the way I hid my hand and the gait that favored my injured side. The unfamiliar sweatshirt, still bagging in front with a pair of stolen cell phones. Her eyes went big, and I waited for her to cry out, to ask what happened, but she said nothing.

“I thought you quit,” I said finally, nodding at the ashtray.

“Did you?” She took her time tapping out another cigarette before she spoke again. “I think it’s time we have some honesty between us, don’t you?”

I had four steps. From the doorway to the chair across from her, four steps to decide what I’d tell her and what I couldn’t, and how that would play with what I’d already said, and it just wasn’t enough. I stayed standing.

Finally her voice revealed a quiver. “So this is what I rate? You stay out all night, don’t even text, come home looking like a goddamned cage fighter, and now you won’t even sit down and talk to me?”

There were words that would undo this, that would heal what I’d cracked, but I didn’t know them. I shook my head, willing her to understand.

She mirrored me, mockingly. “What? What are you doing? What aren’t you saying? Where have you been?” She put a hand to her head.

“I chose you,” she whispered. “All those years ago. You were a lonely little thing tucked into a basket, and I knew just by looking at you that nobody loved you. I held you. And I took you. I watched you grow. I watched your eyes go clear. Go brown, like mine. You were…” She shook her head. “Your hands were like starfish. The top of your head smelled like dried apricots. Oh, my cranky girl.”

Somewhere in her, Ella knew. She knew I could’ve stayed in the Hinterland two years ago, knew I’d thought about doing it, if only for a moment. It was love that made her hold on to me, but it was something else, too. She’d shaped her life around giving me mine. Sometimes that sacrifice was a gift that bit. A rose with thorns.

“I chose you first,” she said, like she’d read my thoughts. “But you chose me back. You got free of it, you came home to me. I’m not an idiot, I know what’s happening here. Why are you letting it right back in?”

She turned realer and realer as I walked, finally crossing the kitchen to stand beside her, in sweats and an old T-shirt and hair more gray by the day. Her spiky beauty was going soft. I could see the end of her days as a warrior. I could see the day coming when she couldn’t stand another fight with me. For me. Love rose up like a noose and circled my throat.

I bent over and wrapped my arms around her, pressing my nose into the space where her neck became her shoulder. It smelled of rosemary and iron, like a ward against fairies.

“I love you.” I said it quietly, right up into her skin, but she heard me anyway. After a moment, her arms lifted to hug me back. Her hair stuck to my cut face and my side tugged against the Band-Aids but I was afraid of what might happen if I pulled away.

“I never wanted to spend my life in New York anyway,” she said.

I shot up. Her face was defiant. I’d seen that expression before.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We’ll go somewhere beautiful.”

Oh, shit, I’d heard that voice before. That exact promise.

“We could live on a farm. We’ve still got money left over from the Hazel Wood sale, enough to live on while we wait to sell this place. We could live in a place with red rocks, where you can see the Milky Way. We could finally get a dog.”

I breathed in and out before I answered. “We can’t keep doing this. Promising me rocks and dogs—it’s not enough for us to keep doing this.”

She lifted her chin, looked me in the aching eyes. “I once promised you a whole world. Did I not make good on that promise?”

“I can’t move again,” I said. “I can’t.”

Because my life here wasn’t just blood and violence and secrets I didn’t want to keep. It was walking over the bridge with Sophia at two a.m. It was hiding a deck of vintage playing cards in the books on Edgar’s shelves, little unsigned notes to fifty-two buyers. It was having the world’s best Danish on Church Street and the world’s worst coffee on Cortelyou and seeing the divot in my bedroom wall from all the times I’d opened the door too hard, a divot that was mine, in a room that was mine, in a city that belonged to no one but at least you could borrow it, in pieces, and pretend it loved you back.

“So what do we do? Just go on like this? On and on like this?” She stalked over to the junk drawer, where rubber-banded takeout menus bred like rabbits. Yanked it open, pulled out a shiny-covered something and held it up.

It was a college brochure. Two sweatered people laughed together over their books, a manicured lawn glowing green around them. She pushed the bottom edge of it hard into my chest.

“Look at this.” She was half laughing, but her face was wet. “I look at these things all the time when you’re not home. I hide them like they’re porn. It’s not even—you don’t have to go to college if you don’t want to. I just want you to act like you’re here, act like you’ll be here, start putting down some roots with me.” She cupped my face in her hands. “Or not with me. Whatever you need. Alice. My god, what more needs to happen for you to stay away from them?”

I put my hand over hers and slid it gently from my face. Then I stepped back.

“Mama.” She stood up straighter when I said the word. I hadn’t said it in years. “What more needs to happen for you to understand that I am them?”

Smoke played like ghosts over the ceiling. The morning light was a lie. And my mother was a forlorn figure in a room where she lived with a girl who was only a figment, really.