Seventeen
Screaming.
“Sarah, you gotta get up.”
I burrow deeper into my pillow and reach for James. He’s the only one who can make the nightmares go away. I find his arm and hug it to my chest underneath the blanket.
He groans. “Ah, God. Don’t do this now.”
The screams escalate into gurgling screeches that curdle the air in the room.
“Please,” James says in a broken voice. “Something’s wrong. I need you!”
Before I’ve opened my eyes, I’m on my feet. Stumbling, clinging to James as he drags me along, I make it into the hallway and down to our mother’s wide open door.
Nothing could prepare me for what I see.
Our mother lies skewed and twisted in the middle of her bed, one leg hanging off the side. Arching away from the mattress, she lets out another scream.
Agony, my sleep-muddled mind tells me. This is what agony sounds like.
Her thin, white t-shirt sticks to her glistening skin and rides up around her thighs. I recognize the t-shirt by the ancient brown stain on the bottom hem. Years ago, my father wore it under his scratchy red flannel coat while working on his car. I remember that particular day, how dismal and drizzly it had been, because it had been one of the few times James didn’t show up in time.
The ancient brown stain is my blood.
Another shriek of agony. Convulsing that shakes the floorboards beneath my feet. James yells at me to call for help, to find our father, to get a neighbor, something.
I barely hear him. I’m too busy staring at my mother, trying to piece together the bits of my dream that are scattering in the face of her screams. Familiar bruises. Fingertips on my cheek. Her whispered words.
The memory is so vivid and painful, I refuse to hang onto it. To distract myself, I force my attention back to the room I haven’t set foot in since James and I snuck in to steal those pills. There are pictures on the wall opposite her bed. The old Las Vegas Strip, Times Square at night, the Hollywood sign—all magazine fold-outs judging by the creases—hang from multi-colored thumbtacks. I didn’t know she had pictures. Then again, for years, I’ve done nothing but open the door a crack and peek in to make sure she’s still alive.
Wadded up tissues, bottles, and empty cigarette boxes lay strewn all over the floor and sit heaped on the table next to her bed. Dozens of orange medicine bottles sit in various stages of emptiness on the old dresser that used to be James’s when we were kids. All but one of the knobs are missing now and the top drawer sits crooked in its track. The pair of silky blue panties dangling from the corner look completely out of place.
Cursing at me, James barrels out into the hallway.
Morbid curiosity draws me farther into the room, toward the ghost who’s inhabited my mother’s body for as long as I can remember. Her head wrenches right. Left. Though her eyes have rolled up into her head, I know they’re the same pale hazel as my own. Small, freckled nose. Same pointy chin James says makes me look like a pixie. Stringy dishwater blond hair so like my own sticks to her bruised face and fans out across the pillow, the strands changing patterns every time she thrashes the other direction.
Even our screams sound the same.
And then it occurs to me that this still might be a nightmare. That, this time, I get to watch myself die in a dingy, disgusting bed instead of experience it.
When James runs back into the room, he’s tearing at his hair and looking like he’s going to cry or throw up or both.
Save James.
I’m across the room and in his arms within seconds, trying to protect him from our mother’s screams by covering his ears. Clinging to each other, we watch helplessly as she clutches at the sheets, the last of her screams more gurgling screeches as she drowns in whatever is filling her body. Something white and sticky leaks from her mouth.
James shoves me away and throws up all over a pile of rumpled laundry at our feet. More t-shirts. An old pair of my pants. The shorts from my dream. My white Easter dress with its torn hem.
Before he’s done, the room falls into an abrupt, eerie stillness so alarming after all the shuddering and shaking. James climbs to his feet, wiping his mouth on his shirt, and stares at our mother. I’m staring, too.
She’s not dead. Not yet. Through the viscous white foam, she hitches and sputters through her last two breaths. Her fingers relax.
“Oh, shit,” James whispers.
I can hear the sirens screaming toward us. They’re probably rounding the corner by the park right now, and soon, our house will be overrun by uniforms and swirling red lights. They’ll be too late. Will the police come? Will they sense the bruises hidden under our clothes? Will they ask about the ring of burn marks that form a perfect band around my mother’s ankle? I sink onto the side of the bed and touch her bare foot. See the chipped nail polish on her toes. It’s the same sparkly blue color James bought me last year. The tiny bottle disappeared a few days later.
From the doorway, wearing a pair of old pinstriped boxers and a blue, beer-stained t-shirt, our father gazes at her now still body. I get up and move closer to James, who doesn’t seem to see anything but our mother, and study the complete lack of emotion on our father’s face. I expected him to gloat or at least crack open a beer and toast to his freedom. He just stares.
Sick as it sounds after what I just watched her go through, I’m relieved. My mother’s in a place where he can’t hurt her anymore.
His gaze meets mine and holds it for several long seconds.
I shiver.
And then he walks out of the room.