Chapter Two
Iris
The smell of alcohol and vomit toyed with my gag reflex when I opened my bedroom door. I pinched the bridge of my nose to close off the smell as I ventured down the hallway, on the lookout for wet puddles on the floor.
There was no doubt in my mind where that smell was coming from. It was the same place it always came from.
I reached the doorframe of my mother’s bedroom. The room was tidy and clean, thanks to my cleaning skills yesterday. The dust and hair on the carpet had been enough to prompt me into pulling out the cleaning supplies and vacuum. The kitchen had been far worse with dirty dishes everywhere and spoiled food with mold growing on it in the fridge. I had no idea how I managed to get through cleaning without barfing.
Sunlight streamed in through the open shades of the window. My mother was sprawled out on the bedspread, one pale and long leg dangling off the side. The steady rise and fall of her back offered a small measure of comfort. She was alive and breathing, at least. A bottle of fireball whiskey had tumbled down to the floor sometime in the early morning hours. The smell of cinnamon mingled with the other less pleasant smells in the room.
I walked into the room with my fingers still at my nose. A quick glance into the adjacent bathroom told me where the vomit smell was coming from. Irritation swept through me. I’d have to buy another bottle of bleach to clean up the mess all over the toilet and bathroom tile.
I took a blanket to cover up my mother’s bare legs. Even in the middle of winter, she still insisted on wearing dresses wherever she went. The skirt of her dress was bunched up high on her thighs from when she had climbed into bed. I touched her leg briefly to feel the chilled skin before tucking the blanket around her.
It’d be another couple hours if I were lucky before she stirred from her usual drunken sleep. Maybe I would be able to slip away to head back to the apartment and get ready for my next semester at PHU. My mother had a habit of asking me to endlessly run errands, or to get food and alcohol before I left. I wasn’t in the mood to do any of those. I had plenty of things to do.
The kitchen was a mess with bottles everywhere, but I swept them aside into the trashcan to make room to cook. Enabling. I was enabling as usual while I grabbed a clean frying pan to make some eggs and bacon. Everyone told me to let her drown herself in her sorrows, but I couldn’t, no matter how hard I wanted to let her.
It was a fucked up feeling to hope she would kill herself after years of threatening it, and wanting to save her at the same time. Either way was a headache that no one in our family wanted to deal with – including my dad. He’d made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with her the last time I tried to ask for money to get her some help.
“AA meetings are free,” he told me dispassionately, not bothering to look up from his iPhone. “She can go to those. Your mother’s drinking isn’t my concern. It shouldn’t be yours, either, so why you’re asking me for money is beyond me.”
I had turned into the mother over the years. I shopped. I cooked. I cleaned. I made sure my mother kept herself upright most of the time. Anger tore through me as I cracked a few eggs to whisk them violently in the pan.
I didn’t have time for this shit, either. I was graduating from PHU in a few months, and I had to repeat freshman English because I’d failed it while trying to help my mother with her issues. My professor at the time had decided to take the tough-love approach to prove some sort of point to me by failing me when I cried to him about why my essay wasn’t finished. People could be so damn heartless.
He’d wanted to prove to me that it was important to not fix broken people when they didn’t want to be fixed. I snorted. It was so easy to throw out lessons without personal experience for most people, especially the stuffy-ass professors at PHU.
I scrambled the eggs while a headache started to pound in my own head. I reached for a bottle of Tylenol right as footsteps shuffled into the kitchen. Dread coiled in my stomach when I looked up to find her wobbling unsteadily.
“Damn,” I muttered under my breath, twisting the Tylenol cap off. “You’re up early, Mom.”
“I smelled breakfast,” she replied, using the counter to steady herself. “Can I have some of those for this headache? It feels like my brain is cracking in half. Is that possible?”
“No, Mother.” I handed her two pills, even though I knew they did more damage than good. I wasn’t in the mood to argue that. It was a wasted conversation at best, and one we’d had a million times.
“I’m really sorry about last night, sweetie,” she said, her voice soft and sounding almost like someone who might care about me.
I turned away to focus on loading up a plate for her – a heaping plate of food in the blind hope that it’d help her stay away from being drunk until the afternoon.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
Her chair scooted back from the table, the noise enough to give me a headache to accompany hers. “I’m serious, Iris. I’m sorry for everything. I don’t mean to drink that much, but once I-”
“Once you start, you can’t stop,” I monotoned back. “Yeah, I know, Mom. Don’t explain it to me. I already know. We’ve had this conversation before, remember?”
“It’s true though. Honey, I-” I heard a trembling sob, and against my better judgment, I turned to look at her again.
It struck me hard as it always did to see such a beautiful woman, from her petite frame and curly, blonde hair, become such an emotional wreck. The drinking had taken a scary toll over the past few months. Her pale skin had a yellow tinge to it. Delicate bones seemed to be popping out of her skin.
Her eyes were the worst, though. They were red tinged, glossy, and full of so much heartache that it made it hard to be angry at the drinking. She looked up at me with tear-filled eyes. A bit of vomit was still caked to the side of her lips. “I don’t want to be like this, but I don’t know what else will numb this inside of me.”
“The alcohol is not numbing you,” I pointed out, like I had time and time before. “You try to numb yourself out by drinking, but you’re still in it the next day.”
“I know. I know. Ever since your father-”
There it was. The “f” word, as I called him. I set the plate of food down in front of my mom. A few scrambled eggs fell off, but it cut her off like I hoped it would.
“Stop talking about it,” I said, tightly. “I’m not in the mood, and neither are you. I have shit to do when I get back to Provo.”
My mother’s face fell at that. “You’re leaving already?”
“I’ve been here for two weeks, Mom. Remember? Christmas break. I told you that I would have to go back this weekend to get ready for school.”
I handed her a fork. Her clammy fingers brushed against mine briefly, but I worked to ignore the sensation. She wasn’t going to change. Not for me, and certainly not for herself. We were at the point of hopelessness, though I hated to admit it.
She stabbed at the eggs that had fallen off her plate. “Still,” she mumbled, “it was nice having you here with me. It gets lonely here.”
“Go out and do something,” I replied before venturing to the sink to wash the dishes I had used. I left the ones with food caked on them from last night. It’d give my mother something to do later on instead of moping around the house after I left. “Call up a friend. Take a shower, and find a boyfriend. Do something. Anything, Mom.”
“Like you’re the one to talk about boyfriends. You’ve never had a real one.” She snorted and let out a giggle. As if my lack of a love life was funny.
I ignored the insult hurled at my back. I had no time for a romantic life, nor did I really care to have one. I wasn’t like Bailey who always had some sort of boy toy chasing after her every need.
“I have to go,” I said, drying the pan before placing it back in the cupboard. “I’ll be back once the semester and exams are over.”
“You don’t want me going to your graduation?” she asked, a bit too sweetly. Shoving the plate of food away, she reached around to a small cabinet she kept hard alcohol in.
“I doubt you’ll remember.”
Nausea churned in me when she twisted the cap off a brand-new bottle of vodka. I leaned down to kiss her on the temple quickly as possible to avoid the smell of alcohol and vomit. She was still too drunk to even realize she had thrown up all over herself last night.
“Call me if you need me,” I told her.
“You won’t answer,” she replied, taking a swig that nearly gagged us both. “Thanks for the sentiment, though. It doesn’t make me feel less abandoned.”
“Right.”
I left her in kitchen to drink away her demons that she never escaped from. Grabbing my bags from where I had placed them next to the front door, I fled out into the snowy afternoon with a relieved sigh. The fresh air cleared my head as it always did, and I loaded my car with freshly-washed clothes.
Before I pulled away from the house, I grabbed my mother’s SUV keys from the engine and tossed them carelessly into the snowy front yard. It was peevish to do it, but I figured trying to dissuade her from drinking and driving again was better than bailing her out of jail in the middle of the night. Or having to take the blame for her killing an innocent driver.
Those thoughts lifted from my shoulders as I drove thirty minutes back to Provo. The apartment I shared with Bailey was thankfully empty and cold. I couldn’t handle faking a smile for her today. Our relationship was already strained and strange enough. Half the time, I had no idea if she was a friend or a frenemy, and sadly enough, I didn’t really care.
I kicked the heater on while I lugged my bags into my room before gathering the pile of mail that had fallen through the slot. Separating it into two piles, I debated on calling Bailey to see when she would arrive back to the apartment. It needed to be cleaned, and after spending two weeks of cleaning up after my mother, I hoped Bailey would return within the next day or two. She was OCD about cleanliness like I was.
I settled on sending her a text message about picking up cleaning supplies on the way back to Provo. I turned my phone off after that because I didn’t expect a reply, and I didn’t want to deal with my mother’s usual breakdowns after I left.
The cotton sheets still smelled fresh when I slipped into them despite it being mid-morning. The entire Christmas break had been all about staying up and listening to my mother’s problems. I needed to sleep. I needed to focus. I needed to push away my mother because I didn’t want to go down with her.
“She’ll be fine,” I whispered, rolling over to curl up into a sleepy ball. “She’ll get through the next couple of months. She always has.”
Sleep tugged at me, promising a rest from my worries. I ignored the little voice inside me that screamed, “Liar. She won’t be.” I only said those things anymore to comfort myself. Not because I believed any of it was true. I didn’t, couldn’t.
But unfortunately, I’d run out of options to help her. The damage her drinking was doing to me wasn’t enough… I wasn’t enough.