After school that Thursday afternoon, Willow and Asher waited for their mother to pick them up for pizza at Lanza’s. Rosie, with a sparkle in her eye and warmth in her voice, promised an adventure.
When she stepped outside to the pickup circle, Willow tied her knit hat around her chin as the cold began to bite. And then she helped Asher slip his eager hands into a pair of mittens. Willow sat down on the curb with her backpack still on and her bony knees tucked toward her chest for warmth. Willow pulled a Pixy Stix that she had found in the seat of the bus earlier that morning out of her backpack, tilted her head back and poured the purple crystals onto her tongue. She stuck her tongue out and crossed her eyes to get a glimpse of the purple sugar dissolving. And then she opened her word search book and pressed Play on her CD player to welcome the safe tunes of Elton John into her head.
As dusk started to fall and a chill began to make its way into Willow’s bones, her tummy turned again. She looked at Asher, who had a smile and a pink nose as he timed himself running from the edge of the curb to the doors of the school.
Then suddenly the sky was entirely purple and fuzzy and everything was cold and quiet outside of Robert Kansas Elementary School.
As the cold bit down harder, Willow couldn’t help but wonder what was taking her mom so long. Where she was. The question swirled all around her as she sat on that curb.
And then the bright headlights of her father’s car speared through the hazy air and his shiny black car curled around the contour of the pickup circle.
“Hop in, guys,” Rex directed from behind the half-rolled-down window.
Everything stayed quiet for another half moment outside of the empty school in the empty twilight.
“But it’s Mom’s night,” Willow blurted out from the sidewalk. She stamped her black Converse sneaker into the concrete in reaction to the unexpected change of plans.
Willow didn’t know it, but she was invoking her father here. The desire, the visceral need, to adhere to the rules. It was just that Willow only liked the rules that got her to her mother’s house. To her mother’s bedroom with matching pajamas and The Twilight Zone on the television as she fell asleep. Not the rules of the morning checklist. Not the rules that forced her to practice piano when she would rather be sitting in her beanbag chair with Prince playing over her headphones. Not whatever rules Rex was invoking now to bring his children to his house when it was supposed to be her mother’s turn. When they were supposed to be at Lanza Pizza. When they were supposed to be drinking soda and playing pinball. But no matter how unjust, no matter how upset it made Willow, Rex’s rules always got to supersede his daughter’s. They always did. It maddened her. Now more than ever.
Asher ran toward the car with his backpack bouncing up and down behind him. He was indifferent to whose back seat he was getting into. Indifferent to whose house he would play with his action figures in later. Indifferent to what he ate for dinner. Indifferent and happy.
But Willow refused to move from the curb. Knees still tucked into her chest. Now shivering.
“We’re switching nights, Willow. Hop in.”
“But Mom didn’t say.”
Willow wasn’t ready to leave that curb. She wasn’t ready to relinquish the idea that Rosie and Lili Von would be roaring around the corner soon to pick them up. Because Willow wanted her mom. And she wanted her dad to know that she wanted her mom. She wanted him to know that he was breaking her rules. And that it was breaking her heart. That it always broke her heart.
“Willow, it’s getting late. Would you just get in the car?”
Her father’s exasperation was apparent, but Willow sat firmly and tensely on the curb.
“Willow, please.”
As Willow rocked herself back and forth on that curb, staring at her father, debating whether or not to get in his car, she got scared. Scared that she had lost her mother. It was a feeling she had experienced up in the branches of that willow tree. And on the couch watching Blazing Saddles. And after the rainstorm. But now, on the cold curb of Robert Kansas Elementary School, it felt so real. And it tugged and pulled on every muscle and organ and fiber in her body.
Willow had no choice but to give in to this new reality as she dragged her feet into the back of her father’s car.
When they parked the car at her father’s house and went inside, Willow left a warm puddle of urine on the seat.
* * *
As each second, minute, hour, day and nighttime checklist passed, Willow’s panic and worry and confusion intensified. And she wanted all of those awful creeping feelings to just go away.
Willow pulled out her word search book to distract herself. But when she looked at the page, she only saw a mirror into her own loneliness. She pulled out a box of crayons and doodled around on some construction paper. But there was no one there to see a sheep when she had really just drawn one big scribble. No one to tell her to add some orange here or some green there.
She lay down in her bed, put on her headphones and closed her eyes while she let the sounds of Prince and then Elton John and then Fleetwood Mac flow through her ears. She pretended she was at her mother’s house dancing around and letting love flow through her heart. But it wasn’t enough to imagine it. She wanted it to be real. She needed it to be real. But no matter how much Willow willed for her mother to come home that night and that weekend, Rosie never came.
So every night, after Rex turned out the lights and told his daughter to go to sleep, Willow got up and sat by her bedroom window and stared off into the woods behind her backyard. She tried not to blink as she waited to see a flicker of her mother’s flashlight. But the sky was just dark and thick and stale.
Willow grabbed the telescope that Dad had set up and twisted it toward the window. She pressed her eye into the back of the tube and scanned the blurry woods. And then she tilted her telescope toward the sky. Mom was somewhere. Somewhere out there. On this earth or in the stars. But out there.
And when Willow began losing the battle against the weight of her own eyelids, she shuffled back into her bed and wrapped herself tightly in her covers. She tickled her own arm, trying to slow her heartbeat. She held her pillow over her mouth to muffle the sound of her crying. She tried to think of her mother dancing around in a fringe vest, hair swaying wildly. But as soon as the vision would come to Willow, it dissolved back into darkness.
That darkness in her mind, that void in her body, left Willow with sadness in her blood as she went to sleep. Which left Willow with a puddle of urine under her waking body every morning.
On the following Sunday morning, after the third puddle appeared on her sheets, Willow went into the bathroom to get a towel. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Her usually clear brown eyes were red from crying. Her eyelashes were covered with a white dusting of salt from her dried tears. And her wild brown hair was even more frayed than usual after three nights of tossing and turning on her pillow.
Willow wondered if she would look like this for the rest of her life. If her face, her hair, her eyes would be stuck like this. If her whole body, her whole being, would be stuck at Dad’s house. In Dad’s world.
She wondered if Dad would start to love her now. She wondered if he could love her at all.
She wondered if she would grow to love Dad now. She wondered if she could grow to love him at all.
She didn’t know the answers, but she knew she needed love from somewhere.
* * *
Willow’s new reality was starting to set in. Mom was gone and Willow was starting to unravel. But Asher was the same Asher. The same bright eyes and toothless smile. The same silky blond bowl cut and skip in his step.
If there were ways in which he carried the damage around, Willow didn’t see them. And watching him smashing two action figures together under the kitchen table made her realize how lucky Asher was in his simplicity. How Asher could find love and happiness in any place and anything. Bugs on the sidewalk. A cartoon character. A room full of toys. An empty box. Mom. Mom’s house. Dad. Dad’s house. Mom’s butterfly kisses. Dad’s slight nod of approval.
Part of Willow wanted to live finding happiness everywhere too. She wanted to live open to all sorts of love. She wanted her heart to fill with all sorts of love. But it didn’t work. She didn’t like Dad’s kind of love. She didn’t like the chore charts and nighttime checklists. She didn’t like his broad shoulders and the intensity between his eyebrows. She liked Mom’s kind of love. She liked the kisses and singing and candy and little surprises on the bus. She couldn’t help it.
But, even still, when her father ducked under the table, took her brother by the hand and guided him into the backyard for a game of catch, Willow wanted to cry. Or maybe grab a baseball glove herself.
Everything looked so nice out there on the manicured grass of her father’s backyard. Father and son in baseball caps and jackets throwing a frayed old ball back and forth. Asher’s big leather baseball glove was way too large for his tiny hand. It dwarfed his entire body. And every time the ball would fly out of her father’s hand and into Asher’s glove, Asher’s entire body would teeter back and forth under the sheer force of Rex’s pitch. But as soon as the ball was under control, Asher would fill with pride. He would arch his back and roll up onto his toes as if he had been catching baseballs for years. The forced casualness was endearing even to Willow, who was quietly shaking with jealousy.
Asher reached into his mitt, pulled the baseball out of its clutches, cocked his arm back and looked up at his father. And Rex repeated the throwing motion again and again and again for Asher. He demonstrated a full-shouldered follow-through and the precise turn of the wrist required for an optimal pitch. He’d flick his wrist up and down to ensure that the end of the throwing motion was reinforced in Asher’s mind. And then Asher mimicked his father’s motion, launching the baseball straight into his father’s hand.
Rex tucked his glove into his opposite armpit, ball still swaddled in there, and shook his hand around dramatically. Like he was relieving the sting of the fastest fastball ever thrown. She could tell her father was faking it, but Asher swelled with pride all over again.
Willow could see so clearly what was happening out there on the grass. Rex had told a small lie pretending his hand hurt, but he was giving a gift to Asher with that lie. The gift of a proud father impressed by his son. And Willow could see that the lie was worth it. It was connection. It was love. It meant something. Something important.
And even though Willow couldn’t hear anything through the window, she could see her father’s lips moving as he imparted something worthwhile and true to his son. It was making it a little hard to breathe. She wanted something too. She wanted love. She wanted it so bad. She needed to breathe it in. It was her oxygen. She was suffocating without it and there her father was providing a bounty of it to her brother.
But Willow and Rex were separated by a glass window and so much more. So Willow just sat there, aching for love and trying to catch her breath.
The sensation was brand-new.
Because this time, that ache for love was directed at her father. All throughout Willow’s life, her mother had loved her so much there was no space for anything else. But right there, forgetting to miss her mother and watching this shared moment between her father and her brother, Rex and Asher, father and son, made her want her father’s love too.
Made her crave it.
Because once you taste that first crystal of Pixy Stix on your tongue, you want to pour the whole rest of the pile on top. Even if it isn’t your favorite grape flavor.
* * *
When Willow walked away from the window, her chest came to a stillness. She missed her mother all over again. She missed her all the way down to her bones.
She was burning up with questions.
Where was she?
Where was her mother?
Did it have anything to do with what was rattling around in that drawer?