Now Grace talked about an open invitation to the ranch. She was thinking of March. The acetone started to hurt my lungs and I pulled my feet away from the woman’s hands, the polish finished only on one foot. I leaned away to find air that didn’t sting but the entire room felt toxic and my chest was closing in. I had to go. I grabbed my purse and I left the woman stunned, polish brush in hand. Grace called out about my shoes, about where I was going, and I started to run. The clubs. She could do it. She would do it. The sitter wouldn’t watch them closely enough. I ran and didn’t stop for the two red lights, holding my hand out for the cars to slow down as my numb feet carried me home.

“You’ll kill yourself!” shouted a man on a bike.

No! I wanted to yell. She will kill him. She hates me that much. You don’t understand.

“Violet!” I threw open the door. I ran to the basement stairs and screamed her name again. Nobody answered. “Sam! Where is Sam?”

The babysitter came rushing down the hall with a finger on her lips.

Sam was asleep. Violet was resting in her room with a book.

I fell back against the wall. Nothing had happened.

Nothing had happened.

41

Anxiety attacks are very common. Especially for new moms. This is normal.”

I wondered if I should have said more. The doctor blew on the end of her pen as though it were hot. She wrote me a prescription and explained when I should take them. I left the building thinking of my mother’s translucent orange containers filled with tiny white tablets, dwindling over the course of each month.

* * *

? ? ?

I knew something wasn’t right. At first it was the emptiness she’d had in her eyes ever since I found her in Sam’s room, the way she seemed to look through me when I was with him now. Her contempt had shifted from the wildly exhausting tantrums that had once left me in tears to a manipulative, premeditated coldness. Her calm, steadfast dismissal of me was far beyond her nearly seven years. The icy looks. The complete disdain. The passive resistance to doing what I asked her to: Can you finish your dinner, please? Can you put away your toys? She simply disengaged with zero reaction, nothing for me to work with. Punishments or threats were useless; consequences had no meaning to her. Whatever attention I had gained from her since Sam was born had all but disappeared. She wouldn’t let me touch her. We resumed our old stand-off. And you resumed your old place as the only person she wanted in her world.

* * *

? ? ?

Eventually we learned to tolerate each other enough to coexist. She needed very little from me, to the point where she began to feel like a boarder I had to feed with plastic dishes on a heart-shaped place mat. I focused instead on Sam, on our routine, on the motions required of me when she wasn’t at school. And when you came home in the evening, she came alive again.

Sam was my light and I did everything I could to stop Violet from dimming it. Some mornings we came home after dropping off Violet and went back into our unmade bed with our suite of necessities—bottle, tea, books, Benny. The mess in the kitchen and the laundry could wait for us. Instead we passed the time staring at each other. We mused about ducks and dinosaurs and belly buttons. Later on we napped in the late-winter sun. He slept on my chest, even after he was weaned from my milk and my smell had changed. It was as though he knew how much I needed him.

The anxiety stayed away for the next little while. I kept the unfilled prescription in my purse—every time I saw the piece of paper when I reached in for something, I would think of my mother. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the pharmacy. I didn’t trust myself.

42

Cecilia’s not here.” My father’s words were meant to be stern but I heard a ripple in his voice. “I don’t know where she is.” He placed the receiver on the phone cradle with a shaking hand. I’d been watching from the hallway. He had lied to the person on the other end. My mother was home and hadn’t left her bed in a while. I didn’t know why, or why my father needed to lie to whoever kept calling for her. The one time I had reached for the phone before him, he knocked it out of my hand, as though the voice on the other end would burn my ear.

He brought her soup and water and crackers. I asked if she had the stomach flu.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

I was in the way. He passed me on the stairs, his back hunched over the tray he carefully carried to her. I hadn’t seen my mother for days, not since she’d been dressed up for one of her nights out in the city. She was going out more often by then, gone overnight, sometimes two. Her disappearing act. I listened from my room but couldn’t make out their words that night. She sounded weak and tearful and he was patient and calm. I tiptoed closer to their door.

“You need help.”

And then a crash. A dish. She had thrown the bowl of soup. I jumped out of my father’s path as he swung open the door in search of a cloth. I looked in the room and saw her in bed, upright, eyes closed. Her arms folded across her chest. I saw the same plastic bracelet I’d seen the year before on Mrs. Ellington when the baby in her stomach hadn’t made it. My mother was thin, though, her waist the size of mine at eleven years old, and there wasn’t any chance she wanted another child. I went to my room and got ready for bed, hoping to hear them continue the argument so I could piece together what was going on. I fell asleep to the sound of my mother crying.