You hung your head and began to laugh. “Well, one day”—you squeezed the bridge of your nose between your fingers and your shoulders shook—“one day I went in your closet to get a sweater you asked for, and—” You couldn’t finish. You were in tears. I hadn’t seen anyone laugh so hard in years.

“What? This is annoying, just tell me!”

“I opened your closet door and everything was . . . it was all cut up.” You could barely spit the words out. The tears spilled down your face. You shook your head and wheezed. “The arms, they had all been snipped and the shirts were cropped. I touched one thing after another and thought, What the hell?” You wiped your face with the back of your hand. “And then I looked down, and there Violet was, hiding under the bottoms of your dresses, holding out one of those modeling knives from my desk. She’d done it. She’d just gone to town like Edward fucking Scissorhands. So I threw the clothes out and never told you.”

My jaw fell. My clothes. She’d massacred my wardrobe. While I sat downstairs on the couch feeding the baby, she’d been up there slicing every nice thing I owned. And you covered up for her.

“That is fucked up.” It was all I could think to say. You looked at me and laughed again, delirious. You were infuriating. I shook my head and called you an idiot under my breath. You shouldn’t have found it funny.

But then I cracked a smile. I couldn’t help myself. I started to laugh, too. It was absurd. You still had that pull on me, that way of making me want to be like you. We howled like a pair of old dogs in the night. At the thought of such a strange thing to do, at the ridiculousness of hiding it from me. At the idea that after everything, we could be there, that night, on the cold porch, together.

“You should have told me.” I wiped my nose on my housecoat and let the laughter settle.

“I know.” You were calm by then and something changed in your face. You looked me in the eye for the first time in years. We sat there together in the heaviness of everything we would not say. I had to look away. I closed my heavy lids and thought of our son. Our beautiful son. I thought of Elijah, the boy from the playground. I thought of the children she bullied. Of the nights she stared at Sam in the dark while he slept. Of her detachment. Of the blades. Of the mother lion she threw out the window on the way home from the zoo. Of my mother’s secrets and her shame. Of my expectations. Of my deadening fears. Of things that were normal, of the things I read into. What I had seen. What I had not seen. What you knew.

You cleared your throat and stood up.

“She wasn’t always easy. But she deserved more from you.” You looked down the street toward your car and zipped up your jacket. With your hands in your pockets, you took one step down the stairs, away from me. “And you deserved more from me.”

* * *

? ? ?

When I went into the house there was a message on my voice mail. It was an older woman, she didn’t say who she was. There was a rattle to her voice and a hollow sound in the background. She’d called to let me know my mother had died that day. She didn’t say where, or how. She paused and muffled the receiver, interrupted, maybe, by someone. And then she left her phone number. The last two numbers were cut off by the tone—she had taken too long to speak.

85

As she stands in the window of your home on Christmas Eve, reaching for the curtain, I get out of my car, these pages in my hands. I stand in the middle of the road in the falling snow lit from the yellow streetlight and I watch her.

I want her to know I am sorry.

Violet drops her arms to her sides. And then she lifts her chin and our eyes find each other. I think I see softness fall in her cheeks. I think she might put her hand to the window, like she needs me. Her mother. I wonder, for a fleeting moment, if we’ll be okay.

She mouths something, but I can’t make it out. I walk closer to the window and shrug my shoulders, shake my head—Say it again? I ask her. Say it again? She mouths the words slowly this time. And then she lunges forward. Her hands push against the window, like she wants to break through the glass, and she holds them there. I can see her chest rising and falling.

I pushed him.

I pushed him.

These are the words I think I can hear.

“Say it again!” This time I shout. I’m desperate. But she does not say it again. She notices these pages I carry in my arms. I look down at them, too. We look back at each other, and I can’t find that softness in her face anymore.

Your shadow appears at the back of the room and she walks away from the window, away from me. She is yours. The lights in your house go out.

A year and a half later

Many seasons have passed since she’s noticed how nice the warm wafts of early June air feel in her lungs. She stops outside her house and breathes again, deep into her soft belly, the way she practices at the end of every session with her therapist. She puffs out the air, counting one, two, three, and then fishes for her keys.

Saturday afternoons are much like any other day of the week. She plucks the green heads off a quart of strawberries that she cuts into halves and eats for lunch, slowly, at her kitchen table. Soon she will bring a small glass of water upstairs into the room that had once been her son’s. She will cross her legs and then lower herself to the meditation cushion placed squarely in front of the window. She will stretch her back and then she will sit there in the afternoon light for the next forty-five minutes, and she will think of nothing. Not him. Not her. Not the mistakes she has made as a mother. Not the guilt she carries for the damage she has done. Not her unbearable loneliness.