How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

  But I don’t know what else to say.

  Kai Henderson and his sweet, sugary mouth is gone. He drove me here in his mother’s gray car with the comfortable seats. The seats in my mother’s car are held together with duct tape. The seats in Kai’s car are velvety and unripped.

  I cried and he drove fast, mumbling under his breath.

  He’d been the one to take the phone call.

  Your mom. Died.

  And now he’s gone.

  I touch my lips. The kisses disappearing, one by one, as though I dreamed them.

  Cake turns and hugs her mother. The frizzy-haired woman pats Cake’s dad’s arm. His face is crumpled.

  I’m alone. Everyone here has someone but me, because the only person I had is flat on her back in Room 142 across the hall from me, and she is no longer herself.

  Somewhere far, far away, I hear a person crying. Nurses push wheelchairs, phones ring, things beep, and the intercom is noisy with words I don’t understand. The whole world is a new language to me now.

  It takes me a long time to realize the person crying is me, and no one has noticed.

  11:04 p.m.

  THE FRIZZY-HAIRED WOMAN AT the hospital who keeps asking Cake’s dad all the questions is a social worker. Her name is Karen and I so cannot believe what she is telling me that she repeats it, twice.

  “You’ll have to come with me, Grace. I’m sorry, but since you don’t have another relative to care for you while all this is sorted out, you’ll be placed in an emergency foster.”

  Emergency. Foster.

  I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  The only thing I can think to say is, “Tiger,” and the frizzy-haired woman says, “What?” And I say, flatly, “My name is Tiger,” because I bit a boy named Jaime Suarez at daycare for that name, and damned if I’m going to lose that now, too.

  I bit a boy named Jaime Suarez because his nose was always running, and he was always crying, and my mother, who worked at Bonita’s daycare, was always the one he ran to, clinging to her leg until she’d pick him up, wipe his nose, and sing to him. Something sad and pretty. She liked dreamy, folksy songs from the seventies. That day, she sang him a song called “Sam Stone,” which is really about a dad who shoots heroin, but it sounds nice and kind of soothing when you’re four, and not sad and tragic, like it does if you’re older, and Jaime positively sank into my mother’s body, and I exploded in jealousy and sank my teeth into his bare leg.

  My mother was all I had. Other kids had dads. Aunties, uncles, grandparents, cousins. Sisters. Brothers. Even stepparents. All my life, it’s just been us. No dad to plop me on his shoulders or cuff me on the head like the dads who picked up their kids at the daycare. I had a vague, mythical presence. I had: The Person Who Shall Not Be Named.

  And I’d be damned if Jaime Suarez was going to take my mother from me.

  Bonita had tugged me away, clucking her tongue. Mom iced Jaime’s leg while he wailed. Bonita said, “Goodness, you’re a little tiger for your mama’s love, aren’t you, Gracie?” And from then on, Tiger it was. All the little kids at daycare started calling me that, and it stuck.

  Emergency what?

  “Tiger,” I say, louder, to the frizzy-haired woman. “And you can’t…you can’t just take me.” I mean, where?

  I live at 344 Morales Road, in a little peach-painted adobe with mammoth sunflowers draping the creaky backyard fence. I live with my mother, June, and it’s just us, and it isn’t perfect, but it’s ours, and I want to yell, You can’t have me, I belong to her!

  But her isn’t her anymore.

  My heart, it turns black. A cold, wet chill falls over my body.

  Everything, all the sounds in the hospital, the clicks and beeps and squeaky gurney wheels, get very echoey all of a sudden.

  “I’m drowning,” I say. The social worker doesn’t bat an eye, but Cake’s dad looks alarmed.

  “Maybe we should get her something. A muscle relaxant. Something.” He looks around for a nurse.

  Cake starts to cry. “You can’t just take her. She’s like my sister.”

  Her mom, Rhonda, spits, “This is ridiculous. This child’s mother has died, and she should be with us.”

  “I won’t let you take her,” Cake sobs again. She holds my hand tightly.

  “I don’t want to go with you,” I say to the lady, my voice breaking. “Please. Just let me go with them.” My heart surges at the thought of Cake’s comfortable, weird house with all its record albums and ferns and iguanas in aquariums and old rock concert posters framed and hung on the walls.

  My little house at 344 Morales Road will be empty now, and cold. A shell. And wherever this woman wants to send me, who knows what’s there? What does that even mean, emergency foster?

  Cake’s dad murmurs, “Girls, please.”

  I am cold, I am hot, I am every possible feeling and temperature you can have at once. All I know about foster care is from movies and books, and it never ends well. They make you cook drugs and beat you and keep you in closets.

  I think I might throw up again.

  Karen the frizzy-haired social worker must have seen all this before, though, because she doesn’t freak out or anything. She just says, “I understand this is a lot to take in, and we’re all very, very upset, but this is going to happen, and I need everyone to calm down and understand that, okay?”

  Rhonda sputters, “What are you going to do, call the police if we refuse to let you take her?”

  Karen looks at Rhonda and says, “I will do that. I have done that. Is that what you want?” Her voice is sharp.

  She looks around at each of us, then, like a teacher in elementary school making sure we all know the rules of the game before we start to play.

  No one says anything.

  “All right, then,” she says firmly, taking Rhonda aside for some whispering. She even hugs her.

  “This is surreal,” sniffles Cake. “I mean, I cannot believe this is happening.”

  I say, “You and me both, sister.”

  Cake stares at me. “How can you make a joke right now?”

  “I’m not joking,” I answer. “I really can’t believe this is happening, either. I’m so freaked out I can’t even feel anything anymore. Look.”

  I push up the sleeve of the scrub shirt and pinch my forearm hard for as long as I can before Cake swats my fingers away. “Don’t do that,” she warns. “That’s not good.”

  “I didn’t even feel it,” I tell her.

  We both stare at the purpling skin of my arm. There are girls at Eugene Field who do far worse, and way more often, but no one likes to talk about it.

  “Don’t start that shit, okay?” Cake says.

  She swipes at her wet face. “I will seriously kill you if you start that.” She claps a hand across her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she says, her voice muffled inside her palm.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her.

  I make a mental note that people are probably going to be afraid to use certain words around me now, like: dead, death, dying, kill, and killing. Maybe morbid and mortal, too.

  It could turn out to be a long list.

  “I have to pee,” Cake says. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “I’m just going to sit,” I say. “Over there.” I point at the long row of gray chairs underneath the window. On the wall, the clock says 11:04 p.m. I pull out my phone and text that time to myself. This morning I had one life, and now it’s night, and I have another, and I want to record the very minute everything went to hell.

  What time was I kissing Kai Henderson and what time, in that time, did my mother’s brain betray her, and me? A brain aneurysm. Sub-something, the doctor had said, but I couldn’t really hear, because my heart was exploding.

  The doctor had used words like rupture and instantaneous.


  My legs feel like cement, walking to the chairs. Will I always feel this way when I walk from now on, like something heavy? Rhonda is filling out papers at the nurses’ station. That woman, Karen, is on her phone.

  I’m facing the door to the room where my mother is, the body they said was my mother. Is she still in there, or did they move her already, and I missed it?

  The last thing I ever said to my mother was a terrible, horrible thing.

  The last thing I said to my mom was “Why can’t you ever just fucking leave me alone?”

  And then it hits me, hard, that she’s done precisely that, and forever, really really forever, and suddenly I’m crying, great gushing waves that hurt my ribs and blur my eyes.

  Only a bad daughter would say something like that to her mom.

  I get up and run down the hall. I have to get away from them, all of them, even Cake.

  In an alcove, I find a kind of niche between tall carts filled with plastic tubs and supplies, like cotton balls and swabs and gauze and bottles and jugs of strange liquids. I fit myself between two of the carts and cry. At first, I’m embarrassed, but after a little while, I realize that if anyone comes by, like a nurse or a doctor, they’ll think nothing of it. Hospitals are filled to the gills with teary people, after all. I’m not any different.

  I need my mother to come get me, to save me from the fact that my mother is dead.

  I start to laugh, because that’s terrible, and awful, and all my bones are shattering inside me and it feels like being stabbed from the inside out.

  My mother is dead, dead, dead.

  I’m a splitting atom, a human fissure, things I don’t even have names for leaking out. Shit I should have studied in school, but didn’t.

  I can’t feel my body, I can’t feel my heart, I’m rising out of myself, watching as I separate into the girl before and the girl after.

  “This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening.”

  I’m whispering it, over and over and over, even as I know it is happening. Truly and definitely and terribly.

  Down the hall, Karen is a watery, slow-motion vision, moving toward me with purpose and vigor, her frizzy hair lit from behind by the fluorescent ceiling lights. She’s coming to rip me from one life to the next and I’m frozen in place.

  I’m a girl-bug now, trapped in glass, watching everything on mute.

  ONE MORNING, YOU WAKE up in the backseat of a small white car, surrounded by empty soda cans and crumpled plastic bags and all the other dirty shit that never gets cleaned out of the backseat of a car. Straw wrappers. Sticky old bags of fruit gummies. Flip-flops. Scrunched tissues. Single winter mittens and Styrofoam coffee cups and movie tickets from months ago. How did the movie tickets end up there? Slipped from a pocket. Fallen from a wallet.

  You’re on your side in the duct-taped backseat, cheek stuck to the vinyl, staring down at those movie tickets. Three little stained stubs amid a heap of trash.

  You finger them. They’re gummy from the last dregs of coffee that dripped from some Styrofoam cups. Things flip in your brain, like a movie reel: the Amsterdam teenage sex movie.

  Why does remembering this stab you so hard? Why?

  Through the window, the sun hits your face like a hot rock. You blink and wonder where you are, why you are in the backseat of this car, cheek plastered to vinyl, and then the world splits open again, wider than you ever thought it could, sucking your breath away.

  Now you remember, now you know, now you know everything, like why the movie memory stabbed so much.

  Your mother is dead.

  You get out of the car and the sun hurts and the ground hurts and even the stupid air hurts.

  You feel skinned. Like whatever held you together has been peeled away. You half expect to look down and see your heart hanging out, a slow-beating, nearly dead thing.

  Your legs wobble and your mouth tastes dry and your mother is dead. They were all staring at you, in that too-bright room, silently willing you to say that the person on the table was your mother and she was dead so they could move on with their lives, while yours had just been stopped short.

  You were kissing a boy when your mother’s brain exploded.

  It’s very early and yet it’s already so hot. The summer is going to be so brutal, you can tell already. Your body feels light, which is weird, because last night you felt as heavy as wet cement.

  If you looked at yourself in a mirror right now, could you see pieces of bone close to the surface? Is this how it will feel every day from now on?

  That you’re walking around with barely any skin, your bones and heart open to everyone, now that your mother is dead?

  Bits of the night before, just hours ago really, seep back into your skin. The frizzy-haired woman telling you she was taking you somewhere. Cake cried, and she grabbed onto you, and wouldn’t let go, and finally the woman relented, and made Cake’s mom and dad sign a piece of paper, and she had a nurse photocopy their driver’s licenses, and said you could come here, and pack a suitcase.

  “Just one, though,” she told you sternly. “You can’t take a lot of things. We won’t know your permanent residence for quite some time. We’ve a lot to sort out.”

  You are to be, as the woman put it, “remanded to the custody of the State of Arizona by one p.m.”

  You slept in the car because the house was too empty and too full all at once. Her things were everywhere, bits of her in everything: the washcloth hanging from the shower faucet, the oatmeal soap in a brown, gritty puddle at the side of the sink. Everywhere you went, there she was, but she wasn’t, and it was too much, and so you went to the car, a tiny, tight space that seemed somehow better.

  Your friend Cake is still inside the house. She’d gone to bed with you, but you got up after you heard her start to snore. You were more tired than you’d ever been in your life, but you could not sleep in that bed, in that house, at that moment. You practically ran out to the car, avoiding the couch, where you think it must have happened.

  Above you, doves shuffle in the cottonwood tree.

  What was her name, the frizzy-haired woman?

  Cathy? Kara? Karen.

  Her name was Karen.

  She’s in charge of your life now. A total stranger. Your stomach coils in knots. You try to walk, to move, maybe even to run, but to where? To whom?

  You can’t move. Is this how it will be? Will even lifting a leg require great effort, and cause so much pain, all at once?

  The blue door to your house opens and your heart quickens; maybe it was a lie, a stupid bad dream, and your mother will appear, blinking in the harsh morning light, a hand shading her face.

  “Hey, you, what are you doing out here, talking to the doves? Come in and have breakfast, silly.”

  That’s a thing your mother would say.

  But it isn’t your mother who opens the blue door.

  It’s Cake. She looks like a sad panda, her black eyeliner smudged in half-moons under her eyes. Her black cotton skirt is wrinkled.

  She puts your pink suitcase at your feet. Her voice is soft.

  “I packed you some stuff,” she says.

  “I was in the car,” you answer. Your voice sounds muted. Girl-bug behind glass. Can Cake see you, trapped in there? Scratching your wings against the glass.

  “I know. I came out earlier when I couldn’t find you, but I didn’t want to wake you up. I cleaned up a little inside. I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

  Your friend looks so frightened. You think she is a little afraid of you now.

  You think this might be the case. That you will scare people now.

  Your friend says, “My mom’s coming back soon. She’s bringing coffee. Are you hungry? I think she’s bringing muffins, too.”

  Your friend bites her lip. “Maybe you should chan
ge clothes,” she tells you. “Before we go to that place.”

  You look down at the scrub shirt. Beneath it, your T-shirt is caked with vomit.

  In the driveway of the small house where you have lived since the day you were born, you pull the scrub shirt off. You pull off the barf shirt.

  Some of the dried-up vomit falls in flakes and chunks to the ground.

  Cake says, “Tiger, hey, no,” but you don’t stop, you don’t care that you’re standing in front of your house in your giant bra that holds your giant boobs, the ones that Cake says aren’t as big as you think they are, the ones your mom says will feed babies someday. She always adds, If you so choose, that is.

  You kick the shirts into the dirt, pull down the too-long hippie skirt and kick that into the dirt, too. Your underwear is loose; the elastic is broken. You meant to tell your mom you needed some new ones, but you were waiting until the last minute. She’d find a sale, or scour Ted’s Threads for a two-dollar package of unopened women’s underwear. If the size was too big, she’d just say, “We’ll wash them in hot, and shrink them!” If the size was too small, she was an expert at washing them in cold water, and then stretching them out by hand, and pinning them up on the line in the backyard to dry. You didn’t like that, though. It made the underwear stiff and flat, like an unseemly cotton cracker.

  “Granny panties,” Lupe Hidalgo liked to whisper in PE as you tried to change out of your clothes and into the red-and-white shorts as quickly as possible.

  Cake’s face is so scared. You push past her, into the small house, close your eyes as you pass by the couch, where you think it happened, open your eyes when you reach your bedroom. You know what you’re looking for and where it is. Your mother treated clothes she loved well. She never just threw them on the ground.

  It’s there, just like you thought, hanging in the closet, carefully wrapped in a zippered bag. She’d been so excited for you to wear it to the dance and you’d hated it and yelled at her. And then she died.

  Ivory-colored, pearl buttons down the front, high lace collar, and the goddamn sash. On the phone she was so happy about the dress. “You’ll look so lovely and authentic at the dance, not all glossed up and plastic-y.”