Before You Break

by Kyla Stone

  Mom’s back was to me. Her narrow shoulders shook. I could see the knobs of her spine through her flimsy nightgown. “Work is always more important than me,” she said, her voice trembling. “Is that how it is now, Jacob?”

  “Eve, I love you. You know that. This isn’t the best time. I’ve got a black eye to take care of.” I knew that meant a broken headlight. “Let’s talk tonight.”

  “When did you stop loving me?”

  Dad let out a long, slow sigh. “I can’t just leave. I’m half a day from delivery. Then I can head back.”

  Mom clutched the phone with whitened fingers. “I need you here.”

  “I can’t lose another job,” he said in a tired, defeated voice. “You know that.”

  A single tear tracked down my mother’s face. “You don’t love me. You never loved me. Just admit it. Tell the truth for once in your pathetic life.”

  There was a long hiss of silence. Finally, Dad said, “I’ll be home soon.

  Please, just hold on.”

  But he wasn’t home soon. Not soon enough. Not until it was too late.

  At the time, she hadn’t seemed any worse than usual. I was used to her wildly vacillating fluctuations in mood. I thought I was.

  That night, I took her picture in the mirror. The next day, she retreated to her bedroom and refused to come out. That was the last conversation we ever had. It was the last time I saw her alive.

  My focus returns to the image in front of me. Slowly, slowly I blend the grays, sharpen the lines, blacken the blacks and whiten the whites, patiently bringing out clarity and purity.

  Still, her eyes are obscured, shielding whatever truth is there, must be there. Her eyes had to reveal something in those last desperate moments before she took her own life. Didn’t they?

  She must have known. She was already plotting it out, her escape from her family. So where was the sign? What had I missed?

  There has to be something. I don’t know what it is, what form it took, or how I’m supposed to recognize it. I don’t even know what I want to see. Fear? Regret? Love for her daughters, her husband? Or even just an awareness, the truth of what was about to happen.

  My stomach twists as I start the final print with the last piece of photo paper. This one will reveal everything. I’m so close. Anticipation and dread thrum through my veins as I expose the photo paper in the enlarger.

  The bathroom door crashes open.

  The Velcro tears, and the felt curtain ripples to the floor. Light explodes against my eyes.

  16

  Lena

  “Hey!” I throw my arm across my face. The glare of daylight strikes my retinas like blazing arrows.

  “Oh,” Lux says. “I didn’t realize you were in here.”

  I step back, blinking rapidly. The print is ruined. Anger balloons inside me so hot and fast, I can barely speak. “You knew! You always do this—”

  “I said I didn’t know!” Lux crosses her arms over her chest. “Did I mess you up?”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, you did.” I stare at her, fighting the anger down.

  She’s even more beautiful than when I last saw her over two years ago. And older. Her features are delicate, a fine spray of freckles across her porcelain skin, a thin silver ring in her nose. Her red hair falls in layers almost to her waist, thick bangs cut just above her green, kohl-rimmed eyes.

  She’s wearing a loose pine-green sweater over faded jeggings, a chunky-knit fuchsia scarf draped around her neck. She’s several inches shorter than I am, and heavier, her body full and sensuous. She’s one of those girls aware of every motion, of every eye following the curve and sway of her body. She’s confident and self-possessed in a way I never was and will never be.

  “Sorry. Like I said, I didn’t know you’d set up the darkroom again.”

  I turn away, banging my trays together. I dump them in the bathtub and run the water. I rinse the trays and tongs, feeling my sister’s presence like a bur in my back.

  “What are these?”

  “Pictures. Nothing.”

  “They’re all of Mom.”

  “Yep.”

  “I have to use the bathroom.”

  “Go upstairs.”

  “I don’t use that bathroom.”

  “Not my problem.”

  There’s a protracted silence. “I seriously didn’t know you were in here.”

  “Sure you didn’t.” I bend over the tub, scrubbing the developer tray vigorously.

  Lux doesn’t respond. After a moment, I glance up. She’s gone. A headache gathers like storm clouds behind my skull. I stack the trays next to the enlarger, wipe my hands on my sweatpants. I need more paper.

  I glance at my phone on the counter. It’s almost three. Time for more pills and a bathroom trip, then maybe I can head to the closest photography store, which is two towns over and a forty-minute drive.

  I take several deep breaths. I will stay in control. I just need more paper, then I can keep trying.

  I pick up the Cass County Gazette from the front steps on the way upstairs. For the last several days, I’ve been reading it to Dad. He still wants me to read him the Bible. But I can’t do that. Not now, when I’ve lost so much.

  Where was God when my mother killed herself? Where was God through the dark and lonely shadows of my childhood?

  I pause in the hallway outside Lux’s door. “I’m going to the store. Will it be too much trouble to stay here until I get back?” Silence. I slap my palm against the door.

  “Whatever,” Lux mumbles.

  “Lux—!” I smack the door again, my hand stinging. “Don’t you dare leave. You hear me?”

  She doesn’t bother to answer.

  “Lena,” Dad calls from his bedroom.

  My jaw aches from clenching so hard. I go in his room, twisting the newspaper in my hands. “What do you need?”

  “It’s that time again,” he says, embarrassment flashing in his eyes. “Time to pay the water bill.”

  It’s his old trucker slang for using the bathroom. He slings his arm around my shoulder and I help lift his bulk. He can mostly make it on his own, he just needs me to steady him.

  When we’re done, he sits up in bed and I sink into the frayed, navy blue La-Z-Boy I hauled in from the living room a few days ago, the one I puked on the day I turned six and stuffed my face with too much cake.

  The fan is switched off. The air is stale, thick with the stench of sickness.

  “Why are you fighting with Lux?”

  “She always starts it.”

  “She’s your sister,” Dad says, coughing. It’s a ragged, phlegmy sound.

  I look down at the newspaper in my lap without really seeing it. “Then maybe she should act like it.”

  “She’s going through a rough time.”

  “Seriously? And you aren’t? We aren’t?”

  A sharp breath whistles through his teeth. “Please, Gingersnap. Can’t you forgive?”

  The muscles in my jaw bulge and contract. The headache hits full force, striking the tender space just behind my eyes. All the trouble she’s caused, the messes she’s made. “Has she even come in to see you?”

  “She deals with life in her own way. Like her mother.”

  “That’s bullsh—”

  “She feels bad.”

  I grip the front page of the newspaper and rip the paper into tiny squares. The shredded pieces slide off the newspaper and flutter to the floor. “Leaving you like that—you could’ve died!”

  “She’s sorry.”

  “How do you know?”

  Dad touches my arm. “The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” He’s quoting one of his favorite photographers, Robert Frank.

  “What does that even mean, Dad?”

  “Don’t judge her too quickly. I’ve already forgiven her. Can’t you do the same?”

  “What am I even supposedly forgiving her for? You won’t tell me what that happened.”

  He sighs, a long shudder of breath t
hat trembles his whole body. I know he wants to escape me, to just walk away or leave the way he used to, whenever Lux or I asked any questions, whenever we dared dip below the surface of things, question the why of what happened to us, the implosion of our family.

  Even when Mom was still alive, he would flee during the bad times, take every job he could find. He ignored the things he didn’t want to see. But now he can’t. He’s trapped in this bed. He must hate it.

  “I want to talk about Mom.”

  “Comeback?” he says, more of his trucker slang.

  “I said I want to talk about Mom.”

  He closes his eyes, gray smudges staining his skin. “The past is in the past, Lena. Let it rest.”

  “I found some old pictures. I found one from two days before she— before her suicide.”

  “Your mother passed. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  “Passed? She passed? Is that what you call slicing her wrists open to the bone?”

  Dad flinches. “Lena, please.”

  I rub my temples, my jaw tightening. I can’t release this rage building up inside me. I have to stay in control. “I remember other times. I remember her being gone, visiting her in the hospital. All the doctor and psychiatrist appointments.”

  “We don’t need to dwell on the negative things.”

  “I dream about her. She tried before, didn’t she? More than once.”

  “There’s no reason to discuss this. Not now.”

  “Yes. There is.” We never talked about it. Not after, and not before. My father didn’t tell us there was something wrong, that a vast black pit had opened in the center of our living room. That we were all balanced precariously at the very lip of it. That only one misstep by any of us and we would all tumble in. He never said, “Be careful.” He never said, “Watch your step.”

  “Your mother was sad. Is that what you need to hear?”

  “She was more than sad, Dad. You know that.” What we don’t talk about, what we’ve never talked about: the times her anguish filled her up to overflowing, until her heart couldn’t contain it all and it turned, transforming into something harsh and ugly. The three tiny half-moon scars on my upper arm, remnants of her fury, her grip so hard her nails pierced my skin.

  “Yes,” he says so softly I almost don’t hear him. There’s something in his voice, a sharpness like a razor blade.

  “She hurt herself. Sometimes she hurt us.”

  “Why must you talk about this? Please, just stop.”

  “Because I need to know, Dad. It’s my history, too. I need to know why. There are things only you can tell me.” The words I don’t say hang heavy over us anyway: soon, it’ll be too late. “The doctors—did they tell you what was wrong with her?”

  “Your mother was just who she was, no more, no less. Labels never helped anything.”

  “They gave her medication,” I say, remembering. “Sometimes she didn’t take it.”

  “She tried her best. Can’t we just leave it at that?”

  I think of that last photo of her, of the mysteries captured in her dark, impenetrable eyes. I’ve tried it his way, just ignoring everything, pretending it never happened. It doesn’t work. I’m still as burdened with grief and shadows as the day the ambulance and the EMTs came to our front door. “No. I can’t.”

  He stares up at the ceiling, refusing to meet my gaze. “I’m the one who failed her. She tried her best. If you want anyone to blame, blame me.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Guilt and blame destroy everything they touch, Lena. I know that better than anyone. I want something different for you. Just remember the good times. You had a roof over your head, didn’t you? Food and clothes. Isn’t that enough? Forget the rest.”

  In the months after Mom’s death, after that night of the funeral, I never saw him cry. His eyes were always bloodshot and watery, red-rimmed and empty. He took on this stooped, hunch-shouldered look, like he was perpetually slogging against a high, harsh wind. Like he wasn’t equipped, wasn’t built for a life steeped in so much responsibility, so much raw, devastating emotion.

  The headache throbs against my skull. “I can’t do that.”

  “Please, I need to rest.” His voice is weak, defeated. He turns his face to the wall.

  I stand up, the remains of the newspaper cascading to the carpet. Everything I don’t know but should is swirling inside me. It feels like trying to grab a fish underwater, sleek and frantic, always slipping just out of reach.

  I may never find the answers I’m searching for. Not from him.

  I grab my coat from the closet and the car keys from the kitchen counter. I stumble down the hall and out the front door.

  It’s in the photo supply store, in the middle of aisle three, my hands reaching out to lift the white box of resin fiber paper off the top shelf, the harsh glare of the overhead florescent lights stinging my eyes.

  I recall one of Dad’s favorite sayings. He always quoted the photographer Diana Arbus, saying, “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”

  The truth comes, sudden and sharp. The print will never be perfect. None of them are. It’s not in the pictures, not in my memories, not in my dreams.

  I won’t find what I’ve been chasing after, what I’ve both yearned for and buried deep within myself, unwilling to face it, to search it out and name it—it’s simply not there.

  I can wipe out every speck, every iota of gray. In the final purity of flawless black and pure, unadulterated white, my mother’s eyes will be what they have always been to me.

  Empty.

  17

  Lux

  I try not to listen to their voices, my father’s choked and rasping, Lena’s sharp and shrill. I want to hook my earbuds in my ears and blast everything into oblivion with roaring, head-splitting sound. But I can’t.

  I sit frozen on my bed, smoke from the cigarette clutched in my fingers wafting out the open window. It’s the first week of February, and the sharp air pebbles my bare arms with goose bumps. I hear every word.

  After awhile, my sister leaves, her feet stomping down the hall, out the door. I sit perfectly still. The house descends into silence heavy as a tomb.

  I snuff the cigarette against the window ledge, drop it into the snow-clumped bushes below. The house is too quiet. I should be in school, but I just can’t seem to make myself go.

  Inertia clamps down on me, cementing my limbs, pressing against my chest like an ice block. I could die here, this very moment, and no one would even know.

  I have to escape. I have to get out of here. Screw what Lena said. It’s not like Dad’s going to die today. He’s lucid, talking and eating just fine.

  I force my sluggish body to move. The origami elephant I’ve been working on all afternoon slips off my lap and falls to the floor. I was wet-folding it, but Lena’s argument with Dad distracted me.

  Now the paper’s hardened, the elephant only half-formed. I toss it in the trash, then tug on my jean jacket and wind a scarf around my neck.

  Phoenix’s little gray paws slip out from beneath my dresser and bat at my toes. She spent twenty-four hours under there my first day back home. Now, I can get her out sometimes, if she has something worthy to attack. She tackles my feet, spitting and growling, as I pull on my striped knee socks and leather boots.

  “Hey, girl. Here, girl.” I lean down slowly, clucking my tongue and holding out my finger. She barely sniffs at me before skittering back beneath the dresser.

  I kneel and try to reach beneath it. She hisses at me. She’s still feral, refusing to be tamed.

  I pause at Dad’s door. I listen to the slow, unsteady rhythm of his breathing, the uneven cadence of his snores. I need to see him. I have to. I know that. I push the door open, catch a glimpse of his dark slumbering form.

  I freeze. Nothing moves. The room is the same as it has always been: bed, dresser, closet, the new full-length mirror leaning against the wall. I sti
ll think of it as new, even after all these years.

  Memories of Mom sweep over me, a savage ache clenching my chest. I must have been six or seven the day we broke the mirror.

  I was chasing Lena around the house, playing my favorite spirit animals game. Lena careened into the doorway of our parents’ bedroom, lost her footing in her socks on the wood floor, and crashed into the full-length mirror.

  I skidded in right after her, barely missing the worst of the shattered pieces scattered across the floor. Lena crouched in the center of it, completely still, her face frozen in shock and fear. Several red spots bloomed on her hands and feet.

  We thought Mom would be furious, but she wasn’t. She rushed in, stepped right over the jagged shards, and scooped Lena into her arms.

  “What happened? Are you okay? Why are you shaking?” “Aren’t you mad at me?” Lena whispered, aghast.

  “Why in heaven’s name would I be mad at you?”

  Mom set her on the closed toilet lid and slowly peeled off her socks. “Oh, baby,” she said, making a pained sound in her throat. She stroked Lena’s feet as she pressed antiseptic cotton balls against her cuts and checked for slivers of mirror inside her skin.

  I watched them, a sharp jealousy pricking me. After Mom bandaged Lena up, she went back to the bedroom to survey the damage.

  “Are we gonna throw the mirror in the trash?” I asked.

  She chewed on her lower lip, her hands on her hips. “Breaking a mirror is seven years of bad luck. I’m afraid the entire course of your future has just been irrevocably altered.” Lena’s eyes widened.

  “But I won’t let that happen. Not to my Lena. There’s one thing we can do to avert this disaster. We have to bury the mirror beneath the moon. You know what this means?” We both stared at her.

  “Midnight picnic!”

  “What about school?” Lena asked, but her voice sparked with anticipation. She wanted to go as much as I did.

  “Bah!” Mom scoffed. “I can teach you plenty.”

  While Mom gingerly picked up the shards of broken mirror and stuffed them into a couple of canvas shopping bags, Lena and I packed the picnic basket with peanut butter and honey sandwiches, fruit snacks, apples, and string cheese.