This Is How I Find Her

by Sara Polsky

  “If you don’t mind…I mean, my mother always said that if anything happened to her, I should come stay with you until she’s better,” I rambled into the phone, shifting from one foot to the other in my kitchen, wondering if I should have taken the nurse up on her offer to call someone for me instead. Wishing there were another someone I could have called. Wishing I hadn’t promised my mother I would do this. I knew I could manage in our apartment alone for a few days.

  Aunt Cynthia’s voice finally drifted back to me just when I was about to say Hello? Is anybody there?

  “Oh. Yes, you can stay here.” She sounded distracted, frazzled, her voice shaky at first. Then, suddenly brisker, she started firing questions at me about my mother. “Did they have her on lithium? Are they switching her to something else? What about vitamins and a sleeping pill?”

  “She was on lithium, yes,” I said, practically spitting out the “yes.” I glared at the wall, trying to put into my voice just how much I didn’t want to answer Aunt Cynthia’s questions. How little I thought she deserved answers after five years of not asking.

  She didn’t ask anything else.

  Now, in her front hallway, Aunt Cynthia tells me to come in, even though I clearly already did.

  She reaches out for one of my bags. I don’t move toward her, but I also don’t stop her when she takes the duffel from my hand. My whole body is braced for her to say…something.

  It’s your fault, Sophie.

  You weren’t careful enough.

  Didn’t you see the warning signs? I would have. I would have stopped her.

  “John?” she calls instead.

  I hear quick steps from another room, and then Cynthia’s husband joins us in the now-crowded space between the front door and the stairs. Uncle John has on a button-down shirt and a tie with tiny dots, the kinds of clothes he wears to his job as an architect. I realize I have no idea what time it is. Did Uncle John and Aunt Cynthia come home early because of me? Or did I spend so long at the hospital that it isn’t even early anymore?

  We all stand there for a minute, staring at the empty air between us. No one says anything about why I’m there. No one says anything at all.

  Then Uncle John clears his throat. He’s taller than the rest of us and wire thin, and I have to look up to meet his eyes.

  “Sophie,” Uncle John says. “Welcome.”

  He takes the duffel from Aunt Cynthia and reaches over to grab my suitcase with his other hand. When he punches the handle down, the plastic clicking sound echoes in the quiet. “Come, you’re in the guest room upstairs.”

  Before I follow him, I look back toward the front door, to where Leila was standing just a minute ago. But the door is already closed. The photo-perfect lawn is out of sight, and Leila is gone.

  Five

  Uncle John deposits my bags in the center of the guest room, which is a creamy beige-white everywhere except for the two dark dots the bags make on the carpet. We study them for a few seconds in silence, as if they have secrets to tell us.

  “There are leftovers from dinner in the kitchen if you’re hungry,” Uncle John says. “Just pasta and sauce.” He takes a step back toward the door. “We’ll leave you to get settled in. Your aunt cleared out the closet, so it’s all yours.”

  Then he leaves, and I sit down hard on the bed, the words your aunt bouncing around in my brain. Even though I know her as Aunt Cynthia, I haven’t actually thought of her as my aunt in a long time. And this isn’t my closet or my room.

  Aunt Cynthia’s house is quieter than our apartment, where we could always hear another family arguing down the hall or kids shouting and stomping their way up and down the stairs. Here, the only sound I notice is the soft ticking of the clock. I look at it and think of the clock by my mother’s bed, flashing at me, 3:34, 3:34, 3:34.

  This has always been my mother’s room.

  Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John called it the guest room then too, when we would sometimes stay here for two or three weeks at a time, but I was sure we were the only guests they ever had. Whenever we showed up—in the middle of the night or right after school or on Saturday morning before breakfast—the room was empty. Aunt Cynthia always took my mother’s arm and led her gently up the stairs, to the right, into this room. My mother curled up on the bed and mumbled something about how tired and scared she was, the words melting together as her head hit the pillow.

  “I know, Amy, I know,” Aunt Cynthia would say, tugging the covers from underneath my mother and pulling them over her instead.

  Aunt Cynthia smoothed down my mother’s hair the same way she patted Leila’s sometimes before bed, and it made me imagine my mother small, the way Leila and I were. When she left my mother there to sleep, she shut the door softly behind her and shooed Leila and me away from where we waited outside, telling us my mother needed her rest. Sometimes I caught Aunt Cynthia on the phone later, saying things about appointments and medications to someone on the other end. She looked just as tired as my mother did, her short hair frizzy and wild around her head instead of neat and pinned the way it was when she went to work.

  For however long my mother and I stayed with Aunt Cynthia, this small, pale guest room was one of the few places in the house that was off-limits to Leila and me. Aunt Cynthia kept us entertained elsewhere. She wouldn’t let us sponge paint her walls the way my mother sometimes did, but she taught us card games and gave us old toys she brought down from the attic. They used to belong to her and my mother, and somehow Aunt Cynthia had a new one every time we came to stay, a surprise for Leila and me. A distraction.

  When Aunt Cynthia wasn’t watching, Leila and I still sneaked upstairs and hovered outside the guest room door. We’d wiggle our fingers at each other and tug on our ears, daring each other in our own secret language to reach out and open the door. But it was mostly a game, both of us giggling whenever our fingertips brushed the doorknob. We never made it inside, never managed to get a peek at what my mother was up to.

  —

  And now I’m the one in here, door closed, blank walls all around me. It’s the first time I’ve ever had my own room.

  I get up from the bed and start moving around quietly, even though I don’t need to worry about waking up my mother the way I do at home. I don’t unpack. Instead, I pull open the drawers in the dresser and desk and run my fingers around the crinkly paper liners inside. They have a pattern of pastel flowers, cheery and at odds with the fog that always seemed to hang over this room when my mother stayed in it.

  I open the empty closet and peer at its back wall. I’m not sure what I’m looking for. Maybe a sign that my mother really was here, some folded note or scratched-in message or doodle she might have left me. Something telling me what she was doing in here, all those times. Something telling me why.

  But by the time I’m done searching, it’s completely dark outside, and I’ve found nothing at all.

  Six

  I wake up to a thumping noise on my left, the sound of someone going up or down the stairs. I don’t remember going to bed, but I’m lying in it now, looking up at the ceiling, the steady soft noise of the clock in my ear. I turn toward it.

  It’s 7:00, so the feet on the stairs could be anyone’s. Leila racing for breakfast before school; Aunt Cynthia or Uncle John rushing out the door to work. I decide it’s Leila, stomping up or down in her loud boots. She’s the one most likely to be running late. She’s never been a morning person.

  But I am. This is the latest I’ve slept in as long as I can remember. And now that I’m awake, something about the room still feels strange, like some essential ingredient is missing. Then I remember what: my mother.

  I don’t think anyone is going to come looking for me, so I let myself lie there, staring up at the ceiling. I conjure up the memory of my usual morning, holding it around me like a blanket.

  “Soph?” If this were our apar
tment, that would be my mother’s voice from across the room, a not-really-trying-to-keep-quiet whisper. She’s an early bird too, most of the time. “You awake?”

  “Of course,” I say. “I have school. It’s Wednesday.”

  My mother makes a pfft sound. “You have hours yet. Come on. To the kitchen!” She swings her legs out of bed and slowly stands up, pretending that her joints are aching. Then she dashes across the room and grabs my arm to pull me out of bed. “Up, up, up!”

  I can’t help the laugh that slips out as she tugs on my arm and I stumble out of bed. When I get to the kitchen, she’s already pulled ingredients out of the fridge: eggs for omelets, chocolate syrup for homemade waffles and ice cream. We spend the hours until I have to leave for school whipping up breakfast and eating it together.

  —

  But now, all I’m doing is staring up at Aunt Cynthia’s guest room ceiling, tracing the bumps and grains of the plaster under the white paint. Instead of seeing the elaborate breakfasts on the blank screen above me, other images start to play there instead. Our messy apartment. My mother’s painting of the running woman. My sneakers on the stairs, dodging the kids on their way down. The white mystery pills, spilled across the table by the bed. The glass of water, nearly empty.

  I sit up.

  I swing my legs out from under the covers, slowly, one after the other, like my mother when she’s planning to catch me off guard by dashing across the room. I’m still wearing the jeans and long-sleeved shirt I had on yesterday. The same outfit that came home from school and went down to the studio, then up to the apartment. That walked across the shredded catalog pages and into the bedroom. The outfit that found my mother lying across her bed, diagonal and still.

  I take it off. The rest of my clothes are still rolled up inside the wheely suitcase on the floor, shirts and pants spiraled to fit as much as possible into the small bag, toothbrush holder and hairbrush and balled pairs of socks stuffed into any leftover space. I grab a T-shirt at random and get dressed.

  —

  Downstairs, Aunt Cynthia’s eyebrows lift when she sees me. Her mouth falls slightly open. She stops halfway between the coffeemaker and the counter, coffeepot held aloft in one hand.

  “I didn’t think we’d see you today,” she says, starting to move again, toward the two tall aluminum mugs waiting next to the sink. I listen to the coffee stream into the cups, then I sniff in the smell. Hazelnut.

  There’s a lilt of surprise in Aunt Cynthia’s voice, and I know I was right; no one would have come upstairs to get me up.

  Then I register Aunt Cynthia’s words, I didn’t think we’d see you today. Something about those words, the light way she says them, penetrates the thick cloud over my brain. I realize that since I got here, she still hasn’t called me by my name or said a word about my mother. She hasn’t told me whether she thinks what happened is my fault.

  Just say it! I think at her, and I don’t even know what I’m expecting to hear. But Aunt Cynthia keeps moving through her morning routine, snapping lids onto the coffee cups and leaving the pot to soak in the sink. She points out the bread drawer, exactly where it was when I was eleven, and the cold cuts in the fridge for sandwiches. Those are the same too—turkey, ham, salami—and it’s strange to me that everything around me feels so familiar when the circumstances are so different. Aunt Cynthia tells me, still in that same light voice, that I can ride with Leila to school if I’m going.

  She can’t hear me yelling at her from inside my head.

  She doesn’t realize I’m actually waiting for a different voice, to tell me she’s making waffles with ice cream for breakfast, to send me off on my walk to school with a see you later and a wink, maybe to hint that there’s a note hidden somewhere in my backpack.

  And I just twist my fingers together and stand there, saying nothing.

  —

  Ten minutes later, I’m in the front seat of Leila’s car, my backpack braced between my legs and the dashboard. I haven’t eaten breakfast. One corner of my math book is digging into my right knee, but I don’t want to ask my cousin if I can move the seat back. I’d rather we both just pretend I’m not actually in the car.

  Leila jitters next to me. She jiggles her left leg, sips from her coffee, drums her fingers against the steering wheel, hums a few bars of music, over and over again.

  Usually, as I walk to school in the morning, Leila drives fast past me, windows open, elbow out, music blaring so loudly it seems to echo down the street long after she’s gone by. But this morning, with me in the car, she keeps the music off and inches carefully out of the driveway. Her car is silver and still looks new, nothing like the ancient, battered two-door my mother and I share, sitting unused in the parking lot at our apartment complex.

  As Leila backs into the street, turns left at the corner and then right at the next, the silence crackles around us like radio static.

  Then Leila’s voice breaks through. “How’s your mom?” she asks. She says your mom and not Aunt Amy, as if she doesn’t actually know her.

  “I don’t really know yet,” I say. I shift, trying to get comfortable, but the math book just pushes more sharply into my leg. “They told me she’s going to be fine. But she was getting her stomach pumped yesterday, so I couldn’t see her.” I say it as matter-of-factly as I can. Then I think of Aunt Cynthia, who might be on the way to some kind of record for how long she can go without mentioning my mother. I wonder how she would react if I said it to her, just like that. Your sister got her stomach pumped yesterday.

  “Oh,” is all Leila says. We slide to a stop at a light behind a long line of cars, and I wait for her to say more. Maybe a question about what the doctors will do for my mother next or about when she’ll be allowed to have visitors.

  But she doesn’t say anything. That one oh just hangs there. I open my mouth, but all that comes out is air. I can’t think of anything to say other than what’s your problem? so I hold myself back. Do Leila and Aunt Cynthia really not have a million questions about my mother, about what happened and how she’s doing? I feel the questions hovering in the air around me.

  After a minute, Leila reaches forward and flicks the radio on. The music balloons into the space and Leila starts humming again, shoving everything else—my mother, that lingering oh—out of the way.

  It feels like the music is pushing me out of the way too.

  I scrunch myself down, closer to the door, and try to remember a time when car rides with Leila were fun.

  —

  “How fast do you think we can go?”

  My mother’s question floated back to us from the front seat. She always had something like that, some kind of unanswerable question or game for us. She shouted over the radio, and her words blurred together as if she had hit the fast-forward button on her own voice.Howfastdoyouthinkwecango? Our car was headed down an empty stretch of road outside of town, windows down so the air could breeze across the seats. We always kept the car windows cracked open in the summer, because even the thin stream of August heat from outside was better than the way the air conditioner rattled and clanked. My mother had a country music station on—the car was the only place she listened to music that wasn’t classical—and we caught snatches of her singing along, hitting words like love and dog and cry. She was singing loudly, sometimes making up her own lyrics and always out of tune with the voice on the radio. Whenever she hit a note particularly wrong, Leila and I would snort and shush each other, trying not to laugh too loudly.

  We looked up when my mother turned to us. We’d stretched the skirts of our new sundresses across our knees to make flat surfaces for our dolls to play, and we were focused on their adventure, a trip to New York City. I tugged at my skirt, knowing Aunt Cynthia, who had given us the dresses on the last day of school in June, wouldn’t be happy about how we were stretching them out.

  “It’s a new school present,” Aunt Cyn
thia had said when she handed us the bags. “You’re officially middle schoolers now.” Coming up behind us, Uncle John had groaned and chimed in, “And about to become ten times more obnoxious because of it.” But he ruffled Leila’s hair and grinned at me, and we were pretty sure he was joking.

  In the front seat, my mother turned away from the road to face us. “What do you think?” she asked again. Her long hair fluttered in the breeze from the windows, as if an invisible hand was lifting up strands and laying them back down against her shoulders. “How fast?”

  I giggled. Leila set down the doll she was holding on the seat between us and leaned forward, focusing totally on my mother. We liked the summers because my mother watched us, and she was always okay with breaking the rules. We liked it when she talked fast but we could understand her anyway, as if her words were a code meant just for us.

  My mother was still looking at us and us at her, the road whizzing by outside the windows without any of us watching it. Somehow, my mother still kept steering the wheel through the road’s twists and turns. As if the car were telling her which way to go. Or she’d driven it this way before.

  “Well, are you ready?” she asked. We nodded solemnly, our dolls forgotten, completely replaced by our game with my mother. She turned back to the road. “Let’s see how fast.”

  —

  A noise that sounds like grr-hem snaps my attention back to where I am now, aware of the car, the radio tuned to Leila’s favorite station, that sharp corner of my math book.

  I twist uncomfortably in my seat, wishing I could go back to that moment, full of anticipation for what my mother would do next.

  Leila is looking at me, and I realize the sound must have been her clearing her throat. Did she say something? I wait a second to see if she’ll repeat it.