by Sara Polsky
Leila stops in the middle of the room, looking around at the cream-colored carpet and walls as if she’s forgotten what she came in here to do. She stands there for a minute, leaning back on the heels of her boots, and then sits down in the desk chair. She’s turned sideways to face me, but she keeps her eyes on the carpet.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she starts.
I want to tell her no. I’m not ready to talk. But I owe her for the way she got me out of English earlier, faking that hall pass from the band director, and I decide it would be unfair for me to stop her. So I shrug and sit there, waiting for whatever she has to say.
“That was awful, what those guys did for their project,” Leila says. “I can’t believe…” she trails off, shaking her head. She sounds too tired to yell or stomp around anymore.
Then she says, as if she’s continuing a conversation we were already having, “It’s not that I thought your mother was crazy.”
And after a second of confusion I realize James must have told her what I said yesterday, about why I thought the three of us stopped hanging out in sixth grade.
“What happened was that my mother told me I wasn’t allowed to be around Aunt Amy anymore, and that it would probably be easier if I found some new friends and stopped spending so much time with you,” Leila says.
“She did?”
I wonder if it has anything to do with what she said yesterday, about not putting her life on hold anymore. I open my mouth to say something else—I have no idea what—but Leila, in charge as usual, holds up her hands to stop me from interrupting.
“It was my fault, though,” she says. “That my mom decided we weren’t allowed to hang out anymore, I mean.”
Was this what I overheard my mother and Aunt Cynthia talking about?
My cousin’s voice gets softer. “I told my mom about what happened, that day in the car when your mother took us out for a drive and asked us how fast we thought your car could go. You remember, right?”
“I think I do,” I whisper. But I’m not sure anymore.
—
In the front seat, my mother turned away from the road to face us. “What do you think?” she asked. Her long hair fluttered in the breeze from the windows, as if an invisible hand were lifting up strands and laying them back down against her shoulders. “How fast?”
Leila and I, playing our New York City game with our dolls across the backseat, looked at each other. I laughed. We loved it when my mother acted this way, like one of us, wanting to make mischief and break rules.
My mother was still looking at us, waiting for us to answer, and the road whizzed by outside the car’s windows without any of us watching it. But my mother managed to keep steering the car through the twists and turns, as if she’d driven it this way before.
“Well, are you ready?” she asked. Her voice was hushed and secretive. “Let’s see how fast.”
We were heading up a high hill, the old, cranky car grumbling underneath us, and my mother put her foot to the gas pedal, pushing it down as far as it would go. At the same time, she unbuckled her seat belt, then reached over and hit the button to open the sunroof. The sun blazed in, making the car even hotter than it already was. We were the only people on the road for as far as we could see.
“Ready?” my mother asked again, as we got close to the top of the hill. I giggled, not sure what we were supposed to be ready for but eager to find out.
“Ready,” we said, Leila chiming in a second behind me.
Then we were at the hill’s highest point, and my mother abruptly lifted her foot off the gas and shot up out of her seat. She twisted her body, threw her arms out to either side, and stuck her head out the sunroof. From where we sat in the backseat, we could hear her shout, a wahoo that tore out of her and flew all the way up the hill behind us.
The car kept going down.
Leila and I both had our hands to our stomachs, which felt like they might fly out of our bodies if we let go. But my mother sounded thrilled, and we wanted to do whatever she was doing. Our windows were already open, and at the same moment, without planning it out loud, we stuck our heads out to either side and shouted too. We screamed into the wind, our voices searching for hers.
—
“It was so scary, Soph,” Leila says, interrupting my memory.
Scary? I’m so confused by the word I barely notice that Leila’s called me by my old nickname.
“But it was a game,” I say softly. “Like always.”
“No, Soph,” Leila shakes her head. “You only thought it was a game because she was always doing stuff like that.”
Leila’s practically whispering now, but she looks up from the carpet and over at me.
“You remember how, when we got to the bottom of the hill, the car kept speeding along?” Leila asks. I nod. This I remember for sure.
“Aunt Amy took her head out of the sunroof and sat down again and managed to stop the car just before we went through a red light. But I was so afraid it would never stop.”
I feel like someone has glued me here, my legs to the bed and my back to the wall, like I’m part of a sculpture. Or maybe like I’m finally feeling the fear Leila felt that day, the whole time I thought we were playing.
Leila keeps going, telling me more of the story I thought I knew.
“When we got back to your place, we went down to Aunt Amy’s studio and she set up an easel and some watercolors for us to play with while she worked. And then she said she was going upstairs to the bathroom and we should behave ourselves while she was gone.”
Leila stops, drops her eyes back to the floor.
“I remember,” I tell her. Now I’m whispering too. I’m not sure where Leila’s story is going, but I don’t want to interrupt her until she gets there.
“It seemed like she’d been gone for a while and I really had to pee, so I took the spare key for your apartment from the drawer and told you I was going upstairs. You stayed there painting.”
I’m still stuck in place on the bed, and I stare down and press my palms against my thighs. What I really want now is to hold them out toward Leila, telling her to stop. But I know I need to hear the rest.
I remember standing in front of the easel after Leila left the room, swirling blue and yellow and red together with my paintbrush, humming along to my mother’s music, not keeping track of how long anyone had been gone.
“When I went into your apartment, I didn’t see your mom anywhere,” Leila says. “I called out for her and she didn’t answer. When I got to the bathroom, the door was closed, and I knocked on it and called out again. She didn’t say anything, but I heard a noise from inside, like something falling on the floor.”
Leila doesn’t have to tell me how scared and nervous and confused she was, standing in the hall outside the bathroom, leaning forward to put one ear against the door. I know because I felt the same way less than two weeks ago, the day I came home from school and hurried through my apartment, calling for my mother, because something about her unfinished painting and unlocked studio seemed off.
My mother didn’t answer then either.
“I knew I shouldn’t go into the bathroom if someone was in there, but something about it felt strange, so I decided to open the door if I could.” Leila’s voice is shaking now, and it sounds like she has to force out each word.
“The door was unlocked, and when I looked inside, Aunt Amy was standing in front of the sink. She was holding a glass of water, and there was a prescription bottle open next to her. There were a few pills on the floor, like maybe the bottle was what had fallen down and made the noise I heard.
“She was just swallowing a pill when I opened the door, and she was holding more in her hand—too many for her to just be taking a painkiller. But the door creaked when it opened, and she looked up. She saw me and jumped and dumped out the water and stuck the pill bot
tle in the cabinet really quickly, before I could see what it was.”
My stomach feels like it’s trying to climb up my throat and out through my mouth.
My first coherent thought after Leila stops talking and my stomach stops rolling is this: my cousin has actually seen a part of my mother that I never have.
Leila caught my mother in the act of swallowing the pills, but I’ve only ever seen what comes after that. The white capsules spilled across the night table, the half an inch of water left at the bottom of the glass, the unmoving woman on the bed. Her still hand and dangling feet; the slight breeze of air from her mouth, tickling my face. The voice on the other end of 9-1-1.
Leila takes a deep, raggedy breath, and I look up and meet her eyes.
“I told my mom about the car and about what I saw afterward, with the pills in the bathroom,” she whispers. “That’s why she said I couldn’t be around Aunt Amy. She was afraid I would get hurt somehow.”
So she didn’t come to the phone when I called, stopped saving me a seat at lunch, and told James I wouldn’t be over anymore after school. On the other side of town, in our tiny apartment, my mother told me only that she needed help remembering to take her medication, and I promised to remind her. She never told me why she wanted help in the first place.
There are so many emotions swirling through my head that if I opened my mouth, I bet all that would come out would be a long, incomprehensible beep, or a burst of static, like a piece of electronic equipment malfunctioning. I can’t even name all the things I’m feeling. I just know everything that happened in the last five years is rearranging itself in my brain all at once.
“I had no idea,” I finally tell Leila, the same thing James said to me two days ago.
But my voice is angry, not surprised.
Why did no one tell me any of this sometime in the last five years? Why have I, the person who takes care of my mother every day, been the one in the dark? Why did Aunt Cynthia get Leila out, but not me?
Leila interrupts me, speaking much more softly than usual. “I know,” she says, in a way that makes me think she really does know how angry and confused I am.
And then she adds something the Leila I used to know, my old best friend, would have said.
“I sort of wish I hadn’t told my mom anything,” she says, “because it just meant that I left you there to take care of her by yourself, and I didn’t even have a chance to explain it to you. That doesn’t seem like it was right either. I’m sorry, Sophie.”
For a few minutes we sit there quietly, my mother and Aunt Cynthia and the memory of that afternoon with the car and the pills filling the room around us. I breathe in and out, trying to clear my head.
“Me too,” I finally tell her, so softly I might only be mouthing the words. “I’m sorry too.” Sorry for not speaking up. Sorry for all the things I thought about Leila when, really, I had no idea what was going on in her head.
We’re silent some more, until I start to feel like I can move again, like the memories and ghosts squeezing into the room with us have stopped crowding me. Then Leila clears her throat, and I’m afraid there’s something worse I haven’t heard yet.
“So I think James likes you,” is what she actually says.
I stare at her for a minute, and then we both start to laugh. I’m amazed that we can talk about these two things, my mother and James, in the same conversation. That it doesn’t have to be one or the other—happy or sad, my mother or my life. Maybe it can be like the axis of the graph, right in the middle, everything at once.
—
When I’m by myself again in the guest room, I stare up at the ceiling, waiting for it to turn into a projector screen again. This time I tell it what I want to watch.
I divide the screen into quadrants, like a scene in a sitcom where everyone on the show is doing something in a different room. In one corner is my mother, painting in her studio. Next to her there’s me, shaping ground beef into patties in the kitchen, my homework on the table behind me to finish later. In the third box, under mine, is Leila, standing in front of a music stand and scatting into a microphone, then stopping and starting over from the beginning of the song. And in the last box is Aunt Cynthia in her kitchen, still in her work clothes, starting to chop vegetables for dinner.
If this were a real sitcom, one of us would pick up the phone and call the next person, who would call the third, who would call the fourth, and somehow it would turn back into one picture, all of us in the frame together.
But that doesn’t happen on the Cynthia-Amy-Sophie-Leila show. None of us picks up the phone. Instead, we stay in our quadrants alone, repeating our routines, on and on and on.
Cut, I tell the show on my ceiling.
I lie there, listening to Leila sing along to a jazz CD through the wall, and I realize I’m not upset with my cousin anymore. I understand why she told Aunt Cynthia what my mother did in the car that day and about finding my mother in the bathroom swallowing those pills. I understand why Aunt Cynthia told Leila it wasn’t safe for her to be around my mother after that, even though the voice in the back of my head is still asking what about me?
But I don’t want it to be like that anymore. I don’t want each of us to be cut off in our own boxes, unable to pick up the phone.
I fling the covers off and go over to the desk, where the stack of books I need to read and homework assignments I have to do gets taller every afternoon. But instead of getting to work, I stare out the window, into the backyard where I buried the veggies from my pizza at my sixth birthday party. I think about everyone who was there that day: Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John, my mother and me, Leila and James and our other classmates and their parents. I think of James yesterday, telling me to let him know if there was anything he could do to help. I think of Natalie, including me in her afternoon with Zach even though we’d just met.
I don’t even know how to put what I’m hoping for into words, or even into equations. But I keep those images at the front of my mind—all the people at our birthday party; James offering his help; Natalie and Zach telling us stories at the abandoned house—look out the window, and wish.
Twenty-two
When James rings the bell on his way home from work, Leila and I both go downstairs. Leila gets there first, and I’m still standing on the fourth step when she unlocks the front door and pulls it open.
James walks in carrying the now-familiar red vinyl pizza case across his left arm and shrugs at our expressions.
“I was hungry, and I figured I probably wasn’t the only one,” he says.
He sets the case down to take off his jacket, and as I take the last few steps down into the hall, I say, “I was starting to think you had that case surgically attached to your arm.”
I make the joke quickly and just as quickly wish I hadn’t.
But we all laugh, even though it isn’t very funny. And then, just as suddenly, we stop, looking at each other in surprise.
“That hasn’t happened in a while,” Leila says. There’s a sarcastic edge to her voice, but as we look at each other, slow smiles spread over all of our faces.
My smile feels familiar but not. It feels like looking at the painting of Leila and me on her wall; like remembering burying the vegetables at my birthday party. It feels like listening to someone who knows me well tell me a story about myself.
—
We follow Leila back upstairs to her room because she says she has an idea for our English project.
But when James starts to pass around plates with pizza and Leila pulls out her copy of the poetry anthology, it feels too much like last week when I yelled and stormed out.
So when James hands me my food, I say, “I promise I won’t throw anything this time,” and we all relax a little bit. We sit cross-legged on the floor as if we’re back in kindergarten, in a triangle with Leila at the top. We listen to the soft s
ound of her flipping through the book looking for the right page. I feel drowsy all of a sudden, like all of my energy has evaporated and I could fall asleep right there, sitting up on her floor.
“Here,” Leila’s voice wakes me up. “I thought maybe we could do this one. It’s by someone named Jalaluddin Rumi.” She sounds more hesitant than usual, stumbling over the name, and instead of reading aloud herself, she hands the open book to me.
I read the poem she picked slowly to myself, once and then again. Then I clear my throat and read the first few lines out loud:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
My voice gets croaky on the sixth line and I stop, trailing off at the end and ignoring the exclamation point. I stare down at the page for a moment until the text un-blurs. When I look up, James and Leila are watching me, as if I’m now the one at the far point of the triangle. I pass the book along to James, who reads the rest of the poem to himself, murmuring the words.
He looks up when he’s done.
“I agree, we should do that one,” he says. “Soph?”
I meet Leila’s eyes and nod, and in that moment I finally feel like we’re on the same wavelength again.
The lines I’ve just read out loud—some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor—echo around my mind, and I think of the parade of unexpected visitors I’ve had in my life since moving here.
I close my eyes, and an image falls into my head. It feels like the perfect illustration for our poem.
I interrupt James and Leila.
“I know how we should do it,” I say. I sound like Leila at her most bossy, but they don’t challenge me when I tell them my idea.
As James packs up to leave, Leila turns her music back on and starts softly singing along. And even though I’m nervous about what I’ll have to do next, I head off to bed feeling lighter than I did before.
