Relative Strangers

by Paula Garner

  When I’d eaten all the bites I could stomach, I put it away and went to my room, where I immediately stopped short. Propped against the headboard was a pillow covered in buttons. Curious, I went over and picked it up. The buttons — they were from my tin. Mom had repurposed an old throw pillow from the living room as a display for them. Dozens of them, all shapes and sizes, were sewn onto the pillow front. She’d done an amazing job — they were more artfully chosen and arranged than I ever could have managed. Her eye for color and composition was not limited to the canvas. I traced my fingers over the buttons. I couldn’t believe it — how long had that taken her?

  But beyond the time and effort that went into this, what made my eyes fill was the message inherent in it: she was acknowledging something that was important to me.

  I messaged her again. Such thoughtful things waiting for me here. The pillow is amazing — I love it. I added, Ready to talk when you are.

  I caught up on my e-mail, which included one from Eli, subject line: “Best recent obituaries.” This was a favorite pastime of his, finding unusual or humorous obituaries, and I always played along because it was one of the few things he shared with me. So I read them and texted him, SPLENDID. Loved the line about Little Debbie Snacks stock prices falling sharply following Ida’s death.

  He wrote back AN ORDER FOR SIXTEEN MOCHA FRAPPES! TWEENS! LOUD STRAIGHT TWEENS! SHOOT ME NOW.

  I wrote, “Shoot me now” is not a thing you want to hear from your friend who is obsessed with obituaries fyi.

  Silence. He was probably frantic with blender action.

  That left schoolwork. With a resigned sigh, I gathered up my materials and dove in.

  A couple hours later, just as I finished my overdue English paper, my phone dinged. I picked it up, thinking it would finally be my mom, but it was Luke.

  Home safe. Everything okay?

  It warmed me to hear from him, and to know he was worried about me. I wrote, Yes. Mom isn’t here, so no big scene or anything. Also, she baked a cake and sewed my antique buttons onto a decorative pillow??

  Him: Aw, that’s nice! Guilt? An attempt to disarm?

  Me: Ha, no idea.

  Him: Let me know what happens. Going to make coffee and get started on work. Possible all-nighter ahead.

  I smiled. Me too.

  He wrote, Had a great weekend with you.

  It felt like the sun breaking through the clouds. I wrote, Same. I had an incredible weekend.

  He sent me a smiley face and wished me happy studying.

  So I tried to study. I imagined us shoulder to shoulder, even if virtually, pushing through the work together. I started with biology — my makeup test was a mere twelve hours away. But my powers of concentration were nearly nonexistent. All I wanted to think about was the weekend, the Margolises . . . Luke.

  By 9:00 I was yawning. I decided to follow Luke’s lead and make a pot of coffee. When I opened the cabinet, I discovered a small bag of fresh-ground French roast from Laroche’s next to the giant plastic vat of Folgers. I knew my mom was upset, but I couldn’t imagine her spending so much time and thought on me, on things that I’d like. I opened the bag and inhaled, closing my eyes. Heaven.

  Where was she? Why didn’t she answer? Could she have gone to the movies? Was she driving? All this time? I pushed aside thoughts of her going out and wrecking herself. But the longer I didn’t hear from her, the more I worried. I’d ignored all her pleas, left her to her own devices. I hoped she was okay.

  I poured a mug of coffee and returned to biology. ATP, ADP, AMP . . . I couldn’t keep the acronyms straight. I lay down for a minute, exhausted. After a while, I texted my mom again: You okay? Answer, pls.

  I thought of all the hours I’d left my mom alone with her thoughts, her worries — all the suffering I’d caused her. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to forgive her for the things she’d done. So I didn’t entirely understand how I could also feel worried for her, and guilty, and moved that she’d made an effort in my absence, despite my refusal to cooperate or communicate. She had hurt me, but I was hurting her, too.

  I picked up my phone again and messaged: I missed you.

  I fell asleep and woke up around five. My mom had left a message in the wee hours: Sorry, phone died. Stayed with a friend — didn’t expect you to come home. I’ll be home tonight after work. Will you?

  A friend? What friend? My mom rarely went out, let alone stayed out the whole night. I sent a quick yes. I had only two and a half hours to get my affairs in order for school and maybe squeeze in a shower. I’d really screwed myself with that untimely nap, but my exhaustion was bigger than I was.

  I did pause, though, to answer a message from Luke. He’d gone to bed around two and hoped my studying was going well. I confessed I’d passed out and was up early.

  I spent the day trying to be the student I used to be. I passed my biology test with a shameful C+. Caught up with Gab at lunch and Leila by text when we could sneak them in. After school I zipped straight home and hit the books again — no Laroche’s, no phone calls, no messaging with Luke. When my mom texted that she’d be home by six, I took a break from studying and surveyed the pantry for dinner options.

  Well, there was ramen — always ramen. I found a chicken breast in the freezer, and there was cheddar and cream cheese in the fridge. In the pantry there was also a can of hot roasted green chilies, and so was conceived the newest in a growing line of ramen perversions: jalapeño popper ramen with chicken. I found some scallions in the crisper drawer that had about a minute of life left in them, so I chopped the most verdant strands to top our dinner.

  I was grating the cheddar when I heard the front door open. I turned and peeked out.

  She was kicking off her shoes, a pile of mail in her arms. I could almost pretend this was any other day — any day before I learned the truth about her, about my past. But the guarded look she gave me made clear that pretending was not possible on either side.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.” She hesitated, then stepped into the kitchen and set the mail on the table. “What smells so good?”

  I described dinner, and she smiled as she got herself a glass of water. “I never would have come up with that. Thanks for cooking.”

  “Thanks for all the stuff you got me.”

  She glanced up quickly over her glass. She swallowed and said, “You liked?”

  “I did. The pillow . . .” I shook my head. “I never would have thought of that.”

  She smiled. “There were some amazing things in there — some of those look really old!”

  I nodded.

  “You really like that stuff, don’t you?” she said, tilting her head.

  “Yeah.” My eyes bored into hers. “I do.” I was grateful that she was seeing me, really seeing me. But why did this have to be new? Why did it take so many years?

  We ate mostly in silence, apart from discussing the food, which my mom enjoyed. It was creamy and cheesy and spicy. I wished Luke could try it.

  As I watched my mom clean up, I reflected on how comfortable I felt, despite the storm cloud hanging over us, the wreckage that was us. She was utterly familiar to me. Could it really have been like that with anyone else? Could I really have seen Mima as my mother the way I did this woman standing before me, looking like me, executing all her idiosyncratic maneuvers? Dumping the whole cutting board into the trash and shaking it off, or picking up a dirty paper towel from the garbage to wipe out a bowl (no garbage disposal in our kitchen, and why use a clean paper towel for that?). She was shortcutty and frugal. She could live with messy but not with dirty. She wouldn’t be bothered by days of mail on the counter, but a smear of coffee would be a nonstarter.

  I loved her and I hated her. I was proud of her and disappointed in her. She was indifferent about things that mattered to me and consumed with things that didn’t matter to me. She was irritating, yet elusive. Too close and too far. She was the nearest thing to my own self that existed — genetically, expe
rientially, geographically, viscerally. She was a part of me.

  “Want a cup of tea?” she asked, putting the last of the silverware into the drainer.

  “Sure.” I watched her, my head propped up on one hand on the table. “Peppermint, please.”

  She put the kettle on and fished out a Red Zinger and a peppermint from the boxes in the cabinet.

  When she sat down at the table, I opened with, “I spent the weekend with my foster family.”

  “Ha.” She dunked her tea bag in her favorite mug. “Is that what you’re calling the Wassermans now?”

  “No, Mom.” I waited until she met my eyes. “My real foster family. In Milwaukee.”

  I guess I hadn’t fully considered how that announcement would strike her, but I watched the blood drain from her face, watched her lips go pale. She let go of her mug and sat back a little, clasping her hands together.

  “Their name is Margolis,” I said. “And they took really good care of me when you were . . .” I trailed off, unable to find words that didn’t seem pointedly harsh.

  She stood up suddenly, her chair scraping the linoleum. She dropped her cup of tea in the sink. It shattered as it hit the old porcelain. No more NO SOUP.

  I followed her into her studio.

  “Do you know where I was last night?” she asked, going to her desk.

  I leaned in the doorway. “No. Obviously.”

  “I went to a meeting.” She shuffled through a stack of postcards — inspiration for the canvas. Places with brilliant waters and impossible skies. Beautiful places other, luckier people had seen, reduced to glossy paper rectangles for the less fortunate. “I hate meetings, I hate AA, I hate talking.”

  “Then why have you been going to them?” If she said it was because of me, I was going to lose my shit. It wasn’t my fault she was an addict. And it wasn’t my fault she lied to me about my past and it came back to haunt her.

  She stared at the postcards in her hands. “This whole situation has brought up some really tough memories.”

  That made sense, I supposed. These were memories of the very things that knocked her off the wagon in the first place. But whatever they were, I was out of patience over not knowing. “Mom, what happened when I was little?” I pressed. “And why did you lie to me all these years?”

  She set the postcards down. “You mean about the foster care? By the time you were old enough to understand, I didn’t think you remembered it anyway. It just seemed pointless.”

  “Convenient for you.” I crossed my arms, still leaning in the doorway. “You could just erase your mistakes, right? Like they never even happened. Like the Margolises never happened.”

  She paused, wringing her hands. When she finally spoke, she surprised me. “You’re right. I let myself off the hook. I told myself things that would make it easier for me.” She glanced at me. “But I meant to tell you. So many times I would gear myself up for it, and . . .” She shook her head. “I could never bring myself to do it. It’s so hard to face what I did.”

  She was finally owning her shit, and I didn’t want to kick her when she was down. I crossed the room. “Mom. What happened to you? Tell me. Help me understand. You’ve been alone with it for so long. But it didn’t just happen to you.” I gripped one of her hands in mine. “It happened to us.”

  When she squeezed my hand and began to cry, it felt like something heavy breaking free in my chest.

  And then, finally, she started talking.

  It wasn’t long before I understood my mother’s inability to talk about the things that had happened in her past. Our past.

  How do you tell your child you left her in a car seat for an indeterminate number of hours outside a bar when she was four months old, before the police were alerted and she was turned over to Social Services?

  How do you tell your child you lied about not knowing who her father was? (He was indeed the waifish boy in the delivery room at my birth. His name was Ethan Whitman.)

  It was his death that sparked Mom’s relapse. She’d gotten sober when she found out she was pregnant. And then, months later, it all fell apart.

  It was unknown whether his death was a suicide or an accidental overdose. My mom believes the latter. She said he was trying too hard and loved us too much for it to be anything but an accident.

  I didn’t argue. I was pretty sure that’s not how addiction or depression or suicide works, but I saw no reason, after all she had been through, to take that belief away from her.

  I was greedy to know more about this fragile, tortured boy who fathered me, but my mother was quickly nearing her limit. The final detail she shared with me was that Ethan and his father never got along, and the older and more independent Ethan got, the harder on him his father was. “He kicked Ethan out of the house when he found out I was pregnant,” Mom said, bitterness thick in her voice. “I hated that man. If it weren’t for him, Ethan might have stood a chance.”

  Mom couldn’t bring herself to talk about my dad any more after that. We were both exhausted. I hugged her good night and wandered in a daze to my room. Thoughts swirled in my head. What if my dad had lived? What would it have been like for me to be raised by a mom and a dad, even if they were both recovering addicts, both impossibly young?

  But I would never know. And it was so devastatingly, infuriatingly unfair.

  But also unfair? The fact that my mother had blocked me from knowledge of my father my whole life. Everything I had ever longed for, she had single-handedly blocked.

  I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep, tormented over the father I would never remember. If he had lived, if they had recovered, I might have had everything I’d ever wanted — a mom, a dad, maybe even siblings. Or maybe my life would have been chaos. After all, how stable would two eighteen-year-old addicts really have been? Maybe they would’ve broken up and fought over custody of me, or maybe I’d have been raised by junkies.

  One thing was certain, though: in any of these scenarios, there would be no Luke, no Margolises. And it was confusing to factor them out of my mind and heart now. They had already loved me. I couldn’t imagine them away.

  Luke. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to talk to him right now, to be held by him. It would be so sweet, so comforting. I imagined how he might tenderly stroke my back as we hugged, how he might whisper that he loved me.

  I knew I should shut down this train of thought, but I was too gutted to be strong. And so I let myself picture the kinds of things I’d been wanting to picture since I met Luke. And it made me feel wrong, ashamed. But admonishing myself not to feel that way was useless.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin when my phone rang. I checked the screen, stupidly hoping it might be Luke. But it was Eli. I frowned; it was almost one.

  “Hello?”

  At first I wasn’t sure if he was laughing or crying. But when he choked out the word “Jay,” I knew.

  “I’m coming, Eli. Hang on.”

  I pulled on some clothes, grabbed the car keys, and tiptoed out.

  His house was dark except for the yellow glow emanating from the basement window wells. I let myself into the front door and crept down the stairs. I found him curled up on his bed, crying like a little boy — a sight that tore my heart in half. I petted his head, glancing toward the cage. I couldn’t see anything from where I was, so I tiptoed over.

  I shuddered. Jay lay on his side, his limbs curled stiffly, his mouth open. Daisy, awake, sat on the mezzanine level, staring out at me.

  I crept back over to the bed to lay down next to Eli, rubbing his back as he wept. I reminded him that Jay had a wonderful life — as good a life as a rat could ever have. And that Eli would always have wonderful memories of him.

  “What do I do?” he asked. “I can’t even look at him. What am I supposed to do?”

  I drew in a slow breath. Was I going to have to remove Jay’s body from the cage? Because I wasn’t sure I was the person for the job. And assuming I could make myself get it out, then what was I supposed to do w
ith it?

  “Have you ever . . . lost a rat before?” I asked.

  He shook his head and wiped his nose on his arm. “Jay was my first rattie.”

  “Well . . . should we bury him?”

  As soon as I said this, I remembered that it was still winter — was the ground still frozen?

  Eli started to cry again. “I don’t know.”

  I sat up and started googling on my phone “24-hour animal clinics.” When I found one nearby, I tiptoed over to the stairs and called.

  After being told I could bring Jay in to be cremated and assured that he would be treated with the utmost respect, I gently shared the information with Eli, who nodded, but remained curled up on the bed. I sighed resignedly.

  I poked around the basement until I found an empty shoe box. I found some rags in the laundry room, which I used to remove Jay’s stiff body from the cage, coaching myself through each horrifying second of it. How would all this affect Daisy? Those two loved each other. They stayed so close — as close as they could be. The idea of Daisy left alone for the rest of his days, lonely and bewildered, tore at my already-torn heart.

  And that’s when it hit me: that’s what was coming for Buddy. To be left behind, bewildered and alone, missing his one love. And it was more than I could bear to think about.

  I wrapped Jay in some extra rags and tucked him in the shoe box. “Um, go with God, little guy,” I whispered, feeling some ceremony was in order but having no prayers or blessings at the ready.

  “Can you bring me Daisy?” Eli called to me.

  “Sure, of course . . .” I set the box on the table and reached in gingerly. “You sure he won’t bite me?”

  He made a muffled sound I hoped I could interpret as an affirmative.

  Daisy turned and sniffed my hand as I reached for him, making me jerk back. “How do I pick him up?”

  “Just pick him up around his middle and then cradle him in your hands.”

  I slowly reached a hand around Daisy, who didn’t seem to mind. When I lifted him out, I supported him with my other hand. “Good boy,” I said softly, taking him over to Eli, who sat up and took him from me.