by Laura June
I jumped out of the car, dropped my books in the snow, and ran toward the house.
“You can’t go in there,” a fireman said, stopping me.
“Where is my mother?”
He said that she and my brother John had just left with a friend.
“She refused to go in an ambulance,” he said, “though she was suffering from smoke inhalation.”
“What about the cats?” I asked dumbly. We had two of them; they were always needing me to clean their litter boxes and feed them, and they’d become an enormous pain in my ass as my mother failed to care for them.
“We didn’t find any cats,” he said as he started to walk away. “You can’t go in there.”
I looked at the house, which was brick and no longer had a roof or half its windows. Police tape covered the doors.
I walked up the street, coatless—I never wore a fucking coat anywhere—to the neighbor’s house. My mother and brother were there. I called Emily, then walked up to her house.
So it was that I stayed, again, with Emily. My mother and my brothers were moving an hour away to live with my grandparents while the house was sorted out. We didn’t know if it could be repaired. Everything that I owned was presumably gone. I thought mostly about my pillow, a feather one that I had had since I was in a crib. I thought about my Lush records and my books. I knew none of it mattered.
I couldn’t move in with my father; he lived too far away for me to finish at my school, of which I had just four months remaining. I wasn’t technically allowed to live outside the school district, so we arranged, through Emily’s mother, who told me I could live with them until June, something that was indescribably generous and still shocks me in how much it meant to me.
I returned to my house the next day. I pulled away the police tape from the back door and walked inside. Though it was very newly deserted, it felt as though it had been frozen in time. Snow had started to drift into the windows.
In the kitchen, I found the first cat, sitting under the kitchen table, meowing. I don’t remember what friend of mine I had brought with me, but I took the cat out to him or her and then went back inside. It might have been one of my brothers who came with me. I remember only how fucking cold it was and how dark it seemed inside the house, where there was no longer any electricity.
I walked back through the kitchen and down the hall to my bedroom. My records, which had been on a shelf on the wall shared with my mother’s room, where the fire had started, were melted down the wall. I took three books, all of which were covered in thick black soot. Anything I carried away from that house that day smelled of the fire forever. It’s a smell I cannot forget.
I looked into my mother’s room. The firemen had said it was an electrical fire, but I wondered if my mother, who had been asleep in bed when it started, had fallen asleep smoking. I couldn’t be sure, though I worried that that was what had happened. Somehow, though it didn’t matter, the thought of her having been the cause gnawed at me deeply.
My brother John, who had skipped school that day to play his guitar in the basement, told me only that she had run out screaming, the house filled with smoke, summoning him from the basement.
I found the other cat as I came back into the kitchen. I stood there, calling her name. She’d been through a lot. She was hiding in the basement, and just as I was about to give her up for dead or departed, she ran up the stairs. I had a carrier I’d brought from the neighbor, and I forced her into it. We left the house, I thought maybe for the last time. I didn’t know that I would be back with my father very soon, inside the house, a dumpster in the driveway, throwing shit away and making lists for the insurance claims. I thought it was over at the time. That you could just go, “Well, fuck it, this one burned down.”
But eventually, we did go back, and some things were salvaged from the house. From a chest in which my mother had kept treasures we pulled three photo albums of mostly our early childhoods and a box of random snapshots from later. I have those here, now. My mother’s baby book came out of the fire somehow, though I never saw it until after she died. I know that it was in the house from the fire only because the edges of the white book are covered in that thick soot that smells like that day. But most of my own stuff was simply gone and truly forgotten. I don’t know what I’m missing beyond simply almost everything. A few of my diaries from childhood, which had been boxed up in the basement, made it out. It didn’t matter so much: for now, we were all still alive.
A year ago, I found something that I had never seen before while searching for local newspaper articles using my old address for an unrelated writing project. I found a small notice of the fire. It was very police blotter–style, straightforward, just a few words: fire in master bedroom, electrical. Female in house refused medical care for smoke inhalation.” Got it. And though I’d carried with me for twenty years the suspicion that my mother had actually started the fire by smoking a cigarette and falling asleep in bed, I found that same day another item in my Google search. In 1981, four years before we bought the house and moved in, another fire: “Master bedroom, electrical; no injuries.” So there it was. After years of wondering, a revelation. Maybe it was just an accident after all.
My father lived only twenty minutes away but I didn’t drive. My mother and my brothers would be, in two days’ time, an hour’s drive away. I owned nothing and had no one. I was alone.
Less than a month and a half later, I was pregnant and called my mother, who might as well have lived in Alaska and was just two months’ sober, to tell her.
CHAPTER 11
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Just six to eight weeks after the fire, while living at Emily’s house with my mother and brothers an hour away and my father out of the loop on my personal life, my mother took me to get the abortion.
And then I graduated from high school—barely, but I did it, in June of 1995, just five days before my eighteenth birthday. My whole family was there, and from that day is one of the only photos I have of my mother and me together, other than a few family portraits taken by a professional photographer when I was very young. It is a haunting photo, mostly because it’s actually a photo of me and my grandmother and my great-aunt. We’re smiling at the camera, and in the background, slightly out of focus and off to the side, wearing sunglasses and holding my graduation program, is my mom. She’s looking away from us, at something else, just accidentally in the photo. She looks healthy and happy.
But before I graduated, there was one more fire.
And though I didn’t start it, I took the blame.
After school on a Friday in late May, probably two weeks before I was scheduled to graduate, I had another one of my many detentions. Once detention concluded, I headed with a girl I knew fairly well but wasn’t that close with to the bathroom by the cafeteria where we smoked in the handicapped stall. We could easily pack half a dozen girls into that stall, smoking cigs and talking shit. We were in there, Chris and I, and eventually we were joined by another girl.
At some point, there in that stall, with cigarettes, a lighter, and a large can of aerosol hairspray, someone—not me, I can tell you that, though I’ll never admit even now, who started it—lit the paper towel dispenser on fire. It seemed sort of funny at first. I don’t think those bathrooms even had smoke detectors then, and anyway the fire was very small.
For a minute. But then it got larger. Everyone was laughing hysterically, then suddenly became nervous. This fire, which had one minute earlier seemed so destined to simply peter out, had actually grown.
We left the bathroom, and on our way out, a janitor saw us leaving. He must have gone into the bathroom and put out the fire. I left school that day in fear but also convinced that somehow it was no big deal.
But on Monday morning I was pulled from my first class, taken into the principal’s office, and asked to explain what had happened. I refused. I left the office, and on my way
out I saw the other two girls sitting there, waiting to be called in.
I don’t remember all the details, but I do remember that, through conversations with the girls there, I realized both were afraid of their fathers. Afraid of them physically. They were crying, telling me that their parents simply couldn’t hear about this. I remember one of them saying, “He’ll send me away.”
The situation hadn’t seemed that serious to me, but when I was called back to the principal’s office, there was a man there who they said was the fire warden. The principal told me that I needed to admit and explain myself or else I would not graduate. I would be charged with a crime. I had no idea if any of it was true, and I said several times, “There’s no way anyone can prove that I was even there.”
“But we know that you were there,” he said. I hated him so much.
“I want to call my mother,” I said. She was too far away to come in on such short notice, so before I explained anything, I said that I was going to call her.
They took me to another office with a phone and left me alone.
I called my mother.
I explained my situation. I told her that I wanted to admit that I had done it, so that the other two girls wouldn’t get in trouble. If I said it was me, that it was an accident, that I’d gotten scared and run away, I thought I could avoid being expelled two weeks before graduation and I could keep anyone else from getting in trouble.
My mother told me she would talk to the principal herself.
“Don’t say shit to them,” she said before hanging up.
That was the end of it. I was suspended for the last two weeks of graduation activities, though I went to classes. Most of the time I was in the library, alone, while the rest of my class went to water parks and practiced, getting ready for the graduation ceremony. Being there alone in the library, reading quietly, I felt, was a fitting end to my high school career. I’d felt solitary among hundreds of kids for a pretty long time and was happy to end this way.
I’d spent the last few weeks of my high school career staying with my father, after Emily’s mom had, unsurprisingly, found two teenagers on the cusp of adulthood to be a bit much for her to handle. This was a very good thing on so many levels: I went to school each day; my father drove me there and dropped me off, making sure I was in attendance. I left each afternoon on time; he picked me up from Emily’s house or a friend drove me back to his place in the evening. I guess I ended my high school career on the highest possible note, given everything that had happened.
But I had no plans for the future.
I felt compelled to move back in with my mother, though, and so I did, just weeks after graduation. I packed up my next to nothing, and I went an hour away to live with her in the new house she had rented. It was a huge, beautiful old Victorian that had been converted into apartments, but it had no other tenants, so the house felt like it was ours.
I moved there at the same time my mother did, when she moved out of my grandparents’ house, where her and my brothers had been staying since the fire. This was a time of great optimism for me, and, I think, for all of us. My mother seemed very healthy. She still wasn’t drinking, and she threw herself into decorating and organizing a new home for all of us.
My bedroom in that apartment, though I lived there less than a year, is one that I still dream of. It was completely paneled in old cherry boards, and when the door was closed, you couldn’t even really see that there was a door there. The room’s two casement windows were nearly floor to ceiling. The floors were cherry, and one wall was covered in built-in bookshelves. This room seemed meant for me; it was literally a cozy cave of a room where I could hide and read all day. I loved it and felt very happy to be there.
I enrolled at a nearby college and tried not to think too much about the future. I felt unsure and weak, as though I’d just gotten over a new sickness and was still wobbly, a just-born giraffe trying to walk. I wanted to be happy, to feel as though I could scream from the rooftop, but really, everything seemed so tenuous.
The fact that my mother quit drinking, even for less than one year, was magical in some ways. It is those months that I now think back on when I want to think of good times with my mother, because in that small space, we made up for some lost time. I had a new and growing circle of friends and a very active social life suddenly and I was going to school, but my mother and I spent a lot of time together.
She couldn’t drive anymore; she’d lost her license for, I’m not sure, possibly forever—I never really knew her to drive again in her life—so I’d shuffle her back and forth to work and we’d walk around the neighborhood we lived in.
We shopped and decorated the house; we cooked and cleaned together. We bought books and made sure my brothers went to school. We giggled at soap operas in the afternoon, and we spent hours watching the O. J. Simpson trial. We watched CNN constantly. My mother was a great lover of the Clintons, and all my grandparents were those ardent, union-loving kind of Catholics who yelled at the TV about Republicans. My grandfather’s Alzheimer’s was advancing, and my mother and I spent a lot of time in that period with him and my grandmother. Though my grandmother’s cutting remarks didn’t recede completely, my mother seemed suddenly more confident and able to let them slide off her back than she had been in the past. Their relationship seemed stronger, too.
My mother’s sobriety did not hold. This was not surprising, though I don’t think it was a judgment on her to say I wasn’t surprised. My understanding of alcoholism, even then, meant that expectations—any, even low ones—should basically not exist. I wanted her to be healthy and sober, but I couldn’t control that, and I knew it.
I’d like to say that I had learned something from the previous years, that I called up friends or family and asked them to help us, but I didn’t. I receded into my old patterns. I withdrew into a world where I partied with new friends I’d made. I tried to get along, I started skipping classes immediately, and, most important, I didn’t tell anyone who could have offered help what was going on.
Here’s the part where I begin to talk about guilt and how I blame myself for failing my mother. I’ve thought this clusterfuck through so many times I get lost in the pathways of who should have been responsible for whom, and I know that there is no way to make full sense of it.
But by then, the disappointment of seeing my mother, who had clocked less than a year of sobriety and who in that time had truly seemed to be the person I’d always known she was, drinking again was not unexpected. I don’t know why: I need to give her credit for those months of effort. I did give her credit, even then. I’m sure, I know now, that they were a devoted effort, and the time we spent together, just doing normal things—like shopping, cooking, cleaning the house, watching movies— is time I am happy to have banked into my memory.
But still, when she started drinking again, everything was worse than it had been before. She moved quickly; her addiction became aggressive and relentless. She stopped caring what I thought, and we fought bitterly and constantly. I told her I hated her. I told my father I hated him too, for good measure. I hated everyone and everything. I shaved my head and got tattoos I didn’t want or need. I started drinking again myself: I’d been sober for much of her sobriety, committed, I think, even if sort of unknowingly, to making a go at something different. And when she failed, I failed with her.
But it couldn’t hold. My life was too new.
My brother Daniel left first. He disappeared basically overnight. I wasn’t there when it happened, was staying in a dorm room with a friend. I came home on a Saturday morning, and my brother John told me: he’d packed up a garbage bag of clothes after some rancid blowout fight with my mother, who had been drunk. He’d called my dad to pick him up, and he was gone.
As soon as he left, he flourished with my father while the rest of us floundered. He went to school, he had a more normal life of a sixteen-year-old kid.
/> I sputtered and didn’t know where to turn or what to do. I dated boys who were just as fucked up as I was, who understood nothing or everything, depending on what I told them. There were lots of nights where I rushed out of the house and didn’t come back for days. There were nights of arguments. I didn’t hold back when she was drunk; I told her she needed to stop even though I knew my words might as well have gone unsaid.
When I’d talked to my mother about her drinking as a child, I’d been subtler, more pleading on her behalf. Now, as a young adult, I was blunter. I screamed and begged and sometimes wanted to shake her, to hit her.
Instead, I left. I left not knowing what to do or where to go except that I had friends who would take me in for a while. I left without taking anything, my mother screaming behind me, “You’ll be back!” I left on foot.
I had no job or car or money. Everything I’d had was hers, and I was determined that I was never coming back, I’d never live with her again. I was eighteen years old. I’d dropped out of school after two semesters and hadn’t even attended any classes of the second.
“You don’t know what it is to be on your own, to take care of yourself,” she said to me that day, later on the phone, when I’d called her back simply because I wasn’t done screaming yet.
“I’m going to find out,” I said.
CHAPTER 12
◆ ◆ ◆
And I did find out. It took me more than a year to go back to school. A year to get a job, an apartment of my own, a boyfriend who was nice and supportive. I got a dog and eventually a cat. I bought a car, and I figured out how to do my taxes and how to apply for financial aid and loans.
My mother was very bad with money. As a growing adolescent, I made a point never to open the hallway closet where we stored random papers, old photo albums, report cards, and school projects. Though I’ve always loved paper, I grew to hate the sight of mail and bills. My mother hid things like bills. My father basically handled the finances as my mother’s problems grew. But, like a child hiding a bad grade, my mother hid report cards and bills as if hiding them would make them disappear. Knowing, as I grew into an adult, that that is not what happens—another bill simply comes until there are worse consequences, late fees, a shut-off phone—I find it hard to fathom what she thought she was accomplishing.
