This Is How I Find Her (17 page)

I'm expecting Uncle John to make a joke about it—
who are you and what have you done with Sophie and Leila?
—but it's Aunt Cynthia who speaks first.

“We picked up some Chinese food,” she says, gesturing back toward the kitchen.

Leila stands up quickly.

“I think Sophie wanted to talk to you guys first,” she tells her parents. Then she gives me another sympathetic look and leaves the room before any of us can respond.

I smile ruefully and shake my head at her back. I bet Leila will never stop being like this, taking charge even when nobody asks her to.

I turn back to my aunt and uncle.

“I did want to talk to you,” I admit. Nervousness is buzzing through my body again and I shift in the chair, sticking my legs out and then pulling them back under me. “Is it okay if we talk before dinner?”

They both nod, and after a moment, they sit down together on the couch opposite me. They stare at me expectantly, and I wish one of them would pick up a book from the table and look at it instead.

“My mother's doctor says she's almost ready to be discharged,” I tell them.

Uncle John leans forward, looking concerned, but it's Aunt Cynthia I'm really watching. My words travel across the room to her and she freezes in her seat. I recognize that response, her temporary paralysis, because it could easily be mine. I have the urge to tell her
breathe
.

“She's doing much better on the new set of medications, and her doctor found a place nearby where she can have regular outpatient therapy. There might even be a center in the city where she can go for free if she's approved for a research study.”

Aunt Cynthia shifts slightly across from me, the first signs of a thaw.

“But I don't think I can take care of her by myself,” I add, the same thing I admitted to my mother this afternoon. “I can't force her to take her medication every day and watch her every afternoon and make sure she gets to therapy while I'm also going to school and trying to have a job after school.”
And getting ready for college the year after next. And having friends.

I can't keep looking at Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John watching me. I drop my gaze to my book, my eyes catching random words—
neutron, proton, noble gas
—that I know I've learned but that, right now, are just bouncing off the outside of my brain without going in.

As difficult as it was to tell my mother that I couldn't be totally responsible for her anymore, saying it to Aunt Cynthia's stiff face and Uncle John's anxious one is harder still. But I force myself to say it again, less tentatively this time, to make sure they know how serious I am.

“It's too much for me to do all by myself,” I repeat, my voice insistent and clear.

But it's not just that I can't do it by myself. It's that, for now at least, I choose not to. I choose to have my own life instead.

“And I don't want to do it anymore,” I say. I look at Aunt Cynthia. “It's like what you said, about how we shouldn't put ourselves completely on hold for my mother. I don't want to keep having to choose her over myself.”

Then, looking at my lap again, I tell them the rest. How Leila finally told me what she saw when we were eleven. What it was like for me to find my mother barely breathing on her bed that afternoon when I got home from school. It's the first time I've described it out loud to anyone. Even when I was talking to Natalie, I didn't tell her about the way I raced up the stairs and called my mother's name and crunched over the cut-up catalog pages in the hallway as I hurried to the bedroom. The way her feet hung off the bed and her chest barely moved.

My voice isn't distant and flat now; it shakes as I talk. But I don't feel panicked the way I did in class the day after it happened, as the clock ticked and I imagined just what my mother might have been doing at that minute the day before. My heart isn't racing and I don't see my mother's still body in front of me. This time I know that day is in the past. I'm just remembering it, not reliving it.

When I stop talking, finally, and look at my aunt and uncle again, Uncle John's eyes are wide and Aunt Cynthia's face is practically white. She's holding her hands together so tightly in front of her that parts of them are turning white too.

I wonder for the first time if she's a member of our club, the one Leila and I formed unofficially yesterday in my room. The club of people who've seen my mother with pills in her hand or spilling out of a knocked-over prescription bottle on the table next to her bed.

I can't sit still any longer.

I push myself out of the chair and only just remember to grab my chem book before it falls to the floor. I stand there hunched like a monkey, holding it.

I have to ask.

“I wanted to ask you whether we could stay here, my mother and I, until she's doing well enough to be on her own for longer,” I say. “I'm sure you want to talk about it before you decide, so I'll just…” I trail off and take a step toward the doorway.
I'll just scram.

“Stop!” Aunt Cynthia's voice rings out and I turn around. She looks surprised by her own forcefulness. I register in a corner of my mind that Uncle John has gotten up from the couch and is moving toward the kitchen. He murmurs something about setting the table for dinner.

“We don't need to talk about it,” Aunt Cynthia says, her voice softer now. “I mean, of course you can stay here. Both of you.”

“Thank you,” I manage. My legs start to feel wobbly under me and I fall back into my chair, overloaded with relief, embarrassment, and a strange feeling of defeat all at once. I've finally done it, finally allowed that desperate feeling I had in the hospital elevator, of not wanting my mother to come home, to win.

But it feels like a little bit of a victory for me too.

“You shouldn't thank me,” Aunt Cynthia says. “It wasn't right to cut your mother off like that. I didn't trust her to be responsible for Leila anymore, and I needed to find a way to take care of my family and myself. But I know she didn't do what she did intentionally.”

I think of how angry I got at my mother that day in the hospital, wishing she would ask me about my day, just once, the way I imagined a normal mom would. Even as the voice in the back of my head reminded me she has never been, and probably never will be, a normal mom.

“And it certainly wasn't fair of me to do that to you,” Aunt Cynthia continues. “To leave you to look after her by yourself when you were only eleven. I'm impressed by how well you've handled it. But you're right, you shouldn't have had to do it at all.”

She pauses for a moment before she adds, “I'm so sorry, Sophie.”

Guilt.

That's part of what's kept us all in our separate boxes on the sitcom screen for the past five years, kept us from picking up the phone. My guilt whenever I catch myself thinking that I want to have my own life. Leila's guilt for telling on my mother; Aunt Cynthia's after she decided to leave me to watch over my mother on my own. My mother's guilt, when she's aware enough to think about it, about the ways we've all had to rearrange our lives around her.

“It's okay,” I tell Aunt Cynthia softly. I sound calmer and more grown-up than I feel.

We stand up at the same time and look at each other across the living room. I feel like the wall between us has lost a few more rows of stone and mortar. We're both tall; maybe now if we stand on our tiptoes, we can reach over the top.

Aunt Cynthia and I nod at the same time, a silent agreement that we'll try to do better from now on. I think of a few lines from the poem Leila chose for our English project.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice. Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Okay,
I tell my guilt and embarrassment and defeat and relief.
The door's open. Come in.

Aunt Cynthia walks to the bottom of the stairs and shouts up to Leila. “You can come down now. It's all clear!”

It's the kind of thing I might have expected Uncle John to say, but not Aunt Cynthia. And my surprise must be obvious on my face because when she turns around Aunt Cynthia actually laughs. It's a sound I haven't heard from her in years, except for the day I stood outside my mother's hospital room and eavesdropped on her visit. Her laugh then was sad and slightly hysterical at the same time, but this one is just a natural laugh, ringing and surprised.

And even though a part of my brain is thinking
this is weird
as I follow Aunt Cynthia and Leila in to dinner, I start laughing too.

Twenty-four

“Just pick a room and paint,” I tell James, trying not to sound impatient. “Use your fingers.”

“But what's it supposed to look like?” he whines, drawing out the words, because he knows it will annoy us. “I don't know what I should be painting.”

I snort audibly. James is lying on his stomach on the floor, and Leila and I roll our eyes at each other over his head.

“Stop making fun of me,” James says, without looking up. He's still whining.

We're sitting in front of one of the house models from Uncle John's office, which he gave us as soon as we explained what we wanted to do. The paint cans from Natalie's garage are arranged around us, along with other colors that Leila, Aunt Cynthia, and I picked up from my mother's studio. While we were there, we brought back some of her paintings to hang up in the guest room and in Uncle John's office, which he decided to turn into a temporary bedroom for me. He insists he doesn't have to bring as much work home now that I'm helping him out.

Through the wall, I can hear my mother's classical music in the guest room, and I picture her there painting, surrounded by her finished work the same way she is in her studio at home. My mother spending her afternoon painting counts as a normal day. Later I'll go in there and sit in the corner, and she'll turn to me every so often and ask my opinion on a color or a section of what she's working on.

“The whole point is that it's not supposed to look like anything in particular,” Leila tells James. “You can do whatever you want as long as each room looks different.” She doesn't make an effort to keep the exasperation out of her voice as she dips her pinkie into the deep red paint and dots it across the white wall of one of the house's rooms. Dip, dot, dip. A few drops splash onto the trash bag we've put on top of the carpet.

“Exactly,” I agree. “Here, just pick some colors and see what happens.”

As I reach for the black paint and mix in enough white to get a medium shade of gray, I recite the lines to myself.
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably
. The words
crowd of sorrows
make me think of a flock of dark birds swooping in.

With a few calm, quick swipes, I cover another room in the gray paint. Then I use black and blue to make dark birdlike shapes, really just arrows, on the walls. I take a tiny wooden table from Leila's piled stash of old dollhouse furniture and snap off two of the legs. I glue the now uneven table and those two sorry wooden stick legs onto the floor of my gray room. It looks like a wind has blown through and scattered the pieces.

Next to me, James finally grabs the orange paint, swirling it carefully with yellow on one of the paper plates we're using for palettes. When the orange is a little lighter but there's some yellow still visible, he starts to dab the mixture on the floor of our miniature house. Then he adds more yellow, dots and stripes and tiny suns with slanting rays.

“It seemed like it could use something a little more cheerful,” he says, shrugging. He's right. The house looks more balanced now, with a bright strip between Leila's angry red and my sorrowful gray.

And the orange-yellow swirl on the floor seems to wake all of us up. Suddenly, we can't grab the paint fast enough, blending and spattering and using the ridges around the edges of the plates to add waves and textures to the plain colors in some of the rooms, making the purple and green and maroon walls look like oceans at high tide. We scatter Leila's old dollhouse furniture, whole and broken, everywhere. We stick beads and dried pieces of macaroni to the walls like we did on art projects in kindergarten. The whole time we're laughing and wildly waving our arms. James dabs me with paint, red and then blue, and I return the favor. I catch Leila looking at us, a grin on her face, her eyebrows raised at me as if to say
see?

After a few more frantic minutes of painting and gluing, we all sit back at once and survey our work.

“I think we're done,” Leila says. She sounds surprised and maybe a little bit proud.

James and I nod. Every room has been painted, the guest house ready for all of its new arrivals. We've already decided that Leila, with her singer's voice, will read the poem to the class. James and I will explain our project.

James pops the lids back onto the paint cans, gathers the torn pieces of our paper plate palettes into the trash, and stands to go.

He looks at me from the doorway as he says, “I have to get ready for tonight, but I'll see you both later.”

As Leila and I finish cleaning up, picking macaroni pieces out of the carpet, I glance at the book next to me on the floor. It's still open to the Rumi poem, and I scan the now familiar words. I'm not sure I agree with the last lines, about welcoming the joy, meanness, and sorrow into our houses-slash-lives because they've arrived for a reason, to teach us something, “a guide from beyond.” If that's true, why does my mother have to be part of the lesson? I'd rather think that her illness is a random genetic accident.

But as I look at the house the three of us painted, I still think the first part of the poem is right. The only thing we can really do with these unexpected visitors is open the door and welcome them in.

—

The doorbell rings for the first time when I'm halfway through setting the table. Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John almost never use their dining room, but they insisted I use it tonight, Aunt Cynthia climbing onto a step stool to get the fancier glasses and silverware from the backs of the cabinets.

Now she hurries into the dining room in her usual neat after-work clothes and grabs the bundle of knives and forks out of my hand.

“Go open the door,” she says, waving me away. “I'll finish putting these out.”

When I open the door, James is standing on the front porch, wearing khakis and a button-down shirt, holding a white casserole dish.

“See, I promised I wouldn't bring pizza,” he says before I have time to tease him about it. “There are some vegetables in that, though.”

I stick my tongue out at him and he laughs, not at all offended.

He follows me into the kitchen, where my mother is helping Leila roll out the dough for a piecrust. I stop just inside the doorway, not sure if I need to reintroduce James and my mother. Should I have told my mother that James knows why she was in the hospital? She agreed when Aunt Cynthia and I asked if we could have a dinner to welcome her back. But I'm not sure she realizes that everyone knows where she's back from.

“Mom—” I start.

But before I can remind her who James is, she looks up from the dough and smiles at him, the kind of welcoming, wide, present-in-the-moment smile that makes me want to grin back, I'm so relieved to see it.

“James!” she says, coming around the counter toward us.

“Hi, Ms. Canon,” James says. It comes out in something closer to the little kid voice I remember, lifting at the end, like he's pleased she remembers him. They both laugh.

I step aside and she reaches for his arm just as the doorbell rings again. When I leave the room to answer it, she's pulling him toward the counter to pour the filling into the crust.

This time when I pull the door open, I know I'll see Natalie and Zach standing in the pool of light on the porch, leaning against each other. They both smile at me, and Natalie squeezes my shoulder as she comes in, as close as she gets to a hug.

“Thanks for inviting us,” Zach says. It sounds oddly formal, but he softens it by actually giving me a hug.

“Come meet everyone,” I tell them, leading them into the kitchen. I walk them over to my mother first, introducing Natalie and Zach as my friends.

Soon, everyone's talking to one another, Natalie asking my mother about painting and my mother waving her arms around as she answers; James and Zach chatting as they snack on chips; Leila and Aunt Cynthia carrying dishes into the dining room as Leila asks her mother how long the pie will need to bake. I have to grab a spoon and clink it against a glass to get everyone's attention when it's time to sit down for dinner.

James grabs my arm to hold me back as everyone else moves into the dining room. When I look at him, he stares at the floor and shuffles his feet.

“I have off work tomorrow. So I was wondering if you, um, if you maybe wanted to hang out?”

I feel a smile spread across my face, so wide I'd be embarrassed if James were actually looking at me. It's not just his question, it's everything: having my mother back, having everybody there.

But still, I have to ask. “Are you sure?”

James looks at me, as if to say,
why would I have asked if I weren't sure?

I tilt my head toward the dining room, where everyone is passing plates and pulling out their chairs. The whole messy group of them.
Do you really want to get involved in this?

But really, he already is.

“I'm sure,” he says. We spend about a minute smiling at each other, until he shuffles his feet again. “So, tomorrow?”

“Okay,” I say. “Tomorrow.”

—

As soon as we're sitting at the table, passing around the food, the conversation picks up again. Now Leila's telling Natalie about her classes—I hear her say something about our English project. James asks Zach about living in New York City.

“I'm hoping to move there for college in two years,” he tells him. “I'd love to go to NYU.” Something I didn't know about him.

I know no one would mind if I jumped into the conversation, if I told Natalie and James that Leila and I used to want to live in New York too. That maybe someday we still will. But for the moment all I want to do is lean back in my chair, watch, and listen.

Aunt Cynthia and my mother have their heads bent together, and they're talking to each other quickly, excited about something. Every so often, they erupt into laughter, and I wonder what they're whispering about. Uncle John smiles, looking at them, the kind of
what am I going to do with them
smile I imagine he's been giving them ever since that party years ago when my mother introduced him to Aunt Cynthia.

We look nothing like Trudy's family, all with identical strawberry blond hair and the same pattern of freckles across their noses, matching like the pots lined up in Aunt Cynthia's kitchen. We're a mishmash. More like the array of dishes and spoons and forks that might be in the kitchen of a guest house, where people are always coming and going, accidentally taking some pieces with them to be replaced by others that don't quite fit.

But in a way, we do go together. Uncle John, at the opposite end of the table from me, spotted the ways Aunt Cynthia and I are alike when neither of us could see them. There's Aunt Cynthia and my mother, whose heads of identical brown hair tilt toward each other at the same angle as they talk. Natalie loves photography the way my mother loves painting. Zach and James have the same dream of living in New York City. Leila spends as much time practicing her singing as James does his drumming.

And then there's me, who has a little bit in common with each person lined up around the table.

My family.

I don't want to interrupt to make a toast, and I'm not actually sure how I would say everything I'm thinking right now. But Leila and I catch each other's eyes and smile, and then I look over at my mother and Aunt Cynthia.

We don't need to say anything out loud. But at the same moment, the four of us raise our glasses to each other.