Black Iris (19 page)

My bones felt full of something black and awful, an ache that twisted deep into the marrow. I wanted an oxy so badly my teeth ground.

“Answer me, Delaney.”

“Or what?” I couldn’t meet her stare, so I spoke to the table. “You won’t ship me off to Dr. Patel. You’re scared she’ll put me on something that’ll mess my head up even more. I should do it. I should go become a robot.”

Dad shoved his chair back, rattling the glass and silverware. We all looked at him, startled.

“You hear that, Caitlin? That’s your bullshit coming out of her mouth. You’ve brainwashed her into thinking getting help will make her worse.”

Wonder flitted across Mom’s expression. “Are you finally growing a spine?”

“I raised them. I’m the one who took care of them while you were off wining and dining. While you were enjoying the fun parts of your illness. And I’m putting my foot down now. It’s time for you to take a step back. She needs help that you can’t give her.”

Donnie and I exchanged shocked glances. Dad never talked like this.

“You didn’t raise them,” Mom said, snorting. “The Internet raised them. You don’t know anything about them.”

“I know my little girl is in pain, and needs help.”

A weird hiccup went through me. Don’t cry.

“Your little girl had her heart broken by another girl. It’s teenage melodrama. It’ll pass.”

Wait. There was no way she could know about that, unless—

“Did you read my stuff?” I said.

Mom looked at me sedately. Took a sip of wine.

“I can’t believe you.” I grabbed the table’s edge. “You snooped through my private journals.”

“I paid for those journals. I paid for the therapy. I even pay for the drugs you’re trying to kill yourself with. Nothing of yours is private to me.”

My nails gouged wood. I imagined it as her face.

“What did you expect, Delaney? You refuse to tell me what’s going on. I have to learn about it somehow, and I’d rather it not be in your suicide note.”

“You don’t deserve to know what’s going on.” The words came out screechier than I’d hoped, but I couldn’t stop. “You’re never here when I need you. You spend all your good days with other people. You only spend the bad ones with us.”

She peered into her wine.

“Did you ever realize that not taking your meds is selfish, Mom? That they’re not just for you, but for
us
? So you can act halfway human when you decide to actually grace us with your company?”

Dad stood up. “Sweetheart. Kids. Let’s take a break, let’s cool down—”

“And don’t even talk about melodrama,” I cut in. “You’re the biggest drama whore in this house. You never let anyone else feel bad. It’s always you, you, you.”

This piqued her at last. “Oh, is that it? Angry that mommy dearest is hogging the spotlight? Did you think sticking your face between a girl’s legs was going to shock and awe me?”

“I’m not doing this for attention. I hate what I am.”

“Lesbianism.” She imbued the word with the same disdain she’d used to order a twelve-piece bucket of extra crispy. “How passé. If you wanted to impress me with your bourgeois depravity, why not fuck your brother?”

“Caitlin,” Dad said.

“Benjamin,” she said, “for God’s sake, shut up. People are speaking honestly for once.”

Dad’s face drained.

“It’s not about you,” I spat. “You are so egotistical, Mom. I don’t care what you think about anything. I have my own problems. Everyone at school hates me. Luke hates me, Kelsey hates me. I hate me. I’m a total freak and they all know.”

“And I suppose you blame me for that, too? You know, your great-aunt Rebecca is a lesbian. Perhaps I passed the gay gene along to you.”

“Stop saying that. I’m not—that.” God, I still could not fucking say it. It had been easier to call myself a fag than to say the inoffensive word. Easier to hate myself for it than to accept it.

“Or perhaps my cells conspired against you,” she went on. “Perhaps they poisoned you with too much androgen while you were in utero. Now you’ll never fit in with the popular crowd. How tragic. Whatever it comes down to, you can always blame Mommy.”

You’ll feel it, the moment you snap. It’s like working out a kink in your neck but deeper, its roots snaking down not just your spine but your whole life, every humiliation, every indignity, every lunch spent crying in a bathroom stall, every clenched fist, every granule of ground-up tooth enamel. Every Zoeller, Luke, and Kelsey. Every night you desperately jacked off to her and loathed yourself for it. Every fantasy of bringing the gun to school. It goes through everything and finally reaches the core of you.

I rose. Barely five feet but rage made me a titan, limbs like Roman columns, teeth like guillotine blades. Mom stood too but somehow I was looking down on her.

“It
is
your fault. You made me this way. You’re ruining our family.”

“Yes, I’m certainly the biggest drama whore in this house,” she said dryly.

I played into it, uncaring. “I wish I wasn’t your daughter.”

“Isn’t that sad? I’ll be your mother as long as I live.”

“As long as you live.”

The silverware jingled. She’d grabbed the corkscrew. “You could be motherless right now. Shall I?”

Then Dad’s hands were on me, ushering me from the room. Donnie was crying. My eyes were wet, too, but it was from fury, not pain.

“Do it,” I yelled over my shoulder. “You’re a fucking cancer.”

“I’ve tried,” she called back. “Oh, how I’ve tried.”

Dad put me to bed. He talked for a long time but I didn’t hear a word. I only heard her, over and over, filling the hollow channels of my heart with her mother’s-milk venom.

She was right about one thing.

I was her daughter.

In every hateful, destructive, murderous way.

———

It stood at the foot of the bed so still and so long I was certain it wasn’t real. Nothing watched you like that but the demons in your head.

Then it sighed and said, “Delaney June.”

I was too tired to tell her to leave. I’d cried myself raw. All I could muster was a sluggish roll to one side, blinking crystals from my eyelashes like a mermaid sloughing away sea salt. Mom moved soundlessly but I tracked her smell, rosewater sweat, cabernet breath. She sat and the bed bowed toward her. My body tensed.

“When you were a little girl,” she said, “you were fascinated by me.”

Incredibly, she began reminiscing. Told me how I’d watch her paint on makeup like liquid magic. How I’d stare when she spoke, imitate her expressions. How I’d follow and watch, unnervingly quiet, a silent doll with blue glass eyes.

“You were so serious. Always observing, absorbing. Some
times I hardly saw you as a child. You were my little protégée.” Her voice floated to the ceiling. “I never wanted children. You were a concession for Ben. Ben was good to me, good for me, and he wanted this, the full house, the sitcom fantasy. Two-point-three children, two-point-three-car garage. Two-point-three orgasms a month. He kept me from hurling myself off the ledge, so I gave him what he wanted. What harm could there be in more anchors to this world?”

I listened. Deep down I’d known all this but she’d never confessed it so baldly.

“I never wanted you until I had you.” She looked at me now, her breath ruffling my hair. “And then I couldn’t imagine my life without you. You’re the dark thing that was in me. I set you free.”

“No mother on earth talks like this.”

“I’m no mother. I’m a creator.”

I didn’t know what she meant, but it sounded apologetic.

“What dark thing?”

She touched my head. “There are two parts of me. The night and the day. One part went to you, one to your brother.”

“You think I’m the bad part of you?”

Her hand twisted in my hair, painful. “Darkness isn’t bad. It’s only darkness.” Those fingers relaxed. “All it means is you don’t see the world as they do. You see what’s really there. They see what they wish was there.”

I didn’t speak. I was a little afraid of hearing more.

Her hand ran down my face, fell. “It unsettles me to see so much of myself in you.”

“What do you want, Mom?”

“To release you.”

A shiver scuttled over my shoulders. “From what?”

But she didn’t respond. She gazed across my room, lost in herself.

I didn’t buy it. She’d accused me of doing all this for attention. Fuck her.

“You can’t treat me the way you do,” I said, bolstered by the shadows. “It’s emotional abuse.”

“I know.”

“I’m sick of being your punching bag.”

She looked at me.

“I’m sick of your mood swings. Sick of never knowing if you’ll be sweet or a total bitch. I’m sick of walking on eggshells all the time. And I’m sick of the way you treat Dad. He deserves better. The only one you actually love is Donnie, and you’re warping him.”

“I’ll stop drinking.”

“It’s not the drinking. Being bipolar isn’t a license to be a bitch, Mom. You said you could handle it without meds, but you were wrong. And we’re all paying the price.”

She looked away. Moonlight scalloped over her throat. “I can’t take medication.”

“Why?”

“It makes me feel dead inside.”

This was like some biblical moment when the scales fell from my eyes. I stopped seeing the Gorgon and saw a human being in pain.

“How?”

“Everything is the same. No more highs or lows. I’m inside a glass box with the air pumped out. I can see, but can’t taste or smell. Can’t get enraged or aroused. Can’t hear myself scream.” She leaned closer but her voice sounded farther away. “It’s awful, Delaney. I start thinking, What if I’m already dead? Isn’t that what being dead is, the inability to feel? What if I stepped in front of a train? Would there be any difference?”

“Mom,” I said, getting freaked-out.

“I need the highs
and
the lows. It’s who I am. I need them
both, but they’re killing me. There’s no way for me to be at peace.”

“You’re scaring me, Mom.”

“It scares me, too,” she whispered.

I was clenching her hand. Since when? “They can change your meds. You don’t have to take lithium. You can take something else.”

She stared at my hand on hers as if she couldn’t comprehend it.

“Please. Say you’ll try something else.”

“I’ve tried so many ways to be normal. I just want to be myself for a little while.”

Something tiny and sharp cracked in my chest. We are the same, I thought. I could have said those words.

“You should go to bed.” I pulled away. “Talk to Dad. Tell him all of this.”

“There’s no one to tell. No one understands. Only you.”

For the first time she had given me control of something, and it was her life.

“Go to bed,” I said, baffled by possibilities.

And she did.

———

I paced up and down the street outside the house, shadow to lamplight to shadow again. Twice already I’d let my finger float over the doorbell. This time I pressed. No electrocution. That’d be letting me off too easy.

Warm gingery light glowed from the inset window. A ponytail bobbed in silhouette. The door opened, and a girl I didn’t recognize—pretty and put-together—said, “Yes?”

“Is Kelsey here?”

The girl blinked. Then she turned and said, “Dad.”

That’s when I should have left.

Idiot me waited on the doorstep until Mr. Klein eclipsed the light with his Hummer-wide physique and crew cut and faint odor of beer and onion rings.

“What do you want?”

“I’m Delaney. I’m Kelsey’s friend.”

“I know who you are.”

Run, my mind said. My mouth said, “Can I talk to her?”

Mr. Klein glanced into the house. Then he stepped onto the porch, pulling the door closed.

Neither of us spoke. My neck ached from craning to look up at him.

Finally I said, “I want to apologize.”

“Apologize.”

“Yeah. I—” God, what did he know? “I embarrassed her at school. I feel bad.”

“Embarrassed.”

This echoing shit creeped me out. “I understand if she doesn’t want to talk, but I want to tell her I’m sorry for—”

Mr. Klein advanced until he nearly touched me. I retreated to the railing.

“You want to tell her you’re sorry,” he said in that frighteningly calm voice. “For what you did to her. To her body.”

“No.” I edged toward the stairs. “This was a mistake. I’ll just—”

A massive arm seized the railing, cutting me off. Instinctively I lunged the opposite way and the other arm came down, bracketing me. I looked up at that slab stone face.

His voice remained calm.

“If you ever touch my daughter again, I will beat the living daylights out of you. I don’t care what you are, girl, boy, alien. You stay away from her, you sick freak.”

I stared at the miniature gold cross gleaming against his throat.

“She’s a good girl. Not like you.”

In all my life I had never felt this small. Maybe small enough to get away if I ducked under his arm.

“She’s my little girl.” Beer fumes bathed my face. He was actually teary-eyed. “My goddamn little girl. You keep your faggot hands off her.”

I raised my eyes.

The wolf raised its head.

My breath was thick as smoke in the cold. I exhaled into his face. When the pall cleared I saw the muscle tremor in his jaw, his forearms. Smelled the acrid yellow fear coming off him. Fear of this tiny trembling person who could ruin something he loved. So afraid of what I could do with soft words and small hands that it took every bit of testosterone and menace in him to fight back.

The wolf did not cower from the sheep.

“There’s something you should know,” I said.

I thought of all the things he wanted to hear.
Nothing happened. We just kissed. She felt guilty and guilt blows sin out of proportion. She can still go to heaven with the other good girls.

I told him the truth.

“She wanted it,” I said. “She begged me to make her come.”

Somewhere in the night a bell tolled. Oddly, I was on the ground, my cheek pressed to something icy and rough. Pine plank. The porch.

Mr. Klein knelt beside me, frowning. “You all right?”