Page 12 of Our Crooked Hearts
I’d say a rabbit’s.
It was barely eight when I escaped to my room. I lay in bed sucking on ice cubes, flipping the pages of a graphic novel Richard had loaned me, but I kept seeing my mother. The way she’d looked at me before she knew it was me. The gesture she made with her hands that twanged like a discordant note I’d heard before. And the dead rabbit, the iced shells of its eyes.
“Ivy?” My mom tapped on the door, then opened it.
I swallowed an ice cube, wincing as it ran like an ice-skate blade all the way down. “What’s up?”
“I meant to ask how you’re feeling. Fee told me she gave you some stuff for your lip.”
I hadn’t thought about my lip in a while, because it had stopped hurting. When I pressed a pinky to it, the swelling was almost gone. “Yeah. It helped.”
“Good. So. Your hair.” She rapped again on the doorframe, then walked all the way in. “I think it suits you, actually. It’s very old Hollywood.”
I had zero to say to this bullshit backtrack. I watched as she took a dirty T-shirt off the floor and folded it, placing it on the foot of my bed. That wasn’t like her: my mom didn’t take care of our messes for us. And she didn’t have the kind of nervous hands that made busy work out of nothing.
“The other night,” she said idly, still smoothing the shirt, “you told me Nate swerved.”
“Yeah.”
Now she looked up. “What did he swerve for?”
I smiled at her, no teeth. “A rabbit.”
She watched me steadily and didn’t reply.
The book I’d been reading lay across my chest. I put it aside and leaned toward her, stretching out a hand. Brow furrowed, like she suspected a trap, she reached back.
I caught her hand in mine. Touched a fingertip to a ridge of scar and looked at her questioningly.
She snatched it back. “Stop it.”
“Mom,” I said softly. An hour ago she’d spat another creature’s tooth out of her own mouth. We’d watched her do it, watched her lie without even caring whether any of us believed her. It was like a game of pretend we never stopped playing.
I took a breath. “Who did you think I was when you walked in today?”
She flinched. Her face stayed smooth, but her shoulders jumped. “Ivy, you’ve got white hair and a fat lip. I didn’t knowwhatI was looking at.”
There was a recklessness in me, rising. I lifted my hands, arranged them in the unnatural way she’d held hers in the front hall. It made my fingers prick. “What,” I asked her, “does this mean?”
She lunged. Her knee came down on the bed and she was above me, squeezing my fingers in hers, forcing my arms to my sides.
“Don’t,” she said, her voice steady. “Do not.”
Her right hand on my left was smooth and manicured, her left hand on my right patchworked with the scars she nevertalked about. And that was just the secret you could see. I made a sound in my throat, where bitterness burned like an aspirin pill. She heaved herself back off the bed.
“Ivy,” she whispered. Her eyes were wet. I waited as her mouth worked itself over unsaid things, her expression shifting like a slots machine. And I watched as she went away from me, back inside herself, gone.
“Good night,” she said, and closed the door.
After she left I tried to cry, but I couldn’t. I stared at my windows instead. When they were bright black squares I sat up. The house was quiet, Hank off somewhere and my parents across the hall, sleeping or watching two different shows on two separate iPads. Midnight came and still I felt too hollow to sleep.
Downstairs I crouched in front of the open refrigerator, forking leftover noodles into my mouth. When I stood, swinging the door shut, something caught my eye through the window.
Someone was out there, among the herbs growing at the fence line. A stooped figure that stayed a while, troubling the dirt, and became my mother as it rose. She dusted her hands over the knees of her jeans before walking back toward the house.
Some instinct sent me swiftly across the kitchen, onto the basement stairs. Through the crack between door and frame I watched her pad softly to the sink. Her back was to me as she washed her hands, then filled and drained a water glass twice. She was still turned away when she collapsed, head dropping onto her folded arms, and let out a cry. Just one, pressed into her skin.
I stood on the step, the basement’s cold breath on my neck, fear pricking at the backs of my knees. When my motherstraightened it was with the sprung snap of a folding knife. Her face as she left the kitchen was set, her eyes a leaden blue. I waited behind the basement door until I was sure she was gone.
