Page 22 of The Burning
“Ah, another one of Mom’s tales. Don’t try to distract me.”
Our mother loved to tell us stories about the most random things. She should have been a writer with the way her imagination worked, sometimes so well that she floated between fiction and reality. This particular story was that Austin, the capital of Texas, was named after my brother when he was born. Her legend had it that the state had been in a drought for months until the moment he was born, making some mayor or senator name the city after him, even though we were twins and born only seconds apart.
Austin could have his city, though, because I had my own special island named after me. The beaches had white sand and there was a castle named after my mom. She told me these legends and secrets about our island, way past the age that I actually believed it. It was off the coast of Florida, she said. It was stunning, and the sun on your skin was as warm as the people. In a soft, wishful voice she would speak of a secret beach on our island where you could see the brightest stars hanging in the darkest sky. They lit up the night like nothing anyone had ever seen before, and she promised to take me there one day.
“Once we go, we can’t come back,” she would say, her fingers playing with the ends of my hair.
“Can Austin come with us?” I asked her once. I distinctly remember the way her face changed, the way she would always look back at the house from the porch swing.
“I don’t think he can,” answered, and I followed her eyes to the living-room window where my brother and father were watching a football game, talking, and smiling, shoving chips and dip down their throats.
She made me pinky swear not to tell anyone, even my brother, about our island. When I agreed, she made up more tales about a queen who shared not only her name, but who also had elaborate escape plans to leave her home island. It all sounded so stupid now, but as I thought about the trapped queen, I realized most of my mother’s stories had meanings too deep for me to understand at the time. In tales told about Austin, he was always, always, always the savior. But mine seemed like an afterthought, as if Mom felt sorry and didn’t want to leave me out; my tales were only woven from her fears, regrets, and worries.
Toward the end of her life with us, she stumbled up to my room more and more often. I would be tired as hell from school and my after-school job, but I would stay up just to have time with her, even with the smell of vodka on her breath and the shaking of her fingers as they brushed through my hair. Instead of making up the stories, she began to ask me to tell her about our island, how I was taking care of it. To be the storyteller instead.
How are the people?
Do we dance on the warm sand as the sun set across the ocean?
That’s how she best coped with things. When I grew up and became fascinated by psychology and why people were the way they were, I read books and searched the internet for facts, for reasons behind the human behaviors that I saw every day. The more I learned, and the more therapists I talked to, the more I realized that my momneededto pretend everything was good to survive. She would always refer to a time when things were “better,” back when I was a little girl. She wanted to live in the past because it was the golden time of her life, despite it being the darkest of mine. She had lived through a worse childhood than I had. Unthinkable things had happened to her at the hands of men in her family who’d claimed to love her, and no one had protected her.
When I was too tired and nodding off to sleep, she would beg me, alcohol thick on her breath, to take her away from here. I would start reciting the stories she had once told me, but she would always take over a few lines in.
She would cry too, sometimes. Silently, but I would feel her hot tears drip on my arm and her body shake in the darkness. When she was really disassociated from reality, I would talk in third person, telling her that I was glad she had visited again, that it had been too long. It made her smile when I said the island’s water was warm and the people were thriving. I would pick up the stories where she left off and rub her hair right at her scalp line like she once did for me, until she spoke again.
The sadder she was, the darker the stories became.
It was hard to sleep afterwards, on the nights when her stories felt haunted, and she would usually stay in my room. Since it would invariably be the most attention I’d gotten from her in a while, I sort of longed for those dark tales.
A pang stung at the bottom of my stomach whenever I thought about my mom. The good memories felt so much clearer than the bad. For years, I’d been trying to hold on to them and pluck the bad ones out of my memory, one by one. It was like having two of her, like she had a twin. The bad times were becoming easier to drown out and emotionally detach from. The good times—the ones when we would laugh until our stomachs hurt while we ate peanut butter straight from the jar using sticks of celery—pulled me into missing her, which only made me feel more alone. That feeling of abandonment would follow me everywhere I went: Hawaii, Texas, Mars; the fact that I wasn’t good enough for even my own mother to stay would always haunt me.
I looked over at Austin in the passenger seat. He was staring out the windshield, and I wondered which version of our mom he was thinking about.
“Where do you think she is right now?” I asked. I wasn’t really asking my brother, or myself. It was more of a call to the universe.
“I don’t know.” Austin didn’t look at me. “But she isn’t here, and she sure as hell doesn’t want to be found.”
Chapter Eleven
“Is it okay if I stay here for a few hours?” Austin asked as he sat down on my couch, scratching his scalp. “I can go to Martin’s later when things settle with Mendoza. I just need a shower and to sleep a bit?”
“Yeah. I’m going to work, anyway,” I told him. “Just lock the door when you leave, and don’t sleep in my bed.”
I laughed lightly, but I was serious. I hadn’t washed my sheets since Kael had slept in them, and I didn’t want anyone in my bed for the small chance that the hint of his scent that was left would disappear.
“Thanks. I’ll crash on the couch, or in the chair.”
Kael’s sleeping body spread across the chair flashed through my mind and I tried to ignore it, telling Austin to sleep there since Elodie would probably be home soon and she would only be comfortable lying on the couch. I needed to get to work. Today had been one of the most chaotic days of my life and I was ready for it to be over. What I really wanted to do was go into my bathroom, turn the shower on as hot as I could tolerate, and let my mind wander as the water soaked my body and hid my tears.
Austin’s phone rang in his pocket. He showed me the screen as he ignored the call.
I rolled my eyes at seeing Kael’s last name.
“He’s a good guy and he’s helping me a lot,” Austin said defensively.
I snorted. “Yeah. Good guy. If he’s so great, then why did he ignore me just now at the hospital? He didn’t try to apologize to me. Or even talk to me. He acted like I wasn’t there.”
“As opposed to you doing what? Being so warm and friendly to him?”
