*
The acceptance letter and scholarship notification arrive in late March of my senior year, and my mother tells everyone again. Anyone. Cashiers. Telemarketers. People in line at the post office. What she doesn’t say, but I know she is thinking: Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
The same week, she takes me for my second appointment with Dr. Maurer. After what happened to John Everett, she’s decided to drag me along to her therapist once a year, like a car that requires an annual inspection. “I want to make sure you’re okay,” she says on the drive to Elizabeth City.
In the waiting room, I open the copy of Absalom, Absalom! Mr.Meeks gave me the day after I told him about the acceptance. The book is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen: a dark red hardback with thick, creamy pages and a darker red ribbon for a bookmark. He’s warned me it’s more difficult than The Sound and the Fury, and he’s right. I keep getting lost in the long, hot, still afternoon of the first two sentences. The third sentence is easier, and makes sense: Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish.
Beside me, my mother scratches blue letters into the newsprint squares of a crossword puzzle—part of her plan to not turn into her mother. When my name is called, she squeezes my arm, as if wishing me luck.
“It’s great to see you again, Lila,” Dr. Maurer says with a too-big smile. I follow her to a windowless office lit by floor lamps, where she motions me toward a cushioned wicker loveseat. Her turquoise earrings swing with each turn of her head. She congratulates me, asks how I’m enjoying my senior year, what my favorite classes are, what I might major in.
I answer her innocuous questions, but like last time, I suspect there are more pressing matters we should discuss: for example, whether my mother has told her about the incident last summer when she emptied a bottle of Klonopin into her hand and cupped it over her mouth in front of me. It was late at night, and the windows over the kitchen sink were black and slick. My mother’s eyes met mine, and there was a moment of recognition when it might have occurred to her what would happen to me if she swallowed them. When she finally spat them, half-dissolved, into her palm, everything pink and sticky with saliva, she threw the mess into the sink with a jerk, as if flinging away a snakeskin. She ran her hand under the faucet and left the water running, resting her head between her forearms on the edge of the sink, and I was afraid to turn off the water, afraid to do anything that might change the direction in which she was headed. She asked me to hold her, and I draped my arm across her back. She said, It hurts so bad. I said, I know, and she turned off the faucet and faced me and snapped, with equal measures of venom and love, You don’t know. I hope you never know.
When Dr. Maurer walks me back to the waiting room, my mother leaps from her chair. “How is she?” she asks. The other people in the waiting room look up from their magazines to stare at me.
Dr. Maurer gives a thumbs-up and grins. “She’s doing great!”
I force a smile. That’s when I understand the appointment is for her. Not for me.
On the trip home, my mother asks which way the wind is blowing.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
She pushes in the lighter and rolls down her window. A brisk, sixty-mile-an-hour blast rushes in. “Is it from you to me? Or me to you?”
I check for a banner or flag. Fallow soybean fields line the road. We pass a billboard for Dirty Dick’s Crab House. “I can’t tell.” The lighter pops. “I think it’s you to me.” She digs in her purse. “Just keep us on the road,” she says.