*
At the scheduled boarding time, my phone vibrates on my desk.
“Are you getting on the plane?” my mother asks.
“I told you not to buy me a ticket.”
“I’ve got a twelve-pound turkey thawing in the fridge. What do you want me to do with it?”
“Mom, listen to me. I love you.” I press my forehead against the window and stare at the vacant sidewalk below. The cold on my forehead calms me slightly.
“Do you? Do you really?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t be—”
“Because this sure as hell doesn’t feel like love.”
“Mom, please. I’ll be home for winter break.”
“Do you want a divorce? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” A divorce is for couples, not parents and children, I think, but cannot bring myself to say out loud.
“Because I can make myself disappear if you want me to.”
“That’s not what I want.”
“You’ll never have to talk to me again.”
“Mom, I love you. Please understand that.”
My mother hangs up. I see again the wide-eyed hollow of her face above the sink, hand over her mouth to keep the pills in. Will she spit them out? Will she swallow them? I’m no longer sure which would be a relief to me.
I look up the number for the police department back home on my laptop and dial it. “Is this an emergency?” the dispatcher asks.
I think of car accidents, house fires, children drowning. “No,” I say. I explain I’m away at college and my mother has threatened to kill herself.
“Do you know if she has a weapon?”
“Pills. And she keeps a pistol in her nightstand drawer.”
“We’ll send somebody out to check on her. What’s the address?”
I recite my home address and thank her. Exhale. I lie back on Kenzie’s bedspread. Visualize the flash of blue lights seven hundred miles away. Hear the bootsteps on the porch, the knock on the door. I silence my phone and toss it aside.
When I open my eyes, I feel like I’ve slept for days. I check for missed calls, but the phone remains blank-faced and innocent, telling only the time. It’s barely after four, but already dusk. I’ve been asleep for forty minutes. Less than a therapy session. When the phone lights up in my hand, I hit my head on the underside of the bunk.
My mother, not the police department. I let it go to voicemail.
Her voice is a hiss. How dare you. A beat, as though we are speaking in real-time, and she is waiting for me to answer. I have never been so mortified in all my life.
I leave the phone on Kenzie’s bed and clamber into my own. Curled beneath the sheets, I close my eyes and hear the sliding glass door. See my mother’s silhouette emerge and lean on the deck’s wooden rail, hip cocked. The orange cherry of a cigarette burns down between her fingers. I watch her tip her ashes into the dark sour mouth of a Diet Coke can.