When I was a child my mom slept through hours as easy as a river bends, a slow winding sleep. No matter the hour she would lay her head on a lace pillow, tuck down deep into floral pink sheets that tampered light streaming through the attic window, and be still. While I would be alone. I had to be about four because I had not been to school yet. It was right after my birthday that we had moved into Grandma’s house. When my mom had finally left my father.
My father. The addict. My father, who couldn’t pay rent, who crashed Mom’s car, towed it under her name, and charged the fees to her credit card. Father. F-a-t-h-e-r. Just another name, another assortment of letters for a liar. I grew into my adulthood hating myself for continuing to love him. For thinking he might be someone different one day. I wonder if that’s what painted the walls of my mom’s dreams? Curated images of the man she thought she was seeing. The man that made us breakfast while singing off key in his boxers. The tall tower of perfect pastel light that danced with us in our apartment parking lot, who held my hand completely covered by his palm, while he unlocked the door. My father.
Often when she left me to sleep I’d sit in a tiny red chair. I’d watch a large-tube television, making sure to keep the volume just loud enough to catch every other word. I’d go outside and climb the trees in the backyard. I’d move through the house pretending I was an explorer. My Hot Wheels cars would race up and down the banisters. I’d jump the last three steps of the stairs that lead up to the attic. If several hours had gone, by I’d sit at the edge of our bed and stare at my mom’s shape through the bedding. Trace the outline of her body in the air with my hand, wondering if she were alive. Beneath the fabric, could she breathe? Was there enough oxygen in her cocoon of blankets? To focus, I would hold my breath and remain still. I would lock my eyes on the area where her chest should have been, and wait. The pressure of my own need to survive would build in my lungs. I’d see the rise of the comforter like a slow yawn, mouth opening wide, then closing. Then I, too, would breathe.
.
She didn’t tell me anything before we left him. We packed up what would fit in her rusted-out Toyota and drove away. I imagine it was raining, but I don’t really know. The feeling of leaving is what sticks the most. A surprise collapse, a sinkhole appearing in the middle of my life, where none was before. I understood we weren’t going back. What I couldn’t understand was why she slept.
I learned from medical dramas that sleep could heal the body. Comas are induced to protect the brain from further trauma. But her body had not been harmed. She hadn’t been thrown from a car window or fallen out a burning building. There were no scars on her skin, but what I didn’t know was that there were many in places she kept covered. In places she couldn’t even see.
On the third morning after the sleep started, I thought she would never rise for breakfast again. Grandma and I were in the kitchen. Her long blue nightdress kissed the floor as she moved about the cabinets, her hair in tight rollers. I always thought her skin looked peanut-butter brown like you could scrape a knife across her forearm and spread it on toast. I had slept in one of my father’s black T-shirts, perfumed in pine and Irish Spring soap.
“June, baby girl, do you want sausage?” she asked.
“Bacon,” I answered.
“Oatmeal?”
“No,” I said to my lap.
“Eggs with cheese?”
Her questions stopped. I looked up. Mom was standing in the kitchen doorway.
“She’s got cereal. I bought it before we, um, well, before we got here.” She said this to the peeling yellow-painted walls. To the cracked white ceiling, the gray tiled floor. Sleep marked her face. Deep circling rings under her eyes like a redwood cut through the core.
I watched her gather the simple ingredients even after Grandma insisted on making us breakfast. Mom’s hair was loosely clipped to the back of her head. She moved around the kitchen in her tattered Lakers jersey, nodding and saying it wasn’t a problem. I wanted to touch the loose hairs at the nape of her neck like she’d do for me when I was sick. Instead, I looked at my small hands and my feet not even long enough to touch the kitchen floor, useless. I didn’t see it happen, but the sound drew my eyes to the floor. Against the gray tile were pieces of a white ceramic bowl.
“I’m just tired,” she admitted. She apologized. But I thought, how could that be? After days of rest, a person shouldn’t feel sleepy anymore. This had to be something else. Grandma swept the mess away while Mom left the kitchen. I watched her shadow darken even as the morning light shone through the open windows. I missed her in a way I never had, felt a darkness of my own settle. Grandma poured me a bowl of cereal before she left to check on Mom. I tried to shake off the chill that rolled through me, but it stayed. I fought back at the feeling to nap, afraid of what might happen if I let sleep take me.
.
The closest I felt to Mom in those days was during bath time. The water would be so hot that my skin would tingle as she lowered me into the tub. Once my feet had gotten used to the heat I would kneel, then sit, then lie on my back to wet my hair. Mom knelt next to the tub, her head on the porcelain edge, possibly daydreaming. She’d skim her fingers across the water-like tadpoles. After I had submerged my entire body, I’d stand. She was so tender. The washcloth moving across my legs, my arms, my pot-belly stomach that she would poke, and I would laugh, her half smile was enough in that moment. After washing my tightly curled hair, she would pour a cup of water over my head, my eyes closed tight. The streams of warmth felt like fingers brushing down my face over and over. Once she was done, still with my eyes closed, she would wrap me in a towel. She’d take me from the tub into her lap. While she sat on the lid of the toilet, she would hold me close to her body.
I’d look up at her faraway face and say, “I love you.”
“I love you too,” she whispered.
These moments were rare. Eventually, bathing me would come less frequent, sleep consuming her, undercurrents of sorrow pulling her beneath the pain. It diverged from the middle, where a hollow ache of hunger sat, where the melancholy had infected her the most.
.
There’s this story my mom tells me. She always starts by asking, do you remember when your father took you? And each time, I tell her no. When I was young, he used to take me places all the time. He would take me to the park to play in the trees. We would go to a pond in the winter and skip rocks across the surface, trying to find a soft spot to take them beneath the water. But Mom was not referring to any of that. She was asking about the time he took me all day without telling her. Back before she left him for good. When cell phones were a luxury that most people couldn’t afford. He hadn’t told her where we were going. He left while she was at work. Mom called his family and hers. No one knew where we were. She said that when he finally came home she was mortified. She said, “Your face was dirty, there was a hole in your white stockings, and you smelled like mildew. I slapped him across the face and took you to my chest to hold you. I could have killed him right there, but I was just so relieved. June, I thought you would never come home. I told him he would never take you again, ever. You were so young, but you knew that something hadn’t been right. Before he took you, you would get up with him and make breakfast, dance with him in your PJs before bedtime . . . you stopped doing that for weeks, and then it was like you forgot what happened. But not me, I never did.”
Mom tells me this story every chance she gets, I think, hoping I will remember something from that day. Sometimes, in my mind, I call up pretend people, tall figures. Dark shades of nondescript human outlines, like cutout paper dolls, but all imagined.
.
My grandma called Aunt Victoria when Mom stopped eating consistently. Her son, Jacob, my cousin, came with her. I didn’t particularly like him, but it was a relief to have company after weeks of being alone. Jacob’s thick round glasses and curly hair tickled my face as he whispered his new game in my ear.
“Let’s play spy. My mom and your mom are the enemies. So we have to follow them, and you’ll have to follow me.”
I nodded with as much interest as a fish in a glass bowl. The screen door whined open. I could hear voices. We jogged to the bathroom across the hall from the attic.
“Victoria, you don’t have to keep telling me over and over again,” Mom said.
She and Aunt Victoria went to the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened. Glasses of beer clinked, echoing through the house. I pointed upstairs to the attic. Jacob shook his head and motioned for me to stay. I didn’t. Tiptoeing across the front room, I took the stairs two at a time, avoiding the loose floorboards. Jacob seemed to press on every creak and crack. I ushered him into the closet. Left it cracked so that we could still see our parents. The dark pressed its hand on my back. I bit back fear with my teeth. Their voices grew closer.
“He said he would go to rehab, get better, and I believed him for so long, too long,” my mom said. Her voice was soft, as if sandpaper had taken all her edges and smoothed her out. Through the tiny slit in the closet door, I saw them sit in the bed with their knees touching. I watched the lean in their backs and the bend of their legs. Sisterhood reached between them, coils of love searching for comfort.
“Honey, we all fall for the wrong people. My psychic told me that it’s the way the world keeps balanced. The bad has to happen so the good can happen too,” Victoria said.
“No one needs a psychic to tell them that,” Mom snapped.
Aunt Victoria pursed her lips, annoyed. Mom put her head in her hands. Jacob poked me in the back. I swatted his hand away, also annoyed, but then I saw it, on the bed my mom’s shadow grew darker, deepening the line of her entire body. It stretched and snapped back and forth with the movement of her hands.
“Do you see that?” I whispered to Jacob.
“I can barely see anything with your head in the way,” he whispered back. I kneeled and pointed to the bed. Barely notable in the dark closet was the shrug of his shoulders. I turned back to the bed, but the light from the attic window shone only on the sheets.
“I just don’t understand how I didn’t notice everything from the start.” Mom’s eyes were wet when she looked up. It made my own sting.
I’d seen my mother cry before then. Sort of, if you count movies and small infants at the mall. But this cry was framed with tight skin bunched at the edges with grief. I didn’t want to watch anymore. I slid to the back of the closet and waited for them to leave the room. Jacob left me there. Closed the closet door completely. I thought eventually I would panic, but I sat still among the musty coats and old Christmas wrapping paper. The dark no longer frightened me.
.
For a while I thought Dad would come for us. That he would knock on the door wearing his favorite green flannel I picked out for his birthday. He’d take us back home, then Mom would stay awake all day again. It didn’t take long for me to realize that wasn’t going to happen. He never called, or if he did, he never asked to speak to me. I was forgotten in the midst of the broken pieces of their life. Grandma did her best, but she was busy trying to help Mom. I think they thought I was too young to understand. But I did understand, I saw everything. Dad was gone. I felt it when his voice became more like a recording in my head. When the smell of his soap evaporated into generic brand detergent, his face only captured on a picture I kept hidden from Mom in my sock drawer. On some level, even then, I knew I had to act ok, so everyone else could heal.
.
I counted to three and jumped. My glee quickly turned into panic when I slipped and hit my knee on the hardwood. I froze. I had made too much noise jumping down the stairs. The thump shook the walls. The pain of hitting my knee was secondary to the fear of waking up Mom. It happened only a few times before. The threat always a tight arm grab accompanied by a tired, but tense, “I’ll make you sleep too.” I didn’t want that sleep, not her long, despondent stillness that went on until the sun either rose or dipped entirely into the ground.
The sound of her feet striking the attic floor radiated irritation. It echoed outward, following her footsteps down the stairs. She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the bed. I cried, my back against the wall pleading to be let back to my own pleasures, my own seclusion. “If I wake up and you aren’t here, I will spank you. That’s a promise,” she said from within her cocoon of fabric.
My sobs eventually slowed to hiccup-like sniffling. It was still so bright outside. The light beamed into the room so brilliantly that I couldn’t see what was beyond the window. The attic was somehow covered in its own silhouette ; night had made its home here. I let the tears dry to my skin. The streaks would stand out white and chalky on my cheeks. I wanted her to see what she had done, that the closest my eyes would get to her dark rings were the tears stained on my face. I stiffened at the thought of being dragged into her slumber. Then, in slow quakes, defiance gripped my muscles. Disobedience, sluggish and thick, moved my back away from the wall. Choking down a panicked breath, I moved from under the cover. Breaking off my skin was a feeling like the snap of weak rubber bands. I was afraid. With my eyes low, I crawled carefully to avoid my mother’s body curled tight. If she woke up, I wanted to at the very least make it to the end of the bed.
I felt the cool wood floor on my toes, then on the balls of my feet. I looked up to see her sleeping. Every groan of the floorboards pushed me forward until my bare feet touched the concrete outside the front door.
The day was warm with summer, the air blithe, playing with my braided hair. The grass, somehow still wet with dew, cooled my feet warmed by the concrete. I picked up fuzzy white dandelions and blew them like they were eyelashes, wishing. I blew them stronger than birthday candles, softer than a prayer. I watched them fly like unstrung balloons. Some went to the sky, lost in blue, others floated back to the lawn, but most met their end on the windshield of a bright yellow pickup truck. Watching those made my knees buckle, sad because now I knew even the wind could take the wrong turn.
Heading back inside, I tripped over an uneven piece of concrete and slid across the gravel. Bits of beige and black stuck to my legs with bright reds and peeled brown skin. I limped back to the attic. I pulled myself into the bed. The mattress cradled me in cotton. Exhaustion felt native. My body failed to resist. I had forgotten what lay next to my mother cradled in the dark of her body. Bands seemed to tighten around me like the legs of a dying insect. I felt sleep on the cusp, fading my conscious thoughts to black.
.
I was aware of a tickle. It spread down my spine looping around the shelf of each rib. The area behind my eyelids had become a solid space, an eclipsed landscape. There was no sky. There were no trees. I felt the weight of myself. I saw the back of my mother’s body shrouded in black smoke at a great distance.
June.
She walked backward toward me. The back of her head acted as a new face, but distance never changed, pushed back by slabs of concrete every inch gained lost . So I walked forward. Mom. Tar lashed around my legs, making each step impossible. By the time I was an arm’s reach away from her heels, my stomach was flesh with the ground. The tar worked its way like vines across my limbs. My fingernails broke, bloody with the effort of pulling myself closer and closer. I opened my mouth to shout her name. The letters bulged in my throat, impeding my breath. With one last push, I brushed the bare skin of her ankle.
.
I awoke from sleep blinking back the fatigue. My eyes formed the shapes of the attic and I saw Mom praying on her knees beside the bed. I could not see her face. She was pleading for God to help her let go of the things that she could not control and the wisdom to know the difference. I held my breath to keep quiet. Desperately I wanted to tell her that I hurt, too, but I knew she was not really there. That she would not understand when her pain had taken her so far from me. Resentment bubbled up in my stomach acid like baking soda to vinegar. This person was not my mom. I rolled over, unable to watch anymore. The black that hid her face was too accurate a representation of the person who lived in daylight.
.
In moments alone when silence feels heavy, I think about those days, and how that could be me. I think of the dream. Of the dried blood I found under my fingernails the next morning. I fight at the tiredness growing in my bones, pushing through long days. Sleep is a constant reminder that I could become a stranger to my own life.
When my mom calls, we never talk extensively about that time. A great deal of unresolved resentment closes me off. But one day I had to know. Exhausted with my head in my free hand, I had to know if she knew that sorrow could take her away. If she knew that the fabric of her life could collapse with one strong pull. If she ever thought it could happen again. Could she sleep like that again?
She let the air on the line thicken. I waited for the image, called up from my mind and ghosted in spreading smoke, of her back, of the tar spreading, of bloody nails, of my throat, of the light, of the growing shadow. Her voice cut through the memories and halted the surge of dread in my chest.
Simply, she said, “Some parts of ourselves remain unknown until they aren’t.”
True enough, but it didn’t help ease my thoughts about sleep. After we hung up, I imagined her in the kitchen or standing on her back porch. Sitting at her small dining-room table. Swinging in the hammock I put up in her backyard, anywhere, anywhere but her bedroom.
Jamiece Adams is a 2019 Lambda Literary fellow and teacher based in Chicago. She earned her MFA in fiction at Columbia College Chicago. Recently she worked on a multidisciplinary project, Take Care, which examined the roles of intimacy and correspondence, her poem is featured in the limited-edition artist book. Currently, she’s working on a collection of short stories. Some of these pieces have been published in Hair Trigger, Rabbit: Nonfiction Poetry Journal, The Lindenwood Review, and forthcoming in the 2019 Lambda Literary Anthology of Emerging LGBTQ+ writers.
