Free One of Us by Tawni O’Dell Page B

respond. She doesn’t look at me.
    I walk over, give her limp body a hug, and hold out the cupcakes to her. My heart sinks as I remember how she used to take to her bed leaving my dad and me to fend for ourselves for days at a time. Her condition was so eerily complete and alien, she even spooked my dad into acceptance. The shouting I expected to hear never came. He’d come out of their bedroom, silent and uneasy. Sometimes he wouldn’t check on her at all, content to take my word for it that she was “sad,” and he’d sleep on the couch. I think he was afraid she might be contagious.
    Please be okay, I silently beg her.
    She smiles at the cupcakes and relief washes over me. She opens the package and takes a yellow one for herself.
    “Dawnyelle’s favorite color,” she tells me.
    Dawnyelle was an unwed teenage pregnant schizophrenic. Mom immediately knitted her a yellow hat called “hope” upon her arrival at White Hospital, then set to work on a blanket for her unborn baby, who Mom told me in a whisper was going to be a “half orphan.”
    This was well over a year ago. I have no idea what happened to either of them and I don’t have the energy to navigate Mom’s explanation if I were to ask.
    “How are you?” I ask her instead.
    “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be fine?”
    “No reason. We’re supposed to get more snow,” I say, beginning the careful small talk.
    “I remember when you were little we had snow all the time for Thanksgiving,” she says.
    Against my will my mind drifts back to my childhood again, to Thanksgiving days spent at the prison. It was one of the few times out of the year when children were allowed to have physical visits with their moms. After our strip searches, we were led to a room with sets of plastic tables and chairs to spend fifteen uninterrupted minutes with our mothers before they were taken to the cafeteria to poke listlessly at white slices of turkey-flavored mystery meat topped with gelatinous globs of snot-colored gravy.
    I’d crawl into her lap and she’d stroke my hair and hold me while I watched snowflakes fall softly in my mind and imagine what it would be like to build a snowman with her or have her pull me on a sled or have her waiting in the kitchen holding a cup of hot chocolate when I got home after playing with the friends I didn’t have, but I also knew those times would be fraught with anxiety for me, possible precursors to disaster. I’d be forced to dig even deeper into my stores of fantasies about having a normal mom to come up with something truly comforting, but once I got there those times with her were warm and safe until I’d suddenly remember the truth, and as much as I feared my father’s home, I wanted to go back there. Being snuggled up against mymother with her arms around me was somehow worse than my dad coming at me with his rage. With him I felt the fleeting panic of a cornered animal, but with her I felt the permanent agony of the obliteration of my nest.
    “It’s January, Mom. Thanksgiving was over a long time ago.”
    “I know that. I didn’t say it was Thanksgiving now. I was remembering Thanksgiving. Everyone thinks I’m stupid.”
    “No one thinks you’re stupid.”
    “I’m very smart.”
    “I know you are.”
    She finishes her cupcake and brushes the crumbs off her fingers.
    “Can you get me my mirror?”
    One of her few cherished possessions is a cheap silver hand mirror that appeared among her belongings after one of her arrests. Tommy assumes she stole it.
    I open her top dresser drawer and can’t help noticing a work sheet from one of the hospital support groups she attends called Lifestyle Choices. She’s just begun to fill it out. Under short-term goals, she has listed: buy a car, purge evil, hem striped skirt, get out more. Her long-term goal is gardening.
    I give her the mirror. She eagerly takes it from me and gazes intently at her reflection.
    “I’m getting old.”
    “You look great.”
    “I guess I am