Free Heart of Glass by Wendy Lawless

they hung in pretty gold, oval frames.
    â€œUhhhh,” I croaked, bending over and clutching my stomach as the razor-winged butterflies escaped from their cage inside me.
    â€œI can sell them with or without the frames—that’s entirely up to you.”
    I could see her, sitting in her little flat, perched on the olive-green velvet chair with the pretty ornate carved legs, flicking her ash into a cloisonné ashtray on the marble-topped side table next to her.
    â€œI’ll telephone you later in the week, so we can negotiate a price. Good-bye.”
    She had such a talent for making me feel small, unloved, and unimportant. God, I hated her.
    Michael pushed the erase button, Mother’s message sounded like the high-speed voice of a chipmunk while it played backward, before disappearing.
    â€œJesus, your mom is a fucking nutcase. What’s she going to do? Burn your stuff on the front lawn?”
    â€œWell, yeah . . . I mean, that’s probably on her list of options.” I suddenly imagined driving the Dart up to Ridgefield and staking out Mother’s condo. Maybe if I waited for her to go out, I could break in through a window or a back door and get some of my things. Or maybe I could hire someone to break in? Where did thugs for hire hang out in cutesy, little commuter towns? I mentioned this to Michael.
    He shook his head. “Not a good idea.”
    Rats, I thought. Of course he was right. I didn’t care so much about my stuff, just that she was using it as a way to get to me in a way that only she could. She still made me doubt myself, wonder if I really was the ungrateful child she’d told me I was when I was growing up. Walking away from her hadn’t resolved the feelings that she brought up in me. Those emotions weren’t just going to disappear overnight now thatI had left her behind. In a way, I was still there, still in the relationship with her. Somehow wishing it were different, wishing I had a mother who could love me. I thought I’d made my getaway—but I was still in the shit.
    Mother didn’t call back that week or the next. Maybe she was dancing around a pile of my burning books and clothes or sticking pins in a voodoo doll of me—I didn’t care—I was glad for the reprieve, however temporary. Since her call, I had been having nightmares and tremendous anxiety. Taking advantage of my student health plan, I went to see a shrink named Lopez at the NYU clinic a few times. She was tall and thin, with dark, lustrous hair and café-au-lait skin. She dressed elegantly, exclusively in camel and black. Always wearing two-tone-colored clothes struck me as odd, but she consistently looked fabulous, and she was a shrink, right? We all had our little quirks. She lived in an airy, light-filled apartment with windows that looked out on Washington Square Park. She’d sit in an Eames chair while I blathered on about my problems.
    I told her about my recent hideous nightmares, which were always about being trapped at night in a glass case or being lost in a room full of taxidermic animals, like a sort of freaky natural-history museum with all the lights out. It was dark, and sinister, with terrifying, twisted faces surrounding me like the opening-credit sequence from Rod Serling’s seventies TV show Night Gallery .
    â€œWell,” Dr. Lopez said in her calm, low voice, “you’re clearly under a great deal of stress—the dreams are a manifestation of your fears. Your mother is a trigger. The next time she calls you and you pick up the phone, try instructing her to be civil. If that doesn’t work, simply inform her you are ending the conversation. Then put the receiver down.” Dr. Lopez recrossed her legs and pulled gently at the hem of her beige wool skirt.
    â€œYou mean hang up on her?” I realized that as I was saying this, my eyes were bugging out.
    â€œBut, you see, you are not hanging up on her.