Free The Blue Girl by Laurie Foos

chair, bodily picks me up, forcefully even, and shoves me back into my life. But then I smell the vanilla and the sweetness, and I know that she’s out there waiting for me, for us, and that again we’ll go and feed her, feed her our pain and our secrets along with the moon pies, and she’ll take it all in and take it all away.
    I lean over the table and kiss Rebecca on the top of the head—even her scalp shines—and I say, Thank God for you, Rebecca, thank God .
    She looks over at her brother with his face pressed up against the tiny television and wipes a crumb away from her mouth.
    Thank God for what, Mom? she says, and then, under her breath, she mutters, Jesus .
    Just thank God, is all , I say. That’s it. Just thank God. Can’t anyone thank God anymore?
    Ethan throws his head back and laughs a teeth-chattering laugh, and Rebecca says, Not in this house .
    She smiles at Ethan, but when she gets up to rinse her plate, she says, Speaking of God, the goddamned house stinks of vanilla .
    I say, You’re spending too much time with Greg .
    She doesn’t deny it. She likes him. I’ve seen the looks, the sideways glances, the brushing up against her. I remember how it was. I was young and pretty—but not as pretty as Rebecca. All summer I watched my daughter become prettier until one day, it seemed, she moved from pretty to beautiful. I was pretty as a girl, but not beautiful, not like my own mother. Never beautiful. Sometimes I find myself wishing Rebecca were less beautiful. I think how happy my mother would be to see Rebecca now, how my mother always hoped I’d be beautiful. There is always something to strive for , my mother would say as she applied mascara and lipstick. Anyone can be better . It might be easier for Rebecca, though, if she were simply pretty. She’d have less to lose, fewer dreams to hold on to. Maybe she’ll be lucky enough to remain beautiful, unlike pretty people like me, faded, without dreams.
    I move to take Ethan’s cereal bowl from him—always from the right side, never the left—and I am trying to take all three at once—bowl, napkin, and spoon—because the disruption of order is more than he can bear. Rebecca sees what I’m about to do and slides the spoon under my hand. She understands her brother in ways even I can’t, in ways that Jeff has never tried to, and although I’m grateful for her—which is why I kiss her and thank God—there aretimes I can’t stop myself from falling into the deep pit of “what if” . . . what if she has been damaged too, what if her understanding of her brother stems from having a recessive gene of her own—a permutation, they call it. What if she has early ovarian failure or her menopause comes on too soon. What if something were to happen to me or to Jeff, and Rebecca were left to take care of her brother? I take a deep breath and try to push these thoughts away while tipping the spoon into the bowl, waiting for the gap after the commercial to slide the bowl, spoon, and cereal away all at once.
    This is when my mistake happens, when I drop the bowl. Because of all the dreaming I haven’t been doing, I’ve fallen into a daydream of generations of chromosomal damage, of a daughter who may never bear children. And that’s when the white ceramic bowl falls to the white ceramic tile floor, splashing white milk that clings to the silver spoon. It is like slow motion—milk, bowl, spoon, tile, crack—and I am staring at all the whiteness, at my son with his mouth open, screaming.
    The chair falls back—also white like everything in my kitchen—as Ethan stumbles into me and begins banging with his fists and then with his head against the tile floor. Crack, crack, thud, crack.
    The sound kills me, as it always does.
    He yells again in his real voice now, the cartoon voice receding for the moment. Only when he screams and bangs and bangs and