Page 76 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“Don’t be silly.”

Zoe disappears down the hallway, returning a minute later with a handful of damp rags and pouches of alcohol wipes. I reach for her supplies, but she shakes her head and sits on the hardwood floor. She wraps her hand in a rag and, slowly, gently, with the care my mother should have tended my wounds with, wipes away my bloodstains. The wound itself looks like something left behind from the jaws of a rabid animal, with half a dozen shallow, ragged cuts surrounding one that runs longer and deeper than the rest. The shallow ones must have been the splinters. The deep one, I can only assume, was from a nail. It missed my solar system tattoo by centimeters.

My dress is also ripped along the hem. Something else I’ve ruined for Sara.

She doesn’t warn me before the alcohol wipe. I inhale through my teeth and yank my leg away. “Jesus, Zoe!”

“It hurts less if you don’t know it’s coming.”

“Debatable.”

“Give me your leg again.”

I do. I curl my nails into the cushion when she reapplies the alcohol wipe. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?”

“I can put two and two together.”

“He wouldn’t let me see Grace.”

“Of course not,” she says. “How can he have iron-fisted control over her if he lets her have a relationship with someone who escaped that house?”

“I need to talk to her. I have this feeling—” I stop myself. It would unburden me to share my fear with someone else, but the stakes are too high. This is not Grace withholding details from the police. This is not a minor infraction or a well-meaning hiccup. This is catastrophic, and no one else can know, at least not until I’m sure.

“You have what feeling?”

“Nothing,” I tell her. “The usual horrible feelings I have when I think about my father.”

Zoe pastes bandage after bandage over my wounds, and when she’s done and she goes to the kitchen to wash her hands, only one thought pours through my head.Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me.

But she comes back. She reclines on her chaise lounge and drapes her porcelain legs over the top of the seat. Her lavender baby tee rides up above her ribs. The beauty mark beneath her breast winks at me, and she smiles coyly when she catches me admiring her. “What are you thinking about?” Zoe asks.

“My mother.”

“What about her?”

“How I’ll never speak to her again.”

“My parents aren’t dead, but they may as well be,” she says. “We haven’t spoken in thirteen years. They aren’t allowed to speak to me since I was disfellowshipped. Even if we were all in the same room, they’d act like I wasn’t there. Anyway, once I went to college, I used to spend every second hoping they’d call so I could hear their voices again, just be reminded we lived on the same planet, but they never did. I spent years waiting for the phone to ring, and then one night, I was getting in bed and I realized I didn’t think of the phone at all. All this to say: one day the wanting just goes away.”

I clutch a throw pillow to my chest, my fingers dancing along its intricate embroidery. I find a pattern that feels like the letterE, thenL, thenI, so on, so forth.Elissa.The wanting is all I have left of my mother. The void she left behind and everything I hoped would fix it. “You know she called me five times the day she died? I didn’t answer. It’d been so long, I didn’t even recognize her phone number.”

“Providence, you couldn’t have known any of this would happen.”

“Even if she had nothing to say to me, I would know nothing had changed between us. That would have been closure in itself. Now I have to wonder for the rest of my life if she had a change of heart.”

She knows better than to trot out a platitude about how my mother loved me or remind me of the unconditional love a mother has for her daughter. “What would you say to her?”

“I keep asking myself and coming up empty. Maybe it means there isn’t anything for me to say.”

“We always have one last thing to say.”

But I don’t think I do, and that’s because it doesn’t feel like she is really gone. My mother lives inside of me. She will forever be within me. There is no end to our story. She is my lungs and my beating heart. Without her, I cannot breathe. I cannot exist.There is no Providence without Elissa. She is Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, my beginning and my end.

Things I understand to be inevitable: taxes, heartbreak, the heat death of the universe. When Zoe invites me to her third-floor bedroom for a shower and a change of clothes, we begin to feel inevitable too. Something between us shifts, the way the air feels distended just before rain. You know what’s coming. All there is to do now is wait for the heavens to split apart.

The walls here are pine green and accented with ornamental moldings, the bed vast enough to drown in. Propped between pillows is the cherished stuffed puppy she’s had since she was a baby. He resembled a golden retriever once upon a time, but his yellow fur has turned gray, and the stitches of his smile have come loose. She relocates him to the wingback chair on the far side of the room, his arms and legs crossed demurely upon his throne.

She has matching pajama sets in every color of the rainbow. My hair is still wet from the shower as I hunt for anything that might fit me (I’ve always been noticeably thicker than Zoe). Meanwhile, she preens in her full-length mirror. Her hair, free from its braids, tumbles down her back in a glossy waterfall of blonde. I’m certain there are men who vote for her just because she’s beautiful and single. How tantalizing to think that you have a chance, however slim, to fuck your congresswoman.

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