Chapter 2. Feb 28 (Patreon)

two

We live in an enormous white house. Our grandmother's house. There's a kitchen with a normal stove and a wood stove. There's a dining room with a grandmother clock. GrandMOTHER! An office with a window that faces the ocean. There's a living room that curves around the corner. There's a storage area my grandmother calls the veranda. And upstairs there's six bedrooms.

There's a storage room with a door in the floor. Not a trap door, either. A real door, with a knob and everything. You open it up, and there are the stairs. They lead down to nothing, except a small sliding board that opens out behind the shoe rack. A secret exit.

There's a cellar with a mud floor and salamanders with fat yellow spots. There's a little hallway into the garage. Even the garage has two floors. There are creepy wooden toys up there from god knows how long ago. All this to explore, and my mother stays locked in her room.

After our father's funeral, we came back to the giant, beautiful house. And everyone went back to their rooms. Simon and I got out of our funeral clothes, and climbed into our bunks. The top bunk is mine.

We just stayed there. It was the middle of the afternoon, and we just stayed in our bunk beds, waiting. Finally, Simon climbed out of his bed and opened the closet. He pulled out the laptop, and looked up at me. He looked even smaller from up there.

"Is this okay?" he said.

I nodded.

And he played a looping mix of recordings. Our father's voice. I climbed down the ladder and sat beside him against the wall. I was just starting to fall asleep when I heard the tap against the door.

It was our mother, still in her funeral clothes. Her eyes were swollen like she had been crying, but there was no expression on her face at all. It felt like she didn't even really see me.

"Sunday," she said. "Good. Is Simon here?"

He was. He was beside me now.

"A long time ago, I wrote each of you a letter. When you were little. I wanted you to understand. I don't know what else to do with them so." She handed us each a letter. Mine was in a beat up postal envelope, but Simon's looked like a birthday card. She stood there a second longer, then nodded. "Okay." she said. And she closed the door from the outside. She closed our own door on us.

Simon was already reading his letter. I looked down at mine. Who writes a letter to a baby? I opened it. It was handwritten.

-

To my unborn daughter,

You’re quiet tonight. I love the quiet. I hate the noise. The noise and the people everywhere out there in the world, a blanket of harsh light that strangers try to throw over your head. I hope you don't inherit that from me. The fear of people. Of leaving the house.

I hope you don't have the certainty that I have that I will kill myself one day. All this noise and fear and light. It helps to walk. To walk outside in the darkness, when nobody is around. It helps to wrap my head in a towel so tight that my ears and my eyes are safe. If you are born afraid, then walk. When you walk you can be nothing at all. You can just lose yourself in the trees and the leaves and the water and the sky.

I hate it here, in the city. But your father's job is here. My job is here. Fluorescent lights. Cubicles. Clattering keyboards. At least the computers make sense. They're loud, but they fit together like puzzle pieces.

But the quiet. Oh the quiet. The quiet is water slowly filling up a room. You don’t know you’re drowned until you’re drowned. The quiet is the certainty in my mind. Will you ever read this? Do you have a certainty? I used to hate mine. I spent years terrified, seeing doctor after doctor. But now I know it is just me. And that’s ok. You can't cure someone of their self.

I don’t want to live. You aren’t born yet, so you don’t know what it's like. Life. It just goes on and on. Everyone around me wants to live. They have their troubles, and disasters, and they keep on living. Meanwhile, my life is quiet. I have no scars. All I have is this certainty in me, that I am going to kill myself.

But not yet. No, it turns out that I am going to be a mother. I do not want to be a mother, I want to be dead. But your father is so happy. Everyone is so happy, and I am the one who is sick. Wrong. I'm the one who is wrong.

So I think of things to do instead of killing myself. That is my job now. Not killing myself. Clean the whole house. Drive to visit friends for an afternoon. Take a walk. Sit alone in a coffee shop for two hours. Buy a book, so that tomorrow I can return the book. Take a long walk. Buy a dress so that tomorrow I can return the dress. Go and watch the waves crash on the beach. Imagine sitting on the ocean floor.

Write my unborn daughter a letter.

Your mother

-

I read it again. I know she wanted me to understand something. But all I could see was "I don't want to be a mother." She wanted to kill herself, and then I came along and ruined her plan. I read it again. I didn't understand. I knew she didn't like crowds. Or noise. Or light. We used to joke she was a vampire. A computer programming vampire. But she wasn't a vampire. She was a prisoner. She wanted to go and I came along like a prison cell. I was…

My thoughts stopped making sense, and I just sat down. I didn't know what to do with the letter. With the information. Sit alone in a coffee shop for two hours. I thought about the walks she took with Simon, hour long walks to get coffee. Pastries. To get away from the hospital. The lights and noise.

Beside me, Simon was sitting down, too. He was reading his letter again. He didn't look confused or upset, like I must have. He just looked sad.

I felt like I should reach out and show him my letter. Like we should exchange letters and know everything. Maybe his letter would explain mine, like the key to a secret code. Or maybe mine would explain his. But Simon didn't hand me his letter. And I didn't offer mine. We climbed back up to our bunks in silence, and we waited for dinner.

Our mother was not at the dinner table. There was no place set for her. Simon and I sat in silence, and Frank smiled and started dishing out the potato salad.

"Your mom's had a hard day," he said. "We all have. I know. But she's not gonna join us for dinner tonight. I'll bring her a plate later on, though. Don't worry. She won't go hungry!"

It was halfway through the meal before I noticed that I wasn't talking. I was nodding, and making eye contact, and passing the chicken. I was there. I was part of the family. But I wasn't talking. The only reason I noticed was because uncle Jonah asked me directly.

"You're quiet, Sunday," he said. "It's okay if you need to leave. To be on your own."

I didn't try to answer.

I don't know how to describe this.

I could not talk. But I didn't try. I didn't try and fail. I didn't open my mouth and nothing came out. I just looked at my uncle and didn't try to answer. Like the part of me that wanted to speak was gone.

In the end I just kept pointing at my mouth and shaking my head no. Is your throat sore? Have you lost your voice? And so on. In the end my grandmother made me a honey tea, and Simon and I sat in silence in front of the TV. After a while he laid his head on my lap and fell asleep. I sat with my cold tea and looked at the television without really seeing it. I imagined my mother, fat with a baby. Fat with me. I imagined her, round and wobbling, climbing up on a stool and sadly unfastening a noose from the rafter.

Putting all her knives and pills in a wicker basket lined with baby blankets, and crying while they floated away down a river. Stupid. Stupid selfish images that made no sense. What was I supposed to think. She wrote that letter before I was even born. She didn't even know me.

And there I was, doing it again. She gave me that letter because she wanted someone to see her. To see that part of her. She wrote it when she felt trapped and alone.

I nudged Simon awake, and we climbed the stairs to go to bed. I took out my letter and I read it again. I didn't read it like it was a letter to me. I read it like it was from my mother. It wasn't about me. It was about her. I read it again, and then I read it again.

That was when I wanted to show Simon. I wanted him to see her, too. I wanted him to understand her better, the way I felt like I did now. I climbed down to the floor, and sat looking at him, the letter open in my lap. He didn't want to climb out of bed. He didn't want to read my letter. I understood, but I sat there anyway. This was our chance to finally see her, the way we finally saw our father.

He climbed down to the floor beside me, and took the letter out of my hands.

He read for a long time, with no expression. And then there was a bit of sadness in his face. He folded the letter and put it back in its battered envelope. Then he got up and took his own letter out from under his pillow and put it on the floor in front of me.

-

Dear Simon,

Today you said, “Mama” for the first time. Your father was so excited. I remember when your sister first said, "Mama." I remember because I felt sick. I felt like she had reached inside of me and taken hold of my name, and yanked it out, stuffing the wound with 'Mama.'

But then today, you reached up your beautiful arms and your eyes shone, and you said, “Mama.” And I realized there was still a part of my name hiding inside of me. Small, and free. Until today. When you reached in and wrapped your chubby little fingers around its throat. You tore it from my body to make more room for 'Mama.'

I know it isn’t your fault. Nothing is anybody’s fault.

Your mother.

-

When I was done reading, I folded the letter back up, and put it into the envelope. I didn't know how to see her in that letter. I didn't know how to see her. It was just pain and fear and lashing out.

Had we really done those terrible things to our mother? We never meant to. But she was hurt. We never meant to hurt her, but we did. We never meant to trap her. But we did. She was hurt and she was trapped.

The sick pain inside her all these years didn't care if we meant to do it or not.

-