Patrick's Mom
It was eighty-seven goddamn degrees in November, I remember that, because my shirt clung to my back with a warm, greasy anxiety as I pulled into my mother’s driveway and saw the house was black inside, windows swollen with the near-opaque dark. I sat in my car for a second, engine idling and defrost beating against the stink of body-sweat inside the Honda. The old maple out front creaked in a wind that dragged at the powerlines, and the storm that had been threatening most of the afternoon chose that moment to spit its first real splatter of rain on my windshield: the sound was wet and sudden and purposeful, like the opening arc of a well-aimed loogie.
I put my key in the ignition but didn’t turn it. She had texted, not called, even though I’d told her after Dad left that she should always, always call first if she was scared about something. The text was a single-bubble neurotic pulse: "We just lost all the power. Total darkness. Not even the streetlights. Something is off. Can you come over?"
When I lifted the phone, the background photo of her face waited, huge-eyed and constellated with the faint pocks of acne scars, mouth half-open, as if frozen in the split second after she’d said my name. The photo was a couple years old. She’d aged since, sharpened at the corners, gotten that flickering animal alertness that people carry when the world has thoroughly fucked them enough times to train a reflex.
Another flash of rain hit, and I wiped a streak of condensation from the inside of the window. If I sat here much longer, I’d lose my nerve. It worked better if I kept moving: headlong, fast, like ducking my own punch.
I shut the car off, listening for voices or movement from inside the house. None. Just the faint, mechanical burble of the sump pump through the floorboards, and the long whine of wind in the gutters. I shouldered my backpack and made for the porch. The whole block was black; even the purple Christmas lights over Mrs. Peña’s door next door hung dead in the dark, like a string of colonoscopies.
I let myself in. I didn’t bother with the old “It’s me!” shout, because she never answered anyway, and my own voice, raw and deliberate, would have felt like a trespass in the hush of the house. If I’d been normal, I might have called out her name, or checked the electrical panel, or, God forbid, gathered candles like the scene demanded. But I wasn’t here for her anxiety. I wasn’t here for any family member’s need. I was only here to feed a hunger so enormous it had cracked half the bones in my upbringing.
The tiles in the front hall were cold through my socks; even though the power was out, there was a thin flavor of ozone in the air that I attributed to the storm. The living room looked like the lair of a benzo-addled raccoon: mauled couch cushions; half-destroyed crossword books; wine glasses everywhere, some with the sediment calcified a quarter inch up the bowl. The rest of the lights in the house went, in brief geometric patterns: open laptop died a pointless death. Router blinked off, cutting off her last line to the outside. Charging cords tangled on every horizontal surface, like strangler vines left to finish the job.
I slung my backpack onto the dead zone couch and found her in the kitchen, hands wrapped around a mug of nothing. The lighter she’d found was out of fuel, so she’d taken to clicking it rhythmically, like a little campfire metronome. The baseboard heaters hissed, then ticked into silence, and she looked up when she heard me come in. No mascara, no foundation, just her bare caffeine-addled face, pupils wide like she’d taken something she shouldn’t have.
“It’s late,” She said, as if the hour was the main event here. Her voice always sounded raw after a panic, and she said nothing for a beat, then: “Did you hear anything on the news?”
“The whole block’s out,” I said, not quite answering. I let my eyes wander over her, careful not to linger, careful not to give myself away. The robe was the powder-blue terry kind hotel pools pass out in bulk, but on her it only made her look more breakable, the white skin of her collarbones jagged as a new continent.
She said, “It doesn’t feel right. There was this banging, out front. Then the lights went. I don’t know.”
I shrugged, performed helplessness. I was good at it, now: at mimicking her own uselessness, so she wouldn’t know just how efficiently I could cut her open if the urge took me. I thought about the extension cords in the junk drawer; the painter’s tape I’d spotted under the sink; the soft panic-button length of her pulse, visible on the side of her neck. Thoughts flickered, soupy and aimless, through the hungers that had come to be my only real means of navigation.
Mom handed me the mug, which tasted of nothing. She winced when our hands touched, or maybe the heat was too much for her. I said, “Want me to check the fuse box?”
A shrug, theatrical inertia. “If you want. I can’t even find the matches.”
I left her there, fingers drumming the Formica, and went through the ...