THE POLICE OFFICER’S body goes blurry, then sharpens again.
I don’t stare at him directly. I can’t really focus on one thing in this room, but when I do look, his face shimmers.
His badge, the rectangular nameplate, his tie clip? All the little metal details on his chest ripple and shine like loose silver change at the bottom of a fountain. Nothing about him appears solid. Nothing about him feels real.
I don’t think about that, though. I can’t.
Besides, everything looks otherworldly when you’ve been crying for three hours straight.
The police officer and nurse brought me and my father into a tiny mint-green room. Now they sit on the other side of the table. They say they are “explaining the situation” to us. These people don’t feel real, but neither does “the situation” they keep explaining.
I don’t cry for my mother’s death. Or for myself. I cry because these strangers in the hospital—the nurse, the doctor, the police officer—don’t know my mother, and yet they were closest to her when she died. And when your people die, you have to listen to strangers speak your nightmare into existence.
“We found her on Route 70 around eight,” the police officer says. The air conditioner kicks on. The sharp scents of hospital-grade hand soap and floor cleaner blow across our faces.
I listen to these people I don’t know use the past tense about my mother, the person who brought me into this world and created my present. They are past-tensing my heart—my whole beating, bleeding, torn heart—right in front of me.
It is a violation.
These uniformed strangers carve me open with their words, but they are just doing their jobs. I can’t scream at people who are just doing their jobs, can I?
I want to.
My father sits in a vinyl padded chair. It creaks when he leans forward to read paragraphs of fine print on pieces of paper. Where did this paperwork come from? Who has paperwork on hand for my mother’s death? Why are they ready when I am not ready?
My father asks questions, signs his name, blinks, breathes, nods. I wonder how he is functioning. My mother’s life has stopped. Shouldn’t everything and everyone stop living too?
She was crushed inside our family sedan, body half-crumpled under the dashboard after a hit-and-run. She was alone until some nice, probably frightened Good Samaritan saw her overturned car on the side of the road.
Bloodred twine connects the final words I said to my mother—last night, in anger—to another night in February. A night when my best friend, Alice, and I, sitting together in the basement of her parents’ split-level home, decided UNC-Chapel Hill’s Early College Program was our dream. Bright high school students can earn college credit at Carolina over the course of two years, experience life in the dorms, and become independent. At least, that’s what the brochure said. For Alice and me, Early College was two minority girls’ ticket out of a small town in rural North Carolina. For us, Early College meant bigger ideas and classrooms—and adventure. We’d filled out our applications together. Marched right into the Bentonville post office after school together. Dropped the envelopes in the chute together. If we could get into EC, we could leave Bentonville High and move to a university dorm four hours away from home—and away from parents who held us so tight that sometimes we couldn’t breathe.
A decade before I was born, my mother was an undergraduate at Carolina. A burgeoning scientist. I’d heard the stories for years. Seen the framed photos of elaborate chemistry experiments: beakers and glass pipettes; protective goggles resting across her high cheekbones. It was her fault, really, for planting the idea in my mind. That’s what I’d told myself, anyway.
Our letters came yesterday. Alice’s parents knew she was applying. They’d beamed like they were the ones who’d been accepted.
I knew it wouldn’t go that way for me; I’d applied behind my mother’s back, certain that once I got in, once I had that letter, she’d let go of her need to keep me close. I’d handed her the letter on blue-and-white Carolina stationery, grinned like it was a trophy.
I’d never seen her so angry.
My brain doesn’t accept where my body is sitting. It catalogs the last thirty-six hours in an attempt to find the how of this hospital room.
Last night: she’d roared about trust and safety and not rushing to grow up. I’d screamed about unfairness, about what I’d earned, and how I needed to get away from dirt roads.