Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,91

to get there I had to complete assignments about the names of different clouds. And, well, lie about my exercise routine.

On those long weekends without Mia and surrounded by homework, sitting at our round kitchen table, long periods of staring out the windows seemed inevitable. They each had a thin layer of moisture on them that I wiped off several times a day when we were home, feeling like the only difference between “outside” and “inside” was a few degrees and an old pane of glass.

With the misty weather, I’d entered a persistent battle with the black mold that made Mia and me sick. Mia seemed to have constant gobs of snot dripping from her nose. I coughed like I worked in a coal mine, sometimes until I threw up. Once, in a panic after I’d tried to diagnose myself from looking up symptoms online, I drove to Urgent Care. My glands were so swollen I couldn’t move my head, and I thought I had meningitis. Two weeks later, I got a $200 bill for the few minutes I’d spent talking to a doctor. I called the hospital’s billing department in a wave of rage, prepared to not pay the bill at all, not caring what it might do to my credit. By filling out several forms, I finally convinced them to lower my bill through a program they offered for low-income patients. All I had to do was call and ask. It always struck me that programs like that were never mentioned. Billing offices only said to call for payment options, not to lower your bill by 80 percent.

Weather that forces you indoors also forces you to take a long look at the space you call home. I thought of my clients who lived alone. I imagined them walking through empty rooms, the vacuum cleaner lines still visible in the carpet. I didn’t want to end up living like them. My clients’ lives, the homes they worked so hard to afford, were no longer my dream. Even though I had long since let that dream go, I still, in my most honest moments, while dusting rooms covered in pink, flowers, and dolls, admitted that I desperately wanted the same for my kid. I couldn’t help but wonder if the families who lived in the houses I cleaned somehow lost one another in the rooms full of video games, computers, and televisions.

This studio apartment we lived in, despite all its downsides, was our home. I didn’t need two-point-five baths and a garage. Anyway, I saw how hard it was to keep them clean. Despite our surroundings, I woke up in the morning encased in love. I was there. In that small room. I was present, witnessing Mia’s dance routines and silly faces, fiercely loving every second. Our space was a home because we loved each other in it.

22

STILL LIFE WITH MIA

As temperatures dropped, I lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, chewing on my lips in worry every time I heard the creak of the baseboard heaters coming on. Mia and I slept together for warmth in my narrow twin bed. I hung blankets and sheets on the windows to keep out the creeping cold. When frost persistently covered the ground and our windows, I closed the French doors to our sleeping area and we lived in the small room that was our living room and kitchen, and about the size of most of the guest bedrooms or offices I dusted. I folded out the love seat at night for us to sleep on. Mia jumped on it in excitement, again calling it a sleepover. It was a bigger space for us to sleep, but she still slept curled up against my back, an arm over my neck, with her breath warming the skin between my shoulder blades. In the mornings, when my alarm started buzzing and beeping in the darkness, I’d roll onto my back to stretch. Mia hugged my neck, then put a hand on my cheek.

One night after Christmas, winter rain turned to snowflakes the size of quarters, covering the ground, piling inches deep. Mia and I stayed up well past her bedtime, knowing we wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere the next day, to watch the snow. Mia put on her snowsuit and, by the light of a streetlamp, made snow angels in the yard, while I measured the snow on Pearl’s hood—fourteen inches. I hadn’t seen a snowstorm like that since I lived