each side, a frayed line at different heights above her ankles, which stuck out below, like the tongues of bells.
Around that time I also began to walk with my toes facing out. My feet, on their own, pointed straight. I was different when I walked this way, more in charge, more promising, more deliberate.
The fights continued for months, becoming more frequent, so that soon they happened almost every night for several hours. When we were together but not fighting, I watched her face for when her mood might turn.
I would tell my teachers, Lee and Steve, of particularly bad fights. This worried my mother, who was mortified if others were talking poorly about her, and who then started bringing Lee up in our fights, mocking me for running, always, to complain to Lee.
She hit the wall, hurt her hand, yelled so that blood vessels rose around her face, her neck turned into sinews. Doors slamming, charcoal half-moons below her eyes. A couple of times she grabbed the top of my arm and shook it hard.
“I shouldn’t have had you,” she said one Saturday afternoon, toward the end of a fight. “It was a mistake to have a child.” She wept, not looking at me, then got up, went to her room, and shut the door.
I knew other parents didn’t say such things to their children. If I’m ruining her life, I thought, why does she often follow me around from room to room, as if we’re chained together?
I tiptoed quickly to the front of the house, went out the front door, down the steps, across the lawn, onto Rinconada toward Emerson.
Nobody was out in the quiet afternoon, the houses like blank faces, cars gone or in driveways. I walked quickly to the corner, self-conscious of how I was walking, wearing a skirt and flat shoes, looking back in case my mother was coming. She probably hadn’t left her room or even noticed I was gone.
I turned east, south, east, toward Embarcadero, toward Highway 101. Once past the corner, where I might have gone straight, or turned, where she would not have been able to find me easily, I began to breathe. I felt elation and freedom I hadn’t expected, an exciting shiver in my knees. More than escape: relief.
I was light, becoming myself again, feeling the lines around my body where it met the still air.
I looked at my palms. It was true: my left palm was like a thicket of sticks with no clear path. The lines on my right palm were not clearly defined either, but the lifeline was better. I knew the bubbles weren’t good, but how was it possible to tell when one would happen, how far along I was on the line? I kept her vision of my future, even as I cast her off.
At some point, I had to pee. There was a round front window as tall as a person, with rosebushes planted close together on the front lawn of a putty-colored Spanish-style house. I looked both ways—no one around—and peed quickly on the dirt underneath the rosebushes.
I walked around until dusk. I’d been gone for hours, it seemed; there was nothing to do now but go home.
A block away, I saw people on our lawn and heard a sound like insects: walkie-talkies, chattering and static. Lights in our front windows, the porch light, a police car.
A woman in uniform saw me half a block away and started walking toward me. My mother stood with her legs apart on the lawn, her arms crossed.
“You’re back,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
She approached me cautiously.
The female officer spoke to my mother. A male officer, also buzzing with a walkie-talkie, stood farther off, talking into the handset, looking away.
“Thank you,” my mother said, nodding to the policewoman, who nodded back and walked toward the car.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said, after the cops were gone. “You can’t just run away.”
“You shouldn’t have yelled at me.” I stood strong, with my legs apart, like her. Some new power I wouldn’t have guessed I had.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” she said.
That night, before I went to sleep, she came into my room. She’d washed her face, and when she leaned over me and said, “I’m sorry,” she smelled like soap. “Are you hungry?”
“A little,” I said.
She cut apples and cheese in the kitchen and brought them back to my bed on a plate and we ate them together propped up against pillows with our legs under the covers. “You’ll