Page 70 of The Summer Show
“What’s the deal with her?”
“Nothing. Just ancient history.”
“Can’t be too ancient if it’s got you this riled up. You’re white.”
He wasn’t wrong. My mother was a shackle that I couldn’t avoid dragging behind me, from one happy moment to the next.
Hear that rattling?
Mom.
At this point I realized that my feet had stopped moving forward and I was standing still, unable to detach myself from the shackle. You know that embarrassment and shame combo that steamrolls you at 3:00 AM when you’re wide and uncomfortably awake and sleep is avoiding your calls? Here and now, in the middle of the day, it rolled over me, crushing my chest so that I could barely pull in more than a shallow breath. The funny thing was that it wasn’t even my embarrassment and shame to carry. Logically I knew that it was my mother’s burden to bear. She was the one who had done Very Bad Things and yet I was the one feeling her feelings by proxy.
Maybe that’s just how the universe works; if one person can’t feel the shame because they’re too broken, it gets assigned to another. Doesn’t matter if the recipient has done the crime, they still get to do the time.
I was serving my mother’s sentence.
The airways in my lungs responded by clenching their walls and ignoring my attempts to exchange CO2 for oxygen.
Not here. Not now, for crying out loud. Nick Merrick already thought I was some kind of whack-a-doodle with my mom baggage. Now I was having an asthma attack in front of him?
But it was happening—and the more I struggled, the tighter the band around my chest ratcheted. I stumbled to the closest tree and leaned against the trunk while my hand dug around in my bag, fruitlessly.
“You’re going to be okay,” Nick said. “I’ve got you.”
And on that competent note, he delved into my bag and located my inhaler. By some miracle he knew what to do. He shook the inhaler and shoved the nozzle into the spacer and held it up to my lips. Once it was in my mouth, he pressed the canister.
I pulled in a slow, deep breath and held for as long as I could so the albuterol could persuade my airways to chill out. All the while, Nick was rubbing my back, his eyes dark and filled with concern. He was humming a tune, deep and low where I could barely make it out.
Whatever it was, the combination of music and Nick was magic.
I pulled the spacer and inhaler away from my mouth and let out the breath I was intentionally holding. The air came out steady. My airways returned to their usual dilated selves. Disaster averted.
With the hand that wasn’t rubbing my back, Nick opened my bag for me so I could place the inhaler back in its pocket.
“So you’re an asthmatic, huh?”
“Since I was twelve.”
“What happened when you were twelve?” he said, his voice gentle.
The words stuck like glue to my throat.
“Nothing bad is gonna happen to you on my watch, okay?”
There was something about Nick, a quiet competence and unyielding confidence that made me believe. With a few words he was able to unpick the stitches keeping my compartment sealed tight and fling the lids open.
It’s true what they say about sunlight being a disinfectant, and the hard Greek sunlight was a stronger germ killer than the more yellow sun at home. I found myself telling Nick all the things I’d never told anyone outside of the bubble I shared with my grandparents, Dad, and Brit. All the while, the heady mixture of sun and shade lulled me into a space where I was semi hypnotized.
“When I was twelve and Brit was eight, Dad took us and we moved in with my grandparents. It had been coming a long time. I don’t know for how long, but maybe since the beginning, because every memory I have of my mother is negative. Even when she wasn’t being actively mean to me, there was still a wrongness about her. She wasn’t like other moms. There were no hugs, no kisses, she didn’t care about our schoolwork or run out to get cardboard for projects. Our whole childhood, she moved from one obsession to the next without pausing to remember that we existed.” My hands shook, and it wasn’t the albuterol’s fault. Without speaking a word, Nick folded my hands in his and brushed his thumbs over my knuckles.
“The first obsession I really remember was fanatical cleanliness and germaphobia. There were others before that, but I wasn’t aware until that point. The memories are cold and vague. But when I was five she wouldn’t let me in the house after school until I’d stripped down to my underwear and bare feet. Then, and only then, she’d let me come inside. She’d tell me to go to the bathroom where a full change of clothes was waiting for me. I had to shower, wash my hands, brush my hair and tie it back, and then I could go back to the kitchen for a snack. I was five. I could barely do a ponytail on my dolls. She claimed I had to be clean for the baby. Which, in hindsight, I get because kindergarten is an epidemiological nightmare. Not to the extent of making a little kid strip off on the porch, but … I don’t know. After that I remember the raw food diet. That didn’t last long because Dad intervened, but for a couple of weeks we had to eat everything raw. Vegetables, meat, all of it. It was the chicken that ended that phase, thanks to Dad. There were other things after that. A string of obsessions. The worst was the books.” Thinking about it, the memory was covered in a thick layer of smoke. “I was twelve when I came home and found her burning all my books because they were on some ridiculous list made up by people who just hated children being happy. I don’t know if it was the smoke or the stress or the way I landed on the chair when she shoved me because I tried to stop her, but that was the first time I had an asthma attack. It was lucky that Dad came home when he did or I don’t know if I would have made it. He threw the rest of my books in the car along with me and Brit and took me to the emergency room. After a nebulizer of albuterol I was fine, at least until Mom showed up a couple of weeks later to pray for us. Dad and Grandpa stood their ground and refused to let her in, so she stood on the sidewalk and yelled her prayers across the lawn. The doctor had prescribed me an inhaler, so as soon as my lungs started to close up, my grandma was able to stop the attack. Since then my asthma has only flared up when I’m super stressed, and I’m only that stressed when my mother unleashes her nonsense, because she’s incapable of behaving like a normal person. You know the worst thing?”
“Tell me,” he murmured.
“After everything she put us through, I never stopped hoping we would be her next and final obsession. That she’d finally realize how amazing we are, and that she’d know she’d made a mistake by driving us away for religion, and plastic storage containers, and social media fame. I continue to hope, even now, that she’ll change. How stupid is that?”
He tucked a stray piece of hair back behind my ear. “Not stupid at all.”