“Really?” the baker asked.
“Really,” Girl said. She knew that her friends would get it. They would see how funny it was.
She opened her presents, touched that somehow between church and the unexpected party the girls had found a way to get her something and even wrap it. She hadn’t been expecting anything. For once, she wasn’t concerned with getting gifts. When it was time to eat the cake, some of the kids laughed and others thought she bought it on the sale rack, but Girl didn’t care. Brother knew exactly what she meant. Brother knew her better than anyone else.
Girl didn’t have any photographs from her little kid birthdays. No first birthday picture with cake smashed all over her face like her friends had. So she decided to reenact it. She held her hands behind her back and face-planted into her piece—not the whole thing, that would be gross. The boys laughed, the girls looked embarrassed. Fuck it, it was her birthday, the best one ever.
quicksand
Mother said that the infection began with a herpes outbreak in her mouth, the worst she had ever had. Mother woke up after midnight to find her left eye was red, more painful that anything she had ever experienced before. Girl was small—three? Four? Brother was a year older. The doctors removed Mother’s cornea that night, replacing it with one someone had donated by checking the organ donor box on their driver’s license, their eyes harvested at death and the corneas frozen away until someone needed them.
“If kids ask you what’s wrong with my eye, whatever you do, don’t tell them I had herpes,” Mother instructed as she drove Brother and Girl to their first day of school—kindergarten for Girl, first grade for Brother.
“What am I supposed to tell them?” Girl asked.
“I don’t know, but don’t tell them that.”
“Why not? You did have herpes,” Brother said.
“But there’s a bad kind of herpes, and I didn’t have that kind. I had a different kind, and people might not understand.”
“What’s wrong with your mother’s eye?” asked every kid who ever saw Mother.
“Um, she had an infection,” Girl said.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Girl answered. It satisfied nobody.
Mother went on to have three more transplants before she lost her eye entirely. For Girl’s entire childhood, her mother’s left eye was red, goopy, half-closed, swollen. A few times a year, the transplant would “reject” and Mother had to get shots in her eye. Girl could not think of anything worse than having her eye clamped open, watching the needle get closer and closer … she clenched her eyes shut just thinking about it. If the shots didn’t work, Mother went back in the hospital.
When Girl was thirteen, Mother awoke from her latest eye surgery unable to move her arms. The doctors ran test after test, but their final diagnosis was that it was a stress reaction—psychosomatic. Mother had always told the children that the surgeries were no big deal—she had held in her terror for too long.
After a few days, Mother was able to move her arms, but not properly. If Girl held up a finger for her to touch, her arm moved in a horizontal Z through the air. Her hands were numb and unable to grip coins, a pencil, a fork.
“We’re gonna need you to stay home with Mother this summer,” Stepmother said. “You are both going to have to help out more. Grocery shopping, cooking dinner. You’re going to have to pick up the slack.”
“But—” Girl started to object, but Stepmother cut her off.
“We are a family. We all have to contribute. It won’t hurt you to stay around the house.”
Mother was the person Girl loved most in the world, but Girl couldn’t figure out how to make her okay again. The details Girl could manage: buying groceries, answering the phone, cooking dinner. Girl did not know how to comfort her, and the thought of failing her made her want to run down their tree-lined street, run till her nose ran from the wind and her legs ached, run until she was a less selfish daughter.
Girl was afraid, not just of the loss of summer—riding bikes and horses and swimming—but this feeling that Girl would lose herself into her mother. Girl knew she had been waiting all her life to take care of someone. She had watched Mother for as long as she could remember—trying to learn how to give up everything of yourself for other people. Girl knew she wanted to do this someday, and she knew she did not want to do it at thirteen. Girl had a feeling that if she stayed home with Mother, she would never leave again, and she would morph into a smaller version of her mother, forced to wait on everyone and not talk back.
Girl had been trying hard to learn this mothering business. When Girl was cold she said she was warm enough. Girl tried to always make her vote for “whatever you want to do.” Girl tried to swallow every opinion and complaint whole without choking on it. But she was young. She wanted to run as fast as she could and swim and laugh with her friends. She wanted to jump up onto her pony’s bare back and feel his sweaty sides beneath her naked calves. She did not want to do chores and walk to the grocery store with their green folding grocery cart like a homeless person. She hated using coupons. She felt no satisfaction in helping take care of the family while her mother couldn’t. More than that, Girl resented it. She knew she only had a few more years before this would be the rest of her life. She did not want that life quite yet. Becoming Mother’s caretaker meant Girl would be fully subsumed by the woman she was destined to become. Her future was waiting to devour her. She just wanted one last summer.
Girl had
