“Ali, what’s going on?”
“I’m being real, that’s what’s going on.”
My feet are going to explode in this water; it’s so hot. I tug them out, yet I’m still panting. Steam rises into the air.
“Ali, drink water.”
“Stop telling me what to do.”
“I don’t want you to dehydrate.”
“This is not about me dehydrating! Stop focusing on me dehydrating!” I want her to see right through me so I don’t have to say a word. “Because I’m the one who walks around without a mother. I’m the one who every day only has a dad to come home to. I’m the one who can’t go to the mother-daughter events. I’m the one doing all this without you.”
My mother takes a deep breath. Closes her eyes. “Ali, you booked a flight in the middle of the night to come here. What’s happening right now? Talk to me. I feel so in the dark. Your father said there was a lot of stuff happening, but ‘stuff’ can mean many things. I want to hear it from you. I want you to talk to me, Ali.”
“Talk to you? What else do you want me to say?”
She reaches her hand out to me and I swat it away. I would like to hit her. Hard. Harder. Like in the face. Or in the chest. But what kind of person hits her mother?
Only someone as angry and disturbed as me. Only someone as broken as me. Someone who gets raped by a guy she was totally in love with. Someone who betrays a group of girls like Blythe and her friends, who were nothing but nice to me.
Okay, so they were mostly mean. But sometimes nice!
“You don’t know what’s going on with my life at all,” I say, and it pours out. People in other pools stare at us. And I can’t stop it. My arms twist into a crazy, enraged concoction. “You have no idea what it feels like not to be able to run to you. That I can’t even tell you that a boy—”
“A boy what?”
But I’m silent.
“He what?”
I twist around in all sorts of pained movements—hands to forehead, slapping palms on rock, splashing feet in water. I want to tell her so bad. I want to purge it. I’m so tired from carrying it around. It hurts. The pit of my stomach deep down; I can’t hold it there anymore. It’s been trapped for so long and it wants to come out. It wants to be birthed and gutted and expelled, and I can’t even close my mouth fast enough before it comes out without me even having control of it.
“I didn’t want to have sex with him. Even though I did. But then I didn’t.”
“Then you didn’t?” she says. Her face trembling. Her eyes wide. Waiting for me to say it. And I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to say it at all.
She’s staring at me still. Waiting for me. Her face. “What, honey?” She takes my hand. “Tell me, baby.”
So I say it. I finally say it.
And after I say it, I glance down at the rocky bank of the Rio Grande, but the river itself isn’t fast moving. It’s shallow, I know, because I’ve been tubing in it before and I scraped my ankle across the bottom. I want to jump into it. Because now I’ve said it out loud. Now that I’ve told my mother, where will I go? Back to her tiny peach house that’s falling apart? Back to the hammock?
I want to throw up.
My face in my hands. Her arm snakes around me. Her thigh next to mine. The heat. Too much heat. She hands me a cup of cold water. “Please, honey. I’m begging you. Drink.”
“I want to run away,” I say. “I want to run away and never come back.”
“I know about running away, honey,” she says. Her voice quavering. “It doesn’t work. I promise you it doesn’t.” She whimpers an awful sound of defeat. Whispering over and over. “I’m so sorry, Ali. I love you so much, Ali. You’re going to be okay, Ali. You’re so strong, Ali. I’m so proud of you, Ali. We’re going to get through this, Ali.”
And I feel like she’s talking to someone else. Someone who’s not me anymore.
* * *
Down the street. I can barely walk, but I trudge through the gravel road. My bike holding me up. The sun behind us. The dust in front. Walking through it like it’s nothing, like it’s part of us. All that unforgiving sunshine. Not one cloud. Just the glaring sun and the blue forever. We go slow, and I tell her what happened. How it happened. About Sean Nessel. About Blythe. About the article I wrote in the Underground.
Back in her house, I don’t know how long later. She’s a good listener. She tells me she’s been working on that. Listening. She rubs my temples with lavender. She strokes my hair. She kisses my tears. We sit there tangled for a while, saying nothing. She’s soft. My mother is so soft.
Sometimes when I’m watching her, I’m watching myself. Her eyes. Her chin. The shape of her jaw. I have so many of my dad’s mannerisms. But I’m all her.
49
BLYTHE
Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. All the college freshmen are coming home to rule the town. Everyone will meet up at the Sweep, the dive bar that doesn’t card. The dive bar where people make out inside the antique phone booth. The place where the forty-year-old alcoholics line the barstools, in their Danzig and Megadeth T-shirts thinking it’s 1996 or whenever they were seniors. When the pores on their faces were smaller. When their cheeks were less reddened. The women are worse. They glare at us with
