My Mom is watching TV in bed. She never had a TV in the bedroom, so that’s confusing. She is intense, sitting upright. Her face is coated in garish pink and blue light. The profile of her nose is prominent and hawkish. She is not wearing her glasses. I can interpret desiccated palm fronds from Easter-last wedged between the mirror and the wall. My Mom always felt guilty about throwing them out, so they became a Catholic girl’s forever wallpaper. For whatever reason, holy day leftovers always left me melancholy, like reading an old letter from a forgotten friend you never understood. Or a ravaged baked ham, all bone, no ham.
I walk gingerly down the narrow hallway. It’s paneled in faux chestnut, circa 1973. I sense movement.
I pass my brother’s room. He is dressed for his sterile office job, wearing his dutiful and soft wool armor—a navy blue suit, tie, and brown dress shoes. He is pacing, muttering about the cat. We never owned a cat, and his bedroom room is a cave, shadowy, the outlines of a heavy wooden dresser in the far corner. Bats hang from the ceiling, exclamation points that breathe and softly rustle. The silhouette of the small window tells me it's near dawn, and they will awake soon, harassing our hair.
I leave him to it. I am compelled to move. My skin rebels.
The third room is mine, and I enter. The corner space is a furnace in Summer and a deep freeze in Winter. Spring and Fall were only momentary pauses between sweating and shivering. I enter the room, and immediately, my foot is tangled in the snowy-white sheet draped across the floor. Frustration grabs me. How did I not see it? I am a lousy thief even while sleeping.
A young woman, swaddled in a large red-plaid blanket, sits at the foot of my bed, a small bed in a small room. She wears three faces. I recognize them all. She opens her arms for a hug. As I approach, she panics and thrashes about. She shrieks that I should not wait for her. I should leave. Now. Her faces oscillate, an old TV signal, skipping, decomposing, and regaining focus before the static eats her eyes. Then nothing. Switch off.
The comforter is warm as I press it to my cheek and inhale.
I would never wait for you, I say, softly smiling to the absence of her. There was a time, though, that I considered it, but one had become two, and two had become three, which became insanity. I had looked into the abyss, lowered a rope ladder, and looked again, longingly and long. Then, I withdrew.
I did not need love that badly.
I make the bed.
The entire house gives way.
And I wake.
Putting all the pieces together, finally.
Unloved.