Illustration by Bella Aldrete
You and Brisa, the hospice nurse your mother pays under the table, share your uncles’ old bunk bed. You’re on top, and she’s on the bottom.
In the morning pale, she leans against your bunk’s guardrail, showing you videos she took in Guyana on her iPad. It’s been two years since she’s seen her daughters back home, she tells you, while a rushing waterfall crests. You wonder whether she ought to be tending to your grandmother. Or something. She is showing you a video of a parrot, now, perched on her daughter’s thin arm. Gray clouds scream across the sky, swollen with rain.
“I have two daughters,” Brisa says, “three if you count the third.”
“Why wouldn’t you count the third?” you ask.
Brisa nods dreamily, absorbed in her iPad. You looked her up online once, and found that her username everywhere was FatPussyBrisa. She posts nude selfies on Twitter, with slightly incoherent captions. U treat me to good, winky face, smiling cat. Like sexy word salad.
Your mother must have neglected to do background checks. You won’t begrudge Brisa her grainy selfies, though–her work is so sterile, so sexless. Dry even when soaked through with urine. Porn must be the opposite of death, and Brisa’s fat pussy is devastatingly alive. She once sent you a zoomed-in video of a couple fucking beneath a bridge, captioned us. You replied with a question mark and she said wrong number. Maybe she has a husband back home, or a boyfriend in the States whom she fucks beneath bridges. You know for a fact she hasn’t gotten laid for at least a few weeks–she’s been here since your grandmother was first starting to die.
“Your grandmother isn’t doing too well, you know.” Brisa is suddenly serious, looking up from a game of solitaire you don’t recall her starting. She is very nearly beautiful, but her mouth is never entirely closed, and air whistles through the gap in her front teeth.
An animation of cards reshuffling themselves plays on her screen.
“I know,” you say, “that’s why I’m here. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“It’s bad,” Brisa says. Her round face is cartoonishly grave, and you wonder how many times she has reused the dialogue.
It was late December, the start of winter break, when you initially came up to say your final goodbyes. You’d never been to the Cape, but had pictured it as being warm and imbued with New England money. You were distressed, instead, to find an adorable beach town hollowed-out, bone-cold and bloated on its own nothingness. This sky is so close, so immense. The wilted hydrangeas remind you of bloodless veins, ripe for the needle. You don’t know how your mother spent the first eighteen years of her life here. A month has made you want to kill yourself a little bit. Your spring term starts next week, and your grandmother still hasn’t died. Every other day you consider heading back to your empty dorm or convincing your mother to come back to the city with you, but each time, Brisa says your grandmother should be dead by tomorrow. Tomorrow. She says it like a lover’s promise.
You assumed, until now, without any real basis, that your grandmother died when your mother was small. You thought of yourself as somebody without grandparents, right up until your twentieth year, when mother called you at the end of the fall semester to tell you that your grandmother, her mother, was dying and that you had to come see her.
You’ve only spoken to your grandmother once, since you got here. It was the first night. Brisa guided you into the bedroom and sat in an armchair by the window with her iPad, while you perched yourself at the edge of your grandmother’s bed, which was a reclining hospital cot with white railings on either side.
“Diane,” you said, because that is your grandmother’s name. She did not listen to you. Instead, she vomited nothing into a wicker wastebasket. The veins in her hands bulged.
“Diane,” you said again. An ad for virtual slot machines played aloud from Brisa’s tinny speakers. Your grandmother licked her lips, which were recessed and simian. You touched her knee through the papery blanket.
“Anna,” she said, because that is your name.
You nodded and leaned in. Brisa won her game of solitaire, and her iPad played the sound of trumpets.
“Yes. It’s me. What do you want to tell me?”
“Anna.” She held her own stiff hand to her chest like a small animal’s corpse, then reached to touch your cheek. You winced at the contact.
“Anna.” She let her arm fall back to her side. “I’ve never cared much for Jews.”
You nodded for her to continue. She did not.
“Me neither,” you said. Your father is a Jew, and you don’t care much for him. “Beady Jew eyes.”
“Mhm.”
“Should I leave?” You directed the question to Brisa, because your grandmother’s face had gone vacant, her eyes dark with fever. Without looking up, Brisa nodded.
The door made a sound like a barking dog when you closed it.
Around that same time, near the beginning, your mother, who sleeps in her childhood twin bed, came into the room you share with Brisa. She laid supine on the floor, looking up at the ceiling covered in glow-in-the-dark stars. Brisa was snoring, and you could hear your grandmother’s machines settling softly in the next room. You poked your head over the railing to look down at your mother.
“Mom?” you said.
“Hi baby,” she replied faintly. She stayed silent for a moment, then spoke again: “I’m scared.”
“Me too,” you said, “it’s all scary.”
She looked so small on the carpeted floor, like another piece of childhood detritus among the basketballs and encyclopedias. The room hasn’t been touched since your uncles were probably sixteen, around the time they left town, left your mother alone to deal with your grandmother. Their books are still on the shelves, their posters still on the walls. As if they didn’t have time to pack. It’s like Chernobyl, or Pompeii.
“I had a nightmare,” your mother said.
“Me too.”
“I don’t want to go where she is.”
“Me neither.”
“Sometimes I want to smother her with a pillow.”
“That’s understandable.”
“Will you unplug me, or whatever, if I ever get like that?”
“Of course,” you said. “I love you too much to leave you that way.”
“Good,” she said. “Good. Can I join you?”
You nodded, and she crawled up into bed with you. Brisa rolled over laboriously below. Sitting up to adjust her position, your mother hit her head on the ceiling with a resounding clunk and made a sound of defeat.
“I hate it here,” she said, laughing a little but mostly crying. “I always have.” You patted her back awkwardly and wondered whether your conversation was leaking into Brisa’s dream. When you awoke from your sticky half-sleep, hours later, your mother was still by your side, her forehead glowing in the blue dark.
You and your mother have become a pair, here. Like friends. It’s not like it was when you were in high school, when you freaked out while visiting your father in Chicago. When you stopped eating, became silent and weepy, trusting that she would forgive you. You found that things moved out of place with her, then. You found that you couldn’t return them to the way they were. The life that had been yours together became yours alone. She wouldn’t sit on the toilet to brush her wet hair while you shaved your legs in the tub. She stopped asking if you wanted anything from the store. She would not look at your eyes anymore–only at your forehead, your earlobe, your jaw.
But now, here, your mother is scrambling eggs for the two of you. “We’ll get through this,” she says, and your heart flutters. The first-person-plural is intoxicating. We. Soon, your grandmother will die and then it will really be how it was before; tender and still and just the two of you. The two of us.
Here, together, you and your mother go on long, drunken walks along the frozen shoreline, repeating morbid inside jokes to one another until your cheeks hurt from laughing. Together, you linger in the threshold of the master bedroom, watching Brisa lift your grandmother’s tiny body up and set it down in an armchair while she changes the sheets. Together, you watch the pale light stream through the white shutters and onto your grandmother’s blue-tinged feet. Together, you smile slyly from the doorway when your grandmother farts wetly without excusing herself or burps unselfconsciously in Brisa’s face.
Your mother drives you by her old high school and tells you how people used to call her Wednesday Addams because she was so thin and pale and somber. She had no friends at your age, she says. She admires you, she says. You’re sure Brisa isn’t this close with her daughters. You’re sure she envies you–you can feel it in the shared, close dark each night. Your mother hasn’t slept in your bed since that first time, weeks ago now, but you don’t mind. You know, now that it’s happened, that you are bonded like never before.
You and your mother will go to the Hudson River at night, once you get back home, and together you will watch it move. Your mother wants to be cremated, she told you while you walked around the high school track, and she wants her ashes spread in that gray water. She believes you might feel her embrace every time you look out at the icy waves, but you know you wouldn’t see the rushing water as any sort of reincarnation. You would feel your mother hopelessly diluted. You would feel her gone-r than ever. You try and you try to believe in the metaphor of the thing, but a river is not a mother and a mother is not a river.
“If you can’t get to the river,” she said in the car, “keep me in a coffee can in your closet.” Of course you’ll be able to get to the river, and of course you won’t go. Because she is yours, and you plan on keeping her.
The two of you go to Stop & Shop at least twice a week, never stocking up quite enough to avoid another trip in the near future. You call these excursions your little trips to civilization, and you return with Cheeto Puffs, shitty artisanal beers, and peach rings for Brisa. Your mother occasionally runs into people she hasn’t seen since she left town, people she last knew as cruel adolescents, visibly softened with time. When she can’t avoid it, she says hello and smiles tightly, gripping her shopping cart.
“It’s been so long!” she says to a woman with a thin, pointed nose who was definitely hot in high school, and who holds herself now as if she is sorry not to be skinny. “You look great! Yes, let’s catch up soon, please.”
“Fucking townies,” your mother mutters when the woman walks away. You nod in agreement.
“Those fuckers,” you say, angrier than you mean to. She looks at you, surprised, then laughs vaguely.
“Fuckers.” she repeats. “Fuck ‘em. Right?” She smiles earnestly, meanly. You could live inside this moment, this solidarity.
It is your idea, the trip to Luke’s Liquors off Airline Road, that ruins everything. You are fingering a handle of Tito’s, and wondering whether you still need to beg her to buy it for you (or if, just maybe, you’ve transcended that juvenile conversation) when a woman pushes through the glass doors. Your mother looks up at the sound of the jangling doorbell, then grins upon seeing the woman. They share an electric look and something inside of you recognizes that it’s all over.
You don’t know who she is. But here she is, now. Here she is, with cataract-blue eyes and a rain-soaked denim jacket. Here your mother is, crying out and running to her. Here they are, hugging, exchanging exclamations, hugging again. Here they are.
“Hey,” you say, walking up to the two of them, speaking only to your mother. “Do you guys know each other?” The women smile at each other and burst out laughing.
“This is Barbara Ann,” your mother says, “we were great friends, back in high school.”
“Oh.” you say, “I’ve never heard about her.” You turn to Barbara Ann, directly addressing her for the first time. “So, you never managed to leave town?”
Your mother glares at you, but Barbara Ann only laughs. Her soft double chin wobbles. You want to hit her. You want to share a knowing look with your mother, but she is gazing at Barbara Ann once more.
“No,” Barbara Ann says good-naturedly, “never felt inclined to.”
You ignore this. “Mom,” you say, “I have to pee. There’s no bathroom here. Let’s go.” Your mother rolls her eyes, but lets you guide her out to the parking lot once she exchanges cell numbers with Barbara Ann. You do a little dance like you’re going to pee yourself.
In the car, you feel like you might vomit. You shed your parka quickly, wiping the sweat from your forehead. “So,” you say, your voice high and breathless, “who was that fucking townie?”
Your mother looks horrified. “Don’t call her that,” she says. “Barbara Ann is my friend. She’s a really lovely woman.”
Your face grows hot. “Oh,” you say. You want to say more but you know you’ll cry, so instead of speaking you hunch over your phone. FatPussyBrisa has posted a new video, which you open with the volume turned low. Fuuck, water droplets. Her nipples are huge and dark, her eyes gentle and bovine. The beeping of your grandmother’s heart monitor is audible in the background. Brisa opens her mouth to moan, and you mute the video, placing the phone face down in your lap.
Back at the house, you feel newly shy around your mother. In the long, narrow kitchen, she walks past you to get to the fridge, and you flatten yourself against the cabinets, afraid she’ll brush against you and feel the desperation seeping from your pores. It’s early, hardly eight in the evening, but it’s dark out.
“Should I go to bed now?” you ask her.
She wheels around, holding a pinched little apple, and looks you up and down. “If you want to,” she says, taking a bite, “go for it.”
You nod. You are afraid she hates you again. You spent five years tugging at her sleeve, desperate for things to be okay again. You can’t go back to that. You won’t.
You walk backwards into your room, refusing to look away from her. She acts as if she cannot feel your eyes.
You lie down on Brisa’s bottom bunk because you don’t feel like climbing, and because you know she won’t say anything about it. The Brisa-shaped dent on the comforter is warm and vaguely sticky. You sink into it, and try to imagine what Brisa is like as a mother. You’ve never heard her speak to her daughters on the phone, and she hasn’t even told you their names. You wonder if she’s disowned them. Or if they’ve disowned her.
You can hear your grandmother’s labored breathing through the walls, and lightly touch the blue-and-white striped mattress above you. Your grandmother was a bad mother, you know. If she hurt your mother badly enough to drive her away, at eighteen, to a new, strange city and into the arms of a strange, boring man who didn’t even care enough to leave when things got bad, then she must’ve been unforgivable. She must’ve done something to deserve the morphine half-life she shares with Brisa.
Your mother has always deserved better. Better than brothers who leave when they ought to stay, better than a man who stays when he ought to leave. Better than a mother who can’t choose between the two. Better than Barbara Ann, who seems to think she can come and go as she pleases.
You pad into the kitchen. It’s getting late. The darkness is more thorough now. This time of night is more black than blue. You open and close a few cabinets, idly touch the beer in the fridge. Lick one of Brisa’s tart peach candies.
Barbara Ann probably has a slutty little daughter your age. She is probably blonde with cystic acne and a tiny nose. Your mother will probably make you befriend her. Barbara Ann’s slutty little daughter will call you fat and your mother will snicker with Barbara Ann. Brisa will be there. She will change your grandmother’s diaper. It will never be how it was.
A faint light is leaking from under your mother’s white bedroom door. You imagine that she is awake, crying because she misses you. Wishing she could muster the courage to come to you. Blocking Barbara Ann’s number. Maybe your father’s, too.
Armed with this fantasy, you open the door without knocking.
“Hey,” you say.
“Hi,” says your mother. She is sitting up in bed with her knees drawn to her chest, her phone an inch from her face. Her sheets are printed with tiny pinpricks of flowers, and a few straggling porcelain bunnies line her bookshelves. No books. She took the books with her when she moved with your father.
You kneel beside her bed and rest your head on the mattress, looking up at her, arms crossed beneath your cheek. You sit like that for a while, feeling the nubby white carpet dig into your knees, watching your mother’s eyes glow blue in the phone’s cold light. She is typing rapidly.
“Who’re you texting?” you ask.
“Barb,” she says.
“You mean Barbara Ann?”
“Yes.” She exhales hard through her nose.
“I thought you had no friends in high school. That’s what you told me.”
“Then I forgot about Barb.”
Cunt, you think, and you’re not even sure whether you’re thinking of Barbara Ann or of your mother.
“How could you forget?” you ask. “She was your best friend.”
“I never said that.”
“Your great friend, then.”
“People forget people all the time.”
“So what?” you say. “Are you going to forget me?”
Your mother is not listening. She is typing again.
She doesn’t give a shit about you.
“You don’t give a shit about me.” You speak softly.
“Don’t say that.” She puts the phone down on her bedside table.
“You don’t want me around.”
“I do want you around.” Her phone dings and she starts to move it for it, but stops herself.
“You’re being a really bad friend right now,” you say.
“To who? To Barb?”
“No,” you say, pausing meaningfully. “To me.”
“Well that’s fine,” she says. “I’m not your friend. I’m your mother.”
“Okay,” you say. “Fine.”
“Good,” she says. She rolls over and flicks off her lamp, which is baby blue and shaped like a hummingbird. After a moment, she cranes her neck to see you. “You can go now,” she says.
“No,” you say. “I don’t think I can.”
She gives you a long look, then flips onto her stomach. You let her settle in before you speak again.
“Did Barb call you Wednesday Addams? When you were younger?”
“I don’t see how that’s relevant. It’s been a long time.”
“Would she even care if you dropped dead? Would you even care if—”
“You’re being mean.”
“I am mean,” you say. “So are you. We’re mean together.”
Your mother rolls onto her back, her hip brushing past your eyelashes. “I’m not like you,” she says. “I’m like Barb. Barb is a nice woman.”
“She’s not your friend,” you say. “She doesn’t know you.”
“Neither do you. I’m going to sleep.”
“Me too,” you say. “Goodnight.” She makes a big show of yawning, but doesn’t tell you to go. And so, you fall asleep that way, somehow, on your knees, with your chin resting by your mother’s warm side—near, but not touching.
You awake, a little past midnight, under your mother’s bed. Your knees must’ve given out in the night. The darkness beneath the mattress is alarming and complete. You worry that your mother has gone, has been swallowed up by the night at its blackest. You can only hear your own breathing, thin and nasal.
You try to sit in that aloneness. You really try, but you can’t. It’s too scary. You can’t stop thinking of Gertrude, the gentle dog your mother put down when you were sixteen. Of your father’s hooked nose. Of Chicago and the fear. Of your mother’s face when she saw Barbara Ann; the smile without any trace of meanness. Of Brisa’s fat pussy and the daughters it’s made. Of Barbara Ann’s denim jacket; the coffee can full of your mother; the anonymous river full of ashes.
Your mother's face in profile, the same as yours. The contours you share.
She will turn away when she sees you in the mirror.
You can feel this thought breathe. Its live power tickles your ear. It is realer than anything you’ve ever felt. It can’t be yours.
You have to look at your mother, now, full in the face, just to confirm that she hasn’t scrubbed your features from her body, that she hasn’t up and left you in the night. You crawl out from under the bed and straighten yourself with a creak.
“Mom,” you say, turning on the hummingbird lamp. She stirs and turns her face to you, covering her eyes with an elbow as if you are personally emitting the blistering light.
“What? What do you want?” Her voice is thick with sleep. A small film of drool trails along her cheek. You want so badly to be close to her.
“Do I always have to want something?”
“Yes, you do,” she says. “If you’re waking me up, at least, you’d better.”
“Well, I just wanted to tell you something.” You don’t actually have anything to tell her–nothing you could articulate, anyway–but you can’t not speak, now that her expectant eyes are on you.
You wipe the drool from her face with what you feel to be a great tenderness, but she swats your hand away. “What?” she says.
“I just wanted to tell you that grandma shit herself.” This is not true–or if it is, you would have no way of knowing–but it seems like a potential point of connection. You laugh hoarsely, but your mother does not laugh with you. She gasps.
“Really?” she sits up. “Is she okay? Does she need help?”
“What?” you say. “No, she’s fine. Brisa’s got it covered.”
“Oh. Why would you even tell me that, then?”
“I dunno.” you shrug your shoulders. “I thought it was kind of funny, I guess.”
“God,” she falls back onto the mattress and pulls the comforter to her chin. “How’d you get so fucked up?”
You watch her pretend to go back to sleep. You pretend you are not watching her eyes twitch beneath their lids, and she pretends not to feel you watching.
But soon, her phone lights up with a text and her eyes dart open, ruining the game.
She is leaving. She is going to leave you here alone and meet Barbara Ann on the winter beach.
“What does she have that I don’t?” you speak loudly, suddenly, from your diaphragm. You enunciate. Your mother knows exactly what you’re talking about, but makes like she does not. Her mouth starts to form a question mark, and you stop her before she can ask. “Barbara Ann,” you say. “Why do you love her and why do you hate me? What changed?”
They will walk together with their pants rolled to their ankles, their bare feet in the water.
“I don’t see why we have to talk about this right now,” your mother says, her eyes still on the phone. “My mother is dying, you know. Things are weird.”
They will laugh and they will touch each other’s arms.
“I know,” you say. “I just want to understand. I’ll leave you alone once you tell me.”
They will go to the river together. They will go without you.
Your mother sighs.“It’s not a matter of having something, or of not having it,” she says. “Barbara Ann is just nice. Sometimes that’s all there is.”
“I can be nice, if that’s what you want.”
“It’s not.”
“Oh,” you say. “I think I understand.”
And you do.
You understand, now, that in the morning you will find Barbara Ann over with a greasy sack of donuts and a pack of those thin menthols to smoke in the dining room with the window cracked. You understand that your increasingly desperate attempts to revive inside jokes will receive only cursory attention. You understand that you will go on your walks alone and you will come back only to the wheezing gap in Brisa’s pornstar teeth.
You can see it all now: you will never go to the river with your mother. Your grandmother will never die.
Rebecca Kopelman (she/her) is a junior at BC studying English and philosophy. You can find her on Instagram @rebecca_kop