The Betrayal

My choked gasp rockets me from my pillow.

Blinding, the nighttime shadows leave me swimming in black until I catch the digital blink of the bedside clock. It reads 2:30 in the morning. Damn adrenaline. 

I had the dream again.

I’ve had a lifetime full of “agains.”

My hand fumbles to the night table in patting thumps and thwumps. Searching for my phone, the panic clamps my heart in its fist, ready for that inevitable, pleading message—but it didn’t come. There’s nothing on the screen as it lights up to scan my face. No notifications. No calls. No texts. It was another baseless premonition. No one is calling me tonight.

My husband grunts and turns away from the glow my phone casts along the curve of his cheek and the plastic cup of his sleep apnea mask. He may be young, but that doesn’t mean his nasal passages don’t like to close down for business when he lays on his back. His snort and subsequent fart says I didn’t wake him, and I try to keep up the trend. Putting the phone aside. I ease myself back into place, blankets askew and somewhere around my navel instead of cradling my bare legs. Who needs pajama pants? All they do is tangle.

The discomfort needling my insides stays. The dream stays. It hovers in a skein over my vision, superimposed over the ceiling I can’t see, the blackout curtains giving us our money’s worth.

I need to call my mother tomorrow.

I fight the urge to call her right now but remind myself that dreams are dreams, even when they’re based in reality. A twisted take on what could have been, could still be, that settles guilt like a mountain in the soft valley of my gut.

Morning finds me still staring at the ceiling, visions of anything but sugarplums dancing in my head. Is seven am too early to call her? No. She’d love it. It would mean my first thought was of her.

Sneaking another glance at my unconscious spouse, I snag my phone and scoot into the hallway, tiptoeing down the stairs to make my way onto the porch outside. It’s dewy and gross, wet fall leaves already sticking to the soles of my feet, but I find myself begging the voice assistant to dial My Mother, which is how she’s listed in my phone. No name needed. “Call My Mother” is a command I’m compelled to every day. Not out of desire, but responsibility.

Her groggy morning voice is full of the hum of pleasant satisfaction when she answers the phone. “Hey, sweetie. Good morning.” The word dissolves into a yawn.

“Haven’t had your coffee?” I ask.

“Haven’t gotten out of bed,” she replies. “But that’s okay. I’m glad you called.” Her tone drops lower, almost a murmur. “I wish you had called last night.”

My temples throb at the subtle blame in her voice. “Did something happen?”

Her non-reply tells most of the story.

“Was it Rob?” I ask.

Her sigh tells the rest.

Rob is the kind of man who takes up all the space in the room. One who doesn’t deserve but demands every eye, ear, and emotion hung on his spoken hook. He’s the kind of person who will scream at a waiter for bringing his lobster stuffed sandwich with the meat cut too small. He’ll ensure everyone knows he’ll use all five of his Yelp accounts to lambaste the restaurant, and when the poor server scuttles away, he’ll bellow, “Make sure no one spits in it!”

I’ve stopped going to restaurants with him.

“He doesn’t let me get a word in edgewise,” my mother says. “We’ll be talking with our friends and it’s like I have no space there. I just sit and watch, and when I say something, he runs over me, telling my stories for me as if I’m not there. You know how he is.”

How all her boyfriends are, really. She needs them to need her and she’ll put up with any slight to ensure they’re obsessed with the grace she gives them when no other woman would put up with their bullshit. He’s just another man in a chain of Bad Men, but this one put a ring on her finger, and that makes all the difference.

Not that she doesn’t talk about leaving him.

Daily.

Then she’ll dab her eyes and say, “But where would I go?”

Filial piety makes me want to say, “To live with me, of course,” but the truth is that would send me on a grippy sock vacation, the mental hospital throwing me in a room and medicating me until I come down from whatever ledge I was perching on. Another “again” in a lifetime of “agains.”

With Rob off to buy cigarettes despite his recent heart attack and COPD, she has carte blanche to rant, and rant she does. It’s all so familiar, I could tell the stories myself, but it's her tears that get to me. She cries every time we speak. It’s either about him, about my brother—who can’t put up with her “victim bullshit”—or about me. She’ll simultaneously tell me I’m her hero and that I’ve abandoned her. No matter what I do, I’ve always abandoned her.

I say the conciliatory things I’m supposed to. I make sad sounds in the appropriate places, I cluck my tongue and shake my head, unseen. I’ve given up offering advice. They say not to cast pearls before swine, but this is more common sense against a typhoon. A swine can at least eat a pearl if it was so inclined. A typhoon will just hurl your words back at you with a little disaster thrown in for flavor.

“Come visit,” she pleads. Like she didn’t move halfway down the country—something she blames me for. In passing, I said I’d like to live in nicer weather so she went on a vacation to a Southern state only to call me, saying she put an offer on a house. When I didn’t come, it was the worst of betrayals.

“I’m visiting in a few months,” I tell her. Every year, she’s up once for her birthday, and I’m down for Christmas. Never mind that it costs thousands upon thousands of dollars that I’d rather spend anywhere but there, but again, fucking filial piety.

The pause over the phone makes me tense. Is she going to cry harder? Is she going to insult me?

“Why doesn’t anyone love me?” is what she says, her voice barely above a whisper.

“I love you,” I insist, a vehemence in my voice I can’t control.

Her soft huff of a laugh sinks into my skin like poison ivy, leaving me poised for blisters that will welt only after the call ends.

“Not enough,” she says, and then she hangs up the phone.

I blink away hurt and take a deep breath. My husband, disheveled with his morning hair wild, stands staring at me through the sliding glass door that leads to the deck. A look of sympathy blankets his face. He knows the drill. Behind the glass, he simply opens his arms and waits for me to come inside and throw myself into his embrace. I will. I have to. It’s the only thing that will hold me together.

~~~~~~~~~ 

I lay down to sleep, the day’s emotional baggage piled on my face and skewing my features into a frown. My husband wrenches on his mask and scoots down beside me, holding my hand and smoothing his thumb over the back in circles.

Like the lucky person he is, he drifts immediately, and I can tell the exact moment he falls asleep. I don’t want to follow him. The dream will come again, and I’m afraid.

As my eyes sink closed, exhaustion pulling from my brain to my toes, I let it come to haunt me.

Because it doesn’t matter what I want.

~~~~~~~~~ 

In a world where the edges of reality fade to white, the only details that matter are the ones directly around her. Like the pink string of yarn twined around her little fingers. Too little to manage knitting needles, certainly, but not too small to finger knit a long line of bubblegum colored fabric, her tongue out and her brows cinched together until it draws a line up her baby-round forehead. She’s on the fourth pass now, making the line thicker, thicker, perfect, until she’s managed a scarf. Something to keep her mother warm. Mama needs to be warm.

The little girl wears a Christmas-pretty dress complete with a satin bow strung around her waist. Her clothes are frost white, and the bottom flares out with the puffed lining of tulle itching her around her thighs. Her snipping steps lead her to the windowsill where her mother always sits, a patchwork quilt of family memories cinched to her chest, clutched there with thinning, bony hands. Her mother’s skin is sallow and sunken, her eyes like glistening blue orbs that sit in her head, ones that brighten at the sight of her little girl. She smiles, all joy despite the lines that cut through her cheeks, making her look older than she really is.

“There’s my angel,” her mother says, smiling that frail, cellophane-thin smile.

Lips cherry pink, the little girl matches her mother’s adoration and presents the scarf, standing on her tippy toes to wrap it around her mother’s neck. Something else to tuck Mama in with as she’s always chilled despite the warmth in the air around them.

Her mother nuzzles her face into the wide surface as if to inhale the love directly from the fabric. There is love there, woven into every loop.

“Did you eat?” the little girl asks.

The mother nods to the soup bowl on the tray beside her, empty save one noodle. Mama needs soft food. Soothing food. Soul food.

A shyness paints the girl’s face and she looks to the floor, twiddling one polished, gleaming shoe over the plush carpet. “Can I go out play?”

Her mother’s smile fades in slow motion. Those wet, pale blue orbs blink, fluttering her sparse eyelashes over the crest of her cheeks. “But then who will take care of me?”

The little girl knew better, she really did, but the window behind her mother calls to her. Summer has brought a warmth that radiates through the glass as the trees sway gently. The little girl wants to feel the breeze. She’s only ever imagined it. What would the sun feel like if it was directly on her skin instead of filtered through window? What is the wind truly like and how would it feel in her hair?

Taking back her request, the little girl smiles at her mother, knowing that she always needs to be there, promising that she will always be there, and her mother’s happiness returns in a full flood. She nestles her face into her new pink scarf again, all grins. “Time for my nap, baby girl.”

Lunch and a nap, such is the way of the world.

The little girl tucks the quilt tighter around her mother. The kiss on her head is light and sweet, and her mother’s eyelids are already sinking closed. She’s so tired. Always so tired.

That means three hours alone. Three hours of nothing. Three hours of waiting for her mother to wake up and call for her again.

The little girl looks out the window once more, longing in a way that only trapped people ever could. A nasty, evil, piercing thought crosses her mind then, filled with dangerous words. Words that should never exist.

The words: She’ll never know.

Casting a sidelong glance at her mother’s room, door partially closed, the little girl yearns for the sun. She yearns for a friend. She years for more. And since she is little, and since she doesn’t know any better, she tiptoes through the nothing-space of this dream, the floor coming to life all around her as she finds her way to a door she’s never seen. There is no lock, there is no key, because she is trusted. Still, desire drowns her guilt, and the door opens a sliver. Then a crack. Then a gap. Then wide enough for a little girl in a pristine dress to wriggle out into the daylight.

Overwhelming isn’t the world. Her brain lights on fire the way that Eve’s had when she ate the apple from the forbidden tree. 

Everything expands and her pupils contract as the glare of the sky warms her in a way it never has before. The once-imagined wind caresses her and flutters her skirt, cool, crisp, and gentler than any touch she’s ever felt. Grass crunches beneath her feet, vibrant and green like read-about emeralds. Their color through the window was only ever olive and dusky. Now it screams life. Wonder.

She twirls in circles, taking in the azure sky, the wisps of clouds, the scent of flowers, the rustle of trees, and she breaks into a run. Her face splits into a giggling grin as she uses her legs for more than just standing. She trots, she dashes, she gallops. She jumps and leaps and skips along her front yard, away from her mother and that window to the outside world, a window that hid the glory from her.

But the new textures, the new movements, the new experience catches her wrong. She takes a spill, tumbling down, still laughing in spite of it all. Rolling on the grass, she takes in its fragrance. She feels it poke and prod her, just sitting for a moment, alive and breathing…until she notices her dress. Her only dress. Snow-frail satin is now striped with brown mud and green streaks.

What has she done?

The words she’d whispered to herself, the “she’ll never know”, were lies.

Scrambling, her heart is in her throat, and every beat spikes her panic higher. She all but lunges into the house, closing the door behind her, at a loss of what to do. The space, that trapping, stifling space blooms around her again as she goes to ensure her mother is still asleep. The little girl needs time to fix this. She needs time to think it through. She needs time to devise an apology.

But there is no apology that can fix this.

Peeking into her mother’s room, all breath leaves her lungs. Her mouth drops open, and a waterfall of shock sizzles through her nerves.

At the window, wrapped tight in a quilt, is nothing but a skeleton.

A skeleton wearing a pink scarf.

~~~~~~~~~

I startle awake once more, the dream and the horror wrapping around me like a rubber band, cutting off all circulation. There’s nothing in my mind save that image of bones and betrayal. Why did the little girl go against the rules? Why did she leave her mother in her time of need?

Curling into a ball, this time, I weep.

Because it’s always that little girl’s fault.

And that little girl is me.