When Nora was thirteen, her mother veiled the bathroom mirror in textbook wrapping paper and prepared herself to swallow a bottle of Panadol.
Earlier that day, Maxine had picked Nora up from school and slipped into Monarch Pharmacy. This visit would seem no different than any other before, so, as always, Nora agreed to wait in the car. Moments later, Maxine returned, and replacing her heels with driving slippers, she set her hands on the wheel and eased into the chaos of Hope Road at rush hour.
In the seat next to her, the paper bag sat upright and menacing. Maxine had been taken hostage.
She kept the radio on but couldn’t listen, her fingers had gone numb, and as she watched them tapping on the wheel, she wondered, without worry, what it could mean that her connection to them had been lost.
Through the windshield, sun rays lashed her skin. Chest rising and falling, she held her face to the sting. Serve her right. Her mother had warned her about him. Her lips trembled, and she held the bottom fold between her teeth and peeled at the split skin. Stinging and briny, the taste of blood emerged. And the sun was a blinding nuisance. But still she held firm, blinking furiously against the punishing white, and the bitter recollections of her own disillusionment.
Maxine saw two women standing at a bus stop and figured it could easily be one of them. Sourness cinched her throat. Overhead, on the electronic billboard of a cellphone ad, another three women glistened with pleasure. Or them, she grimaced, tightening her grip on the covered steering wheel. She had no clue what kind of woman her husband preferred. She must have known once but that time had long passed.
Along her periphery, tall concrete walls sprouted moss, and behind them palm trees flapped like tongues. “Goodbye,” they seemed to say as she inched forward, their words garbled, as though from the depths of the sea, and she squinted into the restless trees, trying to interpret their howls, their frantic movements, and she leaned further and further into their cries, perilously, until the blast of a horn righted her mind, saving her from a collision with the car ahead. She glanced nervously at Nora through the rearview, then returned to the stretch of road. A faint hue of mountains beckoned along the base of infinite sky. Time slowed; a great weight fastened at its hem.
As she drove, seasoned taxi men raced by, heads and forearms jutting from windows, recruiting passengers, driving with the urgency of ambulance trucks, bobbing and weaving like corrupt politicians. Adolescents split from school gates like guinep seeds, engulfing sidewalks, knocking shoulders and fists as they made their way to Half Way Tree, heading towards home.
At the stoplight, a boy not much older than her daughter began washing the windshield. At any other time, she might have turned on the wipers, or waved a hand to stop him, but this time she reached for her purse and handed him a worn thousand-dollar bill. The boy’s eyes expanded beyond language. Then he scattered like light. She wasn’t worried this overgenerous display might raise Nora’s suspicion. Her daughter was preoccupied with a new cellphone, and besides, she had been pulling away for months, unable to meet her mother’s eyes, withering at her touch, showing no interest in her mother’s affairs whatsoever.
For weeks Nora’s face has been pulled into a tight knot, loosening only in rare moments of sweet surprise. Occasionally, in an effort to free her daughter’s smile, Maxine would orchestrate these moments. On this day, she waved a hand through the window, signaling the young man peddling boxes of jelly donuts. He wore a rumpled yellow T-shirt and old black basketball shorts, and the miserable sun bore down on his bare head. He was three cars behind settling up with another driver, and seeing her, he shot off like a bullet, racing against the stoplight that had changed seconds before. She watched him advance in her side-view mirror, and when all the cars ahead of her began to accelerate, she tapped on the gas just enough to allay the drivers behind her. Now the donut man was running in tandem with her moving car, and seconds before the intersection, he sailed a box through the window of the backseat onto the child’s lap and plucked the bills from her mother, who had witnessed, through the rearview mirror, Nora’s smile spreading open like the skies.
*
In the bathroom, Maxine filled a glass with water and set it on the counter with steady hands. She took the pills one by one at first, and then in fistfuls. If there were nerves, she concealed them well. She might have been eating Tic Tacs. The passing of time was an indifferent shrug: could have been minutes, could have been years. Her mind was bare. It seemed the action, once decided, did not demand her mental participation. In fact, when she placed that pill on her tongue, that one which would be her last, she instinctively tilted the bottle to retrieve the next. But no more fell. She swallowed the final pill just as she was noticing it to be the final pill, sensing, with frightened awareness, that this one was different than the rest.
It landed like a gavel in her stomach. Hurrying to her nightstand, she pulled her Bible to her chest and prayed for salvation. Surely, she would not burn cradling the Word of God to her sternum. But on that matter she couldn’t be certain, and so she flung the Bible open and searched hungrily for the pages that would absolve her. Finding, instead, crayon markings made when Nora was just a baby. Blues and pinks and yellows scrawled onto the page, overlapping in an infinite loop, the end indiscernible from the beginning. Her face broke into a mad smile, pained, the genesis of a scream that would never come. Had someone asked, she wouldn’t have known what to call it. Her emotions stirred and whipped like a severed livewire.
She knew her initial desire had waned. Or else, had become equally matched with its opposition. She wanted this badly and, on the cusp of having it, now despised the wanting of it. A tightrope of uncertainty. And she was terrified. She had never been good at making decisions—not when one choice negated the other. And time had already laced its fingers around her neck. As if to corroborate this, her lungs went flat. She strained for the rim of the bathroom counter. What are you going to do, Maxine? What are you going to do? She closed her eyes, not yet knowing how to lift herself above the rising tide.
See, what she had really wanted was to be longed for. To receive from Richard even a crumb of what she had given. Over the years, though it hadn’t been her intent, she had willed herself into the shape of his sustained devotion, and now in its absence, she had withered. She couldn’t point to the moment his validation had become her only evidence of worth. But it had. And she was desperate to have it back. Without it, she was a feathery, insubstantial thing. And the days clapped by.
If she was being honest with herself—though she would never say this aloud—she had hoped, shamefully, that this act would redirect his affection. Reminding him that it was only the most delicate of threads tethering us to life, which, at any moment, could snap. But it would mean considerable work, excavating this from the recesses of her subconscious. Long after the event she would still never know its true motivations. Only that, in the end, she had become conflicted.
Now, gathering herself, she stepped a few paces to the left, pressed her back against the stippled bathroom wall, and slid to the floor, remaining calm enough to yell for Nora, who—when she heard her mother’s voice—was tempted to increase the volume on her CD player.
*
Nora knew that if she ignored her mother, there were only two potential outcomes and she felt prepared to face them both. Her mother would either carry on doing whatever she was doing without her, confirming the thing’s insignificance, probably something to do with the convoluted plot turns of Royal Palm Estate. Or she would come fuming up the stairs, hurtling the very same words Nora would have had to leave her bedroom to hear. She’d been feeling defiant as of late, testing the limits of her mother’s patience, and so she knew her mother wouldn’t call for her again. There had been precedent, a well-established routine. Which was why the second call was so peculiar. And why the third call raised alarm.
Nora raced down the hall into her parents’ bathroom and, glancing around, detected no signs of harm. Her mother looked just as she had minutes ago. She wore her tailored bank uniform and her recently relaxed hair was smoothed into a polished bun, augmented by a convincing Kanekalon ponytail. Her face glistened. Two pearl earrings dressed her ears. Both her lips and eyes were lined with enviable precision. Her fingernails were overlaid immaculately with pink and whites. And her legs shimmered in ultra-sheer mahogany pantyhose. No runs. Feet bare. Exquisite.
But Maxine had terror in her eyes and so her daughter rushed to her side. After a few hastily mumbled words, she would guide Nora’s finger to the back of her throat.
It was a night spent in agony. Maxine brought all talk of the emergency room to an indisputable end. Refusing to withstand the judgmental eyes of people who knew nothing about her.
“Why should I go? And have them look at me as if I am the weak one?” she huffed, driving a palm into her chest, “Me? When he’s the one who—” she glanced at Nora, then clipped her eyes shut and brought her knees to her chest.
After a moment, she opened her eyes and began again, erratic and adamant, a frustrating combination for Nora, who conceded quickly, because there had been no one to drive them. Her father wouldn’t arrive home until late into the night, messenger bag slung across his back, textbooks shuffling in his hands, stubbornly maintaining the ruse to conceal what Nora already knew. And by the time he arrived, Nora would be sick with rage, because now she knew that her mother—who worshipped her father—knew as well.
*
Most nights, her father left soon after dinner. He was working on his doctorate in Mathematics, keeping impractical hours, his interest in his studies steadily growing inversely proportionate to his interest in his family. Initially, Nora had found his drive endearing, even motivating. “You can’t achieve success without discipline, Nora,” he declared, blowing the dust from her spelling bee practice book, and handing it to her with a grin. Her mother was in the kitchen scooping Grape-Nut ice cream into two crystal bowls. Her father would leave before dessert. A sacrificial act, as far as Nora was concerned, demonstrating his faithfulness to his studies. She had looked on in admiration, and it lit the flame of her own ambition.
That was before she knew.
*
A few months ago, Nora’s father had taken her to his office, where he worked as a research analyst, and in the evenings met and studied with the members of his doctorate program. Nora had needed to print and bind the pages of a history project and her father had suggested that she go with him, help herself to the office supplies. When they arrived, he introduced her to a woman called Veronica whom she greeted with indifferent politeness, reserved for superficial grownup acquaintances whom she would never lay eyes on again. Veronica and her father went to the conference room, their workspace for the evening, and Nora excused herself to find the bathroom, wondering, as she walked, what binding method would most impress her teacher.
The bathroom floor had recently been mopped, a neon sign tented. She tip-toed to the nearest stall, hoping to leave behind as little of herself as possible. The automatic toilet flushed before she was ready, and when she was ready, the toilet lost interest in its singular purpose, no matter how many times she pretended to sit down and stand up. No matter how vigorously she shook her hands across the sensor, it wouldn’t budge. She was ready to give up when, finally, it conceded. But the soap dispenser was another hell, choosing only the moments when her hands retreated to deposit the soap—onto the countertop. Washing her hands had been one prolonged eyeroll. And though drying them had been painless enough, holding her sopping hands beneath the metal box had left droplets of water on the floor. She folded a helping of toilet paper around her fingers and wiped away all her messes. Then she returned to the conference room, confident in the steps she’d taken to eliminate any signs of her presence, and when she pulled the doors wide, her father’s hand retreated swiftly from the low of Veronica’s back.
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