Come Clean

What did we even fight about? Now that I had cooled off, I couldn’t even remember. That was the only bad thing about our arguments: I could never remember why we fought. I knew she would bring it back up when I got inside, but I kept quiet until then.

I climbed up the steps to the front door and pulled the house key out of my pocket like it was chewing gum in my hair. My shoulders and back ached as if I carried the weight of the world on my shoulders. Mom used to tell me that it was because I was always stressed. She never asked why I was always stressed.

I unlocked the door and entered the house as quietly as possible. The door shut with a silent click! before it locked and I turned around, slipping my shoes off and placing them on the mat next to Mom’s shoes. I made note of how quiet it was inside before proceeding from the foyer to the kitchen. Mom must be asleep, I thought.

Stopping in the hall, I admired the family photo hanging on the wall. It was taken about two years before my parents’ separation. I touched the cracked glass that ran over our faces. We were all smiling in that photo. Dad had an arm wrapped around Mom and a hand on my shoulder. Mom carried my infant brother in her arms. My sister wasn’t born yet, but the baby bump was visible in that photo. I moved on before the thoughts of how she was never really born hit again. Two years of suffering and arguing later, Dad had taken my brother and left, saying they would “maybe come back one day.”

That “maybe” was said six years ago, today.

I tossed my keys into the bowl on the kitchen table; the loud clink! they made surprised me. I hurried to the sink where the dirty dishes were piled up, expecting Mom to come rushing in here soon and yell because I had “walked out on her, just like my stupid excuse of a father did.”

At least, that’s what she had said in our last argument after I left and came back. I told her that if she thought I was like my father, then why didn’t she get custody over my brother instead of me? Maybe then she wouldn’t have been so disappointed in the child that she raised. It had been her turn to leave the room.

I did not feel sorry for her. Not for her, not for Dad.

I did feel sorry when we all met up by accident at my sister’s grave and Mom and Dad awkwardly stood there, a tension between them that snapped when Mom threw a fit. She stormed away from the cemetery, dragging me along, and went home to cry over and over in angry sobs, “Why did you leave? You stupid excuse of a man, why did you leave us?”

As I thought, my mind wandered to our argument this morning. Now I remembered. It was about the photo. Mom was trying to get rid of it when I got home from school. I had yelled at her not to as she pulled the frame down from the wall. She asked me why on earth I would want to keep that damned photo.

I told her it was the last thing I had of my family before everything was ruined.

“What family? You call this a family?” she screamed, shaking the photo in my face. She was thinking about the last two years of her marriage.

What had come over me, I wasn’t sure, but I screamed back, “Oh, what? Do you think this is a family? Do you think we are a family? We are nothing but a pair of women living in the same house! That is a family, there in the photo, happy and smiling. That is all I have left!”

She threw her arms down and the photo slipped from her fingertips, crashing to the floor and shattering. I tried to catch it, but it all happened so quickly. I could feel myself cry as I bent over to look at what was left of my broken family. I never cried in front of Mom. I felt so angry, so I left.

She must’ve put it back up after I left.

As I put the last clean dish onto the drying rack, I looked around the room. Where was my mother? She was a light sleeper. She would’ve heard me start the dishes.

I explored the house. First the empty living room, then the empty bathroom, and finally her empty bedroom. She was nowhere to be found, yet the entire house was clean. She must’ve gone out.

I headed towards my room. The white door was shut, my collection of posters of small-time musicians that I had met personally at the local music house greeting me, rather than the interior of my room.

Why was my door closed? I wondered. Turning the knob, I got my answer.

The indigo-painted walls of my room greeted me, followed by the messy dresser and the made bed. After those came the body of my mother laying like a rag doll on the lavender rug. She was holding my medications in one hand. The white bottle held three pills. That wasn’t the amount left from this morning. Blood and water stained the rug around my mother’s shattered cup. The glass had sliced her hand open.

I panicked. I couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. She was facedown; I couldn’t see her chest rise and fall. Her long hair was matted down on the ends by the blood from her hand. I ran over, kneeling down and feeling for a pulse. I couldn’t find one. I felt my pocket for my phone. Where was it? I fumbled around trying to find it without taking my eyes off of Mom, as if I looked away once, her body would simply vanish and I would lose all hope of saving her.

I forced the phone out of my jean pocket and dialed nine-one-one with a shaky hand. An army of ninja-like tears had slipped out onto my cheeks and dotted the rug, leaving ladybug stains in the purple lilies.

“Nine-One-One. What is your emergency?” the dispatcher answered.

“It’s my mother… I think she overdosed on my medication while I was gone and now I can’t tell if she’s breathing…I…I don’t think she’s breathing…”

“Where are you now?”

“In our house,” I softly gave our address. He told me an ambulance would be there shortly.

“Do you have another parent or guardian you can call to pick you up?”

“My father,” I whispered, wondering how Mom would feel about Dad taking me in since she couldn’t care for me at the moment. She would be disgusted. Another thought crossed my mind. “I didn’t get to tell her I loved her…”

“Call your father and keep an eye for the ambulance, ok? Everything will be alright.”

But nothing seemed to make any sense. Alright? How could everything be alright if I couldn’t understand it? The ride from the house to the hospital was inexplicably fast, everything running together. The one clear thing I remember was my mother’s heartbeat. It was almost gone.

They were trying to save her. I had been taken to the waiting room where I met Dad and my brother. Fear was written all over Dad’s face.

“What happened to your mother? Is she alright?”

That set me off. The reality that my mother had tried to kill herself finally sunk in. Is she alright?

I was holding the white prescription bottle in my hand, the three pills still rattling within. They taunted me, cackling every time they hit the interior of the bottle. I could hear them chanting, “She’s dead! She’s dead! She’s dead!”

I broke down, falling to the waiting room’s tile floor. Chills slithered down my spine as the cold wrapped me in a warm hug that seemed to drain the life from you. It was amazing that more people didn’t die of hypothermia in the waiting room than they did on the operating table.

I felt my brother’s hand reach out and touch my shoulder. I looked up and our bloodshot eyes met. He knew. Without a doubt, he had made an assumption that something was wrong with Mom. The difference between him and Dad was that he had accepted and understood that something was wrong. Dad was like a wild animal, fighting the inevitable. He refused to even think that Mom was dying—or worse, already gone.

I took my little brother into my arms where he hiccupped tears onto my shirt. Little sobs were muffled into my shoulder. I shut my eyes and tried to dream this nightmare away, but the truth kept coming back.

Dad reached down and took the bottle from my hand. He didn’t know I took medication. Mom told me never to tell him because she didn’t want him to pay for the medication. She said she wanted to be independent from him. I always felt that was a lie to cover the truth about how she just didn’t want him to know that I was depressed after the separation so he wouldn’t try to come back.

“Are these yours?” he asked. He was reading the label. His lips moved slowly with the words, each painful one equating to a therapy session, an overpriced prescription, and all those dates I turned down because the meds made me even more depressed than I already was and who could love someone who was always sad, said my mother.

I looked up, not letting go of my brother, “Yes, they’re mine.”

“Why do you have them?”

“I’ve been going to therapy since the separation,” I admitted, looking at the floor for moral support. It stared back with a blank face. “Mom made me promise not to tell you.”

“And you listened to her?” Dad whispered more to the bottle than to me. “You listened to her?”

Dad was raising his voice now. He almost never raised his voice, especially not at me. The anger writhing within him was like a caged animal, forceful and violent. I had seen this only once before when he had come home drunk and got into an argument with Mom about this money-gulping habit he had developed over the last two years of their marriage. A week later he left.

“Of course I listened to her! She’s my mother!” I sobbed and my brother backed away. “She stayed with me after you left her, after you broke her heart because you blamed her for my sister’s death and couldn’t stand seeing Rosemary’s eyes in hers. That baby opened her eyes once, Dad! She lived in Mom’s arms for twenty-one minutes and she suffered in Mom’s arms for twenty-one minutes. Mom lost her daughter—”

“And we’re about to lose your mother! Maybe if I had known about this I would’ve come back and helped you out, but you and your mother keep me in the dark! Why can’t you just do the right thing for once in your life? These—” he shook the bottle at me, the pills on his side now. “—are going to be the death of your mother and it’s your fault for not telling me or anyone else.”

I was shocked. My mouth hung agape, opening and closing like a fish thrown out of water. Dad was blaming me for Mom’s overdose. I didn’t even know why she overdosed! Before I could get anything out, a doctor walked in slowly, his stature heavy with shame. His eyes were a dull grey; you could see they had once been a bright blue, but after so many going in and maybe not coming out again, they had faded and lost all light. The creases in his face rivaled the creases in the blue mask clenched in his hands.

He looked directly at Dad and we all knew.

Mom was gone.

Dad was hollow on the drive home. He and my brother had the same eyes; black and dead, a set of glazed-over black holes set in their heads. My eyes were different. They were two oceans, as Mom had once described them, deep enough to swallow anyone and anything up. For a moment, they drowned out the emotions that made my blood run cold in the waiting room, but now the levees that held them back had been suddenly broken and the waters they held within poured out.

I sat in the passenger seat during the ride to our—mine and Mom’s—apartment. There was anything but silence in the car. The road screamed at us through the car’s body, echoing a silent cry that filled the three of us.

Three of us.

Mom was really gone. No more arguments, no more coming home to an angry woman and no more having to worry about the picture getting thrown out. At the same time, that also meant no more going to my mother’s Mexican sweet shop and eating all the panesitos, no more laughing over the stupidity of the customers who couldn’t tell the difference between conchas and panes, and no more trips to the subway after an argument with her.

I unlocked the door, entering the apartment quietly. It was just as we left it when the ambulance had arrived. I could see the ghost-like EMTs running through the house. The lights were flashing in the halls again. My mother was being carefully lifted off my childish lavender rug and placed upon the gurney. They rushed her away and the lights faded.

I wanted to believe it had all been a vile figure of my imagination, but the bloodstains on my rug and a fourth forgotten pill were evidence of reality. I reached a trembling hand to meet the pill and lifted it from its place at the edge of the rug. I brought it to eye level with me and stared at the tiny blue pill in the palm of my hand.

I didn’t have any medication anymore since it had all been used to remove my mother’s soul rather than my depression. This one pill was all I had. Dad had thrown out the other three pills, refusing to allow my depression to spread to the rest of us through the very prescription that was supposed to stop it.

I took the pill in between my index finger and my thumb, forcing it to steady. I touched it to my lips, imagining it was the smoldering coal meant to purge the sin from my life as it did for Isaiah. It hit the back of my throat when I swallowed.

Mom would’ve been disappointed in my choice of possessions I shoved into my pink and black backpack. Most of it was makeup to hide my sadness from the crowds at school and the little jewelry pieces that meant something to me (Mom’s quinceanera ring that she had kept all her life and given to me at my quinceanera and the bronze crucifix necklace dad had given to me the day he left), but I included a week’s worth of clothing for good measure. I took my toiletries and rushed to grab the photo hanging in the hall when I heard Dad’s heavy footsteps clunking through the halls towards our apartment.

Our apartment. Mine and Mom’s apartment.

Dad shouldn’t even be here. This was not his home anymore. He had left Mom years ago to move to the other side of this godforsaken city. He had no place here.

“Hey, are you almost ready to go? I’d like to leave today!” he yelled down the hall. I threw my backpack over my shoulder and walked right past him and out the door. Broken glass from the photograph clinked within, but I ignored it and prayed Dad would too.

“Let’s go,” I mumbled, stepping to the side so he could get out of our apartment before I shut and locked the door behind him. I tied the key around my neck.

One last look at the apartment door left an overcast memory in my mind. The dull city lights outside pitched in a little light down the hall, leaving the entire hallway in a black and white motion picture where I was the star. I looked around at the world I had known all my life. This same apartment, the same neighbors, the same city lights pouring their life through the window down the hall.

All in one day, I had lost everything. This was not how I expected my life to go. The thoughts repeated in my mind, over and over. I needed to get back to the subways and cool off. I needed to hear the dispatcher’s voice again, repeating the same phrase over and over to reassure me.

A week and a half later, I stood to the side of Mom’s casket, family members and friends greeting me with sorrow in their hand and their eyes. My brother stood beside me. Dad wasn’t even at Mom’s funeral. He said he had things to do, but I guessed that meant he was going out drinking again. He never really had things to do. He was a musician. His time was spent at home with his work. He had only ever written one song that I knew of and it hadn’t made very much money. Mom hated his music, but I knew she had a box filled with his songs that he had written for her when they were young. I remember her favorite had been one that she read to me when it was my bedtime.

If my memory serves me right, I think it was called “Come Clean.” It was about a little girl who had unclean wrists and unclean thighs and fought to stay alive because no one knew the truth about her. It was about how that girl always pretended to be happy and everyone believed her until it was too late and suddenly she vanished.

I had gone through the box the day of the separation and found the poem, just for comfort. When I reread it, I realized my mother had changed some of the words to shelter me from what it was really about; a cutter who faked her happiness until one day she couldn’t take it anymore, so she killed herself.

It made me think, is this why Mom had killed herself? Were her wrists and thighs unclean? Did she fake her happiness until finally she couldn’t anymore?

I imagined my mother as the photograph we had fought over right before I left and she overdosed, a piece of paper held within a wooden frame and thin glass to protect her heart until it was just ripped away and shattered into a million pieces. How long was I gone that afternoon? No more than a few hours. What was she thinking in those final moments as she took the pills? Is this why she never accepted the divorce? The medications? She had always told me that she believed people who were always sad could never be loved.

Every family member would come over to say their condolences.

The tears in my eyes weren’t from sadness; they were from anger. I couldn’t take the truth. My mother had killed herself using my medication and I didn’t know why. I would probably never know why. The investigators searched the entire apartment and found nothing even related to a suicide note.

That meant Mom was just dead and there was nothing left of her. No last words, no sweet memories, not even a loving material object for her family to keep as a memento. She was just gone and the only image I had left of her was the image of her dying body lying on the rug in my childhood bedroom. It wasn’t what I wanted to remember her for. I wanted something beautiful to remember her by.

My family members would leave me, glancing into the casket at Mom before making the sign of the cross and hurrying away. I was infuriated. How could they be so quick to leave the dead behind? Did my mother not deserve to be remembered?

My brother jumped when a hand hit his shoulder. I looked up at the man it belonged to. He carried a bouquet of purple lilies in his hand. He had cleaned up nicely. It reminded me of the time he and Mom dressed up for no reason other than to dance around the apartment to Mom’s favorite record.

It was our father.

His eyes were bloodshot from the tears. He laid the bouquet in the casket alongside Mom, not once taking his eyes off of her since he entered the room. Mom’s family and friends stared at him, attacking him with glares. He was hated in this room. He didn’t belong here, just like he didn’t belong at mine and Mom’s apartment. He had done too much damage to fix anything now and he knew it.

He knew it.

If I could make a list of the many depressing things on this earth at the moment, the fact that my father knew that he possibly had a part in the reason Mom overdosed would be at the top. No one could’ve known what he was going through as he watched her with those dead, black eyes. It almost broke my heart. I didn’t want to think about how much he still loved her.

When I was younger, he used to rave about how Mom was his greatest love, and I was one hundred percent sure that no one loved her more than he did, not even their God above. In my childish mind, it was just not possible. I used to love to listen to Dad list off all the reasons he was in love with her.

The day Dad moved out, I laid in bed, relisting those reasons in my mind.

Which ones had disappeared with his love? Had it been her smile? She stopped smiling when Rosemary passed away. Had it been her hair? She cut it short on the one-year anniversary of Rosemary’s death. Had it been her beauty? Medical bills had worn her down so much that the wrinkles seemingly appeared overnight. The light in her eyes had faded away leaving them with a dusty appearance. She lost all interest in her appearance and stopped eating, allowing to herself to dwindle down to nothing but a skeletal figure who baked sweet goods for the children in the Hispanic community we had lived in. All these questions had roamed my mind.

What had Mom done to drive Dad away from us?

Here he stood, his eyes glued to the casket, and suddenly I knew. How had I never known before? Within everyone’s lives there is a tragedy. My mother’s was losing Rosemary. My brother’s was a broken family. Mine was losing Mom.

Looking back, and maybe it was because Mom had convinced me to become biased against Dad, making him the bad guy after he left us, but now I realized that Dad’s tragedy was not his alcoholism. It was the day he left Mom.

I could see it in his eyes. His love for her was profound. Was this why he was so angry? He looked away, his dark eyes glistening like dark chocolate ganache. I imagined each of those tears as a droplet of his love for her and prayed that he wouldn’t cry and lose that love.

I walked over to Dad and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. My brother joined us. He was humming “Come Clean.” I felt the tears welling in my eyes and whispered to Dad, “Everything will be alright…”