Brittle Sorries

Georgia Thompson stares at the numbers on her computer screen with a trepidatious thrill running through her blood.

Her buyer had wanted an existential horror piece, which had been heady and strange to paint, far outside of her comfort-zone. But the buyer had promised twenty-thousand dollars. Exactly enough to round out her savings; exactly enough to finally, actually pay for college tuition. So, Georgia had painted like her future depended on it (because it quite literally had).

Now she was staring at her account, at the money there, and attempting not to weep with relief. She'd made it. She was going to college. She was home freaking free!

The first instinct that tumbles through her, as voracious as a prowling lion, is to tell someone. The only person immediately available to her is Mother. Georgia isn't thinking, necessarily, when she sprints out of her bedroom and down the hall into the living area. She's too lost in the sharp deluge of ecstatic triumph, her soul too much like the striking ring of a bell.

Mother is sitting on the couch. Graying brown hair cascades over her narrow shoulders as she solemnly considers her little black book. She marks something down with a sharp flick of her pen and turns back precisely three pages. The thin, fragile paper sounds like silk against her delicate, wrinkled fingers.

"Mama," Georgia cries, an address she'd never use outside of excitement. "Mama, guess what? I'm going to college!"

Mother's irises are shattered ice chips and the promise of blizzards on the horizon. Her gaze makes Georgia shiver at the imagined chill. "Are you, now," she says, flat and nothing like a question.

"Well. Yeah. Yes, I got," Georgia huffs. Feels her equilibrium trembling to falter. "I raised the money. All the money I'll need to go. So—"

"How on earth did you manage to accomplish that?" Mother asks, politely bewildered. Politely skeptical.

"My art," Georgia says, somewhat small. "Like I told you."

Mother sighs. "Have you been conning people again, Georgia? Don't you remember how upset Mr Flaherty was, year before last?"

"I'm not conning anyone. And Mr Flaherty was just— he was an opportunity, okay. He couldn't put my stuff in his gallery because he thought it didn't match the theme he had going; he wasn't upset, really, he—"

"Oh, he was upset, sweetheart," Mother says, clicking her glossy red nails against the end of her pen, impatient to get back to what she was doing. "Most adults won't share such things with children, but he did tell me. I'm not about to lie to you, the way you seem so intent on lying to others." Her tone crests high and airy, "I don't know where you got it from. I certainly didn't raise you to be this way."

Where once Dad might've cut in to jape and laugh and soothe, there is silence. A sentient, insidious silence.

Mother goes very still.

Georgia swallows and, feeling flayed raw, desperately tries to move on. "I'm not conning anyone," she says, as if repeating herself will make Mother listen better. "I'm good at this, Mother. I am."

Mother levies a prim dissatisfied look upon her that wonders: are you?

The sugar-spun thing in Georgia's belly melts into something thick and sticky and nauseating. She chews on her bottom lip, eyes stung and aching. What kind of response can she possibly give?

Mother doesn't wait for her. She returns to her journal; absorbs herself in her budgeting, such as it is.

Georgia wonders if... Did she lie? Somehow? Only, she couldn't have, it would be impossible to, when she was letting her art speak for itself. And her art had just earned her twenty-thousand dollars, hadn't it? That had to count for something.

It had to.

Georgia goes back to her room. Lies down. Presses her knuckles into her eyes in a pitiful attempt to stop the mounting sobs that would like to tear through her, cut her into river-ribbons, make out of her a useless, distraught mess choking on the taste of the sea. There's no point in crying. She has, practically in hand, the future she's wanted for herself since she was twelve.

Dad isn't here to see it and Mother doesn't believe in her, but she'll prove herself. It'll be okay. It may take years, but Mother will see. And in the meantime, Georgia will do what she'd been born to do.

She'll paint. She'll create. She'll survive.

In the moment that drowsiness overcomes her, but her emotions do not, Georgia looks over at her computer screen. At the perfect, beautiful, academic-career-securing numbers there, and she smiles.

■ ■

The numbers on the screen have changed, when Georgia wakes up. As in: they've lowered. Dramatically.

She goes to her computer, wide-eyed, heart in her throat. The more she looks for a cause, for some mistake somewhere, the more she is snarled up in frustrated terror. Every inhale owns thorns, piercing little barbs attached to constricting vines. Her blood ferments, fizzes sour. What happened? How did—

Then she sees it. Nearby her keyboard, Mother's little black book, open on a page that reads simply (cuts deeply): I'm sorry.

Georgia shudders so violently it takes her a moment to realize that the ground beneath her isn't suffering the same catastrophe that her body is, that her bones are. This earthquake is too intimate for the world, caged pure inside her skin.

She snatches up the journal and flips through its pages for an answer. Any answer, other than the one that seems most obvious. There are detailed lists of money earned and spent. There's a distressing outline of Dad's hospital bills. Funeral bills. Payments due that have only recently been check-marked. The money that was drained from Georgia's account spills out on the paper in slanting black ink. Diverted.

Georgia takes the evidence, the paltry I'm sorry, and goes in search of Mother. She finds her in the kitchen preparing breakfast.

"What did you do?" Georgia asks, tremulous, core-shaken.

Mother flicks a dismissive glance at her and exhales deeply. "What I had to do," she says, "for this family."

Georgia sits down at the dining table and stares.

"Do you even realize how selfish you were being? We were in enough debt to be drowning, Georgia. I've been working myself down to the bone ever since your father left us..." He didn't leave, Georgia wants to protest, he died. But she can't muster up the energy. The reality and magnitude of Mother's betrayal is sinking in, a shard of condensed anguish thrust into the depths of her heart. "—and you didn't even try to appreciate how much that money could've helped anyone but yourself, did you? How much it's going to help."

"How could I have appreciated it, Mother?" Georgia breathes. "I didn't even know we were in- in debt, or whatever. If I had I—"

Mother tsks. "You're far too young for such a burden."

Georgia recalls what Mother said about Mr Flaherty just yesterday and is startled into harsh, bitter laughter. Her heart cracks open under the force of it. "Young enough to keep ignorant," she says, wretched, "old enough to steal from?"

A beat, then: "This will be better for you, Georgia. You'll see. You can take a year to consider your options. Find a career path that'll actually get you somewhere. I've saved you from indulging your- your delusions of grandeur."

"Delusions," Georgia repeats numbly. "Really."

Mother purses her lips. Inhales to speak. Georgia doesn't want to hear it, finds herself spinning out of her chair and crumbling into her bedroom. She closes the door softly, sits on her bed, and (because she must, because she has become without choice) reevaluates her entire life.

Reconciles who she thought Mother was with who Mother really is.

■ ■

She calls her best friend what could be eternities later. He wants to play mediator. Georgia really wishes he wouldn't.

She understands that there are complexities to this. She gets that they are, or were, in debt (now, anyway). But she's been lied to, she's been manipulated and stolen from, and through this terrible new fracture in their relationship, Georgia can finally see all of the ways in which Mother has always been like this.

"I mean," Cassius says, "at least she only took enough to pay off the big stuff, right? You still have three-hundred?"

"Yeah," Georgia says, feeling anything but gratitude for that small, apparent kindness. Exhaustion swims in her marrow. She feels the kind of drained that smacks of the aftermath of a childhood fever. "Okay, and? What? Is that supposed to redeem her in my heart?"

"Georgia... She's your Mom."

"I know. And she always will be my Mom. But I'm done." It's such a relief to hear it out loud, in her own voice, in her own words. Years of weight drag up her arms, rest heavy on her shoulders for a moment like understanding, like sympathy, and then lift. Lift. Lift. "I'm really," she sobs, her heart wrenches. She has waltzed a step outside of reality. It is the best kind of agony. "I'm finally done."

When she hangs up, she regards her room steadily. She has bags to pack. It's time to go. (It's been time to go for a long time, though, hasn't it?)

Georgia swallows each iteration of grief, folded over and over until the layers of it are too thick to discern, and begins the arduous process of gathering her things, discarding whatever won't be essential.

She has no idea where this flight will take her, or where she'll land, but she knows, deep down, what she has always known: she can do this. She can make it. She can survive.

And she will.