Against the Maple

Buffalo County sits thick in fog as my mother and I put the finishing touches on our faces. It’s too early for anyone to be doing their makeup. The kind of early that when the sun finally reaches and stretches into the sky, it reveals patches and crooked lines upon the face. But now, here in the dim light before dawn, Mom looks beautifully made up. Tired-but gorgeous. The skin under her arm hangs loose as she blots her red lipstick, weighed down by the day’s task.

My twin sister Willow is a half-hour drive away in a drug and alcohol treatment center. A rehab. As we step out onto the front porch and lock the icy blue door behind us, I steel myself for the trip ahead. Mom turns on the high beams to combat the fog, though I think this may be making the vision worse. I can barely make out the maple tree in our fenced in bit of front yard before we turn left and head toward the center.

Mom said she named me Maple after that tree in the front yard. After Dad left her, and before Willow and I were born, she told us she sat under that maple tree every day and talked to us in her belly. Willow, we guess, was named after another pretty tree because she came out second and it went well enough with Maple. Though I am the eldest, I doubt I'm the favorite.

Willow and Mom are close, and what brings them closer is their thirst for drink. Mom went through periods of sobriety and periods of drowning as we grew older. Willow discovered her thirst after high school-at a party we went to down the road. Sitting around a bonfire, I nursed a beer as I saw the beast release in her, shot after shot. Vodka. Our family’s choice drink.

I have held my family’s hair back from the toilet. I have been the mother. I choke back the tears to appear strong. Lately though, my strength is wavering. It has been teetering each time I see a new car pull into the driveway and I watch Mom run to exchange a small plastic bag for cash. It has been faltering as I see Willow’s hands shake in withdrawal when the sun rises. It has been exercised when four dark eyes stare back at me with no recognition of where they are.

Mom pulls hard into the small parking lot outside of the treatment center.

“I need to grab something from the trunk baby,” she tells me as I wipe the last of the sleep from my eyes. ‘Grabbing something from the trunk’ means tilting one of those airplane vodka bottles down her throat. I know this, but I don’t say it. The airplane bottles are hidden all over our house, along with mountains of books on every available surface and in piles all over the floor.

I was lucky to get Willow to agree to treatment. I begged in the past, but was always met with a “I don’t have a problem Maple,” or “I mean, I’m only twenty-one, can’t I just have some fun?” How do you tell your sister that you think she is killing herself? How do you say, ‘I care about you and I want you to get help’?

“Come on Maple,” Mom yells toward me, “We gotta get back soon”.

I sit across from Willow at a beige lunch table. The tables and attached benches remind me of the ones we sat on in elementary school. In some way, that makes the tears even more difficult to hold in. Covering the walls all around the room are signs and slogans. Some seem 12-step related, and others maybe religious, but I don’t look away from Willow’s face long enough to think about it.

Fraternal twins may look different but I’m not sure we feel any more separate. Willow is my life. My “ride or die” she says. I guess the main differences are that Willow has a cute button nose and a natural curve in her eyebrow, where my nose juts forward and back and my eyebrows are straight and grow much more hair. My spine curves in an S-shape, but I think that might be from the stress of trying to be the caretaker, especially the past couple years.

We catch up with our eyes. The guy at the front desk told me we were only allowed a hug in greeting and a hug for goodbye, but I hold Willow’s hand underneath the table. How could I explain to him that she is the other half of my soul? After I get the details of all the cute guys, Willow looks at me with sudden seriousness.

“Look, Maple,” she starts, looking around to see Mom isn’t listening. She is out the back door smoking a long cigarette and checking her watch every few seconds.

“First, I want to thank you for getting me in here,” she says as I shake my head and feel the tears finally break free. “I am so grateful and feeling a lot better already and I just really wanted to thank you.”

“Willow, you don’t ever have to thank me. I would do anything for you,” I say as I squeeze her hand tight underneath the table.

“I know,” she says before hesitating. “Which is why I have to ask you to do something.” Her hand slips out of mine and presses down flat on the table. She leans in a little bit closer.

“I know you’ve seen Mom selling stuff to those guys that drive by the house sometimes. There is someone here that told me her brother is a cop and that they’ve been watching the house.”

My heart stops. Cops are watching the house? I briefly see my mother in an orange jumpsuit. Imprisoned. No matter how much I want her to stop drinking and selling drugs, I would never wish her a felony.

“She won’t stop even if she knows they’re watching Maple, I know her. You need to get rid of the stash.” The tone in her voice is begging.

“Get rid of the stash?” I say a little too loud. “How am I supposed to do that?” My thoughts are racing now.

“Her little black book. It’s all written down in there.” She looks desperate at me. Before I can speak again, Mom is walking in from outside. Her pace is fast, and she barely glances at Willow before looking sharp at me.

“Yeah, we have to go,” she says, smacking a piece of gum between her teeth.

We pull back up to our oddly painted rancher in a hurry. Two cars are already parked in the drive with smoke blowing out the rolled down windows. Mom shuts the ignition off and jumps out the door before I’ve even unbuckled my seatbelt.

“Go on inside Maple,” she barks at me as she approaches the two vehicles.

I shuffle past the cars, closing my cardigan and pressing my arms into my chest. It isn’t quite Spring yet and the in-between weather gives me a chill worse than the winter cold.

I tiptoe around the rest of the day, trying to find a “little black book” but with no success. And so, when Mom starts pulling out the big bottles to drink for the night, I retire and set to make an early start of it.

In the morning, I creep down into the kitchen. On the counter, between all the dirtied dishes, makeup brushes, and emptied alcohol bottles is a little black book. It’s curious how I’ve seen Mom write in it but only when she thinks Willow and I aren’t around. I stand for a moment, listening to the house. It is completely still. Mom must be still passed out from last night.

I inch toward the book as I feel my heart move into my throat. I wonder why I have never seen it left out before and what could be written in it-if it is written in secret. My hand lands on the edge. Sleek. Smooth. Leather. Dark. My heart is in my ears now. My hands start to perspire but I don’t know why. I’m not sure why the possible contents of this book stir my stomach and dry my mouth.

Stretching the elastic and pulling it behind, I release the notebook and turn to the first page. A list of books is categorized by author along with a number attached to the right of it. Some of the books, instead of numbers, have a letter next to the listing. C, H, or W seem to be the only letters.

I flip through the pages, but nothing else takes them up but the list. Seeing the stacks of books listed out makes me surprised. I knew we had a lot of books in here, but not this many. I choose a book I know well from the notebook’s list: “I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith-300”.

I walk up and down the hallway where I think I last saw the novel. I remembered it was in the hallway because that was one of my favorite books growing up. I would sit under the maple tree and read it over and over, imagining I was Cassandra in a castle far away. I find the book and open it slowly.

The book seems light, and as I open the front cover, I notice why. The book has been hallowed out. Inside the cut-out section is three one-hundred-dollar bills folded and snuggled in the wedge. My eyes blink as if my vision is off. I quickly scan the black notebook for another listing: “Misery by Stephen King-C”. I know where this book is, so I rush back to the kitchen and a stack topples to the ground as I pull it from the bottom. As I open it, the task before me comes into view.

Stephen King’s words have been severed to make room for the largest bag of drugs I have ever seen. The book falls from my hands as my breathing shallows. The list almost takes up the whole notebook. How would I ever be able to clear out Mom’s stash if it were divided up into all the thousands of books hidden around the house?

Looking back at the notebook, I try to start counting the numbers next to the books until I realize that there are too many for me to track mentally. But, in the last page, I find my mother has already done the job for me. A big red number is circled with the note “working total” next to it. Twenty-thousand dollars.

I fill a backpack with baggies all morning, crossing the books I’ve already opened off of the list. Mom must be in a deep sleep because I haven’t been scared of making noise, and she has sent nothing in response. The backpack is almost as heavy as my heart. I’m not even halfway through the list before I hear the doorbell ring.

I stand frozen, after slinging the backpack over my shoulder and tighter into my body. My mom’s footsteps trudge down the stairs as I whisper “No” in my head. She opens the door and I hear pieces of conversation echoing through my silence. “Search warrant”, “Suspicion”, “Drug trafficking”.

There is no stopping it as several sets of feet stomp toward me in the kitchen. There is no stopping the officer taking the backpack off my shoulder and twisting me around. His eyes look disappointed as my Mom says, “troubled teen” and other words that I don’t hear before being walked out of the front door. I press my nose against the glass of the police cruiser and try to focus on my breathing. How did I get here?

As I am driven away, I watch my mother sit down against the maple tree and light a cigarette.