Nobody’s Going to Save You

ONE

When I was very young, my father built a small toolshed behind our house, right at the edge of the deep woods. He needed a place to hang his whitetails in the fall, a closed-in structure where he could cool the animals out with no worry of scavengers. By the time I was seven he was passing most evenings and weekends out there, listening to the Red Sox, drinking his beers in peace. My mother never ventured that way, but I spent hours inside that drafty building, perched on a tall metal stool and painting scraps of wood, trying the sips of Budweiser he offered, which I swallowed down and pretended to like. Sometimes we’d catch sight of Ma through the bank of grimy windows over his workbench—trailing a garden hose through the flowerbeds or standing cross-armed on the porch with a cocktail and a half-smoked Parliament, gazing off like she was expecting someone to come rushing up our wooded drive. I asked Dad once what it was he thought she was waiting for. He set down his beer can and came to stand beside me and we peered for a long time through the murky glass. “If I knew that, baby girl, I’d be a very happy man.” 

Even before he strung himself up from the joists with a blue extension cord the year I turned fifteen, the damp space felt haunted to me. Its bare bulbs cast strange shadows onto Dad’s towering gun safe and the tools cluttering the pegboard walls. And lining the rows of shelves like specimens in a museum were glass jars filled not as I liked to pretend with floating eyeballs or wrinkled gray fetuses, but with an archive of metal fasteners—wingnuts, lag bolts, washers, nails, screws, tiny bits of wire, anything he imagined might one day be of use. Yankee ingenuity, he’d say whenever I lifted down a jar to inspect its contents. “Three quarters of what’s busted in the world could be fixed if folks had a little more patience.” Patience being something my father himself must have run short on in the end.

On the morning of his funeral, I came downstairs to find Ma flinging old dishes from the kitchen cupboards into a pile on the linoleum. A half-empty Bloody Mary stood on the counter, garnished with a stalk of translucent celery from the bunch Dad had bought the last time he’d made deer stew. What was it the school counselor had told me? Grief won’t look any one way.

“Ma. What are you doing?” 

“All this stuff, Rosie! It’s too much! It’s weighing us down!” 

She looked like a madwoman at a bonfire.

Beneath the growing heap of dishes—the deep enamel pot we used to boil lobsters, the plastic colander I’d nested on my head when I was little—lay a bunch of checked flannels and pit-stained undershirts. I dug around and discovered Dad’s spare boots, his coveralls embroidered with the shipyard’s logo, the forest-green hard hat sporting the union insignia and a unicorn sticker he’d let me paste on when I was eight. He’d been dead for nine whole days. I lifted a blaze-orange hunting vest from the pile and zipped it to my chin. 

“It’s not weighing me down.”

Ma stopped rifling in the cupboards to look at me. She wasn’t yet forty but her hair had gone completely gray, which she liked to say was my fault. One of my earliest memories is of my mother telling me she’d never wanted kids, and even then, young as I was, I assured myself she didn’t mean that I specifically was unwanted. She pushed the hair out of her face and swirled the flaccid celery in her glass. 

“You don’t want that ugly thing,” she said. She reached for the cigarette balanced on the sink’s edge and started to nod slowly, pointing it at me. “No,” she said. “Actually, that’s good. You should keep it. The two of you—” She trailed off and ashed into the drain.

Until my father died, the distance between my mother and me had always seemed fixed. Navigable. Suddenly that distance was expanding, rapidly and in all directions, the way my science teacher said the universe had been doing for billions of years. Was there some way to slow it down? Some way to retrieve all the far-flung, careening pieces and stuff them back into something singular and dense and whole? And was that really my job—keeping my mother close, making her love me? 

“The two of us what?” I said, shoving my fists into the vest’s deep pockets. “You act like we were united against you.”

Ma laughed. Something jabbed my knuckle. From the pocket I pulled a lint-covered key, tied with a red curl of ribbon. My mind tore ahead of itself—conjuring a metal lockbox on one of the shed’s highest shelves, a handwritten note folded and stuffed inside. “What’s this?” I said, holding up the key. Maybe the note would explain everything—what had gone wrong, how we could fix it. I was fifteen but some childish part of me believed we might still go back and make things right. 

Ma squinted at me over her drink then dropped her cigarette in the sink. “No telling,” she said. With a grunt she climbed onto the counter and began to wrestle a set of nested Tupperwares from the cabinet over the fridge. There were five bowls, each a different color of the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, and blue—and their plastic coating was flaking like sunburned skin from too many turns in the microwave. She flung the stack toward the pile on the kitchen floor and the bowls came unnested mid-flight and went skittering across the linoleum. “Your father clung to everything except what really mattered.”

I have heard hard times be likened to a crucible. The implication being that the pressure of an untenable situation leads to the forging of something beautiful and new. It’s a lovely idea—creation from the ashes, what doesn’t kill you and all that—and I am sure if my mother and I were different people, life could have unfolded that way for us. We might have stood shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the abyss and stared it down together—battle-scarred warriors facing the foe of a lifetime. But the eleven months between my father’s suicide and my mother’s driving away forever were less crucible than hurricane. Once the storm passed, the house still stood but the landscape was unrecognizable. It was hard to imagine anything, beautiful or otherwise, rising from that mess.