How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

I push my fists against my eyes and hold my breath. Karen says, “Easy, take it easy.” She starts typing into her computer. That’s the only sound, for a long time. I rip the tissue into tiny pieces in my lap.

“Rinse your mouth,” she says firmly. “You’ll feel gross all night if you don’t. Sleep on your side, too, just in case. So you don’t choke if it happens again.” She looks at me sadly. “My mom used to black out all the time from stuff, and you can choke on your barf if you sleep on your back or stomach. I spent a lot of time rolling her over and checking her breathing.” I rinse my mouth. The water tastes slightly metallic, and makes me gag again.

I stagger past her, dizzy and sick. If my mom were here, she’d make me bouillon to drink and crispy toast. Tuck the red wool blanket around my whole body. Like a burrito, she’d say, and smile.

I settle on the bed carefully. My stomach hurts from heaving. “My mom died,” I tell them. The words hurt, coming out. Not my throat. My heart. My words hurt my heart.

She tries to smile, but she’s not happy about it, you can tell. She runs a hand over her bedspread. And why should she be happy? She has more days, more nights, of bland, boiled food in the middle of nowhere. Black bars on the windows. Lists on walls. And she thinks all that is good, which makes you shudder, thinking of where she must have been.

In the kitchen, I start to text Cake. But I don’t—I don’t even know what to say. What words am I supposed to use for…this? Like, Hi. I’m at a stranger’s house. There is a yellow kitchen table. Like, Hey. Like, Hi. My mother is still dead.

Look at the lace of my dress, entwined in my fingers. The intricate pattern. If only I could disappear inside it. The phone buzzes again. I look down. Cake. Talk to me.

I bite my lip. How many times will I have to move now? Harry Potter went to his aunt and uncle’s but he had to live under the stairs. He got Hogwarts, but he still had to go home in the summers. My mother always thought that was bullshit, Dumbledore sending Harry back to a horrible house.

“He could have kept him at Hogwarts,” she insisted. “Or even with Hagrid. He thought he needed to deprive him of love if he was going to do what he needed him to do. But I don’t believe that. Not at all.”

There are tons of LaLas around Mesa Luna. Easygoing hippies with braided hair and worn clothes, with a tincture or a balm for everything. But not for this. There will never be anything, ever, that can heal what I have.

I’ll have to get used to all-new smells. People. Rules. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. My eyes fill up. I dig the heels of my palms into them until I see bright explosions of color.

LaLa says softly, “Grief is a process your body and mind have to go through, Tiger. There isn’t a cure. But I can keep you comfortable and safe.” I fix my eyes on the floor. Faded rag rug. Scuffed wood.

The ceiling over my bunk has old water stains. If I had a pencil, I would write Kill me. Kill me now inside them, like words inside cartoon text bubbles. Draw a girl with crosses for eyes and a limp body in an old lace dress. Or a girl-bug in glass, fluttering her crisp wings, waiting.

This isn’t a bad dream. I am really, really, really here, and she is really, really, really gone. It’s like lightning, what tears through me then. I bury my face in a pillow that isn’t mine, that doesn’t smell like anything I know, and cry myself back to sleep.

I climb down the bunk ladder and walk to the cloud bathroom, pee, wash my hands, brush my teeth. It feels like it takes a million years to do all those things. It feels like it takes a million years to squeeze the toothpaste onto the red toothbrush, lift the brush to my mouth. I can’t even look at the hollow girl in the mirror; my head is too heavy.

I tense, waiting. Drunkard—that’s another word I learned in Lit class last semester, along with malt-worms. Falstaff and Prince Henry and a face like “Lucifer’s privy-kitchen.”

I want to hurt something. Someone. I want to slam the refrigerator door shut over and over and shatter the pert glass jars of sauce inside.

I want to hurt everyone right now. I want to break things so the world looks like how I feel inside: splintered into a million bloody and sharp pieces.

I can’t be this way. I can’t stay this way. I can’t be this way. I can’t stay this way.

Are you okay? My heart surges with anger. How can I be okay? There isn’t any okay anymore. What a stupid question. I almost type that, but I stop myself, and feel guilty, and take a deep breath, then, just: NO. I’M NOT. REMEMBER??

I don’t know what days are supposed to be anymore. What I’m supposed to be doing. Because a mom tells you that, usually. Get up. Eat. Pack your backpack. Brush your hair. Do you have homework? Stop texting and do your math. Should we have pizza for dinner? Look at you, you’re getting so beautiful. Why are you so grumpy? Am I not allowed to call my own daughter beautiful?

Behind my back, I twist my fingers together, hard, where LaLa can’t see. The pain helps keep my tears in.

When they leave, I peel an orange, press a wet wedge to my lips. Nothing. It tastes like nothing.

Brush my teeth. Spit out the toothpaste, rinse the sink. I’m following the routine in my head, all the stuff I’m supposed to do, but it feels like someone else is doing all these things and I’m just watching her from a distance.

My life was small, but it was mine, and now it’s gone.

My room at home looks like this, too: stuff everywhere, piles of my mom’s old records and CDs, underwear and bras on the floor. My mom always says, “This room is a veritable pigsty.” She has to nag me to do laundry in the little shed behind our house. I would do the laundry forever, all the time, if I could get her back.

In the kitchen, I sit back down at the table, listen to the silence, which isn’t really silence at all, because there are little things making noise that you never really notice. The hum of the refrigerator. The clock hands moving gently. A drip from the kitchen faucet. Everything is happening outside of me and sounds very far away. I pick at my cuticles until they turn pink and bleed.

My heart falls all the way down my body, past my knees, through my feet and toes and exits my body. Arrangements. The girl-bug in the jar can barely breathe. She covers her face with her wings.

“Tiger, sweetie, this is going to be hard, okay? Do the best you can.” Do the best you can. Like this is a spelling bee and not a meeting about burying my mom.

I’ve noticed that since I became a teenager, adults respond to you in one of two ways: they wait for you to make the decision, like you should be happy they’re allowing you a choice they’re probably going to change anyway, or they just make the damn decision themselves because they don’t trust you. Right now, I can’t quite tell what direction they’re leaning in.

I’ll never see her crescent moon superhero mark again. It seems wrong to put her in a box and shove her underground and walk away. She made jams and jellies and grew irises and sunflowers and told me about periods and breasts and bras and how to properly wash my face and she brushed my hair and let me watch inappropriately sexy movies,

It’s a funny word, rhododendron, and it ping-pongs in my head. I say it out loud, and everyone frowns at me, so I stare at my lap and fret some lace on the dress. I’m starting to get the wet cement feeling again, from having swallowed down my tears.

Before all this happened, I never knew trying not to cry would be actually, physically painful, but it is. My bones strain with the effort to keep all my tears in, because the last thing I want to do right now is cry in this stupid funeral home in front of this pink-faced man.

The tabletop is cold under my hands. My skin is so dry I imagine it cracking and flaking off, bit by bit, until I’m just bone and gristle, and a great wind comes, and blows the rest of me away, until I’m nothing, not even a speck of a person.

That doesn’t sound so bad. Disappearing. Not feeling. The girl-bug in the jar flutters, nods her head. She taps her fingers on the glass. Yes, she seems to say. What a good idea.

“Oh God.” LaLa sets two soup bowls down, finds a soft cloth in her bag, and wipes my face. “It’s okay,” she says gently. “It’s going to be okay.” “No,” I choke out. “It isn’t.”

I meet her eyes. She doesn’t try to correct me, or give me some crappy saying, and in that instant I understand. LaLa knows, but she doesn’t want to say it out loud. My life is going to be shit from now on. In ways I never could have imagined.

I wrap my arms around myself. “I don’t care. I really don’t.” Truthfully? They can be as noisy as they want. Fine with me. Their noise just fills up all the empty space around me. Areas my sadness can leak.

I text Cake, but she doesn’t answer. Then I remember, Oh, she’s at band practice. She’s at school, still. There’s school, and life, and that’s where everyone is. They are going on, and I’m just stopped, a girl-bug in the dirt, upended and pathetic.

I roll over, press my body against the cool wall. I’d like to become this wall, burrow in it, let the termites get me, ravage me from the inside out.

Here are the things you think about when your mother dies: That her skin was very soft. That you think you can feel it, still, when you close your eyes super hard.

That you’re afraid one day you’ll wake up and try to remember what her skin felt like, her cheek on yours when you were sick, and you suddenly won’t be able to. It will be gone, poof, kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk, just like those blueberries in the pail after Sal ate them. That made your mom laugh, that Sal’s mom kept picking the berries without knowing Sal was eating them all.

LaLa holds your hair, just like your mother did when you were sick, but she isn’t the same, she can’t be the same, nothing will ever be the same, because wherever you go? There will always be this emptiness inside you and beside you, where your mom is supposed to be, and only you will know the emptiness.

I check my phone. It’s been 6,360 minutes since my mother died. I type: How many minutes is 50 years? If I live fifty more years without my mother, I will be sixty-six, an old lady, and I’ll have lived 26,280,000 minutes without her, each one more damn lonely and horrendous than the last.

I rest a hand on my chest. How is it physically possible for a heart to be beating so fast and a person doesn’t die? I feel like I’m going to split open any minute.

“I wish everyone would stop saying it will be okay. It won’t.” I wedge the heels of my hands against my eyes, but it isn’t any use. I cry. Karen hands me a tissue. “It’ll be like this for a long time, Tiger. You just have to keep keeping on, I guess.” My voice comes out sharp and ugly. “That sounds like song lyrics. That sounds stupid.” I sniffle into the wet tissue and throw it on the floor of her car.

When I walk into the funeral home, Cake flies into me, hugging me so hard my ribs hurt. I miss her so much there’s an awful ache inside me, but there’s just too much ache for my mom, too, and it’s drowning everything else out.

She leans over and gives me the lightest hug I’ve ever felt, like she’s a small bird or something, just barely putting her arms on me. Just before she pulls away, she whispers in my ear, “Welcome to the Big Suck. It’s going to be really bad.”

I wonder what other things my mother did without me. Who she talked to. What she…thought about things. Suddenly, I wonder if my mother was lonely, and the thousand bricks on my chest become a million bricks, and I can’t breathe.

People keep asking, Do you need anything? They say, This is so awful. They say, She’s in a better place, and that makes me angry, because what does that make her place with me? Horrible? Adults all look alike after a while. Bland and worn out.