The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

When you did bad things like that the keepers descended, one for each limb, held you so tight you couldn’t move. I did lots of bad things. It felt nice to be held. I liked going limp in their arms and hearing them say, “There. Well done for calming down. Good girl, Chrissie. Good girl.” It was almost like I wasn’t bad at all.

People said it wasn’t fair that I had been let out when I turned eighteen, said I should have been locked up forever. I agreed: it wasn’t fair. The people in charge had hidden me away, then thrown me into a life I hadn’t expected to have to live, in a world I hadn’t expected to have to understand. I missed the clanks and clinks of Haverleigh’s halls, the big metal locks on its doors. “That was my home,” I wanted to say, “my small-letter home. It wasn’t fair to make me leave.”

I missed being curved and hard with her—the unmatchable closeness, the knowledge that no one could take her away. When she had moved in, my body had been like an alley house—dank and grimy and rotten at the edges—but she had still wanted to live there. She had clung on, determined, refusing to evacuate in a shock of blood on porcelain. I didn’t understand why she wanted me—but then, I didn’t understand why I still wanted Mam.

For years I had been hung up on Mam, because your mam was the one who was supposed to fill you up when you felt empty, but she had never done that for me. She had given me dregs and scrapings of warmth, and now that I had seen her again, I believed it was all she had been able to give, but it hadn’t been enough. She was never going to give me enough. I knew, because when she had told me what she wanted, she had talked about going back and making things different for her. She hadn’t talked about doing things better for me.

I didn’t make any crying sounds. I let the tears fall down my cheeks and plop onto the bib of my dress, where they soaked into penny-sized patches. It was the same way I had seen Susan cry when we had been drinking milk at the handstand wall. Silent and still. I hadn’t understood it at all back then; it had seemed such an odd way to cry. I understood it now. It was the way you cried when you were tired to the middle of your bones, when you didn’t have enough left inside you to do anything else except cry.