Heart Bones

I wonder what kind of upbringing is worse for a human. The kind where you’re sheltered and loved to the point that you aren’t aware of how cruel the world can be until it’s too late to acquire the necessary coping skills, or the kind of household I grew up in. The ugliest version of a family, where coping is the only thing you learn.

Before I was old enough to work for the food I buy, there were many nights I’d lie awake, unable to sleep because my stomach would be cramping from hunger. Janean told me once that the growl coming from my stomach was a ravenous cat that lived inside of me, and the cat would growl if I didn’t feed it enough food. Every time I got hungry after that, I’d imagine that cat in my belly searching for food that wasn’t there. I feared it would eat away at my insides if I didn’t feed it, so sometimes I’d eat things that weren’t food just to satisfy the hungry cat.

She once left me alone for so long, I ate old banana peels and eggshells from the garbage. I even tried eating a few bites of stuffing from inside the couch cushion, but it was too hard to swallow. I spent most of my childhood scared to death that I was slowly being eaten from the inside by that starving cat.

I don’t know that she was ever actually gone for more than one day at a time, but when you’re a child, time feels stretched out when you’re alone.

I remember she’d come stumbling through the front door and fall onto the couch and stay there for hours. I’d fall asleep curled up at the other end of the couch, too scared to leave her alone.

But then in the mornings following her drunken return, I’d wake up to find her cooking breakfast in the kitchen. It wasn’t always traditional breakfast. Sometimes it would be peas, sometimes eggs, sometimes a can of chicken noodle soup.

Around the age of six, I started to pay attention to how she worked the stove on those mornings, because I knew I’d need to know how to work it for the next time she disappeared.

I wonder how many six-year-olds have to teach themselves how to work a stove because they believe if they don’t, they’ll be eaten alive by their internal ravenous cat.

It’s the luck of the draw, I guess. Most kids get the kind of parents that’ll be missed after they die. The rest of us get the kind of parents who make better parents after they’re dead.

The nicest thing my mother has ever done for me is die.

Buzz told me to sit in his police car so I’d be out of the rain and out of the house while they retrieved her body. I watched numbly as they carried her out on a gurney, covered with a white sheet. They put her in the back of a coroner van. Didn’t even bother taking her in an ambulance. There was no point. Almost everyone under the age of fifty who dies in this town dies from addiction.

Doesn’t even matter what kind—they’re all deadly in the end.

I press my cheek against the car window and try to look up at the sky. There are no stars tonight. I can’t even see the moon. Every now and then, lightning will strike, revealing clumps of black clouds.

Fitting.

Buzz opens the back door and bends down. The rain has slowed to a mist now, so his face is wet, but it just makes him look like he’s dripping sweat.

“Do you need a ride anywhere?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“Need to call anyone? You can use my cell.”

I shake my head again. “I’ll be fine. Can I go back inside now?”

I don’t know that I really want to go back inside the trailer where my mother took her last breath, but I don’t have a more appealing alternative at the moment.

Buzz steps aside and opens an umbrella, even though the rain has slowed and I’m already soaking wet. He stays a step behind me, holding the umbrella over my head as I walk toward the house.

I don’t know Buzz very well. I know his son, Dakota. I know Dakota in so many ways—all ways I wish I didn’t.

I wonder if Buzz knows what kind of son he’s raised. Buzz seems like a decent guy. He’s never given me or my mother too much shit. Sometimes he stops his car on his patrol through the trailer park. He always asks how I’m doing, and I get the feeling when he asks this, he half expects me to beg him to get me out of here. But I don’t. People like me are extremely skilled at pretending we’re just fine. I always smile and tell him I’m great, and then he sighs like he’s relieved I didn’t give him a reason to call Child Protective Services.