Do you remember the night she left you at the playground? Your eyes squinting in the glare of headlights as she swooped around the lot? I cried for her to turn around but she said we had to teach you a lesson.

She sped down pockmarked roads wearing only her nightgown and wool socks. A chalky patch of cereal milk blemished her collar. I dug my nails into wet palms, angry at myself for not jumping out of the car right then, for not running and throwing my bigger arms around your smaller ones.

We tore past the cornfields and onto the main road, where she unrolled the window and smoked as the wind whipped her dirty curls, shouting about how you were going to be the end of her. You were out of control. In the backseat I tugged at my fingers, pinked and warmed, tugged with such force I thought they might pop from their sockets. I remember thinking you were going to freeze out there even though it was only October and you had on your windbreaker and your Pocahontas hat. I imagined finding you on the ground, eyes coated in a mucus, lips blued. What would we do with you then?

She wasn't thinking about these things—webs of black hair caught in her mouth, fizzing when they kissed the lighted end of her cigarette.

When we came back some minutes later you were standing by the swing set, toeing the dirt with your light-up sneakers. Your lower lip was thrusting out but I could see the swing shaking wildly behind you and I knew you'd just hopped off, that you only wanted her to think you'd been having a miserable time. She bopped the horn and you knew to come running. I could smell the cold coming off you when you slid in beside me, tried making eyes but you only looked out the window as the lights sliced the trees into halves.

Remember what she did that night? When we pulled into the garage and you crawled out from the backseat? She knelt bare-kneed on the concrete and pressed her face against your hard little stomach, begged you not to tell him in her desperate whisper-strains. Her nails slipped as she clawed your coat sleeves. Teardrops puddled the fabric. You reached for a strand of her hair and twirled it around your finger. You took her in—her ruddy cheeks, lashes clumpy wet with mascara. I hadn't left the car but sank myself deeper into it, until I was crouched on the floor, my legs crumpled under the seat, afraid of her crying, of your mothering.

She did a lot of things back then but you seem to have forgotten, judging by the hours you now spend at her kitchen table. The afternoons you share over packaged pastries and coffee when I can barely manage a phone call. Tell me, how do you forget? Where do you place those memories? Can you show me how it's done?

Kayla Maiuri's debut novel, MOTHER IN THE DARK, is forthcoming from Riverhead.

This story is a Finalist for the 2020 Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of greeblie.





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