Mom (Madeline)

Mom (Madeline)

A short story by Isabel B. Lesher

Like every morning, the pain of last night had faded, and there was work to do.

Instead of the bed, I was lying on the basement couch. To my right, a can of vomit, tinted with blood. Too damn tired to care, I averted my gaze. The dust-covered fireplace held only three things– my mother’s urn, a pile of bills, and the clock that read 4:52, which meant it was 4:59. I never did wind it. 

If I had screamed for help every time I felt like I was dying, my voice would go raw. So, I didn’t. I had snuck down in the middle of the night, hands shaking, vision blurring, fingers leaving sweat stains on the walls. Two flights of stairs with my body tearing itself apart. My chest felt like it was coiled in the hands of a metal man, skin and muscles and heart twisting. The world kept moving under my feet, and yet, I grabbed the trash can and collapsed on the couch. My heartbeat thudded in my ears and drowned out the sound of my own retching. And the pain, it snaked through my heart and down my back. I breathed like I did when I had my son, short puffs, waiting for agony to thin. It never did.

I laid on the couch that no one ever sits on, coated in basement dust, turning every once in a while to choke out into the bin. Sleep came in fits, a desperate claw of rest between the pain.

I wondered if I was dying, but that was hardly new. I did as I always had– I burned through the night in hopes that it would pass. Life is just that. Waiting for the pain to go.

When I woke, I was light as a feather, breathing easier. I looked back on the night before and shook my head, laughing at how ridiculous I was. A panic attack over a bout of indigestion, nothing more. My husband would have been exasperated if I woke him, and god knows he needs his beauty sleep.

I walked like an angel around the house, dusting all I never had time to, rinsing out my vomit, intricately packing lunches with little notes. I wiped sticky handprints from the windows and sweat from the stairs. I finally deep-cleaned the waffle maker, all thick with oil and grime. My family woke to waffles and strawberries.

I watched in hiding to see their reactions. Robert rubbed his eyes and mumbled sleepily, twisting his wedding ring. Matthew whined about not wanting to go to school. They shoveled food in their mouths. Upon Robert’s encouragement, Matthew turned his head slightly and yelled, “Thank you mom!” in no particular direction. I laughed, I suppose, or scoffed. A mix of the two. Neither of them looked my way, too engrossed in the sweetness that I felt too sick to taste.

They really were zombies in the morning. These misty, autumn mornings, too. Matthew sat in front of the heater, warming his socked toes, as I gave Robert a list of things to do today. Nothing compared to what all I had to do, but he still grumbled.

Matthew barely struggled when I put his shoes on and helped him with his backpack. He wandered away from me when I asked about homework, which I’m certain he did not do.

They left quickly, quietly, only a few words in my direction.

“Love you mommy!”

“Bye, Madeline.”

And off they went.

I watched them stumble down the porch steps, noses red and lips trembling. Robert was kind and waited for the bus, and he gave such a warm smile to our son that it almost made me feel whole again. How a man could be so kind a father and so cold a friend, I’d never know. Though someday, I’m sure we will have daughters, and they will bite back at him. I suppose there won’t be anything I can do, then.

I filed receipts. I prepped lunches. I took all the dirty dishes from the dishwasher and washed them myself, the damn machine broke again. I’d call an expert, but Robert would get angry, emasculated. He’d rather say he’ll fix it for ten years.

I flicked through junk mail. Nodded as the milkman came and went. Darned a few patches in Matthew’s socks. The day kept going, misty and overcast, and I never did leave the house. I always thought I would have a moment to take a walk, but that moment never came. Work, rest, work, rest, pray it doesn’t kill you in the end.

I cleaned until I couldn’t anymore and laid back down on the basement couch where nothing could bother me. Even as light and easy as I felt, I was still so, so tired.

Matthew came home first. Gobbled the apple and peanut butter I prepared before rushing back out, spouting something about the neighbors having a bike party. He moved so fast I could barely see him, much less stop him.

Robert came home later. He sat on his kitchen chair and groaned, long and slow, as if he hadn’t been sitting in an office chair for the past eight hours. I placed bread and butter in front of him and tried, tried, to catch his eye.

“Matthew’s out, dear,” I said. He only exhaled and looked my way, and I knew. He wasn’t seeing me. He never did.

“Something stinks in here,” he grumbled, pinching his eyes and sniffing.

“I was sick.”

He ate bread as if it was a turkey leg, ripping off pieces and chewing ferociously. He glanced down at the food before grumbling something I couldn’t hear about his office, taking the plate, and heading upstairs. I listened as his heavy footsteps thumped to his desk, wondering how the hell men are allowed to be so loud when we were so soft-footed.

Matthew babbled all throughout dinner. Robert drank. I couldn’t bring myself to eat. Back in the day, Robert would have seen it. He would have scooped me in his arms and held me high and told me he loved every fold of my child-bearing body. He would have traced the stretch marks and underwear lines with his teeth and made me swear to eat well, to keep this body he loved so much.

Now, he stared at his food like it had cursed him with this life.

I bathed my son. I read him a story. I tucked him in and kissed his little head. He was asleep before I hit the lights.

Robert didn’t look my way as I slid into bed. He looked up at the ceiling, and I did too.

“Do you love me anymore?”

My question got no answer. He just kept staring up, trying to find an answer to our problems in the popcorn ceiling.

The next day, the bin was filled with vomit again, and I was on the basement couch. Fingerprints and dust collected. All that work, for seemingly nothing. Sisyphean, the life of a housewife.

It all happened again. They ate, they left with a few words, they came home, they slept. Different meals and different words, sure, but nonetheless all the same.

Every time I walked by the fireplace, dust had seemingly grown back. Windows were still sticky. I knocked down a cobweb, only to find it rebuilt an hour later. I felt like a king being conquered, losing his domain. Long ago had I given up control of this house, but this. It felt like stories my mother used to tell me of purgatory and insanity. The same things, no different results.

We watched whatever was on the television. Something with feel-good endings and lily ponds.

I brushed Matthew’s hair. I listened as he slept, trying to breathe in his air like it would heal me.

I slept on the basement couch.

It was a week until Matthew cried out in his sleep for mommy. I rushed to him, touched his shoulders, kissed his forehead, but he didn’t cease. He cried until Robert stormed in, practically kicking down the door.

“Is somebody dying, Matt?”

My son sniffled and shook his head.

“Good. Then sleep, boy. Nothing to be afraid of.”

Like a little robot, Matthew curled under the covers. I whispered words of comfort, but he couldn’t hear me over his small whimpers.

No one ever came to the basement. Perhaps they’d heard me retching in the night and thought the place was haunted. Every night, no matter where I slept, I was back there, the taste of vomit on my lips. I stopped questioning it.

No matter how quickly I cleaned, cobwebs formed, dust built, food rotted. No matter how many times I asked, Robert never brought home groceries. I was too tired to ask again.

I couldn’t quite remember what I was supposed to be doing. I kept touching the house to prove that it was still there. I vaguely remembered there was something I wanted to do– I was writing something, once. Something important. Something that made me feel like a human again. I just couldn’t remember where I put the damn thing.

One day, I stayed on the couch. I inhaled the fumes of my stinking vomit and stayed.

Only then, did something change.

I overheard Matthew talking about me to his father. I hadn’t packed his lunch, or fed him dinner, or soothed his nightmares. He misses me, and why did I not tell him that I was going somewhere?

Robert only huffed and called my mother to ask if I had run off to stay with her again.

I didn’t get up off the couch. I don’t think I could have.

With rotting food, they ate out every night, or heated frozen waffles. Homework never got done. Dust. Cobwebs. Dust. Cobwebs. Sticky, sweaty fingerprints on glass. All this I knew, those I never left my only place where I found rest.

I heard they put my face on milk cartons and in the paper. Robert called the police with the shaky voice he only had when he drank.

I couldn’t get up. Couldn’t be damned.

Matthew cried out for mommy, and his father would tell him to be quiet, he needed to sleep, needed to keep this damn house together.

I laughed, a rattling, sickly, sarcastic sound. Damn him for thinking he was the one holding the world together. They barely lasted a day without me.

Matthew opened the door to the basement, then closed it. It was too dark for him. I didn’t want him to see me, anyway.

I heard Robert’s heavy footsteps at night as he paced the house. He slouched against the door to the basement. For the first time since his childhood dog died when he was eleven, I heard him cry.

He cried like he was being strangled. Like he would be shot if he was too loud.

“Come home, Madeline,” I heard him whisper. “I need you, baby.”

And god, wasn’t that ironic. He only noticed I was gone when I stopped exerting myself to care for the damn house. It was killing me, stretching myself thin to touch the walls and clean the floors. He never looked at me, never fucking looked at me and saw that I wasn’t there. Only when the service stopped, did he fucking see me.

I wanted to scream at him. I only breathed until there wasn’t any air in my lungs. That was enough.

He paused, and stood. His hands opened the basement door, trembling, footsteps down the stairs. For once, he had to be quiet. Poetic, in a way. He pinched his nose.

“Fuck.”

He stampeded the steps.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck–”

Robert found me in the early morning. He rushed to my side and cursed and cried. Though my hand was decomposing, he kissed the skin there. He took my face and shook my head from side to side, blubbering.

“Baby, Madeline, baby, fuck, this–”

He was running back up before I could say a thing. I tried to think why my skin looked the way it did. I tried to remember who Madeline was. Perhaps it was me, but I was also mommy, I was ‘your mother is just on a girl’s trip, kid’. 

Within the hour, men were poking and prodding me, moving me from the couch, hefting me up the stairs. I watched from the stretcher as Robert explained through tears that he didn’t know. He didn’t know. He didn’t even notice.

Matthew blinked his baby browns at me. He called me mommy before Robert carried him away. I almost had the strength to yell for my baby to return to me.

They didn’t know what date to mark my time of death. To be fair, neither did I. When my grasp slipped on this world, I don’t know. They said cardiac arrest, heart attack, obesity. Robert didn’t dare tell them he loved my body. He let them judge my flesh and blame me.

I watched my son grow into a troubled teenager. I watched my husband dwindle into an older man. I watched them move from the home I’d held together.

I watched the house fall apart. I watched apartments go in.

I watched my granddaughter move in. I watched her fumble with a lettered board.

When she asked me my name, I couldn’t remember. I just told her I had work to do. She moved her hand around the board, asked what she could do. 

She cleaned cobwebs. When I told her they didn’t notice I had died since my spirit kept cleaning and caring for the house, she laughed with tears in her eyes.

“Men,” she said.

“Men,” I said back, and I watched her fingers fly across the board and a smile quirk her lips.