Alejandra sat beneath the square showerhead in their newly refurbished bathroom. Her feet touched the glass, and her head leaned against the tiled wall. The bathroom was the only place in the house where she could lock the door.
She felt numb as she imagined her mind and body crumbling, her every cell fragile as limestone. The image came to her of a skull, like the ones from centuries ago at the bottom of cenotes in Mexico. For the last four years, she had been that skull.
The doorknob jiggled.
“Mom, Mom, hurry up,” a small voice called for her over and over.
Just five minutes. One minute.
Please.
One second alone to breathe?
She looked toward the door. Her body trembled with the overwhelming desire to shrink to the size of the blood clots trailing down her legs.
Her period arrived like clockwork every month—the only thing she could predict after her tubal ligation. No more children. Never again.
She already had three children. Each birth had left an open wound where each of those pieces of flesh had been hacked off from her.
Since then, Alejandra’s inner world had felt like the scary part of death: They say nothing exists after the brain short-circuits to darkness and the heart squeezes out its last bloody tears. And that was her. For years she abandoned herself to be a willing sacrifice to please everyone around her, and now nothing existed within her anymore. Even her own hand was not a hand at all, but a blade she used to carve her heart for anyone who asked her for it.
Beyond the beaded veil of water on glass, a white form appeared in front of the towel rack.
Alejandra didn’t have her glasses or contact lenses on. It was likely just steam. Or was it her towel? She could have sworn she’d hung it on the hook behind the door. She glanced in that direction. The towel was there. She turned back to the rack, her neck popping from the quick movement.
The form lingered.
What could have been a towel now appeared to be a torn dress. It looked almost like a white mantilla. Her poor vision moved in and out of focus.
From the center of the silhouette rasped a voice so minute it might have come from her own mind.
“You want to end it. Let me help you.”
Alejandra whispered back with the sensation of hot water burning her throat, choking her: “No.”
The steam billowed with the water. It reminded her of the day she’d tried on wedding dresses.
A loud bang on the door made her head jerk and legs tense as they folded into her body. “Alejandra, it’s dinnertime. Are you coming down to cook? The kids are hungry.”
Her eyes broke from the amorphous figure to the door then back again.
The figure was gone.
“Give me a minute,” she called out as best she could through her tearful confusion.
“All right, but you’ve been in there over twenty minutes.”
Matthew’s voice brought her back to the present, the reality she wanted to escape from. His voice had a childish whine. His footsteps down the stairs could be heard through the door. She was relieved he would not be lingering in the hallway to question her further. She rose from the floor to rinse the blood from her legs. Her duties waited, leaving her no time to wallow. Now all she could think about was her hope that the children would actually eat what she cooked. Or would it be another mealtime of watching them spit it out? Every time they did, a feeling of rejection burrowed into her like termites.
Alejandra turned off the water and stepped out of the shower to dry herself quickly before they called to her again from outside her door. She couldn’t stand to hear any of them repeat her name. Her anger would flare up—aimed at herself for being weak. Sometimes her knees threatened to buckle when she thought of how she didn’t own a single thing in the world. She had no money of her own. No job. Her name was not even on any of the bills. Half her life lived as a shadow.
As she ran the towel down her legs, she noticed a slimy substance on the glass door where the hallucination had appeared. It’s probably from the children, she told herself. Alejandra put on sweatpants and a T-shirt, then wrapped her hair in the towel.
Before leaving the bathroom, she paused with her hand on the light switch. Something as deep inside her as the lining of her uterus told her what she already knew: What she had seen was not a hallucination. The presence of something or someone lingered in the heat of the room. She could tell by the way the mist parted and shifted.
Alejandra held no illusions of having any value in the world. But her emotional and mental instability felt monumental, like a large wave in the distance. She felt it gaining height and speed before it crashed onto the shore and pulled her into the depths of the unknown.
She switched off the light, then rushed to the kitchen. The staircase creaked beneath her feet with each step. She paused when she reached the bottom. The stained-glass window in the front door caught her eye. Fractured yellow-and-red light splayed across the floor in broken shards. Her maternal instinct told her to sweep them up to prevent anyone getting hurt by them. A darker instinct told her to use one of them on herself to no longer feel the pain.
But even if they had been real glass shards, would she have had the energy to grab one of them and plunge it into her flesh to end it all? She remembered the encounter in the bathroom and the imagined words, “You want to end it. Let me help you.” She placed both hands over her face as if to block the images and sounds her mind was conjuring that could not possibly be real. Only her pain was real, because it was always sitting on her shoulder.
From the kitchen, the voices of the children bickering and Matthew telling them to stop broke her thoughts of death.
You are still adjusting to the new house. Get a grip, she told herself.
Just three weeks ago, they had moved from Texas to a quiet and leafy suburb of Philadelphia. Matthew had gotten a new job that offered a salary and bonus that they could not turn down, and this large six-bedroom house was one of the many luxuries afforded by his new pos
ition.
She had tried to overlook the fact that she didn’t much like the neighborhood, the school run commute, or the repairs that would inevitably fall to her to oversee. But the move made sense for Matthew, and the space was more than most people could hope for. Be grateful. Don’t start, Alejandra, she told herself. It was meant to be a long-term, putting-down-roots kind of home. So why didn’t it feel like home?
She had brought just two things to remind her of her birthplace. One was the Frida Kahlo coffee-table book she found at a secondhand store before leaving Texas. The cover was the painting of Frida in her white back brace and flowing white skirt against a barren background. Tears streamed from her eyes, yet her face remained stoic. Inside of her was a crumbling Doric pillar.
The second was a photo of Alejandra and her birth mother, Cathy, displayed in the hallway. It had been taken in the coffee shop they regularly met in. They were both smiling. Alejandra wanted to smile like that again. And she wanted to tell Cathy what was going on inside her, but she didn’t want to spoil their budding relationship; they had only just met when Alejandra moved away.
The bickering in the kitchen grew louder. Matthew stood in the kitchen with the same curious look as the children as she entered. “What took you so long?”
She inhaled a deep breath. Her impatience with him was something not easily washed away in a shower. “You could have started making dinner.”
He gave her a wide smile and furrowed his brow. “But that’s your thing. I don’t know what you have planned because you buy all the groceries. You always do the cooking.”
Her belly sank as she envisioned a snapshot of cooking for him for the next fifteen years. But the children were listening to their conversation, especially nine-year-old Catrina, who was waiting for her mother’s response with an expectant stare. Alejandra couldn’t deal with this now. The steam from the shower had somehow carried itself into her head in the form of a heavy exhaustion. “Can you at least wipe down the table?” she asked Matthew.
He glanced back at the glass tabletop. “Yeah, sure. It’s disgusting from whatever they ate earlier.”
Alejandra walked to the fridge to take out something that would expire soon and would make a meal with minimal effort. She used to love to cook, but it had become a chore. The thought of ordering food crossed her mind until she imagined the conversation that would
ensue as they tried to decide what to order. They had reached a place in their relationship where they couldn’t even agree on Indian or Chinese.
She grabbed a bag of prechopped vegetables and an easy roast-in-the-bag chicken with new potatoes. One pot for the vegetables and the one roasting tray for the chicken to toss in the oven. It would take just over an hour for it to be done. Two episodes of some cartoon on Netflix would keep the kids quiet with Matthew sitting next to them. She hoped that they would remain in the other room because her patience had evaporated like water left to simmer to the bottom of a pot. It wouldn’t be long before something inside of her burned.
***
“Elodia, could you please eat something?” Alejandra was on the verge of tears watching all three children pick at the meal. Her only job in the world was making a mushy pile of food that Elodia would later spit out. Will and Catrina poked around their plates. Alejandra’s face felt hot.
Matthew laughed. “They’re just kids. What do you expect? By the way, can you take my dry cleaning tomorrow? You don’t have anything to do. I have to rush out.” She stared at Matthew with an icebox-cold heart as he doted on giggling Elodia.
How happy Matthew had been to have another child. All his many dreams had come true in the last few years. He had a stay-at-home wife with beautiful, healthy children and no money worries. Without knowing it, or appreciating it, he had all the wind to propel him forward as he coasted with the ease of a kitesurfer on a picture-perfect day. Meanwhile she was that tugboat in the back pulling something bigger through deep waters. She listened to Matthew chewing, knowing he didn’t have an inkling of how often the thought of death crossed her mind.
The one time she’d told him she’d thought of ending her own life was after a Saturday alone with all three children. He gave her a look of puzzled irritation before saying, “I’m sorry you feel that way. Why do you feel like that? Look at everything you have.”
His answer was enough to close her mouth and shut off the valve in her heart that had once been reserved for him.
There was not much she felt sure of in this life, but one thing had become clear: The disintegration of any love she once possessed for Matthew had to be connected with the painful chasms cracking open in her soul. No, Matthew was not solely to blame, because she had chosen him, after all. But Alejandra had to figure out what was happening to her before she let go of the desire to continue breathing.
Matthew’s voice pulled her from her somber inner dialogue and back to the dining table. “What’s that face for?” Alejandra looked up from her food. Not again, she thought.
“I’m just tired.”
He made his displeasure known with his raised eyebrows and a cross expression that magnified every wrinkle and gray hair. There was only a two-year age difference between them. But when he made that face, he looked ten years older. It made her feel like she’d married a version of her adoptive father, Jim.
“You’re so miserable, Allie. But it’s never going to leave you because that is who you choose to be.” Her adoptive father would say this to her when she hadn’t managed to smile or exhibit enough excitement. In a house of eight adopted siblings, she always felt like an ou
tsider looking in. She was also treated like an extra pair of hands. It was her duty to help with all domestic matters. Her adopted parents never bothered to ask her, Are you okay?
Charlie, her adopted sibling who was two years older, was the only one who would give her reassuring glances and a playful wink when their parents were hard on them about how they did chores and how they presented themselves to the outside world. It made her feel less alone.
Unfortunately, his time at the home was cut short, because he left as soon as he turned eighteen. He promised to keep in touch but never did. That was before cellphones or social media.
Not satisfied with her answer, Matthew turned his attention back to the children.
“All right, kids, bath time.” The three children ran past them and up the stairs for their bath, which Alejandra was grateful she didn’t have to run. She could stay downstairs alone and clean up. God forbid the table have the smallest smudge on it. Matthew rose from the table. The harder he scowled, the deeper the creases in his forehead and around his eyes appeared. “Just be happy,” he sniped. “Look how lucky you are to be home all the time, in a nice home with no worries. You want for nothing.”
“I just want you to listen, Matthew.”
“I am listening, and all I hear is complaining and negativity.”
She kept quiet and swallowed his words. They sat in her stomach like little dormant seeds. Later they would bloom into anger.
He left the kitchen without looking at Alejandra. The tension between them remained in the air like a smoldering vapor. In that vapor floated the dust of all the unloving and inharmonious things they had ever said.
***
A week had passed since Alejandra’s breakdown in the shower. Her routine propelled her from hour to hour. Once her third child had begun to walk, the daily task of putting everyone else first had become as difficult as climbing a mountain of felt. No matter how hard she dug her feet in and scratched at the fabric, she was always close to falling to certain death.
And yet, residing in the same space in her heart as her despair was her love for her children. That love was a sweet blossom she held on to tightly until the thorns on its stem made her bleed. Those wounds were the stigmata of motherhood, precious and painful.
The windshield wipers squeaked away the rain, and the shouts from the fighting children in the backseat of the McDonald’s-scented car became distracting. Hunger from skipping lunch made her shake. But not eating was the quickest way to get that postbaby “snapback” everyone around her liked to talk about while wearing their athleisure. No hips or belly. Hard and toned said you were in control. Instead, her body felt gross, distorted like overused Silly Putty.
Elodia was wailing.
“Catrina, help your sister…please.” Alejandra’s please barely a whisper through the tears she could not hold back. “Catrina…Please.”
Nine-year-old Catrina was sitting between two car seats with her hands over her ears and eyes squeezed shut. “Make them stop, Mommy! I hate crying babies! Take them away.” Eighteen-month-old Elodia shrieked. She’d tried to wiggle out of her car seat to retrieve a toy just out of her reach, and now her little hand was stuck painfully in the strap. Four-year-old Will complained because he was thirsty, and all the drinks were sitting sweating in the passenger seat.
Alejandra’s foot pressed harder on the gas, uncontrolled, her fingers trembling on the wheel. Her uterus was seizing. After her three C-sections she sometimes experienced phantom movements. She watched the speedometer approach the limit and then go over. Maybe I should leave in the middle of the night while they’re all sleeping and find a lake to drive into. Their screams and wants and pleas will forever be silenced because I will be silenced. They won’t even realize I am gone.
Why am I so awful? Why can’t I be normal? Alejandra’s mind fogged like the window. She didn’t want to harm her children. Only herself.
A message popped up over the directions on her GPS. She tried to keep her eyes on the road and read what it said. It was from Matthew.
I’ll be home late tonight. Expect me around 7.30/8. And save dinner for me.
Her body slumped. She knew she would have no help tonight with the housework and the kids and no close friends or family to call on. And not just for tonight: In the morning Matthew was leaving for a two-week business trip to California. He loved his new job because it put him in charge of a larger team. Before this he’d hated not having a team to direct and not having direct access to a CEO or, at the very least, the board members of a company. Now his bucket list had more check marks than the shopping list she’d written on the back of the last grocery receipt.
When they’d moved, Alejandra had quit her job in data entry and sold what shares she had in the company. Once they’d settled in their new home, the responsibilities of the family had all fallen on her as Matthew devoted all his time and energy to his new position as a director of sales. The space and time for her to find another job had dwin
dled until it became more convenient and financially sensible for her not to return to work.
Some parents might’ve loved this. Many friends told her how they envied her, but was it what she really wanted? “We are a family. Your decisions are our decisions,” Matthew had said. “This is what we agreed on when we first met. You agreed. You can’t go back on what we agreed on. Life doesn’t work like that. You are a wife and mother first. That was your choice. Why do I have to even remind you of that? That’s what normal people do.”
He’d left no room for changing her mind or heart.
She grumbled as she swiped the phone forcefully to return to the GPS app.
“Fuck!” She slammed on the brakes.
There was a red light and a car ahead. The sound of screeching brakes, and then crashing metal. But the children stopped crying and taunting one another immediately. Thank god they’d recently bought a tank of a seven-seater that could withstand a tornado.
“Mom!” Catrina screamed.
Alejandra looked back to make sure the children were all right. Catrina glared at her.
“Now what am I gonna eat?” A burger and all its sticky contents had spilled on the floor.
Fried bologna sandwiches, like I had to eat when I was a kid, Alejandra thought. These kids had never eaten a slice of bologna in their lives, only nitrite-free organic honey-baked ham—thinly sliced. What would the other mothers at their new neighborhood school say about bologna? “I’ll make you fish sticks, or you can finish Elodia’s nuggets.”
“Whatever,” Catrina said under her breath.
Alejandra didn’t have the energy to respond because an angry woman with her hazard lights on was shouting at her to get out of the car. Others were yelling at Alejandra to put on her own hazards as they honked and drove around her.
Your existence is a fucking hazard, she told herself. If only she could just sit on the curb with her hands over her ears to stop the noise.
She would have to somehow tell Matthew she’d gotten into a fender bender on the way home from school because she’d been too busy wallowing in her thoughts after his text. She remembered again that for two weeks she would be on her own to do the feeding, washing, school run, bath time, and bedtime for three children. Two hands to love and care for six of theirs.
Alejandra had never told him she often sat in her car in the school parking lot and cried behind her sunglasses to hide her tears. She cried about everything: her inability to effortlessly care for her children, entertain them with activities instead of TV, cook meals from scratch, hold intelligent conversations, be hot in bed (at least be interested in the same person after all these years), and wear the same dress size as she had at twenty-five.
When she was hurting that badly, the only escape seemed to be death. She had no money of her own and no ambition. Matthew was
not the kind of man to turn her out on the streets with only the clothing on her back, but he could. Anything of worth was in his name. All the money was earned by him. Not a damn thing was in her name. She did not even have her own last name. Not the last name of the children.
Reviving her career or starting a new one seemed an impossibility. First, her work experience was so far in the past that no place would hire her now without going back or retraining. And who would take care of the children? Matthew made it clear he couldn’t spare the time. And it was his salary that kept them going. The vacations, the house, the restaurants, the nice things on a credit card without limit, the school fees. The odd texts from friends in Texas gave Alejandra the encouragement to go on, but it was not enough to make her feel like she had a community.
The condensation fogging the windows and windshield inside the car took her back to her breakdown in the shower. Her eyes darted to the right and left, as if she was worried something might appear. Something white, like a wedding dress.
Alejandra put on her hazard lights so that she could get out to speak with the lady standing next to the Volkswagen Jetta. ...
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