The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

the boy from the playground. I thought of the children she bullied. Of the nights she stared at Sam in the dark while he slept. Of her detachment. Of the blades. Of the mother lion she threw out the window on the way home from the zoo. Of my mother’s secrets and her shame. Of my expectations. Of my deadening fears. Of things that were normal, of the things I read into. What I had seen. What I had not seen. What you knew.

You cleared your throat and stood up.

‘She wasn’t always easy. But she deserved more from you.’ You looked down the street toward your car and zipped up your jacket. With your hands in your pockets, you took one step down the stairs, away from me. ‘And you deserved more from me.’

When I went into the house there was a message on my voice mail. It was an older woman, she didn’t say who she was. There was a rattle to her voice and a hollow sound in the background. She’d called to let me know my mother had died that day. She didn’t say where, or how. She paused and muffled the receiver, interrupted, maybe, by someone. And then she left her phone number. The last two numbers were cut off by the tone – she had taken too long to speak.

85

As she stands in the window of your home on Christmas Eve, reaching for the curtain, I get out of my car, these pages in my hands. I stand in the middle of the road in the falling snow lit from the yellow streetlight and I watch her.

I want her to know I am sorry.

Violet drops her arms to her sides. And then she lifts her chin and our eyes find each other. I think I see softness fall in her cheeks. I think she might put her hand to the window, like she needs me. Her mother. I wonder, for a fleeting moment, if we’ll be okay.

She mouths something, but I can’t make it out. I walk closer to the window and shrug my shoulders, shake my head – Say it again? I ask her. Say it again? She mouths the words slowly this time. And then she lunges forward. Her hands push against the window, like she wants to break through the glass, and she holds them there. I can see her chest rising and falling.

I pushed him.

I pushed him.

These are the words I think I can hear.

‘Say it again!’ This time I shout. I’m desperate. But she does not say it again. She notices these pages I carry in my arms. I look down at them, too. We look back at each other, and I can’t find that softness in her face anymore.

Your shadow appears at the back of the room and she walks away from the window, away from me. She is yours. The lights in your house go out.

A year and a half later

Many seasons have passed since she’s noticed how nice the warm wafts of early June air feel in her lungs. She stops outside her house and breathes again, deep into her soft belly, the way she practices at the end of every session with her therapist. She puffs out the air, counting one, two, three, and then fishes for her keys.

Saturday afternoons are much like any other day of the week. She plucks the green heads off a quart of strawberries that she cuts into halves and eats for lunch, slowly, at her kitchen table. Soon she will bring a small glass of water upstairs into the room that had once been her son’s. She will cross her legs and then lower herself to the meditation cushion placed squarely in front of the window. She will stretch her back and then she will sit there in the afternoon light for the next forty-five minutes, and she will think of nothing. Not him. Not her. Not the mistakes she has made as a mother. Not the guilt she carries for the damage she has done. Not her unbearable loneliness.

No, she will not think about any of that. She has worked too hard to let it go.

I am capable of moving beyond my mistakes.

I am able to heal from the hurt and pain I have caused.

She will say these affirmations aloud and she will put her hands to her chest, and then she will flick her hands, she will release it all.

When it is time for dinner, she closes her laptop and she chops herself a salad. She allows herself to put on some music, just three songs – some of her joys are still measured. But tonight she’ll move her shoulders ever so slightly, she will tap her foot. She is trying, and trying has become easier.

After dinner, as she does every night, she turns on the light at the front of the house. She does this in case her daughter decides it is finally time to see her.

Upstairs, she hums a verse she had listened to in the kitchen. She undresses. The bath fills with hot water and the mirror steams. She is leaning over the counter, wiping the glass, wanting to examine her bare face, to pat the loose skin under her eyes, when the phone rings.

She is startled and clutches a towel to her breasts like there is an intruder in the next room. The phone glows from the end of her bed. My daughter, she thinks. It could be my daughter, and she floats in that hope for a moment.

She slides her finger on the screen and lifts it to her ear.

The woman is hysterical. The woman is desperately searching for words it seems she will never find. She walks to the other end of her bedroom and then to the corner, as though