Instructions for the End of the World (8 page)

It's awkward, at best.

I try to focus on the road while she tries to make up for a year in fifteen minutes, rambling on and on about her many revelations during therapy, most of which involve her feelings toward her mother, her anger at my father, her ambivalence about sobriety.

She says it all like it's a news flash, but I've heard it before. She's a broken record of recovery and relapse, only this time she seems totally convinced it's going to work.

As if, at the age of forty-three, all her past habits have been erased.

Maybe I sound bitter.

That's because I am.

I sit through the AA meeting, and when Annika talks, introduces me, I realize she's building a new identity. Responsible Annika. Cleaned Up Annika. Jesusy Annika.

It makes me sick to my stomach, because it all feels like a lie she's asking me to tell with her—even my presence is a part of the lie.

Later we pull out of the lot of a low-slung community center that's painted a color somewhere between beige and yellow, a cinder block construction of the sort that doesn't even try to be anything but ugly.

I notice these things because I love to think about the shapes and lines of structures, how form and function intertwine, the purpose of one style or another, the ways utility and beauty come together—or don't, in this case.

I feel as if the smells of old coffee and cigarette smoke from the meeting have permeated my very being, after an hour in that place.

“So tell me what's been going on with you?” Annika asks me on the drive back home.

I grip the steering wheel and stare straight ahead, my mind blank. I don't think my mother has ever in her life before today wondered what's going on with me. Again I think,
Why now?

It's too late for mother-son bonding of this variety.

I shrug. “Not much.”

“You're gone from the house a lot. There must be something.”

“Just doing deliveries, that's all.… Why do you care?” I say, perversely not wanting to tell her what she hopes to hear.

“I just want a better life for you than I had.”

Which is a joke. She had a great childhood, with loving parents who gave her every advantage.

“Maybe you should have thought of that seventeen years ago,” I say before I can stop myself.

For a few silent moments, the accusation hangs in the air between us. I don't look at her, don't want to see how she feels about it.

“You're angry with me,” she finally says.

“Not really.”

“I understand. You have the right to be angry. I just hope you can move past it and have some compassion eventually as well.”

I roll a bitter response around on my tongue, weighing it, daring myself to say more, but I don't. I know she likes to argue. I don't want to give her that satisfaction.

“You've grown up so much this past year, but you're still my child. I still get to be your mother, whether you like it or not.”

“You might want to read a how-to book.”

She sighs, and I can see out the corner of my eye that she's staring straight ahead.

I used to ache for her attention, used to try my best to be a good kid, to do whatever she needed so that she'd notice me or love me or both. I don't really care so much anymore, and I'm not sure when the change happened. Definitely before she left, last year. Probably it happened sometime around when I hit puberty and realized the world is mostly a brutal place where we all have to take care of ourselves.

I turn the car off the main road and onto the gravel road that winds through the woods to the village. I am focused on dodging potholes, because the road hasn't been repaired since who knows when.

“What do you want to do with your life?” she asks.

This is way too much parenting for one day. I don't want to answer, but I know she'll keep asking, so I shrug and say I don't know.

“Surely you have some ideas. Are you going to become the recycled building materials delivery man for the whole county?”

The truth is, I used to have answers to her question, but they've become obscured by the gray cloud that veils my thoughts lately. I can no longer imagine the future beyond my tree house or what it might bring.

“You were always so bright. College maybe?”

My mother attended a few years of college before dropping out and traveling around the world with my father. I suppose it was as good a way as any to spend those years, except she seems to have learned nothing, gained nothing, from the time spent. She has no real appreciation beyond the superficial for other cultures, no wisdom gained from a wider perspective on the world, and mostly I think it was just an excuse to try drugs from exotic places. It was her opium period, is what my dad used to say.

When I say nothing to her suggestion of college, she sighs again. “I really think you need therapy to get over your father's death, if you want to know the truth.”

Now she's playing dirty. She's digging for a response, and I can't help myself. I give her one.

“Fuck you,” I say. “Fuck therapy. It's never done you any good.”

“That's not true,” she says, choosing to ignore my insults. “I've grown a great deal from the work I've done.”

I love how she calls it “work,” as if at the end of a session in her therapist's office her back hurts and she has a paycheck in her hand. I'm sure it helps her feel like a useful human being, when she is, in fact, useless.

This is the problem with my mother—she has never even tried to be useful. She has always thought being beautiful is enough.

 

Six

ISABEL

I am finally going to get out of this craphole.

For the past five days I've been stuck here, bored out of my mind, watching the paint peel off the walls while Nic runs around hammering things and planting things and acting like we're living in that show
Little House on the Prairie
Dad used to make us watch when we asked for TV time.

For a while I wasn't sure how long it would take to walk to town, or even which way to go to get there, but then I realized: hitchhiking. I can totally do that. I'll just have to be careful about who I stick my thumb out to. Like no creepy-looking dudes, no serial killers, and so on.

All I have to do is walk to the main road, hitch a ride, and I can be hundreds of miles away from here in a matter of hours.

The only thing that's been stopping me is the idea that Mom might come back home any time now.

Any
minute
now.…

But after almost a week? I'm sick of waiting.

And there is my sister, working like a slave in this unbelievable heat, hammering pieces of wood together to build raised beds, pulling weeds, turning the dirt with a hoe for reasons I cannot begin to imagine.

She tries to get me to help, but there is just no way.

Not a chance.

Yesterday morning I found a reclining lawn chair in our stuff in the barn, and I found a beach towel in the bathroom, and I found my forbidden bikini hidden in the bottom of my dresser drawer. Then I sat reading a contraband
Cosmo
magazine all afternoon from my mother's stash. We teens are totally not allowed to read magazines, unless we found one with a title like
Prairie Home Teen Canning Journal,
but Dad has never been able to convince our mother of the evils of pop culture.

Which maybe is why she's gone.

From the one spot on the driveway where my phone works exactly 10 percent of the time, I have sent her, like, fifty text messages since she left, but I don't know if she's read any of them yet. They say things like:

“Where did you go?”

“When are you coming back?”

“You have to come back. Dad is being crazy.”

“Why haven't you answered me?”

“Dad left us here by ourselves. I'm going to call child protective services if you don't come back RIGHT NOW!!!!!!”

And so on.

I didn't really mean that last message, because while I can maybe use the threat once or twice to get Nic to leave me alone, I know if I call CPS I will end up having to live in some gross home for teens or a foster home or something, and I'll probably get sexually abused, because that kind of thing always happens in those places.

For a while I considered taking the risk just so I could have some decent air-conditioning and TV and normal food, but then I decided it wouldn't be worth it.

No, I have to find Mom.

She's the only one in this crazy family who understands me, which is why I am extra confused that she would leave without taking me with her. She
knows
how much I hate this place.

I am totally (mostly) convinced she will be back sooner or later. Not that anyone has asked my opinion, but I'm pretty sure she just went for an extended spa visit and maybe some hard-core shopping while she considers her options for how to get our family out of this nightmare.

Probably she is thinking divorce, which really wouldn't be the end of the world.

I mean, living in this place is the end of the world as I care to know it.

I guess the sucky part would be that I'd have to go to my dad's house on some weekends to visit him, but the good part is a lot of Mom's family lives in Southern California—Long Beach, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach (all towns with the word
beach
in the name)—so we could move to the beach with her and not have to pretend we are mousy church girls anymore. We could stay with the cousins until we find our own place, which would definitely be a cool condo with a view of the ocean, and we could eat out every night and never have to can things again.

Maybe she's picking out our house now.

I get a little stab of guilt at this thought. I love my dad and all, and I don't totally want them to get divorced, but he so needs to take a chill pill on the crazy survival stuff. And he's not the perfect guy he pretends to be, anyway.

I am wrapping up my second day of sunning myself, having read all the
Cosmo
magazines I can find, when Nicole comes trudging back from the barn, sweaty and covered in filth.

This causes me to check my nails, which are currently painted an amazing shade of metallic orange that looks super pretty with my skin, and notice that I need to apply a touch-up coat tonight.

“Did you start dinner?” she asks me.

“No.”

She turns and walks toward the house, her bony shoulders slumped, and I almost feel guilty. Nic is so hard to like, and we have nothing in common, but she's, like, the only person I've seen in days. I guess I should try to get along with her or something.

I make little resolutions to be nicer to her all the time, but they never last longer than an hour or two (well, I mean, they could last all day if I don't see her, but the second we start talking and stuff I suddenly can't remember why I wanted to be nice).

She's so irritating. She's like our dad's brainwashed robot.

But she knows how to cook way better than I do.

If I'm nice to her she might make something like chocolate chip cookies for dessert, and I'm getting hungry and sick of eating PBJs for every meal.

The sun has dipped below the tops of the trees and I am sitting in the shade now anyway, so I get up and follow her into the house while thinking of ways I can get on Nic's good side. I could check Dad's chore list and do one of the less hideous things on it. Or I could do something that would benefit me and try to scrub that nasty bathtub clean so I can take a bath later.

I'll do both. Chore list first, then bathtub. That way she can make cookies while I soak in the clean tub.

But inside the house I hear an awful groaning sound coming from the walls, like the house itself is in pain. I follow the sound down the hallway and into the bathroom, where Nicole is staring at the bathtub faucet, watching it as nothing comes out.

“What is that sound?” I ask.

“The pipes?” she says.

Like I would know.

“Oh my god. What's the matter with them?”

She breathes a ragged sigh. “No water, see?” She demonstrates by turning the faucet on and off, on and off. “I think it's air in the pipes that's causing the sound.”

Horror balloons in my belly.

No
water
?

I have been baking in the sun all day and I smell like tanning lotion and sweat. I have to bathe or I am going to seriously freak out.

“So we just call the water company or whatever and have them come fix it, right?”

She sits down on the edge of the tub and stares at me. “We don't have water service here. We just have our own well.”

“A
well
? You mean like with a bucket that we lower down on a rope?”

“No, not like that. It's … I don't even know how it works.”

“Then we have to call someone who does. I'm not going to live without water.”

She sticks her thumb in her mouth to gnaw on a nail, but no sooner does she have it between her teeth than she realizes what she's doing and sticks her hand between her legs. Our parents have forbidden her nail biting for so many years, she never does it in public. But it's easy to see she's still a nail-biter by all her ugly, bitten-down nails.

“We can't call anyone even if we could get your phone to work. We don't have enough money to pay them, and if anyone finds out we're out here alone, we could get Mom and Dad in trouble.”

“We just say our parents are out for a little while.”

“It might be something that takes days to fix, and like I said, we don't have enough money to pay a repairman.”

I'm so sick of her acting like this, like she can't think for herself, that I want to grab her and shake her, but she's taller and stronger than me, so instead I go to the kitchen, where I saw a local phone book sitting on the counter. I start to flip through it when I realize I have no idea what to look up.