“You hadn’t noticed any changes in your daughter?” Kirsten asked. “Allison seemed the same to you?”
My mother doesn’t notice me at all, I thought, as she took a seat and started working the clasp of her handbag, clicking it open, then shut. That wasn’t particularly charitable, or entirely true—my mother noticed me; she just noticed my father much more—but I wasn’t in an especially generous or honest frame of mind. This was the most embarrassing thing I could imagine; worse than the time my mom had been called to school after I’d barfed up all those doughnuts after our birthday breakfast gone wrong, or the time they’d called her in fifth grade after my best friend, Sandy Strauss, and I got in trouble for telling the new girl, a kid whose southern accent was strange to our ears and who had the improbable name Scarlett, that we’d called in to Z-100 and won tickets to a Gofios concert and that she could come with us. Where was Scarlett now? I couldn’t recall her last name, but I could remember her narrow, rabbity face, her watery blue eyes that always looked like she’d just been crying.
“Allison?” I blinked to find Kirsten and my mother both looking at me. “I asked your mother if she’d noticed any changes in your behavior over the past year.”
“You have to remember that my father was diagnosed around that time. I think my mom—well, all of us, really—were focused on him.”
“That doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention to you,” my mother said a little sharply. She turned to Kirsten. “I did notice. Especially since I started staying with Allison and Dave. Her moods were . . . a little strange. Sometimes she’d seem sleepy . . . or cheerful, but with an edge to it. Like she could go from being so happy to crying in a minute.”
“I never cried,” I said.
“Allison,” said Kirsten, in her professionally soothing voice, “try to just listen, okay?”
I nodded. But I couldn’t believe that my mother would have the nerve to come in here and try to make it sound like I was the needy one.
Kirsten turned from me to my mother. “The way your daughter’s described it, she was under a tremendous amount of stress.” Kirsten bent, reading from the folder she held open in her lap. “She was working a lot, and taking care of her daughter, and helping you with your husband. He has Alzheimer’s, is that correct?”
My mother nodded wordlessly. Tears slid down her cheeks. Now, I thought, we’d landed on the topic that would take up the rest of the session, the rest of the day, if that was possible. My father, comma, suffering of, and mother’s subsequent agony.
“Are you surprised that Allison ended up in a place like this?” Kirsten asked.
It got so quiet I could hear the clock ticking. Then, unbelievably, my mother shook her head. “No,” she said in a husky whisper. “No, I wouldn’t say I was surprised.”
I opened my mouth, feeling shocked. I wanted to remind her what a good girl I’d been, never skipping school, always turning in my homework, getting a job three weeks after I graduated from Franklin & Marshall, never embarrassing her, never being a burden. But it seemed the shocks were just getting started. My mother asked, “It runs in families, doesn’t it?”
Kirsten nodded. “We know from research that a child who has a parent with an addiction is eight times more likely to develop substance-abuse problems him- or herself.”
I braced myself. I knew what was coming from listening to the other women. Next I’d hear how my mother’s father had been a secret tippler, or how Grandma Sadie had gotten strung out on Mexican diet pills. My mother bent her head, crying harder. “I never meant to hurt her,” she wept. “If I could be here myself . . . if I could take this pain away . . .”
Kirsten passed my mother a box of tissues, an act that was strictly forbidden during normal therapy sessions, on the grounds that being handed a box could derail someone’s epiphany. Her issue, her tissue, the group would chant. My mother grabbed a fistful and wiped her eyes.
“What do you mean, you never meant to hurt Allison?” Kirsten asked. When my mother didn’t answer, I said, “Yeah, I’d like to know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t remember.” Her voice was dull. “Well, maybe you wouldn’t. You were just four.”
“Remember what? What happened when I was four?” She clicked her purse clasp open, then shut, and I remembered—of course I knew what had happened. The Accident.
“But that didn’t have anything to do with me,” I started to say. My mother, her eyes on Kirsten, started talking at the same time.