Midol does not treat sadness of the magnitude that I began to experience. It does not take away the types of thoughts that began to surface in my mind as I was pushed farther and farther out of Patrick’s orbit. I know what she told him. She would say that I was a teenager and that I was alienating myself, but it wasn’t true.
I tried. I really did. I wondered if the things I was feeling were the same my mom had felt. And I wished that she had been there to talk to. I knew nothing about her. My grandmother had little to nothing to do with us. She made no small secret that she blamed me for her daughter’s death. I blamed myself, too, eventually. Why wouldn’t I? What else could have caused a perfectly healthy woman to just … coma out and die like that?
I was poison.
Miranda didn’t even have to say anything after a while. I just knew. I was the reason for every bad thing in my family’s life. Hell, for all I knew, I was the reason for every bad thing, ever. It wriggled its way into my brain, and I tried to fight it. The deepening darkness that started to surround me. Like I owed it to the entire town that had tried so hard to keep me alive for so many years.
Then it happened. I remember, clear as day, no matter how many times I’ve tried to push it away or how many times I’ve spoken with a specialist, the memory is so fresh it makes my chest physically ache.
Me, fifteen years old, sitting at the lunch table, holding a drink in my right hand and clenching my left. I don’t exactly remember what I was looking at—probably nothing, because all I could think about was what Miranda had said about my hair before I had left the house. It was a dig, as usual. My self-esteem was in the shitter, and I’d started to count how long I could press my fingernails into my palm before it became unbearable, when I heard his voice through the haze surrounding my thoughts.
“Jesus, Byrdie. Do you not have a medium setting?”
Cline was leaning over the table, his ever fattening arms braced heavily on the wobbling fixture. I remember he was eating a candy bar and that his left front tooth was caked in chocolate.
The thick fog around my head seemed to settle over my eyes for a second, and I blinked it away, the soda can shaking a little as I turned to look straight at him. “What?”
He licked the food from his teeth and made a motion toward me, causing the rest of the people at our table to turn. “You’re either up here”—he raised his hand above his head—“or down here.” He pretended to bend down and place his palm on the floor. “Are you never just … normal? The fuck is wrong with you anymore?”
I don’t know if it’s because he finally noticed and called me out, or what it was, but having all those eyes on me as he said it sent a flood of panic, unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my life, rushing up through my sternum and into my esophagus. Tears sprang to my eyes, and my throat began to close. I swear, to this day, I could hear my heart beating inside my own ears, and instead of giving a sarcastic comeback, instead of telling him to go to hell and throwing food at him, I stood up really fast and ran out of the cafeteria, in tears.
The entire walk home, I practiced what I was going to say. I had questions and I needed my dad. I wanted to sit down face to face and ask him everything I’d ever wanted to know. I no longer cared if it hurt him to answer. Memories of my mom shouldn’t have been things kept hidden and placed in dark boxes in my grandmother’s house. I should have been able to know her. But I knew nothing. She was kind and sweet and had died too soon. These are the only things I had been told, and I mostly knew them because Cline’s mom would tell me anytime I got the nerve to ask.
I’d had an entire conversation with my father in my head by the time I reached my front door, sweating and trembling with anticipation of what was to come. Patrick Byrd worked from home, but Miranda did not, so imagine my surprise when I heard them arguing in the living room as I walked into the foyer. I wanted to call out and let them know I was home. Wanted to announce my presence somehow. But the yelling rendered me mute.
“I can’t have this conversation again, Miranda. You knew coming into this marriage that there would be no children.”
Her voice was shrill and hateful in response. “No one in this town knows that you’re sterile. We can use a surrogate.”
“No.”
There was a shuffling sound like something was being pushed. Maybe the couch. Maybe Patrick. I can’t be sure, because my eyes were squeezed tight.
“You haven’t had a problem raising another man’s child for the last fifteen years. Why would it be an issue now?”
That darkness, that feeling of desperation I’d been fighting for so long, hit me in the chest like a physical blow, and it took every last ounce of strength in my body not to hit the floor in a crumpled heap.