Mackenzie Cooper

The morning after, I wake up confused again. I recognize the dark low full bed I’m lying on, the mismatched dresser with the bottom drawer off kilter, the framed photo of the whole family at my high school graduation. Before. But the room itself is unfamiliar. Tiny and narrow, barely enough room to walk around the two pieces of furniture. Pure white walls. A window with Venetian blinds, not the handmade blue-and-green curtains I grew up with, its sill jutting into the space next to the bed.

I’m at my parents’ house. Not the house I grew up in but the one they moved to after my sister and I left and they got back to living their own lives. I remember this, but not why I’m here, and that’s enough for now.

When I sit up the pain comes like a headrush and I want to throw up. I bite down hard on my lower lip for the distraction. And the tiny reminder that I’m still here.

Navigating the stairs with my left eye swollen shut is no easier today – my depth perception is all off, and the staircase in this house curves to the left so I have to tilt my head at an awkward angle just to see the stairs. Mom is in the kitchen washing a pile of dishes, though I remember helping her do this last night after dinner.

“How does it look?” I ask her. “Better?”

She turns her head but keeps her body facing the sink and looks me over quickly. She nods. “A little,” but I’m not five anymore, I know when she’s lying. She turns back to the sink.

“Morning, buddy,” Dad says. He comes from the right side and stops to grasp my shoulder. He turns me toward him; I lower my head. “Look like you’re doing better today. How’re you feeling?”

“Well, my head is killing me,” I say, and as soon as I do I realize just how much I hurt. With every beat of my heart my left eye throbs.

“Yep, that’ll happen.” He nods and smiles. I close my eyes and lean my head to the left, because it seems to hurt less this way. Dad squeezes my shoulder twice as if to wake me up.

“Can I give him some ibuprofen?” he asks, looking to Mom, who just shrugs.

“Maybe just some water? And a piece of bread,” I say.

The glasses are over the sink, right where Mom is, but she doesn’t make a move to hand me one. Dad takes a step and she says quickly, “He knows where they are, he can get it for himself.”

Dad touches her on the shoulder. The same small gesture he used on me, but this time it’s tentative, tender. “Honey,” he says. “Don’t. He’s here now. Right?” He raises an eyebrow at me.

“Yes,” I say.

“But how do we know it will stick this time?” she says, her voice sinking with sadness.

Before I can say anything, Dad says “We don’t. But we all want it to.”

Mom leans her head onto his hand and nods. A minute later I wonder if I should go back upstairs or wait here until she’s ready. Then she reaches up towards the cupboard and when she turns around she’s holding a white mug with a design on it and her eyes are red. I squint at the mug until I recognize it: the red and blue smiley faces, the baseball bat with my name in squiggly unsure letters, Mom’s cursive script dating the mug I decorated on my fifth birthday.

I smile; Dad smiles; Mom looks away. I want to tell her I’m sorry. I want to say, I only have one good eye; how am I supposed to see what the future holds? I want to say I will try. Then she looks at me and holds the mug out towards me and I take it.

On Grandma’s birthday, Mom and I drive out to the East Bay to take her parents out to lunch. My mom’s sister lives about 20 minutes away from my grandparents, so we meet her at their house. We stop on the way and get a small brightly decorated cake and a bottle of champagne, which I hold as Mom rings the doorbell and Aunt Mary comes to let us in.

I’m behind Mom, balancing the cake in its white cardboard box on the palm of my left hand and gripping the neck of the champagne bottle with my right hand. It’s the same kind of champagne we drank on New Year’s Eve when I was a sophomore in college – wrapped in pink plastic, with little flowers on the label. Aunt Mary gives my shoulders a squeeze; she looks tired.

I walk into the wood-paneled living room with the familiar family photographs hung on the walls. My favorites are the four oval-shaped framed photos of my mom when she was about six, with a turned-out bob and the exact same huge smile she still has, arranged in a diamond above the low L-shaped sofa. Grandma is perching on the arm of the sofa next to small end table.

“Jan!” she says, happy to see her youngest child. Then she sees me. “Oh, and Mackenzie too. What a nice surprise.”

Mom’s smile freezes a little and her eyebrows twitch down. It wasn’t meant to be a surprise. She told Grandma I was coming; I’ve been planning to come for a few weeks now. Partly because they are getting older and I want to spend time with them while I can, and partly because I’m out of work and done applying to grad school and bored. I decide not to correct her. Behind me Aunt Mary giggles a little.

My grandpa doesn’t get up from his easy chair in the far corner of the room. He doesn’t even smile; he just nods at us then looks back down at his hands in his lap. Mom leans down and kisses the leathery skin on his cheek. He reaches up to squeeze her hand but misses, his hand grasping empty air. He is ninety now. Above his chair is a photo of the whole family from my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, a little more than ten years ago. That same day my grandpa was showing off by doing pushups with the grandkids on his back. He started with the youngest and worked all the way up to a couple of pushups with my oldest cousin Vince sitting on his back. Now just a few minutes of conversation tires him, and it seems like he’s always sitting at the edge of the room halfway asleep. I force my smile even wider and hold out the champagne and cake to my grandma.

“Oh, what is this for?” she asks.

“For you, grandma. Happy birthday,” I say.

“Oh, it’s my birthday,” she says. I nod, unsure if I should be amused or unsettled at this. She is still smiling, her bright lips stretched against her pale white skin. I can’t remember a time when her eyebrows weren’t completely drawn on.

My mom takes the cake and champagne from me. “I’m going to put these in your fridge for later, okay Mom? Something for you two to celebrate with tonight.” In the doorway at the other end of the room, between the living room and the hallway into the bright yellow kitchen, Mom turns around and raises her eyebrows at me and presses her lips together. She glances past me at her sister, who laughs again. She rolls her eyes then disappears into the kitchen.

“So Mom, where do you want to go to lunch?” my aunt says.

“Oh, you know,” Grandma says. She holds up her right hand and turns it in little circles like she’s trying to remember something. Around and around and around in the air, the right words always just out of reach.