Empty Nests

Maybe it’s just wild, passing through the suburbs on its way to greater things.

 
Every time I go home it’s the same. Fruit molding in the white ceramic bowl: oranges turning mossy, apples softening and growing fuzz, bananas darkening in the window light. It’s been six years since I left and my mom still buys enough produce for three people, even though it’s just her now.

I remember how it was in the beginning—I came home often, yearning for the sweet, dusty neglect of our old house. I missed the way the floors creaked and the way the drains clogged with leaves in the autumn, creating a waterfall outside the kitchen window every time it rained. After college and after flailing through SoCal on mostly Trader Joe’s salads and a saggy mattress, things changed. I no longer came home because I wanted to share the good moments. I only yearned for it when everything else familiar fell apart: when I moved to a new county and suddenly had no friends, or when my anxiety got so bad I couldn’t even recognize my face in the mirror.

This time, Mom thinks I’m carving time out of my busy schedule to see her. But really, I have nowhere else to go. In a few days I’ll be off again, couch surfing up the state until I hit oblivion.

When I first pull into the driveway, Mom runs up and throws her skinny arms around me, squeezing even though my own are full of bags and groceries. I hear the brown paper crinkle against the stiff cups of her bra and kiss her lightly on the temple.

“Hi Mom.”

“Hi love, hi love.” She’s still squeezing. Finally she lets me go, holding me at arms’ length. She’s wearing concealer that’s two shades too dark for her, the corners of her eyes still caked with sleep.

“You’ve gotten so skinny. Please tell me you’ve been eating.”

I let her laugh and force myself to smile. “I promise,” I say.

Inside, the place is too clean. The shelves usually stacked to the top with newspapers and empty bottles are mostly bare, save for what should be in them: books, painted vases, faded framed photographs.

The floor looks too empty: no mountains cardboard boxes, no broken lamps and toasters, no car seats from the minivan. I can’t help but picture her, sweating and hungry for affection, shoving everything she’s ashamed of into the garage. Her vacuuming for the first time in two years, imagining me stepping in and saying something like “It looks great,” or “Good job, Mom,” or maybe even “I love you.”

I laugh and drop my duffel next to the couch. “Who were you trying to impress?”

Mom gives me a shaky smile from the kitchen doorway, holding out a glass of water. “Want some tea?”

“Nah, I’m fine.” I take the water and drink half of it in one sip.

“How have you been?” She asks. I can tell she wants to ask more but is stopping herself.

I sit on the edge of the purple loveseat, facing the bay windows overlooking the neighbor’s fig tree. “I’m okay.”

I feel her standing next to me, waiting.

“I’m okay,” I say again, and wish I hadn’t, because somehow the second time is worse. It sounds like I’m trying to convince both of us of something.

She steps in front of me, the bright window backlighting her silhouette. The lace of her cardigan the only texture that survives the glare.

“You know you can talk to me. You know that, right?” Her voice gets lost halfway between frustration and disappointment.

“I’ve literally been here for two minutes. Okay? Can I just… have a sec?”

She puts her hands up: blank palms, fingernails catching the light like crescent moons.

“Sorry, I just… sorry.” She’s fighting the words you never tell me anything, and it makes me want to take her spindly shoulders and shake them, yell what did you expect? That you’d just clean the house, wipe all the dust into the corner and expect me to follow along in your perfect little suburban fantasy? That we’d make salad with all the overripe fruit and spoon feed each other like babies? That I’d tell you my secrets because now I trust you, because now you have a living room and an unobscured TV and you can offer me tea?

But I don’t say any of it. I sit and stare out the window. Eventually she leaves. I hear her clink around in the kitchen. The plastic pop of a bottle with a child safety lid, the soft, chalky crunch of multivitamins. Eventually she goes into her room and before she can come out again I slip into mine and close the door.

I leave my bag opened on the floor. The top layer stares at me: tank tops, jean shorts, a Hard Rock Café hoodie. I shove the hoodie to the side, shuffle my hand blindly until it catches the edge of a plastic Ziplock full of lip-shaped gummies. I pop one in my mouth and lie back on my bed, chewing slowly. My tongue is washed in the tang of citrus and sour cherry, the faint skunkiness below it slowly growing.

Maybe it’s just the power of association, but I already feel my lips going numb. My body humming as if I’m in a fast car. As if I’m in the passenger seat, to be exact. And then I open my eyes, and I am.

It’s Saturday, or maybe Friday, and I called out of work sick. I’m sailing over the Bay Bridge, the water glittering on both sides. The car is the same: faded, beige leather, deteriorating and leaving a sweet, earthy smell in the air. I’m chewing on one of those gummies: the rest are in a bag in the cup holder.

Josiah is driving: one hand on the steering wheel, the other on my knee. My favorite song is playing: “Friday I’m in Love” by the Cure. I’d shown it to Jo a few weeks back, because he said he’d never heard of the Cure and I didn’t believe him. I made him listen to it on his bed: he stopped to kiss my cheek, my neck, saying something like, “This song reminds me of you.”

I wasn’t sure if I was in love with him, but I knew I wanted to be. I wanted him to wrap me around him, become a nest for me to sleep inside. I saw freedom when he looked at me, rubbing his thumb in circular motions over my knee, catching my leg hairs and tangling them. I thought he could be the one if I just kept going, and if life kept going like that I think he would’ve been. He was becoming that person because I wanted him to.

In the salty wind over the bridge, my hair rips out of my braids. I keep singing, belting at the top of my lungs: Monday you can fall apart, Tuesday Wednesday break my heart.

“Have you ever had your heart broken?” I yell over the sound of the freeway.

“What??”

I lean toward his ear. “Have you ever had your heart broken!?”

He glances at me and laughs. “What, is this an interview or something?”

“Yes,” I say, picking up the hand on my leg and balling it into a fist under his mouth like a microphone. “And I want to know.”

He pauses. His smile falters, just slightly, and I watch the dimple on his pale cheek wash away like a footprint on the beach. “Yes. Once. They said they wanted to marry me. Then… well, let’s just say I found them—” His words are lost in the wind.

“What??”

“I found them in bed with my roommate. At my 22nd birthday party.”

“No!” I say. Our microphone has dropped into his lap.

“Yes,” he says, and then he starts laughing and lip-syncing to the song again, and so I laugh and do the same. We’re almost at the end of the bridge, but I don’t want to be. I don’t want anything to end. If the universe glitched at this moment and I was trapped in a time loop, I would welcome it with open arms.

“What about you?” Josiah asks.

I look out at the water, the shimmers making their way slowly to shore. A black bird in the distance perches on an object in the water, but from here it looks like it’s standing directly on the waves.

“Once,” I lie. I know what it’s like to seek out comfort and not find it, I want to say. I know what it’s like to constantly search for someone to cure your loneliness and never find it.

I suddenly feel that familiar creeping, a trickling of dread around the corners of my forehead, and suddenly the freeway is too long, the lights are too bright, the music is too loud. The sour taste in my mouth lingers and I’m positive he knows I’m lying.

I open my eyes and lean over the edge of my bed, spitting the half-chewed candy into the wire trash can. It splats on the unlined bottom, drowning in a pool of pink saliva.

It’s not fair, I think. The way she treats me, the way she keeps letting me step over her without fighting back.

Mom makes bell pepper salad to go with the rotisserie chicken. I watch from the counter, licking peanut butter off a spoon, as she shreds a sprig of rosemary over it.

“You want anything with that?” She eyes the jar of peanut butter as she places the cutting board in the sink.

“No, actually, this is fine.”

The kitchen smells bright and oily. We take the dishes to the living room and sit in front of the TV— it’s just Jeopardy, and neither of us seem to want to watch it. We just eat, letting it distract us from everything else.

“Nick—”

“I know,” I say too soon.

“You don’t, you don’t even know what I was gonna say.”

I push my plate away from me. “I do. I do know. You were gonna say to talk to you. That you want to know how I’m doing, or you’re worried about me, or you want me to talk more, or you miss me, or something like that. Am I wrong?”

She pulls her lips thin. Suddenly, in the light, I realize how old she looks, how the color of her concealer mimics dark circles, its blotchiness like a shadow of pubescent acne scars.

“No,” she says. “I don’t need you to say anything. I just want you to be here. I’m just… glad you’re here. That’s all.”

I stare at the orange peppers on my plate. They’re drenched in too much vinegar, not enough oil. A sprinkling of guilt.

I say nothing.

“I was also going to say, Mira, you know, the next door neighbor? She’s… well, their rabbit escaped. I think a few days ago. Anyways. I know you were saying you wanted a rabbit but, maybe you could talk to her? About what it’s like to take care of one. Get some tips.”

I picture a tiny white rabbit, used to twice-a-day baths and ear scratches, wandering around the dirty city.

“How did it escape?”

Mom shrugs. “How does any animal escape? It just wants to. Maybe it thinks there’s something better out there.”

Outside the window, the leaves of the fig tree move silently. Speckled light dances on the overgrown lawn, casting the wildflowers in temporary shadow.

  

I sleep a few hours and dream about someone, half Josiah and half someone else, a centaur of memories and imaginations. He’s singing me a song by the Cure, fingers tangled in my hair. We’re lying under a fig tree, bulging fruits the size of my head, and I hear a rustling in the bushes. I look over and it’s a rabbit: chestnut brown with a white tail. Its eyes spiral into a well of animal emotions: hunger, fear, slight horniness. When I look back up at my lover he’s morphed into my mom. She smiles with yellow, crooked teeth and they drop like pebbles onto my stomach.

When I wake up my heart feels like a thrashed basketball. I wash my face, throw on my single hoodie and sweatpants, pee, then go to the kitchen. The light is still dim and low, the shadows long and tinted with yellow. An unused tea bag sits alone on the counter, next to a clean mug—the tea she’d asked me if I wanted yesterday. All the dishes from last night are still in the sink, becoming brittle.

I trace a still shaky finger over the fruit in the bowl—the only fruit that’s still okay is a banana, robed in black splotches. The rest lies in a brown, fermented puddle. The peel falls away easily, too easily, and the ripe smell reminds me of baking banana bread, the sickly sweet mush that seems like it only belongs in a muffin. But my stomach gnaws at me.

I finish it as soon as I step onto the porch. I never understood the point of porches—I’d rather place my toes directly into the grass, wiggle them around in the dirt until my soles are crusted with mud. I walk down the stairs and settle in the cool grass, still tinged with dew. I’m swallowing the last bite of banana when I see it: a rabbit, no, the rabbit, the same one from my dream, standing at the edge of the lawn. It’s brown with a white tail, its head turned over its shoulder just like in my dream, looking at me.

“Hello,” I say dumbly.

The rabbit doesn’t say anything back.

“Are you…” then I realize Mom never told me the name of Mira’s rabbit, the one that ran away. And it might not even be a pet. Maybe it’s just wild, passing through the suburbs on its way to greater things.

Or maybe it ran away from home. Maybe it’s looking for a door, a portal. Maybe it’s looking for its family at the rabbit breeding farm and has a plan to set them free, to run off into the forest and start a commune with all the other runaway rabbits.

The rabbit turns away and runs under a silver Corolla. I step forward slowly, leaning down to peer under. It has one eye on me, its tiny nose wiggling.

“Hey,” I say again, taking another step forward. “Hey, do you have a name?”

But I move too fast, and I watch as it scurries out, bolts across the street, and dashes behind a neighboring tree. The trunk is too thick, and for a second I can’t see it at all.

It’s going somewhere, I can tell. I want to know where. Is it just running away, or is it running towards something? Does it know something? Does it feel something other than just rabbitness, other than animal instinct or the paralyzing urge to survive?

When I reach the tree, there’s no rabbit behind it. Only tree roots and patchy, unwatered grass. And, between the grass, a few tiny rabbit pellets, the color of coal. I walk back to the front door slowly.

The morning lingers like a thick fog, the image of the rabbit peering its head from behind the coffee cup, ears hidden in the replica of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, reflection of ceiling lights on the water pitcher like two rodent eyes. I stay curled in my childhood blanket for most of it, the one covered in sleepy, pink fish. I look at my phone, then flip through my high school diary. Words about the future, the city I was going to live in, the freedom I’d have to love and fuck and get wasted.

I could do it again, I think. I could find another Josiah. A better one. I could run to the countryside and start a farm, feed goats and plant flowers in all my windows. I could wrap myself around another person and another life in a deep-body cleanse, losing the past, watching it run down the drain like dirty water. I could run away. I could be a rabbit.

And then I think of Mom: her rotting fruit, her empty nest. I imagine her here in this creaky house: alone and malnourished. Chewing vitamins to prolong a fruitless life. I think of our words last night over peppers and chicken—words that were split and empty, at least that’s how I saw them. But maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe something had changed, and it wasn’t just learning how to vacuum.

I hear the familiar floorboard creek. I look up and it’s Mom in her fuzzy green bathrobe, her hair falling in clumps around her shoulders. Her roots are coming in: peppered gray against the artificial red. New year, old me. She’s not wearing makeup, and she looks younger somehow, despite the gray, despite how thin her lips look without gloss on them, and despite her ever more yellowing teeth.

“You must’ve gotten up early,” she says. “I look like a wreck.”

No, you don’t, I say, almost.

“I’m thinking of making some pancakes. How’s that sound?”

I try to smile at her but it warbles. It’s not fair, I think. The way she treats me, the way she keeps letting me step over her without fighting back. It makes me want to scream and shake her, call her a bitch just to see her raise her voice and say something horrible about me in return.

But then she turns into the kitchen and the feeling fades.

She washes her hands in the sink—they seem to turn translucent under the flush of water. The scent of coconut soap fills the small room.

“I was thinking, blueberry pancakes? Or chocolate chip? What do you think?”

When she turns I see something in her eye; a switch, a spiraling, an urge to run away. I keep looking at her.

“Do you want to go somewhere with me?” I say. “The park? The ocean? Another country?

Anywhere? Just go together for a while and see what happens? Do you think we could?”