Page 24 of Breakdown
Cynthia brushed the thought aside like an irritating fly, not letting it gain purchase. Right now, she’d settle for the coke. Her lips parted as she pushed aside the powdered sugar in the pantry, her nerve endings tingling. She leaned in close, confused, her fingertips brushing nothing but the back of the cupboard.
Panic gripped her chest, a hammering pain growing behind her ribcage as she pulled out cans and spices and every single mug they owned. Where the fuck was it? The pots and pans, the dishes, the food in the fucking freezer, all hauled out onto the countertop. She’d had at least two grams left. It had to be here. It wasn’t here. Ithadto be here.
“Mom?”
She startled, looking up from emptying the cutlery drawer. It was only Peter—all awkward knobby knees and sharp elbows and too-long preteen limbs—hovering at the threshold of the doorway as though he didn’t quite want to come in.
“Peter.” Her voice was much too loud and he recoiled a fraction of an inch. “What are you doing up? You should be in bed.” The admonishment spilled out of her automatically, annoyed that he’d interrupted her search and then disappointed with herself that that was all she was thinking about.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. She’d always loved plants, and she remembered being fascinated by those time-lapse videos they showed in high school biology class—the bean sprout pushing up, green and uncoiling and wavering slightly. It was like watching that in reverse now, Peter shrinking into nothing under her clumsy touch.
“It’s fine, Peter. You just startled me. That’s all.”
She couldn’t be trusted to handle delicate things. Cynthia should’ve gone to her son, held him, but instead she found herself taking a seat at the kitchen table, nodding her head toward the chair across from her. It was all she could do, and it wasn’t nearly enough. But, like her, Peter had learned to live on scraps of affection and he hungrily, guiltily obliged.
Whatever parental instincts most mothers possessed innately, Cynthia had discovered quickly she was lacking. In those early weeks, after the hospital, she’d look at Peter and Olivia lying in their cribs, with their downy heads and their sweet little faces, and she’d feel...hollow. Or worse, she’d be overcome with a surge of resentment and anger so strong that it scared her.
It felt like a joke, that fucking Klimpt print just outside the nursery door, a gift Erik had nailed to the wall like a warning. It showed a beatific, beautiful young mother cradling two cherubic infants. It was a bastardization of the real painting,The Three Ages of Woman,and it made Cynthia unreasonably furious every time she looked at it. She missed everything that was supposed to be there: the bared breasts, the ravaged old crone, the fucking truth of the thing. But that was typical of Erik, wasn’t it? As long as everything looked fine, it didn’t matter how much ugliness was just out of frame.
That’s when things really started to go bad for them. Erik was working through the nights and he loved to remind her thatshewanted these brats, not him, so it held that it washergoddamn job to shut them up so he could sleep. But she remained frozen, unfit and inadequate, outside the nursery door just staring at that goddamn print unwilling to enter that room and confront her total failure. Erik had shaken his head at her in disgust, and then shoved in past her to soothe the children himself. The reckoning came later that evening.
The doctor had to wire her jaw shut for four weeks.
She wondered if Peter could see it now, that hesitation to nurture that she could never quite shake. She wondered where she’d hidden that baggie. “What’s going on, sweet-pea?”
Peter cleared his throat, producing a mangled envelope that had clearly been crammed into a backpack for more than a few days. He attempted to smooth the worst of the creasing, flattening it with his palm onto the oak tabletop, and between his fingers Cynthia spied the familiar letterhead. She tried not to sigh out loud. Another note from the school; this year had been full of them. They were acting out, testing the limits afforded to them by an addict mother and a criminal father.
Whatever it was now, she suspected that it was Liv who’d been the mastermind and Peter who’d gotten caught. That was how it tended to go. Recently, they’d been split up because of it, seated on completely opposite corners of the classroom. Apparently, the separation didn’t take, which surprised her a lot less than the school administration.
Liv and Peter were a gang in miniature. United against the world. In a way that made her feel guilty, she envied that closeness. How good it must be to always have someone on your side. Even now she spotted Olivia out of the corner of her eye, lurking silently at the top of the stairs where she thought Cyn couldn’t see her.
Peter pushed the envelope across to Cynthia wordlessly, watching her carefully as she skimmed the page. Squinting a little, now that she really looked. How had she missed it?
“Why didn’t you say anything?” she said, more accusatorily than intended. The guilt threatened to swallow her whole as he shrank a little more in his seat. He deserved better than this, than her.
“Sorry,” Peter said again, dragging his hand backward through his wheat-blonde hair, tugging hard at his scalp in a way that made Cynthia wince. The hair and the nervous habit he inherited from his father. The rest: the indecision, the self-doubt, the tendency to fuck-up? That was all hers. God, she wished she could’ve saved him from it. “I always just used to copy off of Liv. Then when we got split up and... it wasn’t so bad at first; I was close to the front. But then it just kept getting worse.”
So had Peter’s last report card. That should have been the tip-off. The words, haughty and so fucking obvious, stared up at her from the official school letterhead.“It has come to my attention that Peter appears to be having difficulties viewing the board. He may be in want of a pair of glasses.”Cyn could read between the insufferably formal, pretentious lines; Peter was practically goddamn blind, and his own mother had failed to take her head out of her ass long enough to notice. “If need be, I can recommend an excellent optometrist...”Some condescending cunt with thirty other snot-nosed brats to keep track of had figured it out before her.
“Sorry,” he repeated, trailing off.
“Peter, you’re not in trouble.”
He nodded mutely, staring a hole into a spot of congealed tomato sauce still on the table top from dinner three nights ago. Takeout from Frank’s. She never cooked anymore.
“I just wish you would’ve let me know sooner,” she tried again, softer. Some days she could almost fake it.
“You don’t have to tell dad, do you?” he asked, barely audible.
Something happened during Erik’s little field trip with the twins last week after another letter from the principal. To ‘show them how the world works,’ he’d said. He’d hauled them out of bed after midnight on a school night, and she’d been three Klonopins too deep to do a damn thing except watch them go. They were different after: Liv was harder and Peter, more skittish. She wanted to ask; a good mother would have asked. But Liv spirited them both upstairs the moment they’d gotten home, and Cynthia was ashamed to admit she was glad she would never have to know. Whatever it was, she couldn’t protect them from it. She couldn’t even protect herself.
“It’ll be our little secret,” she promised.
Peter’s shoulders relaxed, just a fraction of an inch.
“Was there...” She hesitated, scanning his bare arms for the telltale yellowing of old bruises and coming up empty. Erik hit her because she deserved it, but he never touched the kids. She would’ve noticed, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t have missed something like that. “Was there something else, sweet-pea?”
“No. Like what? No.” Peter’s shoulders tightened again immediately, his gaze flicking painfully to Liv. Away from Cynthia. “What else would there be?” he asked, the note of hysteria making his prepubescent voice crack.
