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I shook her by the shoulders, yanked on the pink sweater that she loved so much.

For the second time in one day, I dialed 911.

Chapter7Present

Breakfast Is Xanaxand gas station coffee in the prison’s parking lot. My anxiety has eaten my appetite. My anxiety has eaten everything actually, the process to get here being half the battle. I had to claim her to see her, write her name out in connection with mine. Virginia Walsh. Gran had not given her a middle name, and she had not given one to us. It all seemed very spiteful: Piper and I took it hard. The loved kids at our school had middle names: Amy Lynn, Jessica Marie, Hailey Grace. Their moms proudly labeled their possessions with their full names, like it really mattered. I loved the way their lunch boxes and jackets had neatly penned tributes of love. I was also jealous.

There is a lot of buzzing in prison: you wait and walk…wait and walk.Buzz buzz buzzlike a bored fly. It reminds me of the game Taboo, where players are not permitted to say specific words, hence the name. If you do say one of the taboo words, the opposing team presses a buzzer.

The guards wear the same “we’re here now, might as well” look on their faces.I’m buzzed into the final room. There are ten tables; I choose the closest one to me—far from the door she’s going to walk through. I want to watch her walk across the room, study her facial expressions.

When the door buzzes open, I jump and brace myself. But instead of my reedy mother, a heavyset older woman wearing an orange jumpsuit walks in. I’m relieved only for a minute as I watch the stranger walk to a table where two younger men wait—her sons. I look away abruptly, thinking of Cal. What would it be like for him to visit me in a place like this? Gray and smelling faintly of piss. The thought of him being here in this dingy depressing room is too much. So why am I here? Virginia Walsh had never even tried to be our mother, and if she had, we hadn’t noticed.

I don’t feel healthy, maybe that’s why I’m here.No, that’s not why you’re here. I’m here to see Mom… Mother… Our mother, who art in prison.

Linoleum—everything is linoleum in here, scuffed and chipped and yellowing. I crack my neck.

The door buzzes again, this time it’s her. My stomach squeezes, flips over, and lands in my bladder. I crack my knuckles and hide my hands under the table in case she tries to touch me.

She nods when she spots me, proud to have recognized her own daughter.

There she is! Sometimes I forget I have one.I keep my face light with a hint of unaffected. She is different. I can tell right away. Her face is tan and freckled; she has deep wrinkles near her eyes like she’s spent her life smiling. They somehow make her look meaner.

“I’m not using anymore, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She slides into the chair opposite me and grins. She never smiles with teeth; she’s self-conscious about the ones that are missing.Her hair is mostly gray and short, but it’s full and healthy—as is her face. Last time I saw her she’d been emaciated…using.

“Do I look different? You can say…” She waves to a guard all beauty-queen-like, then looks back at me.

I’m disarmed, feeling like my twelve-year-old self again. “You look great,” I mutter.

She nods. Pauses. Waits for me to say something else. She nudges me with her eyebrows, but the Xanax has given me cotton mouth, and also—I don’t want to.

“Are you…good?”

She leans back, crossing her arms over her chest as she considers me—which is different than seeing me.

“What do you think about your mama being born again, little girl?” I am silent. Stunned but not stunned. Her lips are pressed into a tight rosebud, her eyes wide like a Kewpie doll.

My mother had worshipped only one thing, though during one stint with rehab she’d hung a framed painting of a creamy-looking Jesus on the living room wall. Painting Jesus had been serenely blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked. His robe a glowing white. Whenever a laundry commercial would come on TV, Piper and I would look at the painting and whisper, “White bright Jesus keeps your whites whiter.”

It hurts to think of Piper and it hurts to sit across from my mother—who has loved many things very much, but never me.

“I’m a believer,” she says when I don’t respond. “God cleaned me up. I believe he brought me here to change my heart, to purify me so when I get out, I can serve him.” She’s waiting for my reaction.

I picture white Jesus cleaning my mother up, wiping the drool and vomit from her face in his glowing robes. She is serving a five-year sentence for aiding in an armed robbery. The armed robber? Her boyfriend at the time—Joey Ger-something—I could never remember. Gran had gone to her sentencing while I stayed home with Cal. I hadn’t wanted to go. What I would never forget was my grandmother’s face when she came home that day—it was the same face she’d worn the weeks after Piper went missing.Empty. Vague. I already hated my mother, but that day, cradling my baby as Gran looked right through us, I hated her more. She took everything. Even now from jail, she was taking Gran from the two people who needed her. I wanted to tell Gran that it wasn’t her fault how my mother had turned out, but as I looked down at Cal I didn’t know if that was true or not. Piper and I were products of her upbringing, so who was to say she wasn’t? Gran was good to us, perhaps not so good to Virginia when she was trying to keep food on their two-top thirty years ago. It wasn’t an excuse—if I had managed to be a good mother after having her it all boiled down to choices.

I clear my throat. “I’m here because something happened to Gran.”

It takes her a moment to adjust. Her eyes narrow, then glaze over. Realizing the conversation is not about her is my mother’s least favorite turn of events. I watch her face fall in boredom.

“Oh, yeah?”

“She had a stroke…she’s been in the hospital for about nine days and—”

“Strokes run in our family. I always thought that I would die of a stroke, but the doctors in here say I’m healthy as a horse.” She dusts her hands of the worry, makes a face like she doesn’t need to be bothered.

I stare at her and she stares back, unmoved. “Yes, well, Gran unfortunately is not, and I just wanted to come tell you.”

“I’ll have my group pray for her. We pray for Piper every meeting—every single one. I think she can feel it too, you know.”