The Best American Essays 2015 by Ariel Levy Page B

Russell’s face was slack. His cheeks sagged, and the rolls of his neck were gray and unshaven. In the dark hall there was a picture of Russell at twenty, handsome and thin in high-waisted jeans. He was standing in a barn, hand resting on a horse’s back, a saddle at his feet. Russell-thirty-years-before stared into the camera with a half-smile, and his face was like Elizabeth’s—curly black eyelashes, small nose, mouth like a rosebud. That night, as he sputtered and snorted in the smoky living room, I looked at the picture and did not understand.
    By late autumn of the year I was sixteen, my mother weighed eighty pounds. For long months she grew thinner; her pain intensified. I carried her, one arm behind her back and the other under her knees, and I could feel her spine through blue pajamas dotted with tiny roses. I placed her on an overturned bucket in the shower, so she could sit beneath the spray. Her ankles were bone under loosening skin. I helped her to the bed she shared with my father and held a squirt bottle to her mouth so she could drink. I kissed the sweat on her forehead.
    She told me,
“Te amo.”
    A few months before, she was beautiful—you could still see it in flashes. Her hair was thick and blondish, and her body was round in some places and slender in others. Her hands, always cold, held pens and typed and cooked scrambled eggs. Her eyes were blue and her heels were narrow. She looked a lot like me.
    Elizabeth’s roof felt very low on those autumn nights, as the rain hit the sheet metal and the clouds heaved over the mountaintop, moving south. We crept down the hall to Russell’s bathroom, the darkest room in the house, which we were both afraid to enter alone. It was windowless, a huge mirror reflecting the jumble of the closet. The shower was a cavern walled in dark stone. When I spent the night I washed my hair, nervous beneath a torrent of hot well water, watchful of shadows blurred by the slimy plastic curtain. I dried myself, the dark mouth of the shower gaping behind me in the mirror.
    Our fear of this bathroom began early that autumn. Elizabeth called me one evening, when October had yellowed the aspens outside her window.
    â€œThere was a little girl in the shower.”
    I was sitting in my bedroom when she called, back to my locked door, staring at the floor-length black curtains I bought at Kmart for ten dollars.
    â€œI saw her in the mirror.” Elizabeth relied on sharp and sometimes cruel humor. She was not dramatic and she was never publicly afraid or weak. “Her throat was slit. She was looking at me.”
    â€œDid you tell Russell?”
    â€œHe’ll say I’m dropping acid.” I pictured her in her room alone, listening to her father’s bed creak on the other side of the wall. “Do you believe me?”
    I did. I never saw the little dead girl, even though sometimes I wanted to; I would gaze into the mirror until the darkness of the shower distorted.
    â€œJesus fuck. I’m never going back in there alone.”
    I promised she wouldn’t have to.
    Thus began the showers with the door cracked, at six o’clock before school, whispering, one rocking on the shaggy carpet while the other washed quickly. We chose our clothes—red pistols on a black tank top, a pewter belt buckle in the shape of a skull—and waited for whatever neighbor had been saddled with driving us over black ice, between mountain ranges, through the gorge.
    Every morning in my house, my brother and sister fought as they ate cereal and gathered little bags of trail mix for lunch, then waited in the mudroom to be picked up. Sometimes my father was awake. Other times he was with my mother. Once she woke with a red rash covering her back, but most mornings she slept late, against the rasp of the oxygen tank.
    Elizabeth and I had a memory of Halloween, a few weeks before my mother made the long drive to the city for tests, when we only