Constance

It was an accident when I saw Mom cry for the first time. I was cutting class and snuck home during lunch—freshman year, each day a unique disaster; I had been slighted by some former best friend and needed to get away—but when I tiptoed into the apartment, Mom’s racking sobs were coming from the kitchen. She propped herself against the counter, fists balled and knuckles white. It was an open-eyed cry, her heaving gasps didn’t sound defeated. She was releasing something dense from deep inside her. When she caught me peeking, she put on her everyday composed, maternal face. But it was too late. Daughters aren’t supposed to see their mothers like that. I had no choice but to ask if she was okay. Mom explained that her sister had called. Their Mom died. I didn’t know then that Mom had a sister. I guess I knew she had to have a mother herself, but that still surprised me. Mom had never talked about family in any terms other than the two of us.

Our apartment, the ground floor unit of a duplex in West Garfield Park, was humble or quaint if we were trying to make it sound nicer than it was. But it was claustrophobic during that conversation. Mom’s younger sister was Jodie, she told me, and their mother was Constance. Mom referred to her by her first name: Constance.

Constance was cruel in a way that would oscillate between rampage and neglect. She would lock Mom in her ascetic bedroom to howl and whimper like a beast, she would throw Mom’s few self-won luxuries–a diary, a scarf, a softball–into the fireplace, she would refuse to serve Mom meals for days at a time. Constance would pummel her own body with her bony fists and then show Mom the bruises, screaming all the while, “This is what I get for birthing a rotten girl like you.”

Jodie, apparently, was the only thing Mom and Constance ever agreed on. Jodie was innocent and precious, and avoided the entirety of her mother’s ire. She did her best to provide small comforts to her sister amid Constance’s punishments, but there’s only so much kids can do for each other in a haunted house. When Mom finally escaped, she wanted to bring Jodie with her, but Jodie couldn’t follow. “If I go with you, she might kill you.” They lost touch afterward. It was too impossible.

When Mom told me about Jodie, I imagined this brave, beautiful girl. She should have been radiant. Instead she was frail. Thin in a chitinous way. She looked like a bug when she first visited us. “What are you doing here?” I asked before I even confirmed who she was. Mom told me not to be rude. Jodie asked me about school and my friends and boys or girls I liked in the stilted manner of an adult afraid of a child. I answered every question with single mumbled words. Despite my behavior, Jodie hugged me goodbye and said, “It was so nice to finally meet you.”

“What the fuck was that?” Mom admonished me for my language, of course.

With Constance dead she had a new chance to reconnect with her sister. And Jodie wanted to get to know me, because Jodie wanted me to get to know her son, my heretofore unknown cousin Nico. Nico was really sick. This was probably our only chance to all be a family together.

Mom and I had to take two buses to get to the sushi place in the Loop. Nico wore red flannel pajama bottoms and slides with socks to the restaurant. Mom wouldn’t tell me what he was sick with, but I ruled out cancer as he had blond hair curled into that broccoli style boys my age loved. He was pale, and his movements with his chopsticks were painfully slow–he didn’t finish eating until an hour after I did–but he was cool. He asked what I was into, softball, and what position I played, first base. He told me he loved movies and dreamed of making his own some day. He didn’t talk like a boy that would die. Instead, he acted with unexamined immortality.

“They seem nice,” I admitted on the first bus home. “Can I ask you something?”

“You just did.”

“You’re the worst. Do you think Jodie told Nico about Constance?”

“No. Jodie had to live with her for years after I left. Even if Constance never treated Jodie badly directly, she still saw what happened to me. I know she was scared. What good would it do now to tell Nico about all that?”

“Don’t people deserve to know when someone was an abuser or whatever?”

“She’s dead now. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“How did she die, by the way?”

“I don’t know. I never asked. It was more important to know she was gone. Not how. Whatever you can imagine, it should have been worse.”

“What if she had each limb tied to a different horse, and then each horse was sent running in a different direction, so she was pulled apart into a bunch of pieces all over the place? I think that’s how one of the kings of England executed his prisoners.”

For the rest of our long trip back to West Garfield Park we imagined all the wonderful ways Constance could have died.

As the year progressed, Mom and I continued to meet with Jodie and Nico. It felt like our family was becoming more real each time we met, though even as I warmed up to them, Jodie never seemed entirely comfortable. Our get-togethers became farther and farther apart the closer we got to summer. By the last day of freshman year, I hadn’t seen my aunt or cousin in over a month. I came home, ready to be mindless and lazy until September, but Mom had a message. Nico was getting worse. He’d asked if I would stay with him for a while, so we could spend time together before he was gone. Mom helped me pack a week’s worth of my things and said, “Be good.”

Her Lakeshore condo, on the nineteenth floor of her building, could have fit three of my apartments in it. At least. It had a living room, a sitting area, and a den, each with indistinguishable leather chairs and framed abstracts and colossal windows looking upon Lake Michigan. The glass was polished so perfectly it looked like I could step through it into the air and I might not even fall.

Nico moved slower than the last time I saw him. He needed to brace himself against the cream colored walls as he shuffled. They must have had someone clean those walls daily to keep them so spotless. Or maybe boys like Nico didn’t leave fingerprints where they touched. His room had the best TV and game consoles on the market. The perimeter was lined with movie posters, mostly deep cut film snob stuff. He had a king bed. At its foot was a collapsible cot.

“Is that for me?”

“I hope that’s okay. It’s not weird, is it?”

“I just figured I’d have my own room while I was here, you know?”

“Yeah, I get that. I can ask my Mom to set up one of the spare rooms if you want. But I thought this way we could spend more time together. My Mom thinks it's important. So you’ll remember me. Since we didn’t have that chance when we were little, right?”

“Is it okay if I ask what’s wrong with you? Or is that insensitive or whatever?”

“Bad heart.”

“Shit. Bad bad?”

“That’s what the doctors say. My Mom has been basically losing her mind over it. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t really move. It feels like I’m not inside myself.”

 “Are you worried?”

“No. It’s hard to explain, but I think I’ll be okay.”

“Okay,” I said, “the cot will be fine. It’s whatever.”

Those first few days in the Lakeshore place, spending time in Nico’s room was more fun than whatever else that summer could have been. He had a nice camera, and he’d film us. He had me act out some of my softball stories–he’d direct me to take my batting stance and when I did it without appropriate gusto he said, “Do it for real!”–which was embarrassing at first, but became liberating. Nico dared me into minor pranks he couldn’t do himself. I snuck into the kitchen to steal some of the premium snacks, small pours of wine, vodka, whiskey, gin, and mezcal into red plastic cups, and insignificant bills–ones and fives–from Jodie’s purse left on the kitchen island. When I crept back into Nico’s room with the contraband, he filmed as we celebrated our teenage victories. At night Nico played scary movies Mom never wanted to watch with me. We screamed and laughed at the blood and guts until Nico passed out. His heart probably couldn’t keep up with us, but he looked content as he slept. Never troubled in any way.

The fourth night I was there, he said, “I have another movie I want to show you. One of my favorites. But we can’t watch it on the TV that’s in here.” Nico gave me instructions to sneak out to the hall, careful not to wake Jodie who was not pleased with how little sleep her son had been getting since my arrival. A storage closet opened to reveal a cart with a bulky old television set and VHS player. Nico was so excited, he dropped from his bed to the floor and began to rummage underneath as quickly as his sluggish body would allow. He pulled out an old, much loved toybox. Inside, a collection of tapes. Transformers action figures. A toddler-appropriate toy camera. A knife, sharp and shiny, as haphazardly tossed into the box as everything else. Seeing it glisten was the first time I felt nervous in his house. “Some of my best stuff,” he explained. As if that said it all. I needed to be his hands at this point. Nico had me set up the TV and insert the tape, and then he clicked play on the remote.

Constance appeared on screen.

I knew it had to be her. She was an old woman with a fat face, nearly no hair, and a prim and proper black dress with white lace. Like a decrepit pilgrim, I thought. She was laughing at the camera, but her little eyes were humorless. It felt like she was staring through the screen. My skin itched while she looked at me. Like when I had chicken pox and I wanted to scratch so bad but Mom wouldn’t let me and I hated her for it even though she was trying to protect me. A little giggling version of Nico–before the bad heart kicked in–sat so happy on Constance’s lap. I imagined this woman, finally with a face, thrashing against her own body in a desperate fury directed at Mom. Directed at me. “Fucking hell, Nico. Turn it off.”

“That’s Grandma. You never got to meet her. Don’t you want to see what she was like?”

“I don’t have a Grandma,” I spat. “And I know what she was like more than you! Now turn it the fuck off.”
“Literally what are you talking about? Don’t be a bitch, just watch the movie.” Nico tried to hide the remote behind him, but weak as he was, I wrestled it away. I yanked the power cord to the stupid old TV out of the wall more forcefully than I needed and shoved the cart out into the hall. The cord wrapped around one of the wheels, it bumped into one of the walls, and it crashed down to the floor. Shards of the bulbous screen scattered around. The tape spat out of the crushed cassette in the console like intestines.