Sharp_Objects

pulled back the covers and motioned for me to sit in bed, then got in next to me. All those months after Marian died when she kept to her room and refused me, I wouldn’t have dared to imagine myself curled up in bed with my mother. Now here I was, more than fifteen years too late.
    She ran her fingers through my hair and handed me my drink. A sniff: smelled like brown apples. I held it stiffly but didn’t sip.
    “When I was a little girl, my mother took me into the North Woods and left me,” Adora said. “She didn’t seem angry or upset. Indifferent. Almost bored. She didn’t explain why. She didn’t say a word to me, in fact. Just told me to get in the car. I was barefoot. When we got there, she took me by the hand and very efficiently pulled me along the trail, then off the trail, then dropped my hand and told me not to follow her. I was eight, just a small thing. My feet were ripped into strips by the time I got home, and she just looked up at me from the evening paper, and went to her room. This room.”
    “Why are you telling me this?”
    “When a child knows that young that her mother doesn’t care for her, bad things happen.”
    “Believe me, I know what that feels like,” I said. Her hands were still running through my hair, one finger toying with my bare circle of scalp.
    “I wanted to love you, Camille. But you were so hard. Marian, she was so easy.”
    “Enough, Momma,” I said.
    “No. Not enough. Let me take care of you, Camille. Just once, need me.”
    Let it end. Let it all end.
    “Let’s do it then,” I said. I swallowed the drink in a belt, peeled her hands from my head, and willed my voice to be steady.
    “I needed you all along, Momma. In a real way. Not a need you created so you could turn it on and off. And I can’t ever forgive you for Marian. She was a baby.”
    “She’ll always be my baby,” my mother said.

Chapter Sixteen

    I fell asleep without the fan on, woke up with the sheets stuck to me. My own sweat and urine. Teeth chattering and my heartbeat thumping behind my eyeballs. I grabbed the trash can beside my bed and threw up. Hot liquid, with four kernels of corn bobbing on top.
    My mother was in my room before I pulled myself back onto the bed. I pictured her sitting in the hall chair, next to the photo of Marian, darning socks while she waited for me to sicken.
    “Come on, baby. Into the bathtub with you,” she murmured. She pulled my shirt over my head, my pajama bottoms down. I could see her eyes on my neck, breasts, hips, legs for a sharp blue second.
    I vomited again as I got into the tub, my mother holding my hand for balance. More hot liquid down my front and onto the porcelain. Adora snapped a towel from the rack, poured rubbing alcohol into it, wiped me down with the objectivity of a window cleaner. I sat in the bathtub as she poured glasses of cold water over my head to bring the fever down. Fed me two more pills and another glass of milk the color of weak sky. I took it all with the same bitter vengeance that fueled me on two-day benders. I’m not down yet, what else you got? I wanted it to be vicious. I owed Marian that much.
    Vomiting into the tub, draining the tub, refilling, draining. Icepacks on my shoulders, between my legs. Heat packs on my forehead, my knees. Tweezers into the wound on my ankle, rubbing alcohol poured after. Water flushing pink. Vanish, vanish, vanish, pleading from my neck.
    Adora’s lashes were plucked clean, the left eye dribbling plump tears, her upper lip continually bathed with her tongue. As I was losing consciousness, a thought: I am being cared for. My mother is in a sweat mothering me. Flattering. No one else would do this for me. Marian. I’m jealous of Marian.

    I was floating in a half-full bath of lukewarm water when I woke again to screams. Weak and steaming, I pulled myself out of the bath, wrapped a thin cotton robe around me—my mother’s high screams jangling in my ears—and opened the door just as Richard busted in.
    “Camille, are you okay?” My mother’s wails, wild and ragged, cutting the air behind him.
    Then, his mouth fell open. He tilted my head to one side, looked at the cuts on my neck. Pulled open my robe and flinched.
    “Jesus Christ.” A psychic wobbling: He teetered between laughter and fear.
    “What’s wrong with my mother?”
    “What’s wrong with you? You’re a cutter?”
    “I cut words,” I muttered, as if it made a difference.
    “Words, I can see that.”
    “Why is my