Weary of re-reads, I’d wandered into the nonfiction section. I’d picked this one up on a whim, on a joke almost because the title seemed so silly. Everything You Wanted to Know About Niagara Falls. Who wanted to know anything about Niagara Falls?
Then I read it.
I snuck back every day for a week, enamored by the descriptions, in awe of the pictures of water rushing, enchanted by the majesty and magic of this place both faraway and someday attainable. My mother didn’t let me get a library card, so I’d stolen the book and kept it ever since.
Now the paper was thin and pliable, well-worn from years of turning the pages. The binding was loose, the stitching visible between the cardboard and glue. By now it was probably held together by the clear tape that held the library tags to the spine.
“Happy birthday,” I whispered.
My present to myself: to finally see the place I’d been yearning for. The place I’d dreamed about even before I’d gotten the book, for all twenty years of my life. For room to breathe. For freedom.
Even my camera couldn’t sustain me. I flipped through the photographs on the digital screen, every single one taken in the house or the yard. Nowadays mom got antsy when I walked over to the park. There were only so many times I could pretend a new angle of the flower pot was artistic instead of just plain pathetic. I wanted to see new things, new places—new people.
I piled everything into my bag. I was far too old for the purple backpack. But then, my body was too old for me. Somewhere in the past five years, I had blossomed into a woman, with full lips and fuller breasts, with hair in places I was almost afraid to touch, except when I just had to at night in my bed, and I did—oh, I did, and it shamed me. I shamed myself with the wetness and the horrible, rippling pleasure around my fingers.
My twentieth birthday. Neither my mother nor I had acknowledged it at breakfast, as if even the mention of passing time would crack the fragile votive that ensconced us.
And now, I would shatter it.
I wouldn’t be going around the world or even outside the state—at least not today. But the fear felt huge inside my stomach. Her anxiety was rubbing off on me. I had to get out of here.
Everything fit neatly into my faded backpack, but then I was well-practiced in packing it after having done so at least a dozen times. Each time had ended in screaming, in tears, and in me back upstairs in my room.
Not this time. If I didn’t follow through now, I would be stuck here. I’d live here forever.
I’d die here.
Feeling queasy, I slung the bag over my shoulder and headed down the stairs. My mother sat at the kitchen table, her thin robe loosely tied, eyes glassy from the pills. The medicine was supposed to help her, but she never got better—only worse. More fearful, more controlling.
All those chemicals had taken their toll on her body. She looked so tired. The weary shadows around her eyes and tension lines around her lips always made my gut clench. I should be here to protect her. I just couldn’t, I couldn’t.
I leaned my backpack against the leg of the table and sat down across from her.
“Mama.”
Her eyes came into focus. She sighed. “Not this again, Evie.”
I swallowed. “Please, Mama, try to understand. I need to see more of the world than these walls.”
“What is there to see? Suffering? People starving? Go look at the TV if you want to see the world so badly. You know I’m right.”
We used to watch the news together. Every young girl abducted, every college girl who had her drink drugged was somehow a mark against me.
That could have been you, she would say.
Whereas most families might let the tragedy of strangers pass them by like waves, she would catch them, collect them, marking down their names and ages in her notebooks and checking whether they had been found in six months, a year, five years, until I felt like I was drowning in unseen violence.
“I don’t want to watch the news. I want to see things for myself. Ordinary things. I want to be ordinary. I want to live.”
She scowled. “Don’t be dramatic. You’re living here. You’re safe.”
I firmed. “No, Mama. I know you need to stay inside, but just as much, I need to go out into the world. Experience things for myself. And I’m going to. You can’t stop me this time.”
Her face seemed to crack. Plump tears slipped down her cheeks. “I don’t understand why you’re talking this way. What have I ever done but protect you?”
Guilt swelled my chest, but I forced it down. I would be strong.
“I can’t stay here. I love you, but I just can’t stay.”
“Evie, Evie, my baby.” She clasped her hands together, begging.
I knelt at her feet, taking her hands in mine. I could feel each bone, each tendon beneath the paper-dry skin.
“Please. Give me your blessing to leave. I’ll come back to visit. Maybe even move back to town after a while. I need to see something of the world first.”
“How are you going to afford it?”
I’d been lucky enough to get a job doing touchups for a small photography studio up the road when I was sixteen. I could do the work from home, and the paychecks were deposited directly in our account—well, technically my mother’s account. I wouldn’t take that money even if I could, knowing she didn’t have another source of income.
I did get a small weekly allowance, though, and had saved up a hundred and sixty dollars. Not enough to get me all the way to New York, not with paying for gas, food and motels along the way.
“I talked to someone through the college’s job placement system. There’s an opening at a photography studio up in Dallas.”
I’d work there for a while, saving up money and looking for another stop closer to Niagara Falls. That was the plan anyway.
She sniffed. “If you leave, you won’t ever come back.”
It was a pronouncement, bitter and unyielding.
“I will, I promise—”
“No.” She hardened, her tears drying as quickly as they’d come. “I mean it, Evie. You wouldn’t be welcome here anymore. You’d be one of them.”
The paranoia. I knew it was a sickness, but labeling it didn’t help me.
“I’m your daughter. Always.”
She shoved back from me. “If that were true, you wouldn’t leave me. If you leave, you wouldn’t be my daughter anymore.”
Her words sank into my stomach like a lead weight. No shock, only resignation. Maybe I had always known it would come to this.
“I love you, Mama,” I whispered, and it panged with permanence.
As if finally realizing I was serious, her eyes widened, filling with rage.
“You won’t last a second out there. Not one goddamn second, you hear me? You have no idea what kinds of things happen out there—”
“I do, Mama. Because you’ve told me every day that I can remember. Well, do you think nothing bad ever happens here? That I’m safe just because I’m trapped here? What about Allen?”
Her head jerked back as if I’d slapped her, and in a way, I had. We never talked about that, not even to the counselor.
Mama had dated a few men when I was very young, when she still left the house. The last man she dated was Allen. He had been so very understanding of her desire to spend nights at home instead of going out for dates, even if it meant her young daughter was in the way. My mother would take her pills and go to sleep and he would slip into my room.
One night, she caught him in the act. She’d kicked him out of the house the next day, and that fall, I’d stayed home to be homeschooled instead of going to ninth grade.
She had stopped dating altogether. She stopped going outside too. The world was too scary. Well, I was a little scared too, but I was even more terrified of rotting here. At least her isolation had led to me getting my driver’s license and the rust bucket I used to get groceries each week. It was a pumpkin turned into a carriage, ready to take me away from here.
I softened my voice. “I’m not mad at you for what happened. It wasn’t your fault.”