Times Square

I was next to my father in the back of a police cruiser as the resentment towards my mother grew. I was six months pregnant and when I realized that the door locked from the outside, echoes of my doctor’s voice flooded me. You have to remain calm when you’re pregnant, eat well, play music for your baby to hear in the womb. They internalize your emotions in utero and can be traumatized before they are even born. I tried to breathe as I looked ahead through the grates that divided me from the backs of the policemen’s balding heads and put a hand on my hard misshapen stomach as I rolled my window down the two inches that it allowed.

My father cleared his throat and I could see he was weighing which words to use. I studied his face as I waited; his eyes were tired and it seemed to me that he had aged since the night before. I knew we were both thinking about my mother, the woman we were there to save, a woman that arguably did not want saving.

Until that time, I had looked up to my mother despite the fear she provoked and the judgements she passed without discrimination. I was twelve when my mother first told me about the sexual abuse she suffered at her father’s hands. After all, we were close, and I was old enough to notice her self-medicating. Once I knew, there was nothing in the world I would not defend her from. I was her champion. As a child, I watched my mother dismiss the kindest of neighbors, teachers, and friends as stupid, naive, or untrustworthy, which gave her intended effect—she was right and the rest of the world always had it wrong, and with this conviction she drank with a self-righteousness that was hard to deny.

My mother did not make my job as protector and denier of all wrongdoing easy. She had yearly breakdowns, which wore me down. One was reliably around Christmas, her favorite holiday. She spent the weeks leading up to it planning meals, scheduling family visits, and decorating every corner of the home with garland, reindeer, and lights. Yet she was really just setting a stage for her unraveling. Often she was in a bathrobe, stumbling down the stairs, a drunken puddle of misery and self-doubt, threatening me, my brother, and my father that this day would be her last. Other times she would be off-stage, and we’d be begging her to come home from whatever motel by the sea she had chosen to drown her sorrows in. Each time we’d cry and plead and tell her how much we loved her until she came home, usually with a police escort. Enough days would pass and she would pretend like nothing happened.

However, that Christmas was different. I was different. I had given birth to my son, who was then two, and I was six months pregnant with my second child. I was teaching full-time and was tired, stretched, but mostly happy. For Christmas, I treated my parents to orchestra seats for a Broadway play. They drove into the city for the weekend to attend. The night of the show, they came to my apartment before the curtain to kiss their grandbaby goodnight and my mother was so drunk she nearly dropped my child. I ushered them out and knew my mother would shortly be passed out in the $350 seat I’d worked a week to afford, and in that moment I hated her.

The next morning, I sat stewing at my desk and decided to write my mother a message with rules for that night’s dinner plan. Please come, but come sober or not at all. I sent it at 8:00 AM in an attempt to catch her before annihilation. It was not early enough. By the time my father had come out of the shower, my mother was gone and he was left wringing his hands alone in their hotel room. Within the hour, my mother sent me back a response: I can not be the person you want me to be, and I am sick of trying. I am done now and it’s your fault.

My father was in a state over this latest threat of suicide, despite the many times we’d been there before, and by noon, he decided to call the NYPD. I begrudgingly asked the school secretary to cover my class, something I had never done before, and left to meet my father at the Sixth Precinct. We were in the back of a cruiser looking for my mother an hour after explaining our situation to the uniformed woman at the front desk. My father shifted, trying to get comfortable on the torn pleather seats. I fidgeted with the bulging foam between the tears as he continued.

“Why did you have to say that to her? You know how fragile she is.”

I was silent and my daughter kicked as his blame washed over me and my unborn child. I contemplated the anger in his voice, something that was rarely there and never directed at me. I didn’t answer, not right away. My thoughts were muddled and I tried hard to sort them out. I found myself weighing the possible answers. My mother was wrong. My mother was sick. My mother was a tyrant. If we did not play life by her rules, she punished us. Why should we ignore it? Why should we participate in it? Why should we be willingly sick along with her?

I thought back to before I was pregnant for the second time. It was Easter and my husband and I, together with our son, were spending the night at my parents’ home so they could watch him collect hidden Easter eggs in the yard while my mother excused herself to secretly pour gin into her coffee. The only way I knew how to weather my mother was to join her, and by noon I too was knocking back whatever she was pouring. Now that she had a willing partner, she was free to drink openly. By 8:00 PM that evening, my son was still awake and I knew that we should all be asleep, but when I made a move to bring my child and myself to bed, my mother hissed, “Don’t you dare leave me.” I was taken aback, but knew better than to disrupt the delicate house of cards she had built and all our many roles within it, and so I poured myself another drink and sat back down while the baby played sleepily at our feet. I felt awful the next morning, hungover and too tired to properly care for my child, and it was my husband who pointed out the obvious.

“You always put them first, even now that you have your own family. Always.”

I came back to my present state of mind and looked at my father once more before I tapped the window and asked the police officer to pull the cruiser over to let me out.

“You’ll have to find her yourself this time, Dad.” I gently shut the door behind me. My brother called me later that night to let me know that they had finally found our mother in some cheap midtown hotel. I wondered if she had a view of Times Square, one where the lights lit up her room even when the curtains were drawn. The police had to kick down the door and drag my poor mother out into the night, where they strapped her down on a gurney and into an ambulance, sirens blaring all the way to Bellevue, to have her stomach pumped, my father by her side.

At the end of the story, my brother, just eighteen months younger and the only other person who had endured our mother throughout our childhoods, asked me the same question my father had. “Was it worth it?” He asked. “That was pretty selfish. Look at this mess you made.”

-Heather Campbell

Heather Campbell is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been published in The Coachella Review and she is delighted to be included here in Herstry. You can send her a note at hacwrites@gmail.com if you’d like to be in touch.