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“Yes,” Jade says. “She doesn’t always . . .” She trails off, pausing for a deep breath before continuing. “The danger is always there. But this is the first time in a long time it was really serious like this.”
“That sounds really scary,” I say, because what else is there to say to something like that?
“When I was eleven,” she starts, emotion straining her voice. She clears her throat, pushing past it. “The guy she’d been seeing for a year left her for someone else. It was her longest relationship since my dad, who she was with for nearly three years. She found some text messages between that guy and another woman and she went off the deep end. Like, the real deep end.”
Jade pauses. A horrible sick feeling overcomes me, as if my body knows where this story is going before I do.
“She drank so much so fast. My grandma wasn’t in town, but promised she’d start driving and be there as soon as she could. I was only eleven, and it was my first time dealing with my mom without my grandma. I did what my grandma always did—I started collecting liquor bottles from around the house and pouring them down the drain in the kitchen, but I only got rid of, like, two before she found me. When she realized what I was doing, she pushed me—like, to get me away from the sink. But I fell and sprained my wrist, ’cause that’s what I landed on. Plus, Iwas still holding the fifth of vodka in one hand and I didn’t want the glass to shatter everywhere. The bottle was fine, but I wasn’t, and my mom screamed at me and then snatched the vodka out of my hand. That’s the only time she’s ever lifted a hand to me or been outright mean, and I know she still regrets it.
“Anyway, she grabbed all the bottles I’d collected to dump, took them to her room, and locked herself in. I thought that was the end of it. I thought she’d drink herself to sleep and then wake up and, like, do what she normally did—mope around, drink some more, but mostly start to get better—and that would be it. So I went to bed. I thought it was safe.”
Her voice trembles, and she shivers like she’s got a fever. I hold her tighter, trying to communicate that I’m here, she’s safe, and it’s okay, but I don’t know how effective it is, because I’m shaking too. The urge to cry sits heavy in my chest.
“I woke up the next morning to knocking on the front door. I remember at the time being super annoyed by it, so I went looking for my mom to figure out why she wasn’t answering the door. I don’t know if you’ve ever opened the front door to a police officer, but let me tell you, it’s not an experience I want to repeat. I thought my mom was dead. I really thought, ‘This guy is here to tell me my mom is dead and it’s my fault.’ I was bawling before the officer got a word out.”
I know how the story ends. I know her mom is alive—I saw her last night. And still, I have trouble swallowing past the lump in my throat.
Jade huffs a laugh—kind of a forced, dark laugh. “She wasn’t dead, obviously, but she’d been in a pretty nasty accident. The officer was just coming to get me and take me to the hospital. My mom had asked for me, and that’s how they knew I was home alone. I had no idea she’d taken the car sometime while I was sleeping.”
“God, Jade . . .”
“I don’t beat myself up for a lot of things, and I don’t really have any regrets in my life, but I could have prevented that accident. I could have hidden the keys. My grandma always hides the keys first. I knew better.”
“You were eleven, Jade. It wasn’t your job to think about things like that,” I say and try to keep my voice steady, but tears prick the backs of my eyes.
“Anyway, it turned out she’d swerved off the road and into an electrical pole. The passenger’s side was wrapped around the pole. The cars behind her called 911 pretty quickly, and thank god no one else was hurt. The officer kept telling me it was a miracle she was alive, that I should be grateful. But I remember in that moment, riding in the back of a police car to visit my mom in the hospital, that I wished she had died, because it would have been easier to be an orphan than to be her daughter.”
Her words hang in the hair between us, suspended as if held up by invisible strings, the weight of them dragging them down to hover over us like a blanket on a laundry line.
“I know that’s a terrible thing to say,” Jade says, still whispering. Her voice is shaky.
“No, it’s okay.” I try to assure her I’m not judging her. How could I? I have no idea what it was like to grow up with an alcoholic parent. My chest aches as if my heart is literally cracking into pieces.
“But that incident—arguably one of her worst besides this one—fucked me up for years. My grandma blamed herself for a long time. I still blame myself. And both of us know the real person to blame is my mother, who refuses to admit she has a problem. It’s the incident that inspired my grandma to join Al-Anon. I went a couple times too, but I had a lot more trouble connecting with all of it than my grandma did.”
“What is Al-Anon?”
“It’s like a support group for family and friends of alcoholics.”
She says the word “alcoholics” the way I said the word “demisexual” the first few times. Like maybe she’s said it in her head a few times but saying it out loud still feels foreign.
“How long has this been going on?” I ask.
“My first memories around taking care of her start when I was five, but before that, my grandma took care of her.”
“Jesus Christ.”
A heavy horror settles over me at the reality of Jade’s childhood.
Jade has never been parented. She is the parent.
“I have no respect for my mother.”
Jade’s reaction at the tailgate when she saw those texts makes so much sense now. It activated the worry and fear she’s been programmed to feel when her mom gets out of a relationship.
No wonder her guard is always up. She’s never had a chance to take it down. She’s spent her whole life worrying about her own mother, taking care of an unpredictable alcoholic.
Like a door unlocking once the right code is entered, things fall into place in my mind. Earlier, with my dad, I thought she was projecting her issues with authority figures onto him, but she talked to my dad like he was her peer. She would talk to me the way she talked to him, and I understand now it’s because she wasn’t raised to see parental figures with an air of authority or to speak any differently to them than she might her friends.
