Bend, Don’t Break

 “You can spend your whole life trying to bend something your way, but in the end it may be better to break it.” That was the last thing my mother said to me the night she left us. Ok, maybe those weren’t the very last words, but they may as well have been. I guess she said all the usual things that night. That she loved us. That none of this was our fault. That she wished things were different. Frankie and I were confused and groggy with sleep, but when we heard the screech of the screen door, we chased her out into the night. A late autumn storm raged. We couldn’t see much through the rain, but the lightning flashed bright over the water. White caps reared up over the surface like it was an ocean and not just the river that wound sleepily through our town. The thunder swallowed up our calls like it knew they would never reach her anyway. We ran right to the water’s edge, but still we couldn’t see her. I snatched up Frankie’s arm as he started to wade in. He was certain he’d seen the yellow of her blonde hair somewhere down the current. I knew, though. Knew that whatever he saw, it wasn’t her. Knew that we could stay on that river bank all night and we’d never find her. Not if she didn’t want to be found.

Later, after they pulled her from the river and laid her in the ground, I realized that she wasn’t wrong when she said sometimes things need to break. Life was different after she was gone. We stopped needing to explain unexplainable bruises at school. We started eating dinner together as a family. My father took Frankie fishing in the summer and I perched on the hill above the water, reading and getting sunburned. One hot night, after we’d eaten the trout Dad and Frankie caught, my father poured all the liquor left in the house down the kitchen drain. It burbled and puddled before exiting our slow draining pipes. I watched the brown liquid swirl against the stainless steel sink and thought of the river when the water is low and looks shiny and clear as glass. When you can see the silver glint of fish, and the mud in the riverbed is silky and soft and begging you to take a step in. And then you do and the mud clouds the water and it ripples out from your ankles and you can no longer see the bottom. I thought about the river a lot in those days.

Ok, ok. Honesty time? Almost none of that story is true. Look, I know we’re here to talk about our pain and our grief and whatever else makes us so angry, but the truth is just so mundane. My mother did leave us, but there was no river, no burial, no closure. She just left and didn’t come back. That thing about bending and breaking? I read it in an old Cosmopolitan at the doctor’s office. And there were no bruises. It’s important you know that. It’s not really fair to my dad. It does give her a reason to go, though. A good one. Better than the truth. That we simply weren’t enough. So, yeah, I embellished what happened. I bent the story a little out of shape. But it’s my story now. I’ll do with it as I please. And isn’t that all a part of the process anyway?

You want the truth?  I remember almost nothing about that night. Maybe there was a storm. Maybe there wasn’t. Did the screen door really screech when she left? I don’t remember. What I do remember is her hand on my forehead, her face close to mine, and the taste of salt as she pulled away. Then I rolled over and went back to sleep, never doubting for a minute that she’d be there when I woke up.

Alexandria Faulkenbury holds an M.A. in literature from East Carolina University. Her work has been featured in Front Porch Review and The Bookends Review. She lives in central New York with her family and can most frequently be found writing at the kitchen table while the baby naps. She is currently revising her first novel.