Delores woke to a wheezing sound, floating up from the heating vent, a sound similar to what she heard when her daughter still lived in the bedroom below and thought no one could hear her cry. Now away at college, Tillie was probably laughing with friends, watching a movie, or whatever kids did overnight with their new campus freedoms.
She got up to check on the dog, Lonesome. He slept all day and night in Tillie’s empty room. She turned on the light and Lonesome raised his head, staring blankly with his cloudy eyes and gray muzzle. Beyond him the turquoise wall had a hole. Chunks of drywall and chalky insulation hung around the opening, like peeling skin on chapped lips. Small black eyes peered from the hole. Opossum, Delores wondered. Or racoon?
“Lonesome, what’s that?” she said, hoping to alarm the dog. Maybe he’d frighten the animal away. He put his head back down and sighed.
She threw a slipper toward the hole and the animal disappeared. What now? She pulled her silver hair behind her ears and sat on the mattress next to Lonesome. She looked around. Nothing had been touched. The top of the dresser was still stacked with sweaters to be picked up at Thanksgiving break. Books were piled at the head of the bed. She thought about the night she and her ex-husband had to clear the room of everything that could puncture skin. Sharps, the therapist called these things: scissors, pins, earrings. It didn’t occur to them that pencil erasers, when dragged along flesh with enough repetition, could also cause injury. The other mothers in the neighborhood stopped making eye contact then, as if what Tillie was experiencing was contagious. She found solace in texts with friends from her old job. They rarely touched on parenting.
She stepped closer to the hole. It smelled like graham crackers and wet fur. She couldn’t see inside, but heard scraping and huffing.
Five years ago she moved into this apartment, with her ex and Tillie, carrying boxes full of resentment. Her husband took a job here, despite her pleas to stay in the city she loved, in the job she loved. His new job included a travel allowance. He took this expense account on the road twice a month. She hunted for work and got trapped behind a wall of grief. Its dust poisoned the air, turning everyone feral.
She tied her bathrobe sash into a lasso and swung it into the hole. The creature bared its fangs and clawed the sash. One of its legs slipped through the lasso. She managed to tug more of the sash across its body. It hissed and scratched the inside of the wall. Afraid of what would happen once it climbed out, she secured her end of the sash to a dresser leg and backed out of the room. Lonesome climbed off the bed when the animal began to shriek. She closed the door.
They both went to her bed and pretended to sleep. In the morning she called off from her job at a shoe store. After a cup of coffee she peeked in Tillie’s room. The racoon was on the floor chewing a copy of Infinite Jest. The black around its eyes looked like tear stains. She picked up Tillie’s basket hamper and trapped it. She closed the lid and secured it with a belt. Dizzy from caffeine and adrenaline, she thought about calling her ex for advice but knew it would accelerate her heart rate even more. She opted for a hot shower.
Once calm, she carried the hamper to her car. On the way to the vet she passed the school where Tillie was suspended for writing graffiti in the bathroom after a classmate told her to kill herself. Her breath quickened as she remembered siding with the principal. She passed the intersection where Tillie screamed and called Delores a cunt, for the sin of taking her to a day therapy program. That’s when it occurred to Delores that if anyone were expert in oppositional defiance, it would be the day therapists. So she drove beyond the vet, to the clinic.
In the lobby the racoon stared out a hole in its wicker cage, its nose vibrating toward a bowl of individually wrapped peppermints.
“I’m not sure this is the right place for training your new pet,” the intake therapist said.
“I’m not sure it’s a pet yet,” Delores said. “But I’ve been through this program. I know the language, the acronyms, the validation techniques. We’ll see what happens.”
The raccoon made a trilling whine.
“Do you still have the solitary room? For when someone’s feeling dysregulated?”
The intake therapist handed her some forms and suggested Delores fill them out at home.
After Tillie’s second hospitalization, and after her ex decided his childless assistant would be a better partner, Delores and Tillie went to visit the city they loved. In a taxi that smelled of chemical apple and fried food they stared out the windows as reflective high rises grew closer and closer. On the bridge cars slowed. Deloroes rested her head against the seat. She felt fingers in her hair, as Tillie inserted an earbud in Delores’s ear. They maintained eye contact as a man’s voice filled their ears. Delores recognized the song, called “Taxi Cab,” from a band Tillie listened to repeatedly. “Don’t be afraid,” he sang. We’re going home.” Delores grabbed Tillie’s hand. The buildings grew taller around them, confining them like a weighted blanket.
After her visit with the intake therapist, she sat in her car and scanned the forms, the horizontal rows of numbers between one and ten under each question, to catalog mood, ability to eat and sleep. So familiar. The racoon chirped.
“Don’t be afraid,” Delores said.
She drove to a pond and freed it from the hamper. It fled into a thicket of blackberries, the robe sash and bits of wall plaster trailing behind.
~
Lori Barrett lives and writes in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Salon, Citron Review, Laurel Review, Peatsmoke Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Identity Theory. She’s an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and a prison writing mentor.