Flying

Inspired by true events in Santa Cruz, California

The pill was so small she couldn’t feel it in her hand, could barely feel it in her mouth as she looked out the window above her bed. If she had struck the sky that day, she was sure it would ring, so clear was it, so blue was it.

She hadn’t heard from Staz in a week.

This happened sometimes when Staz was deployed, her life so elegantly regimented at war, so consumed by the unpredictable, the exotic, the camaraderie of her command, that she didn’t have time to email. Sofie understood why. To write in a letter that Dominic wet the bed last night, that his crying woke Poppy, and Sofie spent the hours after pretending at sleep until her alarm went off at dawn, minimized it somehow, lessened its gravity. Just as Staz writing, “Edwards died by IED Saturday,” made the news feel untouched and glossed over, information as emotionless as a seal carcass on the sand, absent even a smell to make her shiver. So she kept this piece of her life, like everything else she held, inside and at bay.

After showering off the sweat and stench of sleep, Sofie rubbed her face with a washcloth and stared into the bathroom mirror, the glass dripping condensation like tears. Her dark hair was greasy and unwashed, one of her eyes a deep carmine, pus leaking from her tear duct. Leaning toward herself, she lifted her droopy eyelid, and inspected the red sclera around her pale blue iris. Pink eye, she decided, and squirted a few drops of antibiotics beneath the lid. Blinking through the fog that came next, she scrolled through her email.

A note from Staz.

Deployment extended. Three more months. Maybe four. Will update when I know more.

Sofie read it again, wanted to swear but didn’t, just let the damp towel fall off her shoulders and stared at the dirty emerald tile on the vanity. She had been waiting, all this time waiting for October 23rd, the day Staz would fly back, and now she wouldn’t be home until after the new year. That meant Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Poppy’s fourth birthday, all of it she had to navigate alone. The reality shivered through her, sunk deep into her rib cage, and then exploded, draping itself like a pall over their messy house, where meals had still to be cooked, bedtimes enforced, emotions honored, resentment tended like a fire, not stoked but claimed, named, cared for.

“What do you want me to do?” Staz might have asked if she were beside her. “Orders are orders.”

 Staz was at war, and Sofie was only at motherhood.

“Where’s your booboo?” Dominic found Sofie sitting on her bed, his mop of brown hair almost covering his walnut brown eyes. Climbing up beside her, he placed his small hand on her knee, his six-year-old voice high and tender. “I’ll kiss it for you.”

“I’m okay.” She wrapped her arms around his thin shoulders and held him for a moment, waiting for his embrace. Hugs from her children were the only physical affection Sofie received anymore, and they were pallid, emotionless drops in the gaping well of her.

As he kicked the duvet beside her, watching the dust exhale as the down compressed, he did not hug her back, so she released him.

“Is it school off?” he asked.

Adding up the days of the week, she paused for a moment before saying, “No. Tomorrow.”

“Ew, Mom. What’s that?” He pointed at the bedside table, piled with a dusty stack of books, vitamin bottles, abandoned pens and frayed chargers.

“A spider,” She peered at the tabletop. “I think it’s dead.”

Curling perfectly in the gray light, its eight legs nearly touched at its navel in precise geometry. Dominic leaned in, exhaled a quick pointed breath, and the spider flew into the air.

It didn’t fall like a body, but caught the air like a parachute, not twisting or turning but resisting, pushing against the atmosphere as if sinking slowly through mud, as if instead of matter it was spirit, unaffected by the living realm and all its gravity.

Their house was small, but when she and Staz lived in a one-bedroom loft near Jersey City, she would have called it big. Three bedrooms, a galley kitchen with a dark gray countertop, and dirty white cabinetry with mysterious brown drips down the doors.

Here, stuff careened in on them, bookcases full of unused frames, unframed photographs, and unread novels towered over her bed, toys exploded over the boxes and bins in the living room, clothes piled on the couch waiting to be folded, Legos spilled over the rug. It wasn’t always like this. The drawers, she thought, got smaller. Everything in the house grew smaller, as the children got stronger, their messes bigger.

As Sofie pulled a carafe of cold coffee out of the coffee maker, her heart raced. She couldn’t do it, the lunches, the dog food, the day on her list, day after day the same meaningless tasks done and redone. Every day, what should have been easy was so infinitely hard. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t. Not until January.

They were already running late.

She couldn’t do it anymore.

It was on the Golden Gate Bridge that Sofie’s mind first betrayed her. She was newly pregnant with Dominic, and Sofie and Staz took a weekend trip north to San Francisco. The towering redwoods that crawled up the mountains from the coast were exchanged for buildings that split the sky, both cathedrals of a sort, magnificent and brave.

She clung to Staz’s hand as they made their way along the paved walkway at the edge of the iconic bridge, cars thundering by them on one side, the depths of the bay, its glittering green water, on the other. It wasn’t the height of the bridge that scared Sofie, nor the cacophony of tires on pavement, nor the way the wind ripped through them relentlessly on that rare clear day, but how tempted she was to throw herself over that chipped red railing and fly down to the cushion of blue.

Holding her belly, its form rounding and just starting to show, she looked over the edge. It seemed so small a barrier, as thin as the line on the horizon, as breakable as skin. Out there, the pressure of the entire universe met with the weight of the entire ocean, and when they collided a line was made, a perfect horizon in contrasting blues. Which, she wondered, was heavier? Dark or light? Water or air? Each pressing against, and holding the other at bay, light in all its hopefulness, all its endlessness, and the absence of it, a dark gaping mouth sucking everything in, even her.

Clutching Staz’s hand, she turned away from the edge, her jaw tight, her mouth dry, and said, “I need to lay down now.”

Staz, as she always did when they were side by side, wrapped her arm around Sofie’s waist, and obliged.

Sofie bent to pour kibbles into Frida’s bowl, the clink clink clink of the brown pellets pounding through her, making little dents in her chest. She tangled her hand in Frida’s butterscotch coat and paused, massaging the soft curls back and forth as her heart sped. Then she stood.

She sliced apple after apple until the dull blade slipped against the brown of her finger and carved her skin.

“Mom.”

As blood pooled on the cutting board, as Frida licked the clean dishes in the dishwasher, as she curled her chin into her chest, dying, drowning, she clutched a dish rag around her wound and stained the white cloth carmine.

“Mom!”

When Poppy stomped into the kitchen, her blonde hair matted and wild, her feet bare and small on the wide tile floor, too hard, too cold, too sticky for toes so bare, she pushed her sweaty curls from her pillow-creased forehead and peered at Sofie from beneath a furrowed brow.

“I was calling for you,” she whined. “When’s dinner going to be ready?”

“It’s breakfast, hon,” she said, and Poppy’s face broke open into a wide wail, big wet tears leaving shiny slug trails on the pink of her cheeks.

“It’s dinner!” Poppy’s whole body shook with the words.

Kneeling down, Sofie hugged her, held her, her bloody finger held up and away, throbbing. She looked down at Poppy’s bony back, inflating and deflating in punctuated bursts, like a balloon she wanted to pop. She pressed her palm against Poppy’s small back, felt her lungs vibrating with each word as Poppy wailed, “Mom. It’s. Dinner!”

As Sofie stared at the linoleum floor, she clenched all her muscles so Poppy wouldn’t feel her body convulse. She wanted to be nothing again, empty like Poppy, and she wanted Poppy to be empty too.

Staz once told her that the brain is an organ, and when an organ fails, you don’t try to treat it at home. If your mind wants to self-destruct, it’s an emergency, you need to go to the emergency room.

She was referring to one of her patients, a soldier she’d talked off a ledge, once literally, when he was suffering from the worst of his PTSD, but she was also trying to explain to Sofie something about Sofie.

“When you feel this way,” she’d said that night when Dominic was still new, as Sofie sobbed into Staz’s chest because her nipples were cracked, her body so used up, and she was terrified of what she might do to herself when Staz was next deployed. “This isn’t Normal Sofie, okay? When you want to hurt yourself or your body, something is broken, and you need to get help.”

This made sense to Sofie, who had been a trauma nurse at Providence Oaks Medical Hospital before she had Dominic, nursing broken bones, hearts, and bodies. Pressing her cheek against Staz’s tear-soaked shirt, she inhaled the smell of her, the sour milk spit up on her clothes.

“Hey, you’re okay,” Staz told her, never asked, and Sofie opened her eyes, looked in Staz’s dark brown ones and saw something she’d never seen there before.

“Yeah,” she lied, exhaling the word as her cheeks steeled. “I’m okay.”

She remembered when they used to laugh together. It seemed like they would laugh forever.

The second pill she could feel on her tongue, it stuck in her throat, and she swallowed another gulp of cold water from the glass on her bedside table. For a moment she worried she would choke, die right there in her bedroom trying to down another Zoloft. Maybe she hadn’t swallowed the first pill that morning, just backwashed it in the glass without knowing. She coughed, swallowed. What would her children do if they found her like that, dead by trying to stay alive.

“Dominic,” she asked as she set two bowls of yogurt on the table and sprinkled granola in each, “do you know what to do in an emergency?”

“No,” he said, climbing into the thrifted dining chair that she and Staz picked out back in Jersey, and that the Army had moved all that way to the west coast.

“You call 911, okay?” Sofie placed spoons on the table next to their bowls and looked for her coffee cup.

“Okay.”

“Do you know how to do that?”

“No.” He dug a spoon into his yogurt.

“Poppy, breakfast!” She turned back to Dominic, “You ask my phone, okay?”

When Poppy saw her bowl, she fell to her knees and sobbed on the cold red tile, pouring herself over the chair as if she wanted to become it. “I hate this granola!”

“Okay, Dominic?” Sofie yelled over Poppy’s wails as she knelt beside her.

“Okay,” he said, but Sofie was sure she’d never make it. He’d never call 911 in time.

While Poppy and Dominic got dressed in their rooms, Sofie bandaged up her cut in her bathroom. Once, Dominic asked her why cuts knew how to heal, and she told him that if they didn’t, then his body would just keep getting cut, keep getting hurt until his skin was one big wound that never scabbed over and never healed. Sometimes that’s how it felt to Sofie, like her life as a mother was a thousand tiny cuts that never turned brown and scabbed, only pussed, only bled, only screamed out in pain.

  “You can get used to anything,” Staz would tell her before they had kids, before her first deployment, because it was what the army trained her to believe, “anything but death.” Back then it was a romantic notion, to endure no matter what happened, but now Sofie wasn’t sure it was true.

She pressed on her eye again and peered at the leaking puss in the mirror.

Dom’s voice grew louder, Poppy’s more squeaky, Frida barked, then she heard shouting, Poppy’s “Mom!” and then “Mommy!”

That’s what they called Staz. She wanted Staz.

When Sofie found them, Dom lay on the ground, legs outstretched, as he manipulated a monster truck across the high shag of the living room carpet and Poppy stood half naked on the carpet and cried, stuck halfway into her blue corduroy dress.

She helped Poppy pull the blue jumper over her arms and zipped up the back. Near the bottom of the zipper, a hole in the corduroy opened like a mouth, fraying and blue, little threads cockeyed, exposing her peach skin behind it.

“No, Mom, I don’t want this dress.” Poppy struggled out of the arm holes, and Sofie turned her attention to Dominic. His ocean themed pajamas swam with whales, dolphins, and jellyfish, all too close to one another. She used to think the ocean was mostly empty.

“You’re not dressed, Dom.”

“I’m not going to school.”

The light from the back window opened for a moment, revealing a golden light, a glow that shifted with the shadow of the fig tree Staz planted when they first moved in.

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

As the light paled, dread filled her.

“Mom,” Poppy whined, desperate. She was lying on the floor in a state of undress, one arm out of her jumper again, crying as she tried to pull the other one free.

“Hang on a sec, Poppy.”

“Mom!”

“Then you have to go to school.”

“No!” Dominic chucked the monster truck at her, and as it connected with her brow bone she revolted in pain, grabbed his arm hard, and dragged him down the hallway.

In that moment, she didn’t care that he screamed, that he was in pain, just dropped him at the mouth of his bedroom, and as he collapsed in a heap on the floor, she stepped back, hand to her brow and revolted at his writhing body on the carpet. What had she done? And why was it so easy to do?

“I don’t love you,” he screamed between sobs, but she understood every word of his blubbering. “I wish you would go to Afghanistan.”

Afghanistan. Most days, she wished she was in Afghanistan too.

When Dom was three or so, and Sofie was pregnant again, her doctor recommended she see a therapist for her anxiety.

Pregnancy was the only time a medical team cared about her health, physical or mental, in a meaningful way. With Dom, her anxiety came upon her with the grace of undoing, until it felt as though nothing existed without that feeling of dread that filled the cavity in her chest, but with Poppy, Sofie felt certain her baby had three arms and no nose, certain she would emerge from her dead, certain something was wrong with Poppy’s organs, her genetics, that she was a psychopath, and that certainty impaled and disabled her.

Sofie arrived at her therapist’s office, her belly bulging more the second time than the first and held Dominic’s small hand tight in hers. Calm then, sweet then, he was awed by the scale of the building, the yellow backhoe he saw working outside. He tried to pull from her, to see the tractor better, for longer, but she clung to him, dragged him through the double doors as her chest tightened. There was still some part of her that wanted to hold onto the fear, felt comfort in it, but another, bigger part wanted to set the fear free, for him, for her.

Dominic was whining about the tractor, so Sofie didn’t hear the receptionist at first when she spoke.

“I’m sorry,” the woman repeated from behind the long counter as she nudged her glasses up her nose, “We don’t allow children.”

Later Sofie would describe the receptionist to Staz as scathing, but in that moment, the receptionist seemed sorry for her, so sorry she had to say this, and Sofie muttered something like an apology for her bigness, her motherhood, her inability to escape or undo it, and went back to the car, buckled Dominic in his car seat, and sat before the steering wheel and cried, tears staining the pink cotton flowers that covered her sunlit belly. She was Dominics’s mother. She was Poppy’s mother. She was ravaged and moved by them before they had faces or names, and she was never, not for a single moment since they were conceived, her own.

The door to her room was too hollow and too white as she pushed it open and looked around. There was nowhere to go. The chaos wove through the tangled clothes on the unmade bed, the boxes of needed things she did not need. The sound of her children penetrated everything, their sobbing cries like needles in her temples. What had she done? What could she have done?

Glancing at the bottle of pills, she knew she needed something. She needed something more to get her out of this. Her whole body was shaking, slipping, how did she get so mad all of a sudden? She felt out of control. Crazy. She needed to breathe for a moment. She needed to get away from the sound of Dom crying, of Poppy looking for her. She needed to be free of them.

She peered at herself in the mirrored closet door, her furrowed eyebrow red and puffy from the monster truck, her eye still pink, pus shivering at its corner.

“Mom!”

The closet door slid easily beneath her fingers. Her ragged reflection disappeared, and she slipped between her winter coat and the flimsy dry-cleaning film of Staz’s dress blues. She pressed the door closed and waited. What would it be like, she wondered, to inhale that plastic, the smooth film pressed against her mouth? Would her lungs suck like frail balloons until they gave up? She blinked in the dark, straining to focus as she shifted her weight on the pile of shoes beneath her.

Her phone lit everything in hypnotic blue light, the far away ringing filling the small space before she pressed the phone to her ear. She didn’t call Staz as a rule. Calling was for emergencies only. She counted the hours between there and Afghanistan. Eleven. It was almost seven pm. Maybe she was on break.

The phone rang and rang.

“Hey, Sof.” The grace of her. “Is everyone okay?”

Sofie’s voice burst, and sobs buckled from her. Pressing her hand hard against her lips, she tried to stifle the sound.

“Sofie.” Staz’s voice warbled, strengthening. “Are the kids okay?”

“Yeah,” she exhaled between sobs, “they’re okay. I just—need you to come home.”

“I’m sorry, Sof.” She did sound sorry. That was the worst part. “I wish I could.”

Garbled voices mumbled low and hungry behind her.

“Sir,” Staz said to someone else, then to her, “Can I call you back?”

“No, Staz—”

The phone went silent, that vacuum seal sound that indicated absence, that whatever was said now might as well be tossed into a black hole, sucked in and crushed by gravity.

  She tried to breathe but everything was shallow and incomplete. That was it. All she had was Staz, and she didn’t even have that.

“Mom!” Poppy was right on the other side of the door. “Mom!” She was out of time.

The vibrations of Poppy’s pounding filled her, upended her. Sofie was wobbly, she was rage, she was unhinged. Her fists filled with so much pressure she thought they might rupture.

The door slid open.

“What is it?” Sofie’s voice was raw, unrecognizable.

“What are you doing?”

Poppy hiccupped her breath in, coughed it out. Her eyes were big round peaches. The cheap sequined Cinderella dress that Staz bought her for Halloween, that year after Sofie said, “No more princess stuff,” fell off her shoulders beneath her yogurt stained cheeks. Who cared for this child? She was so untended.

“What is it?” Sofie said softer, the words melding together into a single offering, and opened her arms wide so Poppy could lean into her, and she did as she cried harder.

Sofie held her right there on the filthy closet floor, watching tufts of tan dog hair shiver on the beige carpet, and whispered, “It’s okay, Poppy. Everything’s okay.”

“Is Mommy in here?” she blubbered, lifting her head a little to look around.

Sofie shook her head, and Poppy’s eyes welled up again as she pressed her small face into Sofie’s chest, her hair damp with tears. “I want Mommy.”

Severed, Sofie bit her lip, curled around Poppy’s small body, her chin tucked against the scratchy tulle shoulders of her dress.

“Me too,” Sofie said, “but I’m all you’ve got.”

“When’s she coming home?”

“Soon,” she answered, the impulse to squeeze Poppy forever tightened in her. “Soon.”

Anyone can go to war for one day, Staz told her once. It’s the foreverness that gets you. The relentlessness. You can’t even escape in your dreams.

As they shuffled through the dewy morning to the car, jackets and water bottles hanging from their bodies like flags in a cortege, Sofie was barely aware of Frida pawing the door behind them, of Poppy still wearing her princess dress and sniffing softly, of Dom merely carrying his shoes, his socked feet soaking in the scattered puddles. Sofie looked up, her mind shuttered behind her eyes, saw their neighbor but didn’t wave, her fingers leadened, her eyelids like drowning things.

The day was as crisp and clear as hospital linens, almost sterile the way it came upon them. She used to feel relief in that moment, the kids in the car, the Prius pulling away, the gravitational pull of school each morning swirled toward, but that day she only felt the pall of dread, the inescapable truth that the chaos and prison of motherhood would go on and on as long as she lived.

“I want to listen to the Peppa Pig song.” Dominic kicked her seat hard. “Mom.”

“No! We Will Rock You,” Poppy cried her voice edging into fierceness.

Their voices inking into her brain, her eyes blurring as her chest filled with panic, she pulled onto the main road. At least they were trapped in their car seats. At least they couldn’t get to her.

They sped down the highway like that, some ball of perpetual motion, chaos contained by plastic walls, cheap fabric seats, sand and Cheerios crushed into the gray floor mats.

Poppy was crying, wailing like someone was torturing her.

“Rock you!”

Dominic yelled, “Mom Mom Mom! Poppy’s crying! Mom!” jamming his feet against the back of her seat.

Dominic’s exit was first, a funnel to the business district in town, and the line of cars in front of her slowed, stopped, slowed, stopped, and she slammed the brakes.

The car stopped, everything stopped, and for a moment Dominic and Poppy quieted, shaken by the abruptness of it. The coastal redwoods towered over them like matchsticks, as her body bobbed softly forward and backward, rocking herself, her own mother, everyone’s mother. A truck rumbled by and shook the Prius. Then they were wailing again, one and then the other.

“Mom.” Dominic was pleading now sobbing. “Mom!”

Her grip tightened on the steering wheel.

Turning left, she pressed on the gas.

Whatever it was that possessed her didn’t imprison her but embraced her like a mother, didn’t force her but guided her warmly.

She has a sleeping bag, she thought, her mind unraveling, Poppy does. We all have sleeping bags. Like in a dream she didn’t understand it, but the thought comforted her.

Her body vibrated as the hybrid engine hummed forward, jostling her bones, shifting them into place. They sped past enormous oceanfront houses stifled together, all peering over the same rocky cliff that surrounded a sandy inlet, but off the road at the end of that street, expanded the great green nothingness, the waves jostling for a better view, tumbling over each other in the chaotic churn.

What was on the other side of flying she never considered, only felt the car accelerate beneath her, only felt the world quiet, her foot on the gas, her eyes wide open. She saw only an end to the noise, an end to that carnival ride that sped up and up and up.

The impact of the curb was first. The tires gave under the pressure as the Prius mounted the sidewalk. Then the full force of the guard rail hit them, a frontal blow that threw Sofie’s head into the steering wheel. A scream, her own, ricocheted off the windshield, the glass cracking to life, as she lurched back into the headrest, and the car shuddered into space.

For a moment Sofie thought they would just keep flying, right up through the cloudless sky, into the blue and past but as the airbags deployed, a chalky dust suspended in the air for a moment, and then the full force of gravity introduced the car to the waves, stopping them with the completeness of birth, the way that labor ends and life begins.

Shifted by the waves, her foot still pressing on the gas, she felt nothing, not the whir of the engine, not her heart pounding her rib cage, not the water sloshing at her toes, not the relief of urine escaping her. She felt nothing.

Glorious, impossible nothing.

“Are you okay?” A surfer pounded on the window, breathless, his arms shaking as he screamed something toward the coast. It didn’t occur to her the strangeness of it, someone floating outside her window, her kids wailing in the back. She merely felt the word okay flick into her consciousness before she rocked to sleep, her head throbbing dully, the sun on the water blinding white, the airbags deflating like popped balloons as the car bobbed forward, pulled by the weight of the engine, of her.

Okay? she thought as she slipped behind a wall of consciousness. What a silly thing to ask. Okay?

But some days they were.

---

C. L. Brenton is an MFA graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts and her work bears witness to motherhood. Her stories about women on the brink have appeared in Colorado Review, Witness Magazine, and A3 Review among others. She is fond of really nice cats, chocolate chips in just about anything, and mothering her two young sons in Carmel, California. Discover more at clbrenton.com