Unsettled

Dad taught me to be codependent.

Mom taught me that love oscillates wildly, never stable, altogether unsettled and unsettling, full of hugs and cheek-kisses and spoken, doting affections, until another storm of curse words and the lightning-striking “less thans” roll in and out and in again, striking my father, striking him less than, striking us kids, striking us less than, four-letter thunders splitting off the ceiling of our house, off our many faces we make up there in the ceiling stucco, lying here, looking up at the stucco, staring, wondering when she’ll stop. When will Best Mommy in the Whole Wide World come back?

Five minutes, ten minutes, an hour probably. Any minute now.

The only thing that’s predictable.

And then sometimes these storms in her bring the tornadoes of her checking. Checking, checking, always checking. Abandoned babies in the back seats of parked cars, in open dumpsters, in neighbor’s left-open garage doors. Oh please, guy up the street, close your damn garage door, don’t leave it open again, not at night, or she’ll get Dad out of bed again. Midnight. Drag him if she has to. Always at midnight. Dad’s got to drive her, drive her around to go check. Checking. Checking. She’s just gotta check. She saw something again. Again, all over again. She just needs to check, she just needs to check, that’s all. Can’t you guys understand? What if she really did see something? What if it really WAS a baby? Wouldn’t you want to rescue it? What if God gave her these powers, just for this reason? And these brothers of mine, all my younger brothers that aren’t really my brothers anymore—they’re really just replicas left behind by aliens over and over and over again until they’re less than, too, less than, like me, because I saw it all, I saw it when she was normal, I think, I don’t know, I’m still unsettled about it. Always will be, I suppose.