Opiate Kintsugi

I can see the flowerbed behind her: banana plants higher than roofbeams, elephant ears the size of car doors. A semi-tropical suburban jungle. But it's like someone has carefully cut her figure from this photographic memory, leaving a negative space the exact size and shape of my mother.My memory of my mother is talismanic. With the unshakable belief of a child, I make every object she has touched a holy thing. I kneel in front of her chest of drawers and run my grubby little kid palms over her satin underwear, lifting out a complicated number in red lace like a priest raising the Eucharist chalice before I bury my face in it, the lace scratchy against my sticky cheek.Her coral lipsticks sit in their black and gold tubes. The bottle of Opium holds a last splash of perfume. All the little things she used every day—in those mysterious rites performed by mothers in front of mirrors—crowd around the bathroom sink. Toothbrush, hair dryer, that terrifying eyelash curler. I stand with my toes buried in the brown carpet where she must have stood, staring hard into the mirror, watching my pupils dilate and contract.I am eight years old and mirrors feel like a dangerous sort of magic. The loud girls at my new school like to scare each other by playing Bloody Mary in the bathroom mirror. I am convinced that if I played the game, it wouldn't be Bloody Mary but my mother's ghostly face staring out at me.I sleep on her side of the king-sized waterbed for years, well into puberty, waking every night squashed against my father's snoring back. In science class, the teacher takes a giant comforter and places the solar system upon it. She shows how the larger planets sink deeper into the blanket, how a marble rolled past Jupiter will fall right into its gravitational pull. I orbit my father like the moon does the Earth, even in my sleep. I claw my way back up and out to the edge of the waterbed, trying to fit my body into the place where she slept. I am already much bigger than her. There's no indentation to show she was here, no shape to match myself to. No proof she ever lay here at all. Our old spaniel hears me stirring and wiggles her stump tail. I climb into her tiny wicker bed and curl around her like a spoon. This shape fits, and I fall back to sleep.In my dreams I dig up my mother's bones and gnaw on them like a dog. Isn't this what we do with the dead, with our memories of them? We suck the marrow dry, spend the rest of our lives wringing love from these tattered scraps like blood from a stone.Look, I don't want to write a Dead Mom Essay. What I want to write about is memory, and how slippery it is. How I'm starting to suspect that most people are making it up. How everyone in my family has this ability for highly detailed recollection and all I'm left with is spiderwebs, Swiss cheese. My sister remembers too much to be fully believed. Her narratives are complete, like she's told them to herself over and over, tumbled the words until they are worn smooth and glossy. Her memories are shaped like stories, by which I mean they might be partially fiction. My Dad remembers everything, but he must be asked very specific questions to access that vault. My father's memory of my mother lies behind a combination lock. I think he has the right to keep that silence, and I don't want to hurt him by bringing it up. I turn to my aunt.During the eighties and nineties, my uncle became one of those Video Camera Dads. My aunt finds a clip from some Christmas past and sends it to me, apologizing for the fact that it has no sound.I desperately crave sound. I want to hear my mother's voice so badly my chest aches. How can you crave something of which you cannot prove the existence?I thank my aunt and open the video. The person on my phone's screen is a stranger: a painfully thin, fish-belly-pale woman in a red holiday turtleneck with a stunningly unflattering Princess Di pixie cut. She walks into the TV room at my grandparents’ house, a room I vividly remember in specific detail. I remember the painting on the wall, the smell of that couch, the green leather of my grandfather's recliner. Everything but her. She's holding a fistful of crayons. She laughs at a joke, makes what looks like a snappy comeback, then leaves. I rewind, watch her walk into the room, pause, laugh, leave, over and over and over.Nothing. Not a glimmer of recognition.I swear I've never seen that woman before in my life. My chest feels like it's caving in, my surface buckling and giving way to a vast, empty space I didn't even know was there.I don't know what my mother's voice sounded like, and strangely enough, I can't even try to imagine it. When asked to imagine her voice, my mind goes completely blank, and my ears begin to ring as if trying to fill the void with something.But all I have is nothing.It happened again this year. I know it falls somewhere in August, but I can never remember the anniversary of my mother's death. It happens like this: I am happy. I am having a good day. I am anxious or slightly blue. I am having a something's-off-but-I-can't-quite-put-my-finger-on-it day. I'm having a terrible day. I am having a killer hangover from one of those binges that sweep me away like a rip tide. I am consumed with dread and the conviction that I'm just not very good at this whole living thing. Then comes the reminder, usually from my sister. A post on Facebook. A text. “I miss her every day!” Oh.At this point, reality slides a little sideways. My body suddenly feels too big for me, the ground astonishingly far away. It's like something from Alice in Wonderland, or Gulliver's Travels. I feel so stretched and hollow that if you thumped me with your finger, I'm sure I would toll like a bell.What is this? It feels more like confirmation bias than memory. More bad acid trip than trauma. I wasn't there when my mother died. I wasn't there when they airlifted her to Dallas—or maybe it was Houston—for a Hail Mary pass at a liver transplant. I wasn't there when it was too late. The moment my mother drew her last breath I was probably swinging by myself at recess, pumping my legs toward the sky, eight years old and oblivious.If I didn't get the reminder, would it be just another day? I repeat the date to myself, roll it like a rosary bead between my fingers. Next time, I'll remember. Next time, I'll see it coming.Every revelation, every door cracked open releases something I could never have seen coming. My sister and I are in our pajamas. We are drinking Riesling in Germany while visiting my nephew during his study abroad. We're talking, of course, about Mom. My sister hasn't had enough wine to be slurring like this, and I realize her sleeping pills must be starting to kick in. She tells me her version of how our mother died and then nods off, snoring gently. I stare at her, waiting for the rest of the story, waiting for a different ending, waiting for some kind of explanation to soften what I just heard. I watch her breathe for a long time, then I stare out the window into the foreign night.I fall asleep watching videos on my phone about Japanese ceramic techniques. In Japan, they mend their broken pottery with gold.In my dream, I am a little girl watching her mama shove fistful after fistful of chalky white pills into her mouth. She gags slightly but chews with determination. The muscles in her jaw pop, her jaw that got broken and had to be wired shut for weeks, as she crushes the pills between her gold-crowned molars, mixing them with her saliva to form a paste. The little girl is silent. She looks down to see that her chest has been opened like a cabinet. Her mama spits the paste out into her palm and reaches into the girl's chest. With her fingers she smooths it into the cracks that have started to spread in her daughter's heart.I never ask my sister about the story she told me that night, the one that sounds lifted from the pages of a tabloid magazine. The one full of drugs and sex and scandal. I carry it like a grenade.If my family is a solar system, then I am Pluto, flung out at the end of the sun's gravitational tether. Or maybe that's my sister, who moved to the edge of the continent, as far away from home as she could. Maybe my metaphors are all mixed up and there is no solar system, just a bunch of rocks hurtling through space and a family broken apart by grief. But my mother's name means moon and so she pulls at the water inside me, dragging what's left of her own ocean back to herself, and I keep trying to remember. Driven by a personal belief system cobbled together from Sunday school and books of mythology, I sat at the crest of our driveway every full moon night of my adolescence and talked to it as if it were my mother.I still do.I am 30 before I ask my father for his version of how my mother died. I am afraid of the asking and of the answer. He begins with saying that he doesn't think my mother meant to die. He follows with saying that she begged him to let her, feebly protesting as he lifted her small, fading body out of the bed. I'm still marveling at how calmly he tells me this, at how light he seems the next morning. Like I've done him a favor by finally asking for the secret he's been carrying my whole life.One visit home, my stepmom gives me my mother's beat-up old flour sifter. “These things are important,” she says after I tell her I have no use for it. I think she means that my mother's things have sentimental value but she means the sifter itself.“If you sift a cup of flour you end up with a cup and a half, you know.”I did not know. Every time I come home there's another object she's found that belonged to my mother and I take it because it must be hard to marry a man whose house is a widower's reliquary. I place the sifter in the cupboard next to my mother's crockpot and her food processor and wish I could remember what my mother fed me. I remember my grandmother, great-grandmother, babysitter, aunt, all of them, feeding me. She must have too, at some point. These things are proof that she did, and my father and my sister claim she was the worst and best cook, respectively. There's a metaphor here, something about sifting through memories, but it's a cheap one and my heart's not really in it. I have nothing to sift through.At some point in high school, my dad gives me my mom's T-shirt collection, and I wear them until they are thin as tissue. One goes missing and I never find it again. I give one to a boyfriend and immediately regret it, but I can't get up the courage to ask for it back. The remaining two are DIY print jobs from the seventies. One is mustard yellow and reads INCORRIGIBLE in slightly askew letters. The other is a raglan printed with the trademark of Rorer Pharmaceuticals—the manufacturer of Quaaludes. I keep them packed carefully away now, these scraps, these holy relics of my mother. St. Cynthia Ann, Our Lady of Lortab, dead of an overdose at thirty-three.When my mother died, I was told that she took too many Tylenol. An innocent mistake, a tragic oops. A story censored for a quiet child already intent on fading into the shadows. I don't remember when the pieces of that story started to look like they didn't quite fit, but I do remember choosing to ignore the growing sense of unease I felt around it. In learning that my mother was yet another victim of the opioid epidemic, I learned something else.In my twenties, I fell in love with a heroin addict with hepatitis C. My mother also had it. The fact that his liver disease came from needles and hers came from a bone marrow transplant makes little difference, at least to me. The fact that his drug use labeled him a junkie and my mother's made her, to use my sister's words, an accidental addict makes little difference to me either. What I see shines like powdered gold between our broken places. When I snorted heroin for the first time and immediately vomited, I tried again. I am my mother's daughter and when I am chasing oblivion I am nothing if not dogged. And when that second, that third time I felt like my body had been dipped in honey and set afloat—like a fly in amber, suspended and golden forever—I understood. When I see my impossibly young self lying there with her beautiful dying lover, I see a golden thread running from my mother's heart through his to mine. A shining, fragile hope for a way out of the pain we carry.Here is one more crystalline memory: my mother lying on my father's side of the bed, sick. A tiny wicker wastebasket on the floor, its plastic grocery sack liner full of tissues and vomit. A rough washcloth, damp and cool, in my chubby fist. Maybe I am handing it to her or maybe I am a good little nurse and place it on her burning forehead myself while she smiles wanly up at me and my serious little face. Only there is no forehead under the washcloth, no wan smile, no mother in the bed. There is only me, bending over empty space and trying not to fall.