The Love You Want

6.

It was a long wait to hear Hanuel again. My mother insisted I go home for the weekend, so I did. Life almost felt normal for a few days. It was easy enough for it to feel like it was just another weekend that I went to sleep in my childhood bedroom and cook for my parents and fight with my brother. I'd done that plenty of times when Hanuel was alive. I told myself that I was simply waiting for the weekend to pass, and I would soon be seeing him and complaining about everything that went wrong, and checking to see if he had actually cleaned the showers like I asked him to before I left. ("All you have to do is take the soap rack out and put some cleaning spray on the walls! Why is that so difficult?"

"If it's so easy, why don't you do it?"

"Why don't you wash your own laundry, that's easy too."

"That's blackmail."

"It's not blackmail if it's accurate.")

I brought one of Hanuel's blankets and two of his shirts with me, ignoring the fact that they now smelled more like my laundry sanitizer than they did Hanuel.

But he wasn't there at my parents' house, and all of the childhood memories contained at home couldn't replace how much I missed him, or take away the fact that none of the people there cared about cleaning the surfaces they touched, or noted how long food had been sitting out. My skin itched and I put layer upon layer of nail polish on to stop picking at them, then picked at the nail polish.

On Saturday, my mom and I watched a movie together in the living room. I curled up in the corner of the couch, and she sat on the carpet with the cat in her lap. I'd watched the movie so many times before I could watch it with my eyes closed, which I did, and I felt loose and sleepy.

When the movie ended and the credits rolled by with an old song, I didn't open my eyes to turn off the television, and my mother didn't turn off the movie.

When my mother spoke, it was quiet and startled me just a little.

"I never know how to help you," she said. It was an apology.

I opened my eyes and my sight landed on an old wooden crucifix on the wall. "I know." It was agreement. It was not forgiveness. 

She's my mom, after all. We all think our parents can fix everything.

To make the time go faster, I went through some of my old belongings that I'd never moved into the apartment. In the dresser there were shirts and dresses that were so old they would probably be back in style in a few years and a pair of jeans that had been my favorite in middle school and I never had the heart to donate them. In the closet were some dolls that I had made wedding dresses out of tissues for in elementary school and a stuffed bear with its ear torn off. I picked up the bear and grinned, remembering how I had cried when the dog chewed off the bear's ear, balling my little six-year-old fists and screaming at the sky. I hugged the bear before I got up and walked to my parents' bedroom. I stood in the doorway for a moment, admiring the room. My parents' room had always been a special place for me, like a museum you love but only go to a few times a year. I put the bear under the bed, then went back to my room and gathered up the clothes and toys and put them in the donation bin in the basement.

"What are you doing?" my brother asked as I was folding a dress. He pulled one of his headphones off and frowned.

"Nothing," I said. "Do you want some of Hanuel's old video games?"

"Does he have anything good?"

"I don't know."

"Sure, whatever," he said, then left the basement. I stayed there, looking over the old, worthless belongings, until my mother called me for a dinner I didn't eat.