Homewrecker

11 ~ 𝓰𝓸

Somehow, without my noticing, Miles had snuck out of the lake house and into the backyard with me.

I heard his tags jingling together from behind me, felt the weight of his paws trotting on the wooden boards of the dock I dangled my legs off of and into the black waters, reaching out until the undulating surface met the darkened sky, smeared together like paint on a canvas until I couldn't tell where the lake ended and the night sky began.

The dock shifted against his movements as a wet nose brushed against my bare arm and then sniffed my hand resting on my thigh. I looked away from the water for a moment to glance at his beige fur close to my face, the muscles above his eyes looking like concerned eyebrows again, and after a soft snort, Miles slumped his body against mine, claws scratching against the wood underneath him.

He stared out at the water too, sniffing the early night air. I reached up and numbly scratched my fingers behind his ears, wondering if all this meant that he was actually my dog now.

I had been out there for a few minutes, or maybe longer, I didn't really know. Words were jumbled in my brain, half-sentences started and were abandoned as my mind jumped from one thought to the next, wondering how any of this could've been real. How I could be here, feeling the warped wooden boards of a dock pinch my bare legs as lake water brushed against my feet behind the house of a family that had never been mine, and an emptiness closing in on me, accompanied by the realization that the emptiness would stay there forever.

Unlike my mother, who was gone forever.

My face crumpled again as I thought of it, of her, chin trembling and tears slick against my already wet cheeks as they slid out from the corners of my closing eyes. Whenever I breathed in, I sniffled and whenever I swallowed, I heard the thick sound of me choking around the lump in my throat.

My heart sped up with every thought that entered my mind—that I saw her for the last time without even realizing it, walking away from her because I expected her to be still there when I came back. That she died while we were still kind of fighting over the night, she took me to the ATM at a drugstore, before I could've really forgiven her for it even though I knew she was trying.

She died never getting credit for trying. She died knowing exactly how disappointed I had been in her, in her flakiness or in her addictions, remembering the volleyball games she missed or the unemployment payments she spent on the wrong things instead of what she did right. She stayed. She tried. She cared about me.

She was always there, even if I didn't want her to because I wanted her to be at work like all of my friends' moms or something, and she was saving her first paycheck from her new job at Good Greens to buy flowers for my garden. She bought me cupcakes on every one of my birthdays, even if she had to split the cost on her EBT card and her credit card, and she let me have the bedroom in the trailer, bought a lamp for the corner at a garage sale with torn stickers still on the shade. She was my mom.

I never had many people in my world, but my mom was the only one who was always there, right from the beginning.

And now, somehow, I had to learn how to spend the rest of my life without her, on my own. Never hugging her again, never seeing her again, never speaking to her again. There were so many nevers about my mom that I never expected to come across at seventeen. Everything about her was gone, slipped through my fingers before I even realized I needed to hold on, and now there was nothing left but me, not even a home to run back to.

The tornado literally tore my whole life away from me, flinging it away like the debris it carried miles away, like my mother to a creak for days until someone noticed her in the water.