Jade|
The high-pitched wailing of a tornado siren pierces the muddy sky. It's so sudden that my entire body gives a great jolt and in a panic I try to grope my way out of the darkness, a darkness I didn't even know I was in until now, and I'm calling out for Tori so I can get her in my basement where she'll be safe but she's not answering me and I can't see anything and I'm yelling and yelling and there's a tornado and I need her here now and -
My hand slaps against something curved. The tornado siren halts. Relief floods through me like cold water and I sink again, my earlier concerns about Tori's safety wiped away. The tornado siren stopped, so she must be safe, and I'm safe, and everything's fine, and I don't have to panic anymore.
I'm almost completely under when someone touches me. I think it's Tori. I say her name and earn a slight shake in response.
"Wake up. Hey, wake up. You're going to be late."
It isn't the words that wake me up. It's the voice. Because it's most definitely not Tori's.
I sit up so fast the room spins. Twirling across the walls is my mother's face. I blink once, hard, and she snaps back into focus. If I hadn't heard her voice just moments before, it would have taken some convincing to get me to believe that it's actually her. She has no make-up on and her hair is mussed from sleep. Glasses - since when did she start wearing glasses? - are windows to her tired eyes. She's clutching a coral colored robe around her.
"Mom?" I know how I must be looking at her - like a stranger, because this isn't the same woman I've lived with for the past seventeen years.
She offers a light smile and nods toward my bedside table. I follow her glance and see that it's quarter after seven. I slept through my alarm.
"Shit," I say, flinging back the covers. Mom steps back far enough to let me pass into the bathroom. I lock the door and wait with my ear against it until I hear her climb the stairs. Am I in the fucking twilight zone? Is this the right house? I glance around my queer sense of bathroom decoration and decide that I'm definitely in the right place. Maybe a drunken, strikingly similar woman to my mother stumbled into my house during the night?
I run through the various possibilities - I've been dropped in a different dimension, my mom accepted Jesus Christ as her savior, my whole life up until now was one very long and vivid dream - as I quickly shower. By the time I get out and pull on a pair of narrow black jeans and a top that plunges so far in the center I'm positive I'll get yelled at for it, I barely have enough time to put enough make-up on my face to make me not look like a dead dog. I hurry upstairs with my purse clanging against my leg, but before I can make it to the door I catch sight of the strange woman - my mother, I correct myself, hopelessly dropping my other theories with a frown. I stop. She's holding a steaming mug between her hands, expression carefully controlled. The robe is gone, but she's in loose-fitting pajamas, something I haven't seen her in since the tired, warm Christmas mornings of my youth that I had done my best to forget about entirely.
Swallowing, I give her a slight nod. "Uh, thanks for waking me up, I guess." I shift my purse over my shoulder, press a forced smile at her, and start walking toward the front door again.
"Jade."
The name jars something in me so suddenly and so hard that I forget how to walk. My spine stiffens, eyes on the door, the way out, but my ears are pointed backwards, on my mother, on my mother saying my name. My eyelids flicker closed. I try to remember the last time I heard it - the day Dad moved out? Before their fighting enveloped everything else?
A part of me, a part I've long buried and suffocated and forced down, the part of me that's still a little girl who wants her mommy and daddy to love each other, gives a faint cry.
