Short Fiction | February 25, 2021

Pull From the Root

by Tyler Mowry

The first time Mom tried to kill herself, I drove to her house with two medium coffees in large cups. They’re cheaper that way. I was going to tell the ambulance the other one was for her. As I walked through the kitchen, I tried to memorize the smell, like ripe oranges and peanuts and wood. The Japanese maple swayed outside of the window. The alarm beeped from the den, as it did. I took a step, and the linoleum creaked, like always, and I heard something from the bedroom. Still here, it said. I opened the door and found her cold and shivering, bulging eyes, surrounded by blankets. She said that she didn’t understand. I found out later she’d used the insulin wrong. She hadn’t been unscrewing it all the way, so just a tiny bit of it had been injected from the needle. Instead of being dead, she was in shock. I gave her the second coffee and it reddened her cheeks and made the lipstick she’d tattooed on her mouth a bit more pink. I got her flowery nightdress off and I helped her put on some cotton pajamas. When I drew her to my chest, rubbing her bone thin arms, I knew I had done a good thing. 

The second time she tried to kill herself, I decided to be there. It was only a few weeks later. I went to Walmart and bought as many red tubes of helium as I could. I smiled at the clerk. My son’s birthday, I said. She and I huddled in the same bedroom as before, and I read the google instructions to her that I’d printed at home. I reminded myself to shred it later. When she placed the plastic bag over her head, I opened the first canister and it hissed. It hissed so loud I worried the neighbors would hear. I’d made sure to open the window, because I thought the breeze might be nice, but I worried about the neighbors. I told her this, and she told me not to be stupid. Such a small thing to care about, she said. Whenever she talked, the plastic bag puffed in and out, and I thought she looked ridiculous. I didn’t tell her, though. I decided to be decent. I told her, yes, that was a stupid thing to say, and she was happy. An hour later, she was still alive. She blamed me. She said I chose bad helium. I told her there was no such thing, and she said yes, there is, haven’t you heard of bad air, like in China? I didn’t reply, and she settled herself against her memory foam pillow. 

The third time, we tried the helium again. She convinced me there had been a hole in the other bag. She switched to a larger one, with a tighter seal. We hooked more tanks up and I watched from the corner. I watched the way her skinny arms lay like tree branches, as though I could snap them in half. She took the bag off after a few minutes. She looked at her ceiling, placing her palms over her eyes, and she shoved the helium tubes off of her bed. They crashed against the floorboards. I hurried over, worried they had scuffed the wood. She peered through her fingers and told me all I cared about was the resale value. That was true, but I lied. I said it could’ve caused splinters. She looked back at her ceiling, white, cold, and told me all she wanted was to die. She asked me why she couldn’t. People die all the time. Babies die all the time. What about me, she said, over and over. I knew that was true. Just the other week, this kid drowned at the pool my son worked at. When I asked him about it, he’d told me he was fine, God, and besides, he hadn’t even seen it. 

She got out of her bed and shuffled to the kitchen, and I stayed, looking at the hill in her backyard. I watched the apple tree sway, and the redwoods we’d planted together, the ones we’d paid a penny a seed for, but were now so large they threatened to fall on her house. Stupid, she’d told me, when she’d got the estimate for cutting them down. Stupid, stupid. 

I heard noises from the kitchen. She came back in with an old whiskey and a large bulge in her sweater. She took a bottle of aspirin from the pocket and began swallowing by the handful, and I watched as she gulped the whiskey and her face puckered from the burn. When she finally put the bottle down, I told her that it wouldn’t work. That’s exactly what they say not to do, I said. It doesn’t work. I showed her the article, as I had before, and she moaned, placing her head on the pillow. She told me she wanted to call my son. I said no. She said my son never picked up the phone, but she thought maybe this once, maybe, he would. She asked me again, and I called him myself, so he’d answer. He told me he didn’t want to talk to her. I told him she’d be dead soon, and he sighed at me, because I say that every year. I wanted to wring his skinny neck and tell him about the fifty aspirins in her belly and the red tanks under the blanket in my trunk and shove his face in the trash can and make him smell the insulin, but I didn’t. She took the phone and asked him about school, and he told her it was the summertime, Gram Gram. I took the whiskey and put it in her closet, behind the garden hat with the heart patch that my son had made for her. I put the aspirin back into the cabinet as they said goodbye and I laid with her as the alcohol soaked in, and she told me things. 

She talked about the column she joined as a teenager. The day she met my dad. The day she dropped out of school when I was born, and how Dad used to give me such a hard time. That’s why the cancer got him so quick, she said, damn karma. I didn’t tell her that I knew all of this. I didn’t say how many times she’d told me this before, I just laid there and listened. She talked about holding my son’s foot as a baby. He always helped carry the garage sale clothes we bought for Los Pobres, she said, lacing her hands, a large opal cluster ring on her finger. It was set in gold. She couldn’t ever take it off because her knuckles had swelled too large. She sighed again. She scratched her scalp. He dedicated his water lily painting to me in second grade, she said, remember? I didn’t tell her that was just part of his assignment, and she didn’t sit up and apologize for the weight watcher coupons in my inbox. She didn’t rub her eyes and stare and mumble about why she never said goodbye to me when I left for college, and neither of us bit our lips and sucked our guts and owned up to the year and a half in my thirties that we didn’t speak. She fell asleep, and I left.

The fourth time, we tried insulin again. It was dusk out. We ate food together in her bed beforehand, the syringes laid out between us, and my gaze flicked between them and the blooming black eye that was deep set in her brow. When I asked her about it, she told me she’d tried to pick oranges with the fruit picker, and it had slid out of her grasp. I looked away from the bruise. She had a burger and fries, and I had the same, and we didn’t talk. She ate the fries with fast, chopped motions, leaving grease against her cheeks, and she kept looking outside, at a fat yellow moon and the ivy bushes. She asked if I would weed once she died, and I told her I would. Pull from the root, she said, not the leaf. It’ll break off if you don’t. I nodded. She wiped her fingers against her sides. She picked up an insulin bottle and held it up to the light, like she was checking it. She put it back on the bed. I threw the garbage away. I met her mismatched eyes, and she asked what kind of person can’t pick fruit, like she expected me to answer. She blew her nose on a tissue. She adjusted her collar. She unscrewed the syringe, all the way this time, and I watched the liquid fill the entire tube. I watched her draw up her nightdress, a needle in hand, then a second, and a third. She fell back on her pillow. She took my hand and told me to go, and I did, and I drove home, wondering why the moon was so yellow and so big. 

I found her body the next day. I practiced my lines, and then I called, and I sat with her, staring at her face, the yawning mouth, the gray eyelids. They took her, and I called my son, and when I finished, I lay in the spot on the bed next to the stain. I shaped my body into hers. I watched the Japanese maple molt. I watched a deflated ball sit in the bushes. I watched the sway of the wild strawberries growing from the cracks in the deck, and I saw a tiny bird fly from the redwood. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched a few more leaves fall from the maple. Three more. One. Spiraling and green, into the dirt.

Tyler Mowry lives in Davis, California with his wife and two chihuahuas.