On Mothers, and the Ghosts They Leave Behind

Anika Kotapally

I grew up with ghosts, or at least that’s what my mother told me. I remember her placing crystals in my room to protect me from them: jet for curses, tourmaline for strength, amethyst to soothe. She was terrified of ghosts, always looking in cupboards and around corners for strays, fears she hadn’t quite gathered in yet. I think the ghost she feared the most was my father. I had barely known him, even when he was alive. She never talked about him, but the look she got in her eyes when we asked was enough: distant, an animal remembering the feeling of being chased, of fear in the back of their neck. Her ghosts were always running around the house, sneaking through the walls, crawling in the vents, until there were more of them than us.

Before Abby, they were my friends. I would ask their names, play games with them, draw them into existence as second, third, fourth family members. After Abby, though, I forgot all about my mother’s ghosts, my only childhood friends. As soon as she was born, she became my first thought. I would watch her sleep, blow raspberries to make her laugh, play peekaboo to see her gummy smile. I was fascinated by her, her fingernails, her tiny eyelashes, the shadows they drew on her blushing cheeks. But my mother never forgot her ghosts. They always haunted her, I think. Always just a step behind, always something she had to look over her shoulder for. I was sixteen years old when she left, old enough for it to stick to me, old enough to remember. When I came home from school, the car was already packed. She was inside, looking for something she had forgotten. A tchotchke maybe, a crystal, something to save her from her ghosts, the fears she had tried to tuck safely away. Later, I wondered if she had left something back to protect us, or if she’d managed to fit all her love in the car too. I wondered if the dust she kicked up in her wake would suffocate us, make us into another two phantoms she couldn’t shake. I wondered if the ghosts she was so afraid of were just the other people she had left, all screaming, crying, begging her to love them again. If she hadn’t forgotten, I wouldn’t have even known she was going before she was gone. This is as familiar as the flutter of my pulse, the way resignation feels, settled into the base of my spine.

When I got inside, I saw her rummaging through the drawers. No child sees a packed car and thinks their mother is leaving them; how could I have known? When I asked if we were going somewhere— why would we go somewhere on a Tuesday?—she didn’t respond, only clutched whatever it was she had needed and got in the car. She was my mother; I trusted her implicitly. Like some instinct in every child’s genes, one that doesn’t go away until you kill it out of them. When I was six, I had broken my arm falling off a tree, and she was there, clucking over me, kissing my forehead. The pain sketched dark spots over my eyes, and I cried and cried. She shushed me, called me sweetheart, darling, said over and over, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere. And I believed her.

By the time the sun set that day, she was gone. I was sixteen years old. Abby was eight. We were her daughters. She had birthed us, raw and screaming and ugly, held our slimy newborn selves. Her children, her body in another form. My sister didn’t even see her go.

Abby doesn’t remember her like I do. And sometimes, I don’t even think I remember her right. My memories of her are damaged film reel, only flashes of reality coming through, the rest corrupted black. I remember her laugh, harsh and braying. I remember her face when I got pneumonia at eight, like something had been ripped from her, like she was hurting the same way I was. I remember her stories, the ghosts she shared with me, how she looked as she taught me what her crystals meant, how to protect myself from my own ghosts, the ones I wouldn’t be able to outrun either. Red jade for creativity, rose quartz for love, tiger eye for confidence. I remember her, the way she lived, like concrete blocks were tied to her feet, like there was always something she needed to protect herself from. I remember she loved us. And I remember it wasn’t enough.

Maybe it was the money. Or the jobs she couldn’t keep. Or maybe it was us. Maybe it was Abby coming home, perpetually scraped and bruised, the bills for two children she didn’t ask for, the fear of everything catching up to her, the demand on her time, her love, her. Maybe it wasn’t anything I could ever know about. Maybe it was everything.

I didn’t tell anyone for a month. On the first day, I woke up, fed Abby the line I had decided on the night before—Mom’s on a trip right now, but she’ll be home soon, promise promise—got her dressed and both of us to school. When I came home, I figured out how to cook off the internet, how to lie to an eight year old, how to hold myself together in a house that could come down around me at any time. When I could hear Abby snuffling in her bed, warm and asleep, I cried for an hour. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the shadow of the amethyst she had put there years ago, to protect against her ghosts. With her gone, I could feel them creeping in, the ghosts who were my friends, ones I had never seen before. Abby kept snoring. I could almost hear a pale voice in my head, one that sounded like her, telling me what the crystals meant, how to save myself when the ghosts inevitably came for me too. Anger swirled and eddied deep in my stomach, and my fists clenched. She had left, hadn’t even said anything to me, just went out the front door and our lives. I hadn’t even known it wasn’t just for a little while until I found her room stripped clean, the cabinets half empty. I didn’t sleep that night, couldn’t sleep, grappling with the ghost of my mother in my head, my ghost mother who I wished still loved me.

When I finally called the social workers, it was because I knew she wasn’t coming back. I could feel her all around the house: a pale snore coming from her bedroom, imagined headlights up the condo driveway, a phantom creaking open the bedroom door the way she used to when she wanted to watch us sleep. But it had been a month and the closest we had gotten to her was her staticky voicemail—Abby giggling in the background, her voice, bright and happy—telling us she wasn’t currently available so we should call back later. I didn’t know where she was, didn’t want to. Her face was my ghost, the way I thought we must have become hers, and the idea of seeing it in front of me, real and alive and breathing, made something sharp poke into my throat, the feeling you get right before you choke.

They took us to a foster home, loud and cramped and warmer than I had expected. The first night, Abby crawled into my bed. In the dark of a new moon night, we were a tangle of limbs, crushed together under a blanket I had taken from home, the only thing I had brought, along with a bracelet she had given me when I was ten. Abby curled into me, skinny knees poking into the soft of my stomach. Abby, my sister. I knew her eyes, had held her as a baby. I knew how she sounded when she was crying, her smile when she was trying to hide something from me. Once, when we had been alone in the house, before the car stopped coming back, Abby had been playing in the street with her friends. She fell, knees a shredded tapestry of blood and dirt. Her face was blotchy with tears, and I could feel my heart fissure, the stirrings of an earthquake in my chest. I got the first aid kit and wiped her clean with antiseptic, making faces to try to get her to laugh. She picked out her favorite Mickey Mouse band aids, and after, we got mint chocolate chip ice cream from the freezer. Green smeared around her mouth, and, as her feet swung under the counter chairs, I could almost see the baby she had been, shadowed in her smile, in the way her forehead crinkled with her laugh. My mother must have done the same thing for her, enough times for it to become a sort of muscle memory, something you learn until it’s innate. The same way staying with us, loving us, should have been. And still she left.

When I left the foster home for college, Abby cried, the sort of tears that means breaking hearts, that remakes you into someone new on the other side, the sort I knew, the sort I had cried, two years back, in a dark room with only amethyst and snuffling snores for comfort. And all of a sudden, I was her, running through the bedroom I slept in, looking for the bracelet she had given me. I was her; it was her phantom hands shoving a bag into the backseat of my junky, third-hand car. I was her, leaving my sister, never coming home. She was superimposed over everything I did, the ghost I could never outrun, and I was her pale imitation. Her first child, the one who remembered.

A cold feeling splintered through my chest. “I won’t go if you don’t want me to.”

Abby sniffed, running the back of her hand under her nose, and said, “You already sent in your deposit. I don’t think you can back out now.”

I needed her to understand I wasn’t going to leave her. I needed her to promise me I wouldn’t become the person I least loved, the one I could never quite manage to hate, never quite manage to forgive. I needed her to tell me I wasn’t something that would haunt her, that I wasn’t just the ghost of my mother, the pieces of her I just couldn’t pick out. Any words I could think of died somewhere behind my throat. I opened my arms, willed my tears to stay in their ducts until Abby was in my rearview. She came, smiling like sunlight through water, wavering but bright. My t-shirt caught her quiet I’ll miss you, and I hooked my head over hers, flew a kiss onto her hair. She hadn’t done that for me when she left.

As I got onto the highway, the ghost of my mother still haunting my passenger seat, still in my hands on the wheel, I called the foster home, asking for Abby. She picked up the phone and, before she could say anything, I was talking. “You know I’ll be back for every break and I’ll call you every single day and I’ll miss you all the time, right?”

She laughed, and something warm filled all the cracks forming in my chest at the thought of Abby, lonely and without anyone to hug her when she was sad, without anyone to protect her from all the family ghosts. “I know. Do you know that I’ll be completely fine without you?” I did know. I had always known, since Abby, all bloody knees and half-falling tears, came home and smiled at me over her ice cream. “I’m going to go now. Call us when you get there. I love you, okay?”

“I will. I love you.” I looked down the highway, long and light. The sun was still low in the sky, draping the road and the fields beside it in its blue-pink gauze, soft and radiant. Something dangled on the rearview mirror: a chain, green gem hanging from its base. I thought our foster mother might have put it there; it looked like the ones she gave out to all the kids who grew out of her home. Malachite, my head supplied, pulled from one of the lessons my mother had taught me when I was young, when ghosts were friends and cars came home every day, for transformation, new beginnings. My mind was clear, and my mother’s ghost had faded as sunlight crept in. The day was new. I thought maybe I was, too.