Mama would most definitely be ashamed of me in this moment. She always said to me, “Don’t you ever let another person see you cry, because then they win. They win, Brenda.” Which is funny because the whole time she was saying this her eyes were glistening with little dollops of tears. It’s a wonder she could keep then behind her lids so long as big as they were. I never learned how to do that. Maybe it’s the fact that Mama never could cry in front of us, what made her run away. Maybe she went to go find some people she could cry in front of. But whenever I ask Daddy why he thinks she ran away he always says the same thing, “Because your mother is selfish, Brenda, and she never did love anyone more than herself.” But I know for a fact that that wasn’t true because whenever she passed by that full length mirror in the hall I could tell she didn’t like what she saw. Is that why I do the same thing? Force of habit or is it because I wish when I double-check my reflection I could be someone else… someone beautiful.
  My face reddens under pressure, always. And also right before I burst into tears. Those two things almost always go together. I try to hold back the tears like Mama used to but I never can. The closest times she was to crying was always when she was making dinner. Before she left things started to deteriorate, almost like a foreboding of what was to come. I know it was just because she was distracted in planning her new life but it was also like I would see a dirty pile of laundry in the middle of the living room out of nowhere and it would mean, “This is how your life will end up.” Or maybe Mama burning a hole in one of my shirts was saying, “There will be a hole in your life, a missing piece.” Like those fortune cookies you get with Chinese food. Two weeks before Mama left we got Chinese food and my fortune cookie said, “You have a very dramatic change in your life coming up, but it will be good.” I guess you can’t always be one hundred percent right. The next day Mama burned a shirt of mine and the hole was right over my heart.
  But at some point I would come out before dinner after reading a book or drawing in my sketch pad like I do and Mama would be staring right out of the living room window while chopping onions or whatever in the kitchen. She wouldn’t look out the window like me and you would look out the window, ooooh no. She would look out the window like whatever–or wherever– she was looking was her only answer to happiness. And I know now that she looked out of that window because that is the only place she could imagine herself happy. Outside of our home. Outside of this life.
  I can’t draw in my sketchpad now. Not like I used to be able to. Whenever I get an idea for a picture in my head it always comes out looking mean and not quite right. It’s like walking past a madman in the street, his eyes not quite right, harboring something someone else couldn’t even imagine. I saw that look a lot after Mama left. The absent but not absent stare of a person not quite complete, lost. We were all still trying to figure out how to move through the space where Mama used to be. Sit in the seat Mama used to be in. Complete a task Mama used to complete. Like if she suddenly were to have come back from that grocery trip she said she was going to go on carrying a brown paper bag of milk and eggs and whatnot she would be offended to see us moving on.
  I drew my very last picture in the living room with Mama that day. She was staring straight ahead at the opposite wall, at a picture of us all together, smiling. Really smiling too, not like what we do to each other now. Those awkward grimaces that bare pain. No but a real joyful smile. So she stared and stared and stared and I drew her… sitting… staring. And when I was done she got up, almost as if on cue, almost as if I was drawing her professionally and I told her that she could go now that I was finished, and she proclaimed without looking, “I’m going to the grocery store, we’re out of milk.”
  “Wait, Mama.” She looked at me as if she’d just seen me. And maybe she had. “I drew a picture of you.” I flipped the pad around for her to see and she smiled warmly at it from afar, a forreal smile.
  “Well, that’s–” She said walking across the room toward it. But when she got to it her face dropped. I must have gotten it dead on. She must not have liked that.
  “That’s so… realistic, dear.” She paused and stood up straight and rigid and stared at the drawing. “Don’t ever let someone tell you what you will or will not be you hear me?” Suddenly she’s looking at me with fire in her eyes. “Don’t let any man or woman or teacher or whoever tell you what you will and will not be in life. What you are capable of. Because you can be anything, Brenda, you can be anything you set your little imagination to. You know why peoples hearts die as they get older? Because people are always limiting them, so they start to limit themselves. Don’t ever limit yourself, Brenda. If you wanna be a tree don’t let anyone tell you you can’t be. If you wanna be a cloud you be a cloud but the one thing you don’t ever ever be, Brenda Fowler, is ignorant. Ignorant to your own talents and the talents of others. You hear me? You hear me, Brenda Baby?”
  I looked down at her from where she was now kneeling. “I hear you, Mama, loud and clear.”
  She kissed me on the forehead and left out the front door with the car keys. And she didn’t ever come back. And I’m sure she won’t ever come back.
  The funny thing is I can’t help but feel like that’s not the last time I’ll ever see her. But I can’t imagine meeting her again. She’s like a ghost. I can’t imagine her here or anywhere else. It’s like she died. So if I can’t imagine her gone and can’t imagine her here, which one is right?
  “Brenda?”
  I look up from my desk, my face aflame, “Yeah?”
  “I asked you to come up to the board and complete the equation.”
  I watch the other three kids who seem like strangers churn out math problems like they were born to do it. Lil mathematicians. Why can’t I get it like they do?
  I get up to the board and place the chalk in my hand, roll it back in forth just to stall for time. Just so I don’t have to look up at that sea of numbers.
  “Brenda…” Mrs. Quintin is using her warning tone.
  I glance back at the board and am instantly seasick at this ocean of numbers and symbols from hell. I throw down my chalk.
  “I need some air!” I shout and run from the classroom and into the bathrooms where I heave up nothing from my empty stomach. That’s the one thing I can control in this world, food. And it makes me feel satisfied that I didn’t eat anything to throw up.
  I need out of this school.
  Maybe that’s why she left. Not because her life was so heart-wrenching and unsatisfying, but because she got the idea that she had to get out and it wouldn’t leave her mind until she did it. Until she left and never came back to this godforsaken place and I can’t say I blame her. I can’t say I’m mad. But I can say I’m furious. I can say I never got a say in how my life worked out. She should have taken me with her, she should have seen that we were alike, that we were both flight risks. But is that what I really want?
  What I really want, I decide, is some air. On my way outside I notice the bare walls of this asylum. They take off all the little drawings and projects done by all the robots and suck-ups right before school ends and then we get to look at glaring white walls for a week. My drawings were on that wall, back when I was a good little girl who had a mother and did her math no matter how much it sucked. She used to help me. She was great at math.
  Maybe this air is the only air that she could breathe properly, this outside air. Once you get it in your head that a place isn’t right you will never look at it the same and the only way you can preserve the memory and the innocence without perverting the whole thing is to just walk away and close up shop. Cut your loses and start over. Maybe that’s what my mother had to do. Get out before it was too late, before we all turned into dissociative little pricks and blurred the memories of us as her sweet little babies. She would have found herself alone in a house after we were long gone with no knowledge of how to start over. It would have been too late. And for that I’m not mad at her. And for that I’m furious at her. For leaving me with all these maybes. But maybe… she just needed to get out. Or maybe she was just selfish, and never did love anyone more than herself. I’ll just be furious for now, and lie awake at night hoping I never have to ask her why.