The Buzzing Means That Mom’s Back

 
May. Cicadas emerge from the earth, glistening and horny and pissed as all hell. Everyone loves to hate on cicadas, but Cenna’s dislike is more specific. Cicadas mean summer. She doesn’t trust summer.
 
Sure enough, on the Friday before Memorial Day, her older sister calls.
 
“Guess who’s back,” Andrea says, her voice pancake flat.
 
Fuck. Cenna only thinks the word, but she knows Andrea hears it anyway. Beyond her wimpy hand-me-down headphones, the cicadas ramp up. Soon, they’ll be everywhere. In her Algebra 2 classroom, on the boat where she works as a deck hand, in their kitchen when she’s on dinner duty every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday night because Andrea has the late shift at Applebee’s.
 
“Where is she?”
 
“She took Jimter to the pool.” Andrea only uses this nickname for their little brother when she’s feeling stressed or sentimental. She uses it a lot.
 
“You let her take him?”
 
“What was I supposed to do? She’s his mom.”
 

*

 
June. Anticipation thickens the humidity. Their mother is home.
 
Jordana makes frenetic speeches over dinner about how her four children form the corners of the world. When Moose is home—which isn’t often, since he’s working and taking summer classes to get ahead on his engineering degree—he diffuses her with a light laugh and practiced swagger that reminds Cenna of their father.
 
“My Andy, my Moosey, my CeCe, my Jimmy,” says Jordana. “You are everything.”
 
Jim bounces in his chair, a giant smile appleing his sunburned cheeks. Since her arrival, Jordana has taken him to the community pool every day. He comes back overflowing with stories of Marco Polo and Dippin’ Dots and running past the angry lifeguard and racing in the lap lanes.
 
He’s in bleached-out bliss. Back peeling, eyes rimmed red from too much chlorine. Ice cream for his mother to scoop.
 
When Moose and Andrea exchange quick glances, Cenna feels the exclusion like a slap. She wants both. To be included in her older siblings’ skepticism and to partake in the younger one’s hope.
 
“Where has she been?” Andrea hisses as they wash their faces that night. She looks up mid-scrub, makeup dribbling into the half-moons below her eyes, giving her a crazed raccoon look. Through the bathroom wall, they can hear Jordana singing Jim to sleep with “Raspberry Beret.”
 
“She just shows up. Never tells us anything. Never explains.”
 
“I don’t know,” Cenna whispers. “But she seems different.”
 
Cenna doesn’t know what to do with the joy she feels when Jordana sweeps her into a skunked perfume hug, probing about boys and school and sports and nail polish. Even though she doesn’t want to care about any of these things, it’s nice to be asked.
 
Andrea makes a face. The face makes her look like Jordana.
 
“I’m worried about Jim,” she says. Andrea may be the most worried twenty-three-year-old in town.
 
“He’s thrilled,” Cenna says, remembering how it felt to be eight and illuminated by her mother’s glow. Outside, the cicadas are throwing a party. “Let him have a minute.”
 
“Please. You know how this goes.”
 
She knows. She does.
 

*

 
July. Muted dawn pools in damp dirt. Cenna wakes up in the garden. Her wrists and ankles itch, shoulder muscles cramp. She hasn’t slept outside in years, but when they got back from the hospital last night, she made a nest among the drooping flowerbeds. The cicadas wait.
 
Cenna pulls her creaking bones up from the dirt and walks back into the house.
 
Dinner still sits on a long folding table in the living room, untouched. Grease congeals on carrots around a roast chicken. A glass lid cries into a bowl of wilting broccoli. Open beer bottles stand guard over their plates, only a few sips taken. Last night, Andrea downplayed the food while serving, even though it took her weeks to save for and hours to prepare. Jordana stood at the head of the table and made a big speech about how her eldest daughter was a Titan amongst mortals, capable of raising up everyone around her with a dedication that they’d all be lost without.
 
“Thanks for noticing.” Andrea’s voice is balanced on a knife’s point.
 
Jordana looked up and down the table. Her children looked back.
 
“Oh.” Her face emptied. “We need salt.” Then, she excused herself to the kitchen and put a canyon in her forearm.
 
Now, Andrea is on all fours, scrubbing. When Cenna approaches, she leans back onto her heels. She’s so thin, thinks Cenna. Has she always been this thin?
 
She reaches for a rag.
 
“You don’t need to.”
 
“I want to.”
 
“No, you don’t.”
 
Andrea wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. A streak of pink bubbles remains. They begin cleaning together. A low-grade buzz vibrates the kitchen.
 
“It’s not your fault,” Cenna finally says.
 
“Why would it be my fault?” Andrea’s voice catches in the stained grout.
 
Upstairs, a rustling. Jim is awake.
 
“Can you keep him out of here?”
 
Last night, Andrea ran at their mother with both hands out. She didn’t even grab a towel. It was Cenna who located something absorbent, dialed 911, pulled the screaming Jim into another room, and pressed his head into her pounding chest.
 
Cenna intercepts Jim on the stairs.
 
“Let’s mosey back up.”
 
“Let’s what?”
 
“Upstairs, Buddy.”
 
“Don’t talk about my butt.”
 
He listens, though, going to the upstairs bathroom to brush his teeth. Cenna watches him in the mirror, searching for the secret places where the night might have buried into him. Last time Jordana did this, Cenna felt it in her wrists for years. Sometimes, she still does.
 
“Hey,” says Jim, toothpaste foam leaking down his chin. “Don’t throw away my leftovers. I want to put the cheeseburger between my Blueberry Pop-Tarts.”
 
“We can find you something better than hospital burgers and stale space food.”
 
“Don’t,” Jim says again. Very serious.
 
“Okay, Jimter. Message received.”
 
He spits out the gunky paste and gives her a sudsy, limp smile in the mirror.
 
“You sure you don’t want to sleep more? We were up so late.”
 
Normally, Jim would protest, citing cartoons and off-brand Cocoa Puffs to be consumed. But he nods, docile. Cenna leads him back to his room, fingers laced.
 
She wants to do something motherly, like kiss his forehead or tell him it’ll all be alright. She settles for tucking him in at the shoulder, hip, and knee. How Jordana used to do it. How Cenna would like to be tucked in right now. As she shuts his door, she watches a vertical strip of light grow smaller on Jim’s face until he disappears behind the wood.
 
Downstairs, pale sun puddles on the floor. Andrea kneads her left shoulder, staring into the bucket of rosy water. Cenna kneels next to her sister and takes the towel from her hands.
 

*

 
September. After the patchwork days of August, restitched to ensure their mother was never alone, Cenna comes home to find the house empty, “Purple Rain” repeating on Dad’s old stereo.
 
The buzzing fills her entire body. As she moves through rooms—peering around every corner as if she’s in a haunted house—the air shifts, resettles. Once she’s proven what her body knows, Cenna goes outside. To her flower bed, as Andrea calls it. The only blooms left are actually weeds, but Cenna doesn’t mind. She likes that the ground and its greens have reformed to accommodate her.
 
Her phone blinks with a call. Moose.
 
“Hey, CeCe. Just checking in. You make it home to Mom alright?”
 
Cenna pictures her brother striding across campus in sunglasses, waving at someone across a manicured lawn, working out a math problem in his head. Moose is the only smart person she knows who’s never made her feel dumb.
 
“Yep.” She beheads a dandelion. “I’m home.”
 
“Good deal,” says Moose, his voice bright and unencumbered. “Really appreciate you covering for me this afternoon, Ce. This financial literacy course is bullshit, but I need to show up to keep my aid.”
 
She’d called out sick from work, ditching her shift with Hot Luke, even though he was leaving for college the next week and she’d probably never see his eight-pack again. Twenty minutes ago, that had been deeply disappointing. Now, she says, “I know,” and “don’t worry about it,” and “really.”
 
“She seems good today, doesn’t she? I mean, she’s still Jordana. But more like the old her. Don’t you think?”
 
She can spare him the whiplash of the panicked realization, the intense relief, the slow-drip guilt of both. Even if it’s just until after his bullshit financial literacy course.
 
“Yeah.” Cenna plucks a few long blades of grass; starts braiding them together. “Seems good. Singing a lot of Prince.”
 
“Well, that’s pretty fucking standard, isn’t it?” Moose laughs. When a response sticks in her throat, his concern is immediate and obvious.
 
“Ce? You good?”
 
“I’m fine,” she says quickly. “Can you pick up Dominos for dinner?”
 
Moose exhales. “I can do that. You sure everything’s okay?”
 
The cicadas are gone. Cenna’s only just clocked the silence, but they probably left weeks ago. She tells herself they won’t be back. That life will be linear, not surrender to a seasonal loop.
 
“Yes,” says Cenna. “We’re all good. I’m sure.”
 

*

 
New Year’s Eve Day. The temperature hasn’t cracked zero since Christmas, but they’re sick of hiding from the gray. Moose, on one of the last days of his winter break, borrows a friend’s car and drives them out to the lake.
 
Cenna sits behind Moose, zoning in and out of the conversation as he and Andrea fight over the radio. If she looks past her siblings through the dirty windshield, keeping their sweet chaos in the periphery, she can be both here and a decade ago. Crammed into the backseat of Dad’s Ford with Moose and Andrea, another three years before Jim would hit the scene. Jordana riding shotgun, using her pinkie to fluff up Dad’s curls, teasing him about his hockey hair.
 
At the lake, they cling to each other as they maneuver across the bumpy ice. Moose and Andrea pass a flask back and forth while Cenna waves a cellophane pom-pom. The three of them form a triangle around Jimter. He’s wrapped a purple scarf up above his nose and donned gold sunglasses twice the size of his head. The lake is so white that it hurts to look. Cenna looks anyway. It feels important to study something that manages to stay this bright without the sun.
 
“I scheduled my driving test,” says Cenna.
 
“We can’t afford a car,” says Andrea.
 
“Still,” nods Moose. “Good to have.”
 
“Did you know, in 1984, Prince had the number one album, single, and movie?” says Jim.
 
“Yes,” they all say.
 
“I got promoted to bartender,” says Andrea, squinting at a crack in the clouds.
 
“Andy, that’s great! Congrats. Soon you’ll be running the joint.”
 
“Applebee’s will never be the same.”
 
“Damn straight.”
 
“You should make the uniforms purple.”
 
“Good idea, Jimter.”
 
“Yeah,” says Andrea. “It is great. It’s pretty goddamn great.”
 
She stretches both arms wide, flask still clasped in her left hand. She extends one leg back, then the other, until her shuffling turns into a surprisingly graceful glide. Their sister moves in circles around them, reaching out to steady herself when she snags on a rough patch of ice.
 
“You see us?” Andrea yells up at the frosted sky. “You fuckers. I know you do.”
 
Eventually, she stops and hands the flask to Moose, who tucks it inside his jacket and puts a hand flat against her back. The wind picks up, swirling loose snow off the ice, exposing the cracks and bubbles below. Cenna pictures cicadas sleeping in the frozen ground. A new year is coming, but for now, they’re calm and quiet. The siblings huddle closer. They form the corners. They stay together until it’s time to go.