a novel by Yasuko Thanh

EXCERPT

A DAY CAN START out as utterly ordinary yet transform in such a manner that by dusk you realise everything you love can be taken away. Like that. It was a Sunday, a day before the grind began. I was asking myself how it would feel to wake up happy for a change, and it wasn’t a rhetorical question. Juliet was on a scholarship track to university, and I had begun picking up my camera again, and circling the globe with my finger.

However, dusk is an exercise in perspective. Lilac and purple twine in the sky, like a mural that tricks the eye. We’re trained to see depth in this kind of treatment of light and shadow, even when all we’re looking at is a ceiling. A sky. An apocalypse, a lifting of the veil. I see impermanence in swaying leaves. In Juliet’s face, eyes. In the way jewels of star light come on, one by one, and stretch over the ground. Ground I need to harrow.

I’d better explain. I took out the garbage and the compost. My husband Syd did the recycling in his bathrobe. I shut the front door and then turned down the hall, thinking I was a good mother, thinking I was anchored, in the words of Sophocles, to life. Juliet, seventeen, opened her bedroom door a crack and when she asked me to come in, I did, and deferred my nagging, though there was much to nag about: the sour smell, the piles of books, the junk food wrappers, the pop bottles, half a carrot on the carpet.

Then I noticed something different. A cooking pot by the carrot, and another, and a salad bowl. Vomit overflowed her trash can—that’s where the sour smell was coming from—the assortment of pots and bowls with vile liquid inside scattered with the casualness of throw pillows on the floor.

Vomit. Hangover. Juliet hungover?

Before I could launch into a spiel about teenage drinking, she said, “Is it okay if I don’t go to school tomorrow?” Then added, “Actually, could I take a few days off?”

The vision morphed. Not hungover. Pregnant. Morning sickness. Seventeen and a mom?

In an instant I figured, we’d work through this. I was eighteen when I had her. I ran through scenarios where I’d stay home while Juliet finished school, and feed the baby organic vegetables I’d prepared myself in the blender, and diaper the baby with cloth, not disposable…

“Well,” I said, “that depends.”

Then I ran with other scenarios such as “Juliet may want an abortion.” Or, “She might want to put the baby up for adoption.”

I waited for the words, “I’m pregnant.”

They didn’t come.

I smiled to reassure her that whatever words emerged next from her mouth would be met with no judgement, no condemnation, and that I had her back.

She pushed her blue dreadlocks out of her face. “I tried to kill myself,” she said.

✳✳✳

I tried to kill myself.

Her words repeat, beat along with each passing second with the violence of holy men, those old masters who, to teach a lesson, inflicted their disciples with pain.

“I took some Tylenol. But I puked it all up.”

“How much?”

“The whole bottle.”

“When?”

“Friday.”

Friday? This was Sunday.

“Well, Friday. Some Saturday. It took a while. I kept gagging. The pills were so sweet.”

How could Juliet join us for dinner while knowing, hoping, she’d be dead by morning? At what point did she take them? She came home from school. She cooked dinner, it was her night, a meal of pork chops braised with red peppers and served with Basmati rice, then we watched a movie. The three of us piled onto our king-sized bed, Juliet curled up at my feet. It occurs to me now, Juliet’s lack of appetite was out of the ordinary -- she ate no popcorn, no chocolate, no chips. And then, halfway through the movie, she said, “I think I’m just going to go to bed,” to which I said, “Okay, hon, have a good sleep,” and dug further under the covers still crunchy from last week’s crumbs.

The poison had already set sail.

“Do you still have it?” I ask. “The box?”

Juliet passes it to me, her pale fingers with their chewed nails, chipped polish, shaking. I reach across her desk, an old door on cinder blocks, its surface covered with glass jars for her paper clips and pens, and grab her laptop.

I Google amounts, 500 mg times 100 pills.

The computer asks me if I mean t-y-l-e-n-o-l, I click, yes.

“I only told you because it didn’t work.”