Picturesque

Chapter 33: Picturesque

When I showed up at the front door of my house in suburban New Orleans, which looked like a shoebox compared to where I had been staying for the summer, I held my breath. Mama hadn't heard from me since I called her toward the start of my internment. I remembered the last words she'd said to me: "You're gonna see the world. It's gonna eat you up and spit you right out. You're not strong enough for that, Becky. You're gonna come running home to me, crying like a child. But I won't catch you."

Here I was, chewed up and spit out, running home to her and crying like a child. I had nowhere else to go. Holding up a shaky finger, I pressed the button of the doorbell, hearing the familiar chime come from inside the house. It was early in the morning. I just gotten off the plane and got a taxi straight home.

I waited for several moments. She might not have even been awake yet. I was about to ring it again when suddenly the front door opened.

From behind the mesh of the screen door, I saw her. She was in her light pink robe, glasses sitting on her nose. Her hair was shorter now, with specks of gray in it. Did it have gray before? She looked so much older now, though it had only been a few months, and I suppose I did too, because it looked like she didn't recognize me at first.

I think maybe she had expected someone else at the door, someone like the soldier that came to her door when she was pregnant with me. I think she thought I was a messenger coming to tell her that her daughter was dead just like her Daddy, until she realized it really was me.

I felt a little self-conscious as I realized how I probably looked. My hair was messy, and my face was puffy and bright red from all the crying I had done. Everyone at the airport looked at me like I was crazy, some girl sitting in the corner sobbing into a stuffed bunny. Mama's eyes widened, a small gasp coming from her mouth. She looked over me for a moment.

"Becky?" she whispered on the other side of the screen door as I just stood there plainly, tears welling in my eyes. I had missed my Mama so much. I had been through so much in the prior couple of days. I felt stupid because the world had eaten me up, chewed me, and spit me out, and now here I was at her doorstep, crying like a child. And she was going to turn me away, just like she said.

She saw the tears running down my face, and it moved her. It was almost like fear as she saw the grief and pain in my face, how badly I had been hurt.

"Oh," she gasped, pushing the screen door open and stepping onto the porch. She even seemed shorter than me now. She looked up at me, and I was prepared to run away until she said in a wavering voice. "Oh, baby, it's okay. You're home."

I never told Mama what happened with Jo, and she never asked. A part of me thought that somehow she knew, just from the pure pain in my face, what had happened. She brought her arms up around me and I fell into her, sobbing into the soft plush of her robe, smelling the familiar scent of the shampoo she had always used since I was a child. She squeezed me so hard, as if she was prepared to never let go again.

After Mama brought me inside and I cried more into her robe, her gentle hands rubbing my back until I could breathe, she instantly started to make me breakfast, gently telling me to go unpack and take a calming bath while she cooked. I went back into my room, and it was like a warm hand wrapped around my heart. Those four plain walls in that tiny room, my tiny bed, that had seen me through so much pain in my life. It didn't see me through the worst pain in my life that I had just experienced, but the room was welcoming as I came back to it, unpacking my things right where they had been when I left.

As I sat in the tiny bathtub in our bathroom, I sobbed. I sobbed like I had just lost my own limb, like I was a mother who lost her baby. When I stepped out of the bath and slipped into my robe, I picked up my hairbrush and froze.