Susan Pfeffer: This World We Live In

“If there isn’t, there should be,” Mom said. “How long have we been at it?”

“Too long,” I said, and checked my watch. “More than an hour.”

Mom stretched again. “I was in labor fourteen hours with Matt,” she said. “That was worse.”

I thought about how unlikely it was I would ever meet any guy, fall in love, get married, have babies. Especially since I was going to spend the rest of my life in the cellar, where, in the not too distant future, I’d turn into a toadstool. I hoped I’d be the poisonous variety.

I don’t know how much longer we were working before I had my realization: Mom knew how impossible this job was and she didn’t care. It was a convenient excuse to keep me from going out and looting. The only fun I’d had in months and she was determined to prevent me from doing it, even if it meant locking me in a cellar and making me empty pail after pail of water.

Okay, I wasn’t locked in. And Mom was working as hard as, if not harder than, I was. But it still was an awfully convenient excuse to keep me where she could see me.

Given that I’d run away like a seven-year-old the day before, she might have had a point. But I really was capable of biking around town and looking for space heaters, boxes of rice pilaf, and half-used rolls of toilet paper.

Matt and Jon got to be out of her sight for five days. I was out for five hours, and it was down to the cellar for me.

It’s funny. I’m writing all this down because I felt it, and even though I know it was immature for me to feel that way, I’m not sure I wasn’t right. Maybe not 100 percent right but at least partway. If it hadn’t been the cellar, Mom would have found some other job in the house for me. She wanted me where she could see me, and the cellar provided her with a great excuse to keep me by her side.

All of which, of course, put me in an even worse mood. But I kept taking the pails from her and carrying the water upstairs and flinging it out the window, because I’d done my seven-year-old running-away bit yesterday and all it had gotten me was a mound of dead bodies I’ll see until the day I’m part of it.

After a while, though, I had to take a break. “I’m taking a few minutes off,” I told Mom. “I’m going to check up on Horton. And I’ll clean the ash out from the woodstove.”

“I’ll stay down here,” Mom said. “If I leave, I’ll never come back.”

That seemed like an excellent reason to leave, but when Mom’s like that, you don’t try to fight. I took the pails, emptied them, tossed them back to Mom, and looked in on Horton. Or more accurately, his food bowl. He’d eaten a little since last night, but not as much as I would have liked.

I cleaned his litter while I was at it and then the woodstove. Those were Jon’s jobs ordinarily. The ash pile had gotten a lot of snow mixed in over the months, and now that the snow was pretty much melted, the ash had turned into a large messy glop. It was probably killing all the plants around it, except of course there’s no sunlight anymore, so the plants were dead anyway.

I stood there for a moment, thinking about the ash and the sun and death, then trudged back to the house, got to the cellar door, sighed heavily so Mom could understand what a martyr I was, and walked down the stairs, expecting to see Mom surrounded by full pails of water for me to ditch.

Only Mom wasn’t surrounded by anything. She was lying, face down, in the water.

I first thought, She’s dead. She’s dead and I killed her. And for a second I was frozen with terror and guilt. She must have fainted, I thought, and fallen face down in the water. You can drown in six inches just as easily as six feet.

They say in the moment before you die, your whole life passes in front of you. All I know is Mom’s whole life passed in front of me. All her hopes. All her fears. All her anger.

The moment passed as quickly as it had arrived, and I raced down the stairs to get to her. I’m a swimmer. I’ve taken lifesaving courses. I hadn’t dawdled that long outside, and for all I knew, Mom had collapsed five seconds before I found her.

I yanked her up out of the water and gave her mouth-to-mouth until she began breathing on her own.

When I was sure she was alive and conscious, I pulled her up the stairs into the kitchen and then into the sunroom. She was still coughing, but she hadn’t died some stupid, meaningless death.

I wanted to yell at her, to tell her never to do anything like that again, but instead I ran for towels. She was shaking too hard to undress herself, so I took her clothes off. She’s so thin. She’s eaten less than any of us so we can all have a little bit more.

I dried her off, but she was still shaking, so I heated some water on the woodstove and sponge-bathed her, then dried her off again. I found clean clothes for her to put on, extra socks and a coat, even though the sunroom is pretty warm. I wrapped a blanket around her, then used up one of our last tea bags and made her a cup to sip. Horton jumped on her lap, and she stroked him until they were both comforted.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I was all right, waiting for you before I began working again, and then I must have passed out.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I found you. You’re fine.”

“Would I have died?” she asked. “Could I have really died that way? After all we’ve been through, could that have happened?”

I knew she was asking herself those questions, so I didn’t say anything. She’d stopped shaking, and for me that was enough.

Neither one of us mentioned going back to the cellar. Let the house sink into the earth. Mom’s avoided the mound of death for one more day, and that’s all that matters.

Mom was a nervous wreck waiting for Matt and Jon to return. She kept looking at her watch like they were late for curfew.

I was anxious for them to get back, too. The past few days without them hadn’t been particularly pleasant.

At least Mom didn’t make us go back into the cellar. I was afraid she would, to give us something to do while we waited. But instead she leafed through one of the mysteries I’d taken without permission. It’s Saturday, so I don’t have to do schoolwork, but I pretended to read my history textbook anyway.

We both heard them, the sounds of their bikes, the sounds of their laughter, at about the same time. I got to the door first, opened it, and waited for them to cross the threshold so I could hug them and keep them from ever leaving again.

But when they did cross the threshold everything was different. Forever different.

There was Jon, holding on to a trash bag filled with fish. There was Matt, looking even happier than the day he got into Cornell. And there, clinging to Matt’s arm, was a girl.

“This is Syl,” Matt said. “My wife.” He grinned. “I love the sound of that,” he said. “Syl. My wife.”

“Your wife,” Mom said, and it was obvious she didn’t love the sound of that. “Matt, Jon, come in. Miranda, take that bag and put it in the garage. We’ll deal with it later.”

“There’s another bag,” Jon said. “I’ll go with you, Miranda.”

“Great,” I said, taking it from him and walking to the bike. Jon got the second bag, as full as the first, and we began the walk to the garage.

“Wife?” I whispered. “What happened? Who is she?”

“We were at this motel,” Jon said, like he was bursting to tell me. “It was the second night. There are empty motels all over. You find a room and take it. You know how there’s a door to another room right in yours? We could hear a man screaming at a girl in the room next door. It sounded like he was hitting her. Matt broke the door down, and he ran in there and grabbed her and told the guy to keep his hands off her if he knew what was good for him.”