Girl in Pieces

It’s so hot outside, the sweat is pouring from my face when I get inside the library. I spend some time mopping up in the bathroom. My room was too hot, the building too noisy with people running fans and coolers and playing music too loud.

At the computer, I type in Ariel Levertoff + artist. A bunch of articles come up and some galleries that sell her work. I scroll through, not sure what I’m looking for, until I see one article titled “Death and the Disappearance of Ariel Levertoff.” It’s a long article, in some fancy art magazine, with tons of huge words and a black-and-white photograph of Ariel and a little boy with dark, dark hair falling in his eyes. They are surrounded by paintings. He holds his hands up, happy. They drip with paint. Ariel is laughing.

Her son died of a combination of pills and alcohol. His body was found in an alley in Brooklyn. Alexander. He’d flunked out of school, he was bipolar, she’d lost touch with him and even hired a detective, but she couldn’t trace him. She’d canceled shows, stopped painting.

He disappeared on her. They found him on the street. A little hole starts to burn inside me.

I wonder suddenly about her paintings, the tiny, tiny shafts of light in all the stormy dark. She said in the gallery that sometimes a painting of just color can tell a story, too, just a different one. Is her son the dark or the light in the paintings? Which one is Ariel? I’m struggling to understand, but it’s hard, so I click off the article. I miss Ellis so much it’s like a huge dark cavern inside my heart. That must be magnified a million times for Ariel when she thinks about her son.

Is my mother at all frantic, wondering about me? Or is it just another day for her, every day, one where I’m gone and not her problem anymore? Was she relieved to hear from the hospital, even if she didn’t come right away? Does she ever think about the times she hit me?

She would get even madder after she hit me, holding her hand up like it burned, staring down at me. Because I tried to hide, especially when I was small. It’s how I first learned to be small, scrabbling away under a table, or finding the corner of a closet.

Was she worried I would tell, in the hospital? I look away from the computer, down at my lap, at my fingers busily pinching my thighs to keep me from floating.

Before I can stop myself, I’m opening up my email and I’m typing in her address, or at least the last one I know she had. I write: I’m okay.

My finger hovers over Send. She would want to know, right? That I’m at least alive out here?

She knows Mikey’s number. They talked in Minnesota. But she hasn’t called him, or anything, to see how I am.

Sometimes when Fucking Frank was very high, he would tell us, all of us in the house, “Where are Mommy and Daddy now, huh? Are they at the front door, begging you to come home?” Smoke would drift across his face, his eyes burning like coal in the white plumes. “I’m what you have now. I’m your fucking family and don’t you forget it.”

My mother hasn’t called Mikey. Or Casper. Or done anything. Mikey’s leaving. Ellis is a ghost. Evan is all the way up in Portland. I delete the email to my mother.

I’m utterly alone.