The smell hit me before the door finished swinging open.
Smoke and something underneath it, sickly sweet and chemical, my body recognized it the way it recognized the creak of the third stair or the way the kitchen faucet ran cold for thirty seconds before it found hot.
I stood in the doorway for a moment with my gym bag still on my shoulder and let the recognition settle into the familiar anger and disappointment it always became, and then I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.
The apartment was dim, curtains drawn against the afternoon, the television running something I wasn’t paying attention to.
I dropped my gym bag on the floor by the door, the thud of it swallowed by the carpet that had seen better years, and followed the smell deeper into the apartment.
She was on the bathroom floor.
Her back against the tub and her head tilted at an angle I had come to recognize as her having been on a high for a while, one arm trailing across the tile.
The pipe was still loose in her fingers.
She was breathing, I checked that first, always checked that first, and the relief of it was so routine by now that I barely registered it as relief anymore.
Just the absence of the worst possible thing.
“Ma.” I crouched down beside her, got a hand under her arm.
“Ma, come on.”
She stirred.
Her eyes opened halfway, unfocused, tracking something that wasn’t in the room.
“Ezekiel.” My name in her mouth came out softened at the edges, her Haitian lilt thicker when she was like this, the way it always was.
“You’re home.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m home. Come on, let’s get you up.”
She let me take her weight at first, her body going loose and cooperative the way it did in the first few minutes, before the part of her brain that was still running caught up with what was happening.
I got her upright, got her arm around my shoulders, started moving her toward the shower.
Then it hit her when she recognized what I was doing.
She stiffened.
Her feet found the floor and pushed back, suddenly resistant, her free hand coming up to push at my chest with more strength than she should have had.
“Don’t touch me, let me go—”
“Ma—”
“You drove him away!” The words came out like something that had been sitting behind her teeth for a long time.
“He was your father, Bastien!, he was your father and you—”
“I know what I did, and I’d beat his ass again if he ever shows back up,” I said.
My voice was flat.
Not cold exactly, just emptied out, the way it got when I needed it to not be anything in particular.
“Shower. Come on.”
She swore at me in Creole, a long fluid stream of it that I understood well enough to know I was being called several things, none of them flattering.
I kept moving her toward where I’d sober her up.
She fought me the whole way, feet dragging, her free hand pulling at my arm, her voice rising and falling between French and English.
I got the shower on cold.
She screamed at me for that too.
I sat on the edge of the tub while she stood under the water fully clothed and worked through it, the cold doing what cold did, the screaming cycling down through crying and then through something quieter, and I stayed where I was and let it run its course because there was no shortcut through it and I’d learned that a long time ago.
By the time she was coherent she was sitting on the bathroom floor again with a towel around her shoulders and her wet hair pushed back from her face, and she looked about ten years older than she was.
“Zeke.” Her voice was small now.
The accent was still there but the edges of it were back where they belonged.
“Baby, I’m sorry.”
I was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, looking at the wall above her head.
“I didn’t mean what I said…you shouldn’t have been the one to do that,” she said.
“Scaring him off like that. That wasn’t your job. That was never supposed to be your job.”
“Somebody had to do it.”
“Not you.” She pulled the towel tighter around her shoulders.
“I’m going to get sober. I mean it this time. I’ve been calling the clinic on—”
“Alright,” I said.
Just that. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Alright.
Not I believe you, not I know you will, not it’s going to be okay.
Just the word, dropped into the space between us like a stone into still water.
She looked at me for a long moment.
I was still looking at the wall.
She knew I didn’t believe her.
I could tell she knew, the way a mother always could.
She didn’t push it.
The silence stretched out between us.
Then eventually she asked me quietly, “Do you know why I called you Bastien?”
I looked down at her for the first time since she’d stopped fighting me.
“No, I don’t.” I said in a clipped way, my anger at her shining through.
“It sounds like Bastion.” She said it softly, turning the word over like something she’d been keeping in her pocket for years.
“You know what a bastion is?”
I shook my head slightly.
“It’s a wall,” she said.
“The part of the wall that rises above everything else, the part that takes the hit first so everything behind it doesn’t have to, its where people run to when everything goes wrong.” She looked up at me, her eyes clear now, red rimmed but clear.
“It stands alone not because nobody is with it, but because it carries more than the others can, it rises above. It goes first. It absorbs what would break everything else.” A pause.
“I think I knew, even then. Even before you opened your eyes, I knew what type of man you would become.”
“And what type of man am I Ma?” I asked sarcastically
“A protector…my Bastien…” She whispers as her head starts to loll.
” My Bastion.”