Essay About Family: Cutting Strings

Cutting Strings

I’m in bed, scanning the ceiling for a light that isn’t there. There wasn’t one last night, or the night before, so I shouldn’t have expected anything different than the textured surface that my retinas now scratch across in a long diagonal. The same grey, dried-paint-sharp ceiling that they don’t show in the brochures. Always without a light. Sure, one of those fake-Southwestern lamps with a plastic lamp shade sits beside me on the coffee table, but it’ll just fall with everything else once this island of a motel room shrinks down to a pinpoint and these two beds, those dresser drawers, that mirror, Jessie, Bekah, and my own elusive existence tumble into the empty gap.

“Are they still out there?”

I don’t see her, but I imagine my 16-year-old sister Jessie gaping at the blank TV screen, hoping somebody will answer her question.

“Yep,” Bekah rattles off too quickly.

That’s right, I realize. Still outside. Probably in the car, pinned under the hard rain. It was raining when we got here. Some firefly of a town at the crossing of two faded freeways in northern Pennsylvania where it snows a lot in the wintertime for the skiers, my dad told me in a watery voice while our minivan hummed down the off-ramp. Watercolor black, I thought while I looked out the window, except for the yellow, splotchy Super-8 sign and the white motel lobby. My two sisters and I brought the luggage down and we’re still waiting for mom and dad like dead puppets, and I’m still wishing for a light fixture.

Like the bubble-shaped one that hung in my bedroom about two thousand miles away, before I turned 18 on this family road trip. Before this second act, when my parents stopped flinching their puppet master wrists from above the stage, and so I finally cut my own strings, just to fall flat on my plastic face and deflate like a balloon.

The door clicks open. What can I hang on to? The ceiling is blank.

“Mom?”

I hear my sister’s drawl and think desperately about a light fixture, this one big, with crystal chains and gold bars. I can feel the mattress slipping below my back.

Take your things.

Swinging from chandeliers? No, too much. I’d just hold on.

“Take your things and get out,” Mom says. “You’re sleeping with your dad tonight.”

My two sisters and my older brother and I never heard much, but my mother would sometimes tell us about how her parents beat her and did other things too.