“Pelt” © 2024 by delila

Half-painted in the angled mirror, I ignore my mother’s calls and sweep blush onto my temples. The face of Luz Divinity takes shape beneath my brush. My mother tries again as I tug a wig onto my shaved head, the unit sleek and long, and again as I zip a vinyl bodice over my chest, false cleavage contoured on. I almost let the call expire, answer on the last ring, then shrug the phone against my cheek to wash lipstick swatches from the back of my hand.

“Allô, Ma.” The water runs sunset colors.

She doesn’t call me Luz, or even Louis, but Loulou, the self I wear at home. “Have you decided where you’ll stay this weekend?”

I dry off and palm the phone in one hand taloned with press-ons. The answer is no. I’d hoped to decide later—tomorrow, after the long drive south for my niece’s first birthday, when I’d either pull into a hotel or my mother’s manicured driveway, my brother offering his pullout to our estranged dad instead of me. My ear warms against the screen, just as it did when Juneau broke the news.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “I’ll call in the morning. I’m performing tonight.”

“You—oh.” She remembers what I do for a living. My hot ear tickles as she sidesteps. “Well, not too late. I need to prepare.”

“Okay.”

She says it’ll be good to see me, a line she usually ruins and immediately does. “Let’s make this a nice weekend, yes? I don’t want any drama.”

My ear is fully itching when she hangs up, and I know it will molt soon. I take my time stepping into my thigh-highs, dusting glitter over my collarbones. The more I think on both recent conversations—my brother’s small betrayal, our mother’s assertion that I’m the most likely to ruin a nice weekend—the more I feel my ear prickle, the skin lifting away. Neither came as a total shock: Juneau’s talked grace about our dad before. She deserves a grandpa, Loulou, he once said of his newborn Fabienne, sounding more like our mom every day. We’re only getting older. The baby was a sudden moon, tugging his mercy like a tide. And our mother, well. Gay she could keep denying, but drag is a different offense.

Luz Divinity stares out of the mirror fully stamped. Her work tonight won’t cover a hotel. It’s decided, then, what I’ll answer in the morning, and the thought of this fate is enough to finish the job; I pull on my earlobe and feel the molt detach, chemically peeled by my mother’s words. I flush it away and dab more foundation on the fresh skin underneath, so my ear will match the rest of me.

I inherited the molting, which my mother will deny; she’ll insist it’s a thing only women do, each heartbreak withering from the body like a petal.

I first saw her do it after her mother stilled in her hospital bed. On the ride home, my Mémère’s final kiss dry on her cheek, a cast of my mother’s face unhinged at the chin and floated down into her palms, concave and translucent. The trait loops through our family’s ladies back and back like a braid through beads, since before they left Haiti as refugees. The first pain to peel me apart came later, when she forged “Love, Dad” into cards he didn’t send, that first Christmas after he cheated and left. The bracelet he gave me at birth started chafing on my wrist, and when my mother undid the clasp, my sorrow slipped from that arm like an elbow-length glove, dainty and fine.

Her alarm was quickly disguised. She tried to play it off like I was allergic to nickel and never discussed it again, but Juneau still wears his, and I know it’s made of gold.

Juneau never molted, which confused me back then, but after learning what I was it wasn’t hard to imagine that if our family had borne other men like me, they’d have been molted as heartbreaks just the same. One day little Fabienne will molt, too. She’ll learn repression like the rest, if my mother has her way. The baby will realize quickly that even moons answer to gravity, and we are all my mother’s satellites.

It’s five hours down from Orlando to Kendall. South Florida laps caustic against my body when I step out of the car, eyes level with the stick-figure family on my brother’s back window. I’m glad he’s here. I won’t have to be alone with her. Her house, like her, is too much for no reason, an empty big-top for a single performer. Her high windows end in arches. Her mulch is fresh and bright. She stands a head shorter than I, carefully slim and lotion-sheened with her head wrapped in the absence of a wig. We have those in common. At the threshold she leans for a kiss and says, “I’m glad you could be here, cheri. They’ll be so happy to see you.”

I realize my father may already be in town, that he may have caught a ride here with Juneau and the others. Her face changes when she sees the dread on mine.

“Is he here?” I ask.

“O,” she says in her throat, a deep Haitian sound meaning don’t be like that. “Where else would he be?”

The clockwork of her house stutters as I slot back into it. The walls are more crowded now, barnacled with the usual photos—of me and Juneau, our cousins and uncles, our mother, our mother, our mother—as well as snapshots from the first almost-year of Fabienne’s life. A pregnant Vanessa at a shower I skipped. A hospital room, a baptism. I tug my shirt low, self-conscious in front of so many faces that don’t know what it is to see me through smoke and light, or brush money across Luz Divinity’s bare navel. All my bolder selves wait in a wardrobe far away. We pass a TV where a preacher sweats the Holy Spirit like a toxin, and when the dining table comes into view, it’s clear we’ve been carefully arranged. Facing me, Juneau and Vanessa make up my mother’s right hand; at the other end, Fabienne in a high chair. At my mother’s left there’s just one empty seat—between her and my father, who sits with his back to me. I wonder if God finds as much joy in poising asteroids to collide.

Juneau sees me first, shouting, “Look who it is!”

Vanessa pauses to look in the middle of feeding Fabienne, who strains toward the spoon with her mouth open wide. My father’s greying hair is gelled into threads that taper like contrails across the globe of his skull. I give him a quick hello he might hear or doesn’t. My mother sets a sweaty, microwaved plate in front of me, and I decide I’m going to make it through this dry Boston Market rotisserie without looking at him once. He speaks when she prompts him to—“Gaston, what were you saying about your neighbor’s dog?”—but interacting with us is as alien a reflex to him as walking in heels, or keeping a promise. My brother listens, rapt, our mother’s influence clear, and Vanessa—Vanessa who comments on my live streams when I try out new cosmetics, and sends me memes from Drag Race—Vanessa looks at me like with practiced patience, letting me know I’m seen. “Nou lèd, nou la,” goes the old Haitian phrase. We’re ugly, but we’re here.

I’m short with my mother’s small talk. So many things we aren’t bringing up, and we all know what they are, just like we all knew the mistress’s name, and when they married, and when she died, without a word said aloud in this house. She rubs her wrists like they pain her, but her smile never breaks.

Juneau leads me down pressure-washed sidewalks after lunch to “digest” in the blazing heat. He’s in a polo and cruise shorts. His cologne smells expensive, getting stronger as he sweats. He apologizes again for the short notice, but not the change of plans; he asks about my shows, then corrects himself: “Sorry. Gigs.” I join my thumb and pointer and make a face like Nailed it.

“You should come see me sometime,” I tell him. “I could get you in.” He’s quiet too long, so I voice his thoughts. “Yeah. The baby.”

The excuse has a hell of a shelf life. A heat rash prickles on my forearms, the backs of my knees.

“Maybe if Dad keeps helping out,” Juneau says. “He’s stepped up so much since she was born. He’s over, like, every weekend. He wants her to call him Grandpapá.”

“That’s cute.”

“He’s thinking of moving closer.”

I check my words like produce. Each one has a bruise, so I put them all back.

“He doesn’t need all that space since Mathilde passed away, and I think being around Fabienne has really helped him. I feel like he’s starting fresh, you know?”

It shouldn’t be this painful—diverging, having lives. As boys we’d never needed separate ones, not until I started high school and left him a grade behind, on a different campus; the year I met Rodney, who let me share one of his headphones on the bus rides home. That was the year M.I.A. put gunshots on the radio, the crank of cash registers, the word murder. Luz Divinity used to perform to that song around Orlando, until the real shots rang out this past June and she had to retire it. The sharing led to leaning, that to touching: bare arms, pinkies straining to meet across the green vinyl bench. I walked these same perfect sidewalks with Rodney when a cold snap stunned the iguanas out of the trees, heavy and petrified around our stop, and he enlisted me to rescue the ones that had tumbled past the gutters.

“We gotta get these things off the road,” he’d said, claiming to have seen one burst under a tire.

He cupped the nearest lizard’s belly with one hand and waddled into the grass, arms straight out. He lowered it slow. I copied him all the way up the street, away from our houses, until we reached a small park with a playground. We shared our first kisses in the deserted public restroom. His lips touched my face, my eyelids, my neck, and when at last he reached for me with one cold hand, he paused.

“You’re cut,” he said.

Cut? There was no pain; was I bleeding?

Rodney pulled his hand from my waistband and lowered his own, zipper blooming open. His was unlike my own, unlike my brother’s. When I touched it, the sensation was foreign.

“Godly men are cut,” my mother explained when I figured out how to ask without details, citing diagrams and textbook pages. “Otherwise you’re dirty, and He despises filth.”

That night, my skin lifted away wherever Rodney’s lips had touched, hot with shame over a thing done in the dark, on floors tacky with urine. Filth after all. Juneau watched upside-down from his bunk as I crumpled up the translucent heartbreak that fell from my face, a petal just like our mother’s. I wanted to tell him what happened, why it hurt, who I was, really, now that his life no longer paralleled mine. It would’ve been the first time I’d had to catch him up on anything. I wanted to know how he’d feel if I told him about the first bits of us our mother ever claimed and then discarded. I never asked.

“I miss the iguanas,” I say aloud. I can still feel their skin, bumpy and tight over nothing but muscle.

“I don’t know,” Juneau replies. “I heard they’re invasive.”

I scratch at the inside of my elbow. A crescent of sweat and lotion and grime gathers under my fingernail and I flick it away. We take the narrow sidewalk home, performing proximity, careening apart.

We cool off until dinner, scattered. Juneau sits with our father on the sofa the old man picked out before cheating. The TV airs a block of televangelists—Meyer, Osteen, Jakes. Fabienne is asleep in the bedroom directly over their heads, cushioned like an idol and surveilled by my mother’s faceless foam wig heads. In the kitchen my mother lays chicken thighs into an oiled caldero with a sound like applause, searing them for an elaborate paella, and when Vanessa comes down from settling Fabienne I take the shrimp duty my mother tries to place on her. Peel and devein. The act of flaying comes naturally to my hand.

Vanessa sits nearby at the kitchen bar-top, flapping her shirt to generate wind. A flush hugs her under-eyes. She is blue-eyed and fair, white-passing if not for the Miami on her voice. One dinner, when Juneau was still courting, I found out Vanessa was hiding a shrimp allergy to make our mother happy. “How long you gonna tell that lie?” I asked her then.

“I got Benadryl,” she’d said. “If it was worse I would say something. Or move to a different city like some people.” She winked. I stuck out my tongue. Tonight, I’m sure, she’ll take a pill before eating. The concession hurts to see, when in the early days she arrived as someone I could look at and know I wasn’t crazy. She’s still that, thank God, but she’s done her assimilating. Now Vanessa may as well come clean about her allergy. My mother would praise her and nothing would change. A woman who accommodates; that’s this family’s way.

My mother measures out scoops of dry yellow rice and fills the caldero with stock. She asks for the shrimp just as I set the last one down, but when I carry the bowl to the stove she frowns.

“You took off the tails?” she says. “The tails add flavor.”

“Aren’t they easier to eat this way?” I say, but she shakes her head.

“Just put them in. Here,” she says, lifting the pot lid, and when she stands back to make room for me, the hot water gathered on the lid runs and spills across her bare arm, scalding her. She screams. The lid drops to the counter, spinning on its knoblike handle as she hurries to the sink to run her arm under cool water. It’s so unlike her, this mistake—she’s heavier in space like this, distressed, and everyone in the house rolls toward the heightened gravity of my mother in pain, wondering what happened.

She turns to dry herself and catches me gawking, pausing her refrain of “It’s nothing, it’s alright” to say, “What are you doing? Put those in!” I realize I’m still holding the bowl of shrimp half-tipped over the pot.

As we eat, I see toothpaste smeared over the burn. When the shrimp turn up in the rice, swollen and tender, I find them hard to swallow.

That night the shower is startling white, a camera flash. My own darkness is bold against it. Juneau and I shared this tub as boys, plastering hair from our combs to the walls to keep it out of the drain.

Across the landing from the bathroom, my mother’s room is sealed, double doors with ornate handles that curl away from each other like the halves of a mustache. I once watched through a crack as she applied lotion to her long, smooth legs—a floral cream with glitter in it, one she usually wore to the beach. I coveted it. My own lotions were thick, medicated and scentless, extra-strength and boring. My mother’s glitter lotion spread smooth and cool onto my own legs, and when she caught its sparkle on me in the daylight the beating made that heartbreak slip from both my legs like hose, see-through and delicate. It was the last time I entered her room. I wonder if she still uses that brand. I place one foot toward those doors and hear her footsteps approach.

I leap back into the bathroom and flip the light back on so I can flip it off again and walk out as she appears on the steps. I try to look as though I hadn’t just been considering what I’d been considering.

My mother smiles, the stairs crackling beneath her like ice in warm water. She depresses one half of the golden mustache and says, “Breakfast early. No sleeping in.” I nod my goodnight. We retreat backwards into our rooms, little automatons in a cuckoo clock. In the morning we’ll pop out on our tracks and dance.

In the dark, my old room is unsure how to hold me, so used to containing a boy and then nothing at all. Slipping into these sheets as a man feels like pulling on used socks. She’s cleared out the old bunk, replaced it with an elliptical and a single twin bed. The sounds of shouted ministry tumble down the hall from her bedside radio. I think about sleeping, but the ceiling is too far away without my brother’s weight sagging in the absent top bunk, and years of drag have put my own clockwork behind. I border on nocturnal. I think back to the last night’s final fog-machined minutes and miss them already—the wig, the cover of night, the jewels in my eyes. Here I am bald and shrunken, a burrowing thing blinking in the sun.

What I wish for is company; that I could be in my brother’s apartment, occupying the spaces my father stole from me, or else that Juneau were here, now, so I could run off with his child while he sleeps, the child he is about to raise like us.

I check my hookup apps, put them away, open them again. I shuffle skin like playing cards. There’s a face I keep returning to, have returned to every time I’ve orbited home throughout the years. The face is fuller now, the jaw more sure; a bar piercing bisects one eyebrow, half-hidden by hair styled into twists he didn’t have before. But there’s enough there, beneath the layers of age, and his profile puts him at just the right age. I send the man a message:

What are you listening to these days?

Slats of moonlight rove across my lap as I wait. The linens smell of storage. I open the closet for an extra blanket and find the pair of towels Juneau and I used in our bathtub days, the baby kind with hoods.

I’ve accepted silence as rejection by the time the snoring begins. My mother’s breath fills the house with an honest kind of ugliness, a truth in the ragged pull of her sinuses. The unconscious body doesn’t lie. I’m comforted by it, can even imagine falling asleep to it despite the itch of the bedsheets under my shoulder blades, but a message has just buzzed under my pillow. I squint at the screen, mole-like again, cupping a star in the dark.

Spare headphone for you, he’s written. Come find out.

I’m out the door before I know it. I drive to the pinned address. A phantom trail of stunned iguanas guides my way forward through the night.

When I arrive, Rodney does the expected thing. He says how long it’s been. He wonders why I’m back.

“A baby?” He breathes a long phew, says we’re old. “Good for him. How’s the scene in Orlando?”

I think of Luz Divinity, striding around the downtown in heels that put her six inches higher than me at all times. Her hair catching wind, her lashes glued on, her hips padded with foam cutlets that fill her out every time she mounts a stage. It feels like a betrayal to speak of her here, to a neighborhood that doesn’t want her. When I answer, it’s muffled through my mother’s palm. “It’s hard to say. I’m not really part of it.”

He smiles weirdly. “Okay, well, you’re totally lying. I’ve seen you perform.”

I sit up straight. We’re in his bedroom, dark save a blue neon sign of an astronaut. “You have?”

“I visit some buddies there sometimes,” he says. “I was pretty sure I saw you dancing to ‘Paper Planes’ from the sidewalk last summer, but then I saw you again in October and knew it for sure. On that parade float.”

I’m not prepared to remember this—that particular Pride, the vigil, the names read aloud, the forty-nine lanterns loosed over Lake Eola in the heart of downtown. I’m not prepared to remember how Juneau and Vanessa blew up my phone the night it happened, wondering where I was, while my mother never offered me a word of condolence past “See? How this thing that you do is so dangerous?” I’m not prepared for any of it, so I make a joke that doesn’t land. “Did you tip?”

“The last time I touched you, we never spoke again.”

“That was my mom.”

“Is it different now? There’s no one here but us.”

The astronaut drifts, and I join it. I wonder if that’s true. More than her hand over my mouth, I feel her face behind my skin, her bones beneath my muscles. Like it or not, I’ve learned more than I thought about lying as preservation.

Memories curve before me like space across a visor, scenes from a service on marriage that left me itchy and raw, my arms raked with white ash that I had to beat from my trousers and the seat around me. After, in traffic, Juneau listened to music in the backseat while I twitched in the passenger. “I hope you listened today,” she said. “I talked to Pastor about you. He told me we must pray.” When we made it home she sent Juneau inside and led me in the sign of the cross. My right hand cycled again and again to my face, heart, shoulders, and with each plea for my purity the heartbreak loosened and loosened and detached, a long, empty glove. She threw it out the window. It flailed down the street. I hid myself better after that. Just until I could leave.

I look at Rodney and see my face reflected twice, dim blue Neptunes in the night of his eyes.

I lean forward in answer to his question and feel my mother pass through the back of me. We are a moment of impact, comet and crater. When he lays me back, his sheets are cool and smell like him, and when I draw him into me it’s like I’m a creature with suddenly twice as much flesh. This time, when he kisses me, it’s as though he smooths down the parts that would otherwise lift away, sealing me up.

He bites my earlobe. “Louis,” he says, pronouncing the s, and it almost sounds like Luz.

The morning of the party I overcompensate, awake so early that dawn is not light but color. Red hovers low like a heavy gas. Shaking off odd dreams—iguanas eating their own molts—I sneak my makeup into the bathroom.

I find her at the kitchen sink, lit dimly by the light of the vent hood over the stove. Her wig is a sleek bob, parted down the middle, and she lifts a mug from the drying rack as I approach. Coffee growls into a glass carafe. I watch her notice my face: the yolk-colored eyeshadow I’ve matched to my shirt, the highlight spread delicately atop my cheekbones. She arranges her face the way some people balance rocks. “Eat something quick and come around back,” she says. “I’m cleaning the pool.”

A vacuum wanders the floor of her very leafy pool, dragging its ribbed tubing along the surface of the water. I lift a long-handled net from a hook while she beats leaves and seed casings from the hard cushions of her patio furniture. The debris clatters to her feet. The smell of chlorine wafts up as I disturb the water’s surface. I can tell I’ve unsettled her because she’s absolutely silent. She was always happiest in the sun with us. Juneau and I spent whole summers in this pool, cupping bees out of the filter currents and evacuating our lungs to sink like stones, our skin toasting and deepening while our mother sang worship through her grill-scraping, her hedge-trimming. I know she looks at the water now and imagines me as she made me, the prayer-peeled boy she’d sworn she sent to college with the Spirit in his heart, until he began posting photos as Luz. I wish I could offer her that version of me now—a husk of uninhabited flesh, the full-body heartbreak I shed at eighteen, for her to display on a wall or across the back of her sofa, the mouth of my pelt wide and dark.

My mother and I sweep pavers and straighten tiki torches until the front doorbell chimes through a speaker box by the bar.

I move toward the house but she holds up a hand. “Let me get it. Just go wash that off, yes?”

She shuts the sliding door behind her. My reflection wobbles in the glass.

Rose gold balloons shaped like number ones gather on the ceiling. Streamers climb the pillars in the sitting room, curtaining the sliding glass doors to the pool. There’s metallic confetti on the long dining table where the finger foods wait under cling-wrap. A wide space stays open for the cake. Guests pour in steadily—sunsoaked Kendall beauties from Juneau’s college years and weary pairs of parents and their babies from Vanessa’s mommy-and-me roster; a gaggle of my mother’s bible study ladies introducing each other as deaconess, prophetess, shepherdess, their titles flashing like grilles in their mouths. The kids and cousins run about in water-wings with sunscreen noses.

My mother asks me to pick up the cake, most likely to remove me from view. When I find my car boxed in, Juneau tosses me his keys and says, “Why don’t you take Pop?”

The maneuver is obvious, intentional. She moves beneath his features like a roach under a rug.

Our father is already standing and half the party’s in earshot. I can’t refuse without a scene. He follows me to the door.

The flat palm of the sun is hot on my thighs on the way to the bakery. The heat here has weight. My father’s guayabera and khaki pants blend with the upholstery. Beside his, my outfit is loud—short trunks and bright linen. Mathilde was like him the few times I saw her, plain, unadorned. She was someone the aunties would look at and say, “He left you for that? Huh,” and my mother would say “Now …” in amused alarm, but her face would betray her agreement. She found Mathilde homely, Mathilde who slept late and wore no makeup and hardly kept her house, and if I know my mother there could be nothing more galling than being usurped by someone so low-effort. And suddenly, their differences so front of mind, my father looks so small, so nonthreatening. I don’t see a homewrecker or a deadbeat, a man who leaves his family chasing tail. I see a man who has grieved, still wearing his second wedding ring, still paying for the life that better suited him. I see a man my mother has lied about to preserve her curated reality, and it’s such a cliché I’m actually embarrassed when I realize: she’s mounted a pelt of him, too. We are the same.

The silence between us is fraught. We’re like tuning forks, suspensefully unstruck. We make it nearly all the way to the bakery before I say something I think I’d want to hear, if I were him. “I’m sorry about Mathilde. I wish I’d gotten to know her better.”

He turns. “You do?”

Challenged, I take a moment to see if I mean it, and I do. “Juneau said you’ve been spending a lot of time with them. With the baby. It sounded like that might be because of what happened.”

Brow furrowed, he stares at the dash. I worry I’ve misstepped. He doesn’t speak as I park, and inside the bakery we wait at a glass display filled with guava pastelitos, ham croquettes, finger sandwiches layered with a pink paste. It’s too cold in here to be wearing so little. The mermaid on Fabienne’s cake is lumpy when it comes to the front, her Rice Krispies arms and luster-dust scales looking sweaty, and the name is misspelled Fabiana. We ask for the name at least to be fixed. The attendant snaps her gum at us and takes it back.

“It’s not just because of Mathilde,” my father says at last. “I’m a better grandpa than dad.”

“‘Grandpapá,’” I remember. “Juneau called it a fresh start.”

My father laughs, eyes closed, head shaking. “He’s very sentimental.”

“A miracle, considering,” I say through the side of my mouth—like I would to Vanessa, I realize, because my father’s just said something she would’ve said, and it’s startling to speak so candidly.

“Edwidge feels, she just hides. Her mom was hard too. Your mom stepped out of her whole skin the morning we left Haiti, and Mémère didn’t shed a tear. Not through the whole coup or anything after.” He considers this. “Not anywhere we could see, anyway.”

Bells clang as a customer enters and exits with a gummy-looking racecar cake. I wonder what secret molting she’s done, over her country, or her marriage, or me, or the perceived “dangers” of existing as I do when she’s worked so hard to assimilate. For everything she’ll never ask me are the things I’ve never asked her, our alien griefs and histories, the orbits that won’t cross. Against my will, I get it. I don’t know if we will change.

The mermaid cake returns, touched up. I hold doors for my father and help him ease down into the passenger seat, bearing the cake while he buckles in. I crank the A/C to preserve the frosting.

I take it slow on the way out of the plaza, both for the cake and the iguanas sunning on the cracked asphalt. He holds the cake out steady like it’s Fabienne herself, like both their lives depend on it. In the driveway I lower my visor and check my face, blotting sweat with fast food napkins and apologizing for the delay as I refresh the balm on my lips. He’s pinned down by the cake, unhurried. He says, “You look nice.”

As we gather to sing, my mother hands me her camera so I won’t be in the pictures. The first one I take is a selfie with everyone behind me. We hack up the mermaid and chew her fondant fins.

Outside, Juneau bounces Fabienne by the pool, who cried at the cheers and applause. She cranes unsteadily sunward in his arms like a plant, her head a bulb on a stem.

I take her from his arms and insist he eat cake before it’s gone. At the edge of the pool with Fabienne on my knee, water lapping my calves, her hair smells of chlorine, baby oil, the inside of a hat. I lay the length of my nose against her head and speak into her ear about the water, the leaves that fall in and why. I tell her about the anoles and their wild red throats. I ask her if she likes her party. I tell her what shade I have caked on my eyelids, and that one day Luz Divinity will have more wigs than Grandma, and she’ll have to come north and meet her drag auntie. I tell her how easy it is, in this place, to be scorched. She grasps my forefinger with her perfect little hand. Her skin is impossibly new, her arms fat, squeezable rolls of smooth brown. I direct a prayer at no one at all that her first heartbreaks molt off of her easily, and not for a very long time.

I feel her bottom warm against my arm and carry her inside for a change. “Her things are in Mom’s room,” Juneau says around his cake. “I can send Vanessa.”

Behind him, Vanessa makes a face, so I say, “I’ve got it.”

Past the golden mustache handles, the boudoir is empty. Party sounds seep through the floor. I fumble the change a bit, hiding my trial-and-error from the foam heads lining the dresser at my back. Fabienne is patient with me, gazing at the pink walls, the eighties-chic watercolor abstracts, the bowls full of shells or jewelry or fragrant potpourri. Used diaper in hand, bundled tight, I toe the lever on the tall bin in my mother’s private restroom and pause. Spirals of empty, crumpled arms and fingers and faces, hollow and sheer as wrapping tissue. The topmost limb is smeared with dry toothpaste where it would have been scalded last night. The shed skins inside could be my mother two or three times over. I let the slam-proof lid lower slowly over her heartbreaks and lift Fabienne from the bed.

I spot my mother alone when I drop the diaper into the kitchen trash. She’s different here, believing herself unobserved. For once she’s not performing. She recovers at the sight of the baby, reaching out with fresh arms free of burns, but for a second she looks so exhausted.

Editor: Dante Luiz

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors