Closer Than They Appear

by Nora Esme Wagner

Nine months after shipping our daughter off to a wilderness therapy program for troubled teens, we recollect her. The time apart, a full gestation period. Rhett keeps referring to it as a “rebirth.” In the rear-view mirror, I pay attention to how Liv’s pale, blue-veined skin wraps tightly around her skull. The peanut butter and banana sandwiches I bludgeoned into cling-film, in my bag. I think about asking if she’d like one. I think about insisting she take one. I think about the soft, brown bananas in the kitchen, not right for sandwiches, but perfect for muffins, pudding, tea bread, anything she’d like, as soon as we get home. “Panda Express, next exit,” Rhett says. I try to read Liv’s expression, but when I look into the mirror again, her face is gone. There is just the orange landscape, dramatically flexing, like a yoga instructor alternating cat-cow poses. I turn my head, and there she is in the backseat. Small, delicate parcel. “OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR,” screams the mirror. A caption to nothing, because Liv’s reflection doesn’t reappear once.

The winter with Liv in Utah, us in Denver, unusually cold. Rhett and I, long walks beneath frosted birches, clutching thermoses. Feeling fascinated by the discoloration of their bark, black horizontal lines reminding me of stab wounds. Thought of Liv with red sand in her eyes, ice crystals in her tear ducts, blowing on her fingers, taking freezing bucket showers. Me, grappling with Rhett’s hand; he, tugging away, withdrawing his heat. “You’re making me cold.”

A loud whistling sound whooshes into our bedroom the first night back. I step into the hallway, open the adjacent closet door, rifle through the empty hangers slung from the rod like sleeping bats. I decide against waking up Liv, as the noise builds.

Slept in her bed. Sprayed her vanilla cardamom perfume on my body and tapped my wrists together. Didn’t rub: how to make the smell last, she said. Opened her drawers. Smoked the weed I found. Swaddled myself in her Fisherman sweaters, thick and creamy on the shelves like scoops of gelato. Strawberry, mint chip, mocha.

In the morning, I walk into the kitchen to brew Liv coffee. Honey, half-and-half, a spatter of nutmeg—how she takes it. I find the fridge’s contents strewn and smashed on the ground. A clawed milk carton, a disemboweled pomegranate, swoops of mayonnaise from the jar Rhett doesn’t believe needs to be refrigerated, but, I remind him, the eggs. Comically, a literal banana peel rests next to my foot. I don’t hear Liv approach, but there she is, legs jutting out of her running shorts like bones licked clean. Her eyes circulate around the room. “Hmm,” she says. She begins to push buttons on the espresso machine.

Liv’s letters, full of messages to deliver to Grandma, to friends Rhett calls “bad apples,” to her water polo coach. Signed off “sincerely.” No remorse or anger or affection. Rhett insistent that this demonstrates “maturity.” Convinced she was encoding words for only me to read, in urine or lemon juice, I purchased a black flashlight. In the bathroom, lights switched off, her papers glowing violet. “Sincerely” apparently intended sincerely.

When Liv was gone, I obsessively posted to a Facebook group of mothers with children in troubled teen programs. The days leading up to her homecoming, I provided frantic, gleeful commentary. Room re-painted! Possibility of graduating on time! Coach optimistic about reinstating Liv to the team! Tonight, impulsively, I update: return pushed back indefinitely </3. It doesn’t feel like a lie, with Liv gliding through the house like a specter. Rhett tosses next to me, somehow able to sleep in spite of the whistle, rising every day in pitch and intensity.

Explaining to friends that we had no other choice. Explaining to grandparents that the program was expensive, no hopes of funding it ourselves. Explaining to Rhett why I was never in the mood for sex. Explaining to Liv that I loved her sooooo much, adding another “o” every time she didn’t write it back. Explaining to an Uber driver, one drunk night, that I could feel her crouched inside of me, a nestled Russian doll. Explaining to myself, why, why, why.

I replace the troubled teen Facebook group with a forum of people who claim to be haunted. Every ghost, I learn, is seeking retribution. Some ghosts we refer to as “FD” (fully dead), while other ghosts are only “HD” (half dead). According to the forum members, Liv falls into the latter category: technically alive but fundamentally sapped. I don’t want to think of her as dead at all, even in a partial way, but they are insistent. I am told to watch out for menacing messages scrawled in lipstick, upended laundry baskets, pungent odors, drained cell phone batteries, the sensation of an ice cube slipping down my spine (that’s the ghost stepping inside of you). This doesn’t sound like Liv, I send back. Based on what you’ve said, someone responds, it seems like your daughter justifiably wants revenge.

Six days before Utah, Liv crawling through the dog door, back from a music festival we forbade her from attending, her pupils pot holes, LSD tabs in the pocket of her denim jacket, skin oily, I couldn’t get traction, Rhett unhelpful, scrunched in the corner, enacting in his head what we agreed upon as a “last resort,” to resolve the drug problem, the attitude problem, the truancy problem, the Liv problem.

Lately, I feel conscious of Liv disappearing when I’m not looking. It’s the opposite sensation of how someone’s gaze, even unseen, can exert a pressure: weightlessness. When I turn back, she sometimes still seems in the process of rematerializing. Her outline is jiggly, her veins are electric blue. But that feeling passes, passes away.

Nora Esme Wagner is a sophomore at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in JMWW, Wigleaf, Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Lost Balloon, New World Writing Quarterly, Moon City Review, 100 Word Story, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Her work has been longlisted for Wigleaf's Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Prose Editor for The Wellesley Review.