BLUE REFRAIN by Ashley Wurzbacher

The baby was going to have his own room. Jess had decided it. He was going to have a space of his own, freshly painted just for him, like we never had. Maybe then, she said, he would sense that the world was willing to clear a space for him, and feel welcome here. Maybe then he would cry less. Maybe if we had started life in freshly-painted rooms – Jess, me, our mother – we would have turned out different.
And since our grandmother’s grip on us was loosening with her old age, her waning memory, and the fear that came with them, she did not argue with Jess. After our daily Bible hour – which our grandmother still made us take, even after she gave up on homeschooling us and sent us to public school, even after the baby was born, even after she picked up my Bible one day and found it full of caricatures of herself with an over-stern expression and a lasso in her hand, a halo of lightning and wings of fire – she let Jess and me take the truck to Home Depot to choose a paint color and buy brushes, rollers, masking tape, and primer. Sitting at the kitchen table, with its dents and its coffee rings, she tore a blank check from her checkbook and handed it to me.
“Only what you need,” she said, and gave me a trusting look, as if this was a momentous occasion. And maybe it was. What little money she had she kept hidden in a used cinnamon shaker with a peeling wrapper in the back of the kitchen cupboard, where Jess had been stealing from her for years, just a dollar or two at a time which she transferred to her cinnamon-scented underwear drawer and eventually spent on cheap chardonnay and jeans with holes in the knees.
In stores Jess was always obnoxious, acting like she had money, like she could have whatever she wanted. She pulled things off shelves, held them for a while and examined them, reading instructions or warnings or product descriptions for items she did not need. She placed them in the shopping cart, pushed them around for a while, then put them back on other shelves a few aisles away, acting like she’d changed her mind. Like they were no longer good enough for her. I followed her around picking up discarded things and putting them back where they belonged: boxes of light bulbs, door knobs, padlocks, garden hoes.
Living with you, Jessica, my grandmother sometimes told her, is like trying to clean up after a storm that never ends.
When we reached the display of paint swatches, Jess stood on one side and I stood on the other. On the radio that old song was playing, Teach your children well. It echoed a little in the huge box building with its high ceilings.
“You pick five and I’ll pick five,” she said from behind the swatches. “Then we’ll put them together and see whose are better.”
So I scanned the rows of colors, looking for something mellow. I could hear Jess singing along with the radio and shuffling through the swatches on the other side of the display. She always had to touch everything.
“Hm hm hm hmmmm hy,” she hummed under her breath, “and feed . . . them onion rings . . . “
I covered my mouth to keep from laughing.
“I love this song,” Jess said. “It’s so funny, you know?”
I couldn’t help myself. “Jess, that’s not what they’re saying at all.”
“Well, what are they saying, then?”
“I think it’s, ‘Feed them on your dreams.’”
Now Jess laughed. “Please,” she said. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
She kept shuffling through the swatches. After a while, she said loudly, sounding pleased with herself, “Nannah will hate these colors.” She spun around the edge of the display and held them out, harsh colors called things like Flamenco, Forceful Orange, Jalapeño, Impulsive Purple.
“They’re too bright,” I said. “He’s four months old. They’ll scare him.”
I handed my swatches to Jess: Skylark, Bahama Bay, Soft Cotton, Blue Refrain. She glanced at them only briefly, said, “Those are nice,” and patted my shoulder. She spoke to me as if I had tried very hard at something and failed, as if she needed to console me. I stuffed the swatches into my pocket.
No one was surprised when, after the baby came a few months into her senior year, Jess stopped attending high school. Everyone had always known I was smarter than her: she knew it, and our grandparents knew it, and our teachers, and the ladies at church. But sometimes I wanted to be like her so badly that I could not breathe. And Jess knew that, too.

* * *

For years, our grandmother could not sleep in an empty room. We lived in a house with three bedrooms, but after my grandfather’s death when I was eight and Jess was nine and a half, she made us all sleep in the same room while the other ones sat empty. For years we went to bed at the same time she did, while it was still a little light outside, unless we could convince her we needed to stay up doing homework or reading the Bible. We slept in narrow beds with their heads pushed against the wall in a row, just inches from each other, so that we had to climb in and out from the foot of the bed. We slept with the ceiling fan running and a box fan buzzing in the corner to muffle the sounds of the world outside. Everything hummed and vibrated – my grandmother’s chest rising and falling under her faded quilt, the snag of her breaths in her throat, her snoring like a motor always revving and never starting. The cat chasing the shadows of the spinning fan blades, swatting at them with absurd determination as they flashed and quivered. The click of the sheer curtains flapping against the window blinds. The sense of being enclosed in something about to take off. Jess and I would lay there in the darkening room, not speaking but always aware of each other, Jess silently mocking our grandmother’s snoring, exaggerating, rolling her eyes back into her head and thrashing. She was not afraid to sneak out, and when we got older, it was during these hours that she would slip past our grandmother and out the door, knowing exactly where to step so as not to make the floor creak, carrying her shoes under her arm. Jess found her power in the curves of her body, the flash of skin at her midsection, and knowing this filled me with a jagged mix of shame and envy that scraped at the inside of my chest. She never invited me to come along, me with my knotty orange hair and upturned nose and good grades, and I never snuck out on my own. But I kept a pad of paper under the bed which I would sometimes sketch in, in that room where everything was shades of gray, like we were living in the static between stations.
I was going to be a cartoonist. I was going to go to New York, L.A., or Florida and live by the ocean and make lots of money. I had begun to collect college applications, forms I picked up from teachers or the school guidance counselor and stored between the pages of the sketchbook under my bed. I filled them in slowly, sometimes one word or even a single letter a day, while my grandmother slept and Jess drank and kissed and was kissed back. I would stare at the blank lines and boxes on the applications, print a letter or two, and then, feeling sick with nerves and the terror of possibility, stash them away again.
Those nights, while Jess was gone, I sketched by the light sneaking in from between the window blinds in stripes. I drew cityscapes and ocean views, busy streets, crashing waves. I drew strangers with stripes across their faces, the striped silhouette of the mountains on the horizon, blue from the hour and the distance, that I could just make out through the barely-open blinds and whose curves I sometimes erased and reformed into profiles of skyscrapers against a backdrop of stars. And after I stopped drawing and put the pad away, I still saw stripes when I closed my eyes.

* * *

Much to my surprise, Jess chose my paint color, Blue Refrain. Once we had peeled the old discolored paper from the walls of the baby’s room and layered them with primer, she hauled a bucket of it into the room while the baby slept downstairs, dropped it with a sharp thud on some newspaper she’d spread on the floor, and handed me a roll of masking tape.
“Put this at the edge of the windowsills and along the baseboards,” she commanded. Then she rolled up her sleeves, tucked her hair behind her ears, and cracked open the window.
She dressed the same for every occasion, and this one was no exception: too-tight, too-low jeans, plastic flip flops in the summer, boots lined with fake fur in the winter, low-cut tank top with a zip-up hoodie, fake leather belt with big holes. None of these looked the same since she had the baby, but she wore them anyway, defiantly. She dyed her own hair and never quite got the roots. Everyone was always looking at her.
She had been born stiff-muscled, unable to sleep, and addicted to meth. And I had followed sixteen months later, much too tiny, with smoke in my lungs. Our grandparents adopted us. We had different fathers and the same mother, who we saw a few times a year and called by her first name, Terry, short for Theresa. She said little to us and looked at us like we were aliens, and looked like one herself. Maybe it was because of this that, for me at least, our painting Jess’s son’s room felt so important. Because he was healthy and going to have a space of his own.
Downstairs I could hear my grandmother in the kitchen, the scrape of the oven door opening and closing, the voices of local news anchors blaring from the TV. After a while she shuffled upstairs and began running a bath.
“Listen for the baby, now,” she called to us.
“You listen, Maggie,” Jess ordered from across the room. “You’re closer.” I was lining the doorframe with tape; Jess was sitting on the floor. She had pried open the bucket of paint and was stirring it with a broken clothes hanger, studying it thoughtfully, as if it were speaking to her.
I heard birds outside, a motor starting up somewhere in the distance. From the open window I smelled pine and exhaust and the earthy smell of damp soil and melting snow, a smell that has always, for some reason, made me hungry. From time to time I peered over my shoulder and watched Jess stirring the paint, sitting in a sunbeam, leftover weight from her pregnancy bulging at the waistline of her jeans. I could see the dust in the air that floated around her and looked in the light like flecks of gold.
The baby began to cry. Jess didn’t get up. I started down the hall but made it only as far as the bathroom; the door was open, water creeping over the tile and across the threshold into the hallway, spreading over the worn hardwood floor.
She had left the water running again. Again, she had forgotten she turned on the tap. Things were always overflowing, lately – sometimes the kitchen sink, sometimes the tub, sometimes a pot of water boiling on the stove. I tiptoed through the water in my socks and turned off the tap, grabbed two towels from the closet and threw them on the floor.
“Nannah!” I called. The baby went on crying. “Nannah!”
When she arrived, grey and stern in the hallway with a ratty dish towel over her shoulder and the baby in her arms, she looked down at the water.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my.”
She passed me the baby, her hands shaking a little. I smelled cinnamon in her movements and on the baby’s clothes. She watched the water soak the towels I’d thrown on the tile.
I left her alone, knowing if I hung around she’d snap at me, her way of hiding her shame. I carried the baby down the hall, holding him out in front of me with my elbows locked as if he might bite or strike me. Nannah scolded me for holding him this way, but I couldn’t help it, what with his smells, his noises. He dangled from my hands and I tried to smile at him while thinking how he seemed weirdly bottom-heavy, like a sack of flour, with all his weight seeming to gather in his warm, puffy diaper.
I carried him into his room, where Jess sat writing her name in blue on the comics page.

* * *

For our grandmother’s sake, I was getting in the habit of repeating things. And I had begun pretending to forget things myself, to make it seem more normal. I would leave the forks in the drawer when setting the table, and then, when we all sat down to dinner, hop up and make a show of retrieving them. If Nannah saw through my acts, she didn’t say so, and I would like to think they reassured her – we were all missing things.
Nannah remembered being young and glamorous, when there’d been bright lights downtown and she had walked from theater to theater with a mink around her neck and heels that made a noise like applause on the pavement wherever she stepped. And when the sun set in the evenings it left behind a crust of copper everywhere it had touched, and when the ground froze in the winter, it frosted silver, silver you could scoop up with a shovel. Or so she said. Whether or not these memories were true, I thought, was not the point – what mattered was that she remembered the feeling behind them.
She remembered being a child, playing on tailing piles, fingertips stained from mine waste where she’d dug with bare hands in the silt, not thinking about chemicals, not caring about consequences. She remembered the time she’d decided to drive east to Miles City to visit a high school friend who’d moved there, and had set out on the interstate and made it as far as Custer before she had to turn around, she felt so exposed so far from home, so naked out where the landscape flattened and she could no longer see – or feel – our mountains on the horizon. And she had turned the car around and phoned her friend from a booth in Bozeman, tucked safely among the mountains again, no longer vulnerable, no longer afraid. She remembered Terry’s birth, her first day of school, and – I assume – how it felt to lose her. She remembered the construction of the Our Lady of the Rockies statue on the East Ridge, how she had watched the marble fly overhead in chunks on its way to the cliff, dangling from a helicopter, one piece at a time – first, the Madonna’s feet, and finally, her head, sixteen feet high and ten feet wide with its eyes downturned, watching us. The head had flown over our house on its way to the ridge when I was a brand new baby and Jess a girl just learning to speak. And Nannah had stood in the yard pinning clean sheets to the line to dry, holding Jess’s hand and staring into the sun. Even as the propellers whirled and the helicopter buzzed, she said, and Jess clapped her hands to her ears and began to scream, it had seemed like a miracle.
Our grandmother remembered all these things, and she was at her best when she told them to us, usually in the evenings over dinner, right after she said her prayers. But, lately, she did not remember that she’d put the chicken in the oven, whether or not she’d put the sugar in the cookie dough, or what time Mass began. And we began to find knitting needles in the silverware drawer, the coffee charred and black in the bottom of the pot, and notes around the house scribbled on the backs of old receipts. She had begun leaving her own little path of destruction in her wake.
Living with you, Nannah, Jess told her one day during a fight, is like –
But Nannah swatted at Jess’s head and told her to remember her place. She was always swatting at us. She meant well, I would come to understand. She just didn’t know what to do with us. For a long time, her love was a thing I believed in blindly, hopefully, without hard proof, the way I believed in God. But I found little signs of it scattered around, which I collected, like flat, smooth stones on the shore of a lake slipped into a pocket for skipping.
When we were young we would beg her to take us places, let us do things, and every now and then, on a rare day, she would relent. One day shortly after our grandfather’s death she told us if we could be quiet for three days in a row she’d take us to the hot springs and let us swim. She prepared for the trip for three days, though it was only a half-hour drive to the pools. She bought Jess a new swimsuit (I had to wear Jess’s old one, faded from the sun and pilled from washing), washed the truck, bought a bag of ice at the Sinclair station, packed sandwiches and made sun tea.
That day was one of the brightest I can remember, and for years afterward I would feel it inside me still treading water, defying time – Jess poking at my ribs, telling me to open my eyes underwater, not to be afraid; the sting in my eyes when I finally opened them and saw her through the blue, her eyes bloodshot and her hair floating up around her face; how she seemed released from gravity, celestial. She reached for my hands under the water and took them and we swam in circles, kicking together, and I could hear the muted sound of our kicking from underwater, a noise like distant thunder, and we surfaced to breathe together. Nannah sat in a chair by the pool with her feet propped and her face in the shade of my grandfather’s wide-brimmed fishing hat, waving to us, her shoulders, for once, relaxed. I tore the seat of my swimsuit on a bolt in the tube of the waterslide and had to run up and down ladders and between pools clutching the shabby fabric in my fist, holding closed the tear.
On the way home we opened all the windows in the truck and let in a dry wind that carried hints of smoke from a distant forest fire. Nannah drove fast, and in the narrow back seat behind her Jess peeled her damp swimsuit from her skin and waved it out the window, laughing, while I did the same, laughing, and even Nannah was laughing, and we watched the sleek neon-colored fabric ripple and twist in the wind while our bare thighs stuck to the seats and the sun shot through the open windows and burned our Irish skin.
That night, though, after the sun went down, after my bath, Nannah brushed my wet hair in her usual way: with too much force, ripping at the tangles and dragging the spikes of the brush over my ear while I sat on the floor in front of her, wrapped in a stiff towel fraying at the edges. She tore at the knots as if I were an item on an assembly line, without nerves or senses, and when I complained, she whacked me with the brush, not hard, but hard enough, and told me to sit still, and reminded me I was lucky. She was fond of telling us how lucky we were – to be alive, to have a roof over our heads, to have someone to take care of us.
But we were mistakes, chemical reactions, here by accident. And though Nannah never said so, that was one thing we never forgot.

* * *

“I love him, you know,” Jess said, rolling blue paint in an aluminum tray.
“Who?”
She gave me her angry-sigh and pointed the roller in the baby’s direction. “Him,” she said. “Who else?”
“Never said you didn’t.”
“You’ve been thinking it,” she said. “I can tell.”
“Have not!”
“Fine.”
She picked up the roller and began dragging it in a wavy pattern across a windowless wall, then across the other three walls, stepping over me when she passed me lying on my stomach with a brush, painting along the baseboards. A magpie landed on the windowsill. Over the next few days, Jess painted layer after layer like this, in waves, in words. She wrote things in blue on the blue wall, then painted over them again with neat strokes of the roller, burying them. She got paint in her hair and on her clothes. She bought another bucket of blue and buried everything again.
She left blue fingerprints on things, the hot and cold taps in the kitchen, the light switch on the wall of the baby’s room. The canvas cover of my sketchbook. Alone after an evening of painting with Jess, I pulled the book from its hiding place and found a faint blue mark on its edge, along with evidence of Jess’s efforts to wash it away – a streak of dried soap, the top pages warped and slightly water-damaged where Jess must have scrubbed at the cover.
So she knew. She knew everything.
The applications were in place between the sketchbook’s heavy pages, and I pulled one out. There were the numbers of my birth date and my address, my name only partially filled in: M, A. They seemed suddenly both ridiculous and cruel, and when Jess entered the room half an hour later, I pulled the covers up high and faked sleep. I thought I felt her watching me for a long time.
I knew she wouldn’t mention what she’d seen, even despite the fingerprints she’d left behind. She had always had a laughable overconfidence in her ability to deceive, even hiding her slowly ballooning stomach under the same two bulky sweatshirts each day as she advanced through her pregnancy, as if there was nothing different about her whatsoever. But I wondered what she thought, what she’d felt when she found the applications, and how long she’d been observing the tentative progress of my words across their blank spaces.
We used up all the newspaper, painting. When the last of it was wrinkled and wet with paint splatters, I was the one who scooped it up and threw it away while Jess was out of the room, and, in its place, lined the floor with half filled-out college applications, spread face down. I could always get more, I reminded myself, from school. If Jess noticed, she didn’t acknowledge it. There was a footprint on one of them, now, where she had stepped, circling the room in her flip-flops.

* * *

Just once, I asked Jess if she remembered the spring when we tried to contact our grandfather’s ghost. She said no, but I knew she was lying.
It had been my idea: the bowl full of water on the dining room table, the flour scattered in a ring around it. I had picked it up from a CCD teacher at St. Ann’s, Mrs. Connor, with an overactive imagination, who told us about exorcisms where porcelain plates had flown out of cupboards, angels who had steered crashing cars safely back onto highways, and methods for bidding farewell to the spirits of the dead. She said to leave a bowl of water on a table overnight, say a prayer, and invite the dead person to wash their hands of this earth. And they would. They would wish you goodbye and then leave this place behind.
Mrs. Connor said somebody she knew said they’d seen it. They scattered flour on the countertop, around the bowl, and when morning came the bowl was half empty, the flour turned to dough.
I was eight then, and two months earlier on a sunny day my grandfather’s legs, and then his heart, had given out during his routine walk in the hills outside of town. Nannah found him a few hours later, among scarlet paintbrush and beargrass in an open space near the Continental Divide, with the Lady of the Rockies just visible through the trees. That was the same year three hundred migrating snow geese died in the toxic lake that had formed in the pit my grandfather had helped to dig, one slow load at a time for twenty-six years, until the mine closed shortly before I was born and groundwater began to fill it, one slow inch at a time. The geese landed in the sludge and died within a few days, their insides corroded by contaminants and streaked with burns. Their feathers were dyed red-brown from the metals and toxins that colored the water: leftover iron, copper, arsenic, zinc, and sulfuric acid, materials around which my grandfather’s days, for most of his life, had revolved, that had lined his lungs and rushed through his veins. Since then, the pit had become a tourist attraction, charging admission, and employees shouted into megaphones and fired guns to haze the birds that settled there, so that they scattered up and out of the poisoned water.
Our grandfather had never left the state, never had the slightest desire to. It was impossible to imagine him elsewhere – his way of speaking, imitating John Wayne, his chest full of chemicals he could not pronounce. His hands that bled in winter from the dry air, how he wiped the blood on his jeans until my grandmother, persistent with her jar of Vaseline, sat him down and rubbed the grease into his hands while he grumbled, unnecessary. I had wanted to say goodbye. So I told Jess about the water trick.
She said, “What are you, dumb? It’s not true.”
“But Mrs. Connor said.”
“Mrs. Connor is fat and stupid.”
But it was Jess who carried the bowl from the kitchen sink to the wooden table in the dining room, who carried the bag of flour on tiptoe while my grandmother slept and held it still while I dipped in the sifter and spread flour across the surface of the table.
And it was Jess who was most disappointed when, the next morning, the bowl sat undisturbed, the flour still loose and powdery.
“See?” she said. “Told you.” There were flour footprints where the cat had been.
“I’m sorry, Jess.”
She shook her head. “It’s okay.” She went to the table and began sweeping the powder off the edge and into her hand.
“You can’t get out of here,” she said, not looking at me, “even when you’re dead.” She went to the trash can and threw the flour away.

* * *

Jess did not stop going out with her friends after the baby was born. But she didn’t have to sneak anymore; Nannah had given up on her.
Jess’s friends were always pregnant or killing themselves. Some had kids they named things like Racer or River, and those who came back to school after the babies were born passed photos around the halls and said things like, “He has my eyes, don’t you think?” Some had died in clusters – two, high, crashed through thin ice riding four-wheelers across a frozen lake at night; two more a few months later in a car crash on I-15 – not on a curve, not high in a mountain pass, not in a rainstorm, just in the middle of a wide open flat space on a clear night when they had been drunk and bored. There were little white crosses, now, marking the place where they’d been.
When she finally finished painting, Jess changed from one hoodie to another, yanked up her jeans to hide her baby fat, pulled a bottle of wine from her dresser and drank while she waited for a friend to pick her up. Nannah had gone to bed, the baby was asleep, and I sat on the couch pulling stuffing from the holes in the fabric and halfheartedly working my way through a math problem. Jess paced around the house, dragging her feet in the way Nannah hated, and applied thick layers of eyeliner in the way Nannah hated. She was already a little drunk when she sat down next to me. She held her cup of red wine, so dark it was almost black, with both hands, and stared into it.
“Sometimes I want to smash him,” she said. She pressed her toes into the carpet while she spoke. “I want to throw him out the window. I think about bashing his head against the wall. When he cries, sometimes, I want to stuff his mouth with rocks.”
She swirled the wine in the cup. She dug her feet into the floor. She took a drink.
“I do love him, though,” she said. “I do. You know, he’s the only person who’s never hurt me, or you, or anyone else, ever, at all. Can you imagine?” She took another sip of wine. “I hurt myself, but that wasn’t his fault. Isn’t his fault. He’s so pure, still, I almost hate him for it.”
Then we heard an engine rumbling in the driveway, and she stood, wiped her eyes, and left.

* * *

The paint was drying, my grandmother was sleeping, the baby was crying. I gave him his bottle in the way Nannah had shown me, holding it up to keep out air bubbles; I bounced him in the way I’d seen her bounce him.
“Shh,” I told him. “Nannah is sleeping.” I dragged his bassinet into his new room, now that the paint was nearly dry and I had collected the paint-spattered college applications and thrown them away. It hadn’t hurt as much as I’d thought it would, at least not yet.
I carried the baby in my usual way, arms extended, his body sort of floating in front of me. “Here,” I said, setting him down. “This is your room.”
He went on crying.
“How do you like it?” I said. “I picked the color.”
He went on crying. So I hunted down the baby book one of Jess’s friends had given her, flipped through the crisp pages to the chapter “Why Is My Baby Crying?” and worked my way down the list of possibilities. When I got to number seven, teething, I went to the bathroom, washed my hands in cold water, then picked the baby up again. We stared at each other. He whimpered.
“Okay, buddy,” I said, and took a deep breath. “Here we go.”
I ran my wet, cold finger back and forth over his gums and, sure enough, felt two tiny nubs beneath the surface. “There,” I said, pink flesh sliding under my fingertip. “Feel those? Those are your teeth. Hello, teeth. Hello. Welcome to the world.”
His gums were moist and slimy.
Once my grandfather took me fishing in a place where, for many, many years, no fish could be found, the water too contaminated from tailings to support life. We walked along stream banks just beginning to revive themselves after the pollutants that had suffocated them had begun to be slowly, painstakingly removed. And, to our surprise and joy, I caught a fish. I reeled it in myself – it was not strong enough or big enough to resist – and my grandfather slid the hook from its mouth and placed it in my hands, cool and slippery like the baby’s gums. Look at that, Mags, he said. Would you look at that! After a short while he told me to throw the fish back, and I leaned over the bank while he held me by my belt loops to keep me from falling. The fish flopped out of my hands, and through the ripples in the water I watched it swim away. No one believed my grandfather when he told them about my fish. But now people caught them there all the time.
The baby had stopped crying and was looking at me with wide eyes. I took my finger out of his mouth.
“You know what?” I said. “It’s going to be okay.”
I went to my bed, pulled my sketchbook from under the mattress, and, while we waited for Jess to come home, I began to sketch the baby.
I imagined my grandmother in a rusting car driving east away from the setting sun, then, all at once, realizing she’d gone far enough and could go no farther, not on that day, and quite possibly not ever. Did the knowledge that she would – that she must – turn back come upon her gradually, like the sluggish spread of an illness, the slow plodding of her memory toward blankness? Or did it overcome her all at once, like the snapping of a slack thread pulled taut? What did she think of when she turned back, drove home with the sun in her eyes?
The baby quieted down and I judged his dimensions, transferring them to the page. He was little more than an outline, with dots where his eyes and nose and mouth would go, when Jess tripped through the front door. I heard her downstairs, proceeding with her usual post-drinking routine: open Saltine wrapper, eat Saltines on couch while watching reality TV, vomit, shuffle upstairs to bed. Sure enough, before long, I heard the toilet flush. She was in the bathroom, I knew, pale and graceless, throwing up stale Saltines and cheap red wine. It was not the first time and it would not be the last. She would crawl into bed with her hair stuck to her damp forehead. She would leave the lights on and the windows open, drawing moths in through the tears in the screen. She would slide into bed and fall asleep still dressed in her jeans and hoodie, curled in a ball with her knees to her chest, and once she was asleep I would turn out the lights downstairs, catch the moths by their papery wings, pull her shoes from her feet.
On her way to our bedroom, I called to Jess, and she came into the baby’s room, her lips stained purple and her eye makeup smeared. There was mud on the hems of her jeans, and a fresh cut streaked down one of her cheeks, red and swollen, still bleeding at the edges. I knew Nannah would ask about it in the morning.
“Jess,” I said. “Feel.” And I took her finger and pressed it against the baby’s lower gums.
She smiled a little; she said nothing, but she went and dragged a chair from another room and pulled it up beside mine. She dabbed a bit of blood from her cheek with her sleeve. She watched while I sketched the baby, his details appearing by degrees on the blank page, while we listened to the dull noise of the box fan whirring from the room where our grandmother slept alone.
In this way, he became real and familiar to us: gradually, in pieces, the way you wake disoriented with the first light of morning and then slowly reinhabit your fingers and toes, rediscover the tempo of your heartbeat and the lines of the room around you, and realize you are home.

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Ashley Wurzbacher’s stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Southeast Review, and Cold Mountain Review.