This Is How I Find Her by Sara Polsky Page A

mother just keeps shaking her head. No, no, and no.
    And for a second, just one second, I want to shake her, to lean in close to her ear and shout until she snaps out of it. Even though I know from years of watching her that her depressions aren’t the kind of thing a person can snap out of, I still want to yell. Hello, it’s me! Remember me? Your daughter? That person who lives with you and takes care of you and who you completely forgot about the other day when you decided to try to—oh yeah—kill yourself? In my head the words get louder, until I’m sure my mother can hear them somehow.
    But I hold them all in, pushing the words back behind that rusty door in my head with as much force as I can. The anger tries to batter its way out again, but I imagine myself leaning against the door hard, forcing it to stay shut. I take a deep breath.
    Then I pick up the TV remote and flip through channels until I find a baseball game, one that looks like it’s just starting and will be on for hours. I have no idea who’s playing. I leave it on mute.
    â€œYou might want something to look at later tonight,” I tell my mother, nodding toward the TV and hoping I sound calmer than I feel. “But maybe we can play cards next time.”
    I lean back in the bedside chair. Instead of shuffling the deck of cards, I reach for my sketchbook and flip it open to the next empty page, right after my sketches of the abandoned house.
    I don’t usually like to draw people. But when I start sketching, what comes out is my mother’s outline, the hill of legs under the blanket, the long hair, the upturned hand. I break her body down into abstract shapes as I draw them with fierce strokes. They’re just circles and ovals and lines, but together they look something like the person lying in front of me.
    When I pull my hand back and look at what I’ve drawn, something about my lines makes it look like the figure on the paper is living, breathing, moving. Like my mother could step off the page, laughing, and start telling me a story about her day. The pencil strokes are more animated than the woman lying in bed in front of me.
    But when I blink and open my eyes again, the lines are just streaks on the page, still and gray.

Thirteen
    Monday morning, and Leila has the radio tuned, blasting, to a song I hate. At the dinner table we manage to speak to each other politely when Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John start conversations, everyone making small talk about school, work, band, homework. But in the car I feel like a tiny country at the mercy of a superpower armed with ear-piercing music. I’m the losing side in a cold war. There are no more polite questions about my mother, just noise that screams I’m ignoring you as loudly as anything can. Today the screaming actually matches the noise in my head, an echo of everything I wanted to yell at my mother yesterday.
    I want to put my hands over my ears and curl up into the small space between the seat and the door. But I refuse to let Leila know her music is bothering me. So I sit there, stiff and silent, while she sings along and bobs her head.
    Then the sound suddenly gets much softer and Leila is speaking next to me.
    â€œHey there,” she says cheerfully.
    I look over. Is she actually talking to me now?
    But no. Her silver cell phone is next to her ear, pinched between her cheek and her shoulder while she steers. I would have expected her to let go of the wheel to hold the phone, but she still has both hands planted in place at ten and two.
    â€œOh no, sweetie,” she says into the phone, her voice losing its chipper edge. “I’m so sorry.”
    I wonder who Leila’s talking to. She doesn’t look over at me, and I assume she’s forgotten I’m even in the car. For a moment I wonder if something’s really wrong.
    â€œDid something happen?” Leila asks into the phone. “How long are they grounding you