“Ana, you said? Well, I’ve got near seven hundred kids this year. I must know ten Anas. Do you have the number of the police? I can get you the number of the police.”

“I’m so sorry to bother you,” Jeanette says again, and ends the call.

The man asks for her phone number as she turns to leave, and Jeanette doesn’t answer but instead thinks cleaning caddy. She thinks arched eyebrows and she thinks impossible choices and she gets the sensation that Ana’s mother already knows about her, already knows she will disappoint. She thinks impossible choices and she remembers, remembers so deep it hurts, why she never thought mother of herself. “I’m sorry,” she says, and she’s saying it to every mother in the world, but the man at the door doesn’t understand; he is not a mother and he is just nodding.

It starts to rain as Jeanette makes her way back to the house, and she sees Ana peering out the window. For some reason the image of a tiny face through a rain-smeared window, a tiny face so full of expectation, makes her remember: She has missed her NA meeting. Jeanette stops, looks up. Will she tell her PO? He will want to know why, and he will assume it’s because she doesn’t want to get better, doesn’t want to let go of Mario, doesn’t want to see another day. She will tell him she’s missed a meeting but will not miss another one, and he will be disappointed and he will not believe her, but she is used to disappointment. She is used to disbelief.

Jeanette doesn’t rush back. She lets the rain patter down around her, soak through her clothes, run into her shoes. It feels good to punish herself. To stand shivering and cold in an empty street. Her sponsor told her once that the only love she knows what to do with is the kind of love that breaks a person over and over again.

Wet, squeaking through her house and leaving muddy imprints, she walks past Ana drawing still, drawing a house, drawing a bird. Jeanette takes the phone to her room. But she doesn’t call Mario. She closes her eyes and tries to remember the opiate rush, the watery calm, the hit to the brain, delicious sleepy coasting. His voice in her ear: “Don’t you feel every molecule that surrounds you? Everything is holding you now.” She doesn’t call him after she’s called the cops. She doesn’t call him even when the police car pulls up and she hears Ana open the door and call her name and her heart is thumping in her chest and she feels for the first time, no, this is what it’s like to break.

3

AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BIRDS

Gloria

Texas, 2014