We moved into my mother’s old house in Scottsville the night of Avery’s third birthday. It was a two-bedroom with a screened-in porch, tree of heaven and stilt grass swallowing the yard, fence rotting and hidden by undergrowth. When Avery was younger, I had friends to look after her for me, could work knowing she was taken care of, a single cub for a pack of mothers. As time passed, though, people moved on, some priced out into the suburbs or chasing careers in new cities, others just absorbed in their own lives. More and more every day, I was alone with a child, my wages going to babysitters while I worked long hours at the bakery, the world closing in around me.

Beneath my grief, I knew my mother’s death couldn’t have come sooner, her house saving me from another month of DC rent. Avery resisted the move with all her might, declaring in sentence fragments her love for our moldy apartment in Carver, but she seemed to fall in love the moment we set foot in Virginia, with its fields of fireflies, its overpopulation of deer, its piles of tires in the woods to climb.

My mother’s things outnumbered mine two-to-one, reminding me of her everywhere I went. Avery moved into the room I once shared with my brother, with a view of the woods from her window. She saw her first wolf spider the night we moved in, recoiling at first, but insisting I let it continue to live on her windowsill. I moved into my mother’s room, sleeping in her bed, though the wood from the frame had begun to warp, slanting the mattress. I woke up on the floor about once a week.

I found work as an editor when I could, and in transcription when I could not, so most of my hours belonged to the house, sprawled on the couch we’d found on Avon Street in Charlottesville. I left for walks to the river or to shop. I would fantasize about finding friends to welcome to our home, to cook dinner for and watch movies with, just like I had in the city, but somewhere I’d lost the ability to reach out and expand my life beyond the walls of our house.

Still, I found intimacy in my own way. Masturbating in my mother’s bed filled me with a sense of guilt, so every night, after Avery fell asleep, I would lock myself in the bathroom and think very intently, for about an hour, of Avery’s father, or the town librarian, or Elsie Culkin, who was once my next-door neighbor. I attempted to make peace with the idea that between work and Avery, my romantic life was over, that this was my sole release, before finally rejecting the idea of peace altogether, which only made it better.

A few weeks after we moved, while we watched a thunderstorm together from the porch, the door swung open on its own. I made a joke about my mother’s ghost coming out to watch the storm with us, and Avery’s eyes lit up. From then on, her favorite game was to play with my mother, holding babbling conversations in empty rooms and introducing her new friends to grandma. I began to wonder where the line between fantasy and delusion lay, uncertain if I was enabling her on nights when, giving in to her enthusiasm, I talked with both her and the empty space of my mother, or left a spot on the couch for her when Avery and I fall asleep in each other’s arms, bathed in the light of the television.

My mother and I used to fall asleep the same way, her playing with my hair while I drooled on her collar. She stopped when I was a little older than Avery and had begun to grow too unruly. We spent less time together. I would go to the river with Elsie, first playing pretend, later smoking cigarettes and weed. My mother buried herself in her gardening, or her baking, anything but speaking to me, but I still remembered the feeling of her touch, cool hands against my scalp.

I worried often that I would leave Avery behind in the same way. Already, her differences from me had emerged, and I did what I could to nurture them. She was warmer, louder, and made friends everywhere she went. Physically, she could pass for someone’s else’s daughter, with her father’s warm blonde hair, my father’s wide, thin-lipped smile, and most of all my mother’s dark eyes, long nose, and clammy hands. It was the same with my mother and I: we shared the same hair, dark and frizzy, but the rest of me came from my father’s side. Seeing Avery look up at me with my mother’s eyes sometimes churned up more than I could stand, and I liked it when she slept.

My impasse with Avery—not her personality or actions, not the pink in her cheeks or the sandy gold of her hair, but the fact of my presence in her life—only grew worse in Virginia. I mourned her loss before conceiving her, confident that I was unfit for motherhood, that I had to come to terms with a version of myself who would never raise a child. I threw myself into school and then long hours at the bakery. She came into my life by accident, her father removing himself from the situation completely, and the thought seized me that I had stolen her from some more deserving mother.

I knew from an early age I was unfit for motherhood. I had a sense of myself as having once been kind, or that time had worn away the memory of my early cruelties. Once, on a late-summer day when I was about eight, Elsie and I lay on my lawn, lemonade dried on our lips, mosquitos descending with the sunset. She had moved to Scottsville in the last week of May, and after our first nervous meeting at the playground, we spent almost every day together, often ending it in that exact place, too tired to stand, succumbing to the itch of freshly-mowed grass and the bug bites that came with it.

I didn’t see the stone before I found it with my palm, hot from the sun, smooth on either side, but with a jagged edge. I sat up, sun in my eyes, before turning to Elsie, who smiled up at me. I brought the rock down on her forehead with as much force as a child can muster, almost connecting with her eye. Elsie cried, blood dripping from the ridge of her brow, scrambling away from me, climbing to her feet and then falling again, a look of fear in her eye, as if I was some kind of threat.

I was grounded for the rest of summer. I could not explain myself to my father, who told me there was something wrong with me, that I must have an illness from somewhere, and then did not speak to me for three days. My mother was softer, even attempted to empathize, but struggled with my lack of explanation, finally snapping at me one day at the end of August.

In September, when school was in session, Elsie and I had class together. Her parents rationalized what I had done as an impulse of early puberty. What ruined me was Elsie’s response: she welcomed me back into her life, sat with me at lunch, and gravitated toward me once again in the playground and on the soccer field. In fourth grade, she braided my hair, and insisted I keep her clips, which were shaped like watermelons. The only remaining sign of what I had done was the scar on her brow.

I became convinced there must have been other moments like that, evidence of my natural unkindness that I’d buried. I had no other explanation for its isolation in the story of my childhood. From then on, I became more confident with each passing year in my own monstrousness.

When I told my first girlfriend that story, I was staying in her dorm room, pressed together in her twin bed, the AC broken. I’d just woken up crying from a dream about murdering Elsie—who was studying art in Rhode Island, and with whom I’d remained friends—by gouging her eyes out with a nail, cutting off her hands and feet and burying her in my mother’s backyard. My girlfriend held me, assured me everything was fine, and told me a story about stepping on a frog as a child, which did not make me feel better.

Over the years, I began to internalize all of Avery’s wounds as my responsibility. A skinned knee climbing rocks in the Rivanna, I inflicted on her; poison ivy on her ankles and palms from the scrubby forest behind the parking lot of the IGA, I inflicted on her; a shard of glass from the kitchen floor, embedded in her heel, I inflicted on her. Every bruise and scratch and sunburn of circumstance a sign of my conspiracy against my child, my threat to her.

I alternated, one month fearful, always watching her, placing rules on which trails through the woods she could follow, whether she could go downtown alone, what words she could repeat. The next, I would recoil from my own parenting, worrying I was becoming an imitation of the neurotic Christian mothers who, raising their kids in the cloister of gated communities, I had always compared negatively to my own. I would loosen the restraints I placed on her, and she would run wild, following older girls to the river, begging the teenagers at the ice cream parlor for a free cone and building forts in the woods, until one day she would return home with some new wound and set my paranoia aflame again.

I did not miss the city often. I was better suited to the low hills of the piedmont and could never give up swimming in the James with Avery and picking buttercups on our walk home. But I did miss the friends we left behind, my reliance on them to care for my daughter, the knowledge that more people than just I loved her. Of them, the only one I still called was Elsie, who moved to Baltimore around when Avery was born and rarely returned home.

The worst was when Avery’s friends visited us, their parents entrusting them to my care. Louise and Mason, whose mother taught herbalism classes in a farmhouse just over the county line to Fluvanna; Lakisha, from Esmont, whose father lost his landscaping business, Evan, from soccer, whose parents were lab techs at the university, all running from room to room and then the yard and then the woods or the overgrown lot down the street. I always made chocolate chip cookies, as my mother had, earning me a similar renown among the children. It was only then that I could measure myself equal to her. Avery would insist that I leave one for grandma, and I would wait until she was asleep for the night to eat it myself.

I could never work when her friends were over. I would sit, unfocused, as images of violence surfaced from somewhere inside me, the children’s bodies mangled and broken, barbed wire piercing their throats, rubble crushing their skulls, coyotes gnawing on their bones, until a passing car or the neighbor starting his lawn mower awakened me and I would get up to check on them. Every time I found them happily exploring, Avery leading them through a fantasy of hers.

One day, hoping to exorcize them, I wrote my visions down, without punctuation or break between paragraphs. I filled almost a page before pausing. Reading from the beginning, a wave of nausea struck me. In my mind, thoughts like those felt like intruders, unwanted parts of myself entering the main foyer of my thoughts. Externalized, they were pornographic, a sure sign of my illness. I wanted with the totality of my being, every muscle and nerve, to smash my laptop into a thousand pieces and then vomit on them.

Then the sound of crying from out back brought me to my feet and out the door. Avery was in the backyard, at the porous border of unmowed lawn and woods, her friends circled around her. She was crying, clutching her thigh; Evan and Lakisha crying too, Mason and Louise just staring blankly. It was not difficult to determine what happened: Avery, perhaps on a whim or dare, perhaps as part of some elaborate game, had tried to climb the rotting fence, and a board had broken under her, cutting her from just above her ankle to just below her knee.

I pushed gently through the circle of children, adrenaline suppressing my guilt at not being able to comfort each of them, one by one, wiping the tears from their eyes and telling them a story, though I was sure word would spread through town about how I had neglected them in their moment of trauma. I scooped Avery up in my arms without a word, reassuring her only with a thin smile, and rushed inside, the crunch of dead grass informing me the other children were following behind.

I took her to the bathroom, setting her on the rim of the tub, and half-closed the door behind us, knowing she would want privacy from her friends, and that the door never fully shut without being slammed anyway. Doing my best to tune out Evan’s continued cries, I turned the tub faucet on, washing her leg in cold water. I tried and failed to keep the hem of her dress dry. The cut was not as deep as I had worried, and I dried her gently, staining our white towel red with blood, and pressed it to stop the bleeding, instructing her to apply pressure for me and only letting go when I was certain she could.

I opened the cabinet under the sink and cursed myself for not leaving gauze somewhere more accessible. I tore up the cabinet, throwing a box of tissues and a spare toothbrush at the wall, spilling a bottle of bleach—the cap improperly sealed—and finally pulled out a roll of gauze and a bandage. I returned to her and wrapped it without looking at her face, though I could still hear her sobs, now softer and less assured.

My knees dug into the linoleum, damp with bleach. She wrapped her arms around my breast and back and began sobbing into my neck, strands of hair clinging to her forehead, a streak of blood transferred from her thigh to her cheek. I realized neither of us had spoken. I had not asked her what happened or offered some formula of reassurance, like a mother should.

I clutched her tightly, there on the bathroom floor, stroking her hair, and realized that I, too, had begun to cry. I felt a coldness in the shape of my mother’s hands around my waist, and heard soft breathing in my ear, all of us clinging together, boundaries between us melting, mothers and daughters.

About the Author:

Annie Russo is a writer raised in Virginia and living in Massachusetts. She can be found on Twitter/X @femalehysteria. Her mother did not inspire this story.

*Feature image by Vinit Vispute on Unsplash