Nonverbal
Upcoming publication in Ever Eden Magazine.
It is 10:51pm and I am massaging poison into my daughter’s scalp. She shifts in the chair and, though I’m not sure if she’ll listen, I tell her, “Almost done, Mal. Please sit still.”
She bounces a plush cat on her knees and leans down to kiss it, and her hair slips from my hand. The damp curls stick to her back. She arches, trying to move away from her wet hair, and moans. I lift the hair off her bare skin and sigh.
“Let’s go rinse it out, okay?”
The whole apartment reeks of lice shampoo. I discovered the bugs after I watched her scratch her neck while falling asleep, and I pulled her out of bed and went on the defensive: sheets in the wash, pillows in bags, poison shampoo in daughter’s hair.
Mallory walks ahead of me to the bathroom. She sprouted, tall and awkward, in the past year, and her gangly limbs warn of puberty. That’ll be a spectacle, I’m sure. I hold her slippery hair like a leash. She’s used to it.
The leash thing, I mean. When she was smaller, we used a backpack-harness contraption to go on walks around the complex, because as soon as she could toddle, she was wild and unpredictable. We tried holding hands, but traffic was close and shiny, and I didn’t feel like chasing my dangerously curious three-year-old down the freeway. People commented, of course. My mom reminded me I wasn’t a dog handler. I probably would’ve said something similar before Mallory came along, but I justified my decision with her autism.
The shampoo will get into her eyes if she washes it out by herself, so I tell her to grab a cup for me to do the rinsing. In my head I hear my mother saying that, at eleven years old, she should be able to do this on her own. I know, I tell the voice. She just isn’t there yet, Mom.
I pull the shower curtain back and turn the faucet. Mal plops into the water, and by the end of the bath, my shirt is soaked from her impatient splashing. I wrap her in a towel and guide her, still dripping, back to the kitchen. She sits down in the chair and sets her forehead on the table. The towel slips to her waist and her back dimples with goose bumps. She squirms, and I drape the towel over her again, patting her shoulder. I comb out the tangles first, then start removing the nits.
The little suckers are tiny and white and they stick to her hair until I spot them, pinch them, and drag them off the strand and place them on a paper towel. An hour in, I’ve collected 23, and Mallory has been mostly cooperative because she’s been mostly asleep.
My fingers weave through her roots and part thin layers in her hair, and I raise my brows to try to keep my eyelids from drooping. I hit a tangle and accidentally pluck a hair from her scalp. She shrieks and sits up.
My fingers clamp in her locks. I force myself to unclench my fists, to take them out of her hair, to walk to the sink. Her crying echoes in my head; it ricochets inside my skull. I want to yank her voice out of me, that wordless moaning like stifled engines roaring under her throat. She keeps at it. She’s too old to be crying like this, says my mother’s voice.
I know. I’m too old to be crying like this, but I bend over the sink and my child screams and I grab fistfuls of my hair and dare myself to yank them out. I can’t.
We are both shaking, staring at each other’s breakdown. She is naked and wet, with wild eyes and scarlet cheeks. She tilts her head, confused.
Before the sobs disappear, I sit on the ground and pull her into my lap. Her almost-teenager limbs sprawl around me and we breathe heavy together. I press my cheek to her wet hair, inhale the acrid shampoo smell, and close my eyes.
If Mallory could talk, and if she had anything on her mind, she would tell me, “Most girls don’t let their moms hold them like this. They grow out of it. I’m so glad we didn’t grow out of it.”
And I would say, “Me too, Mal.”
But there are no words.
Published in The Eckleburg Project, Volume 4 Issue 2