Notmom

Notmom enters our lives without warning, without my little brother and I being asked. “Ellie, Zachery!” Dad calls us as he opens the door, leading her into our once-happy home. In the hallway, Zachery’s small arms hold me tight, the luminous stars on his pajamas contorting and vanishing within creases as if they’re being sucked in by a black hole. Like the one that stole Mom, our center, the sun of our tiny system.

I catch the shy but knowing look of Notmom as she crosses the threshold, her floral dress as old-fashioned as her throat-burning perfume. How dare she enter when Mom has only been buried for...how long? Months and seconds all at once.

I keep Zachery close, gently kissing the top of his head like Mom used to, but he twists away from me, pulling at unhealing wounds. How much has he grown since her funeral? How much has he withdrawn into his world as a solitary spaceman, travelling galaxies on a search and rescue mission he can never complete?

Dad calls us closer. Tells us he’d like us to meet a friend of his. But I’m a teenager now—not a little girl anymore. I know what a friend is, and what a friend isn’t. What a Notmom isn’t.

“Your father told me so much about you both,” she says, voice uneven as upturned soil. “I hear you’re building a new spaceship, Zachery. Perhaps you’ll show me?” she asks, and my body tenses.

Zachery slips from my grip and steps closer to her, into the great unknown. Wary at first, he’s always the fearless one, courageous as the spacemen in the comics I read to him at bedtime. Words don’t come, but he nods. She floats her stare over to me. I ignore it and walk up the stairs.

“Ellie, please.” Dad’s voice echoes in the hallway as I remove myself from the scene.

Against dull-aching pain, over days and weeks, she visits more often, sinks her hooks into Dad.

“Why don’t you try to get to know her?” he asks me. “Why don’t you give her a chance?”

“Why don’t you try to remember Mom?” I say, and he looks at me the way he did at the funeral.

But Zachery is so adorable, so much the innocent child. So much better than me. He welcomes Notmom in, bit by bit. Through my bedroom’s tissue-thin wall, he tells her his dreams: the ones he told Mom, the ones dark as space without stars, the ones I thought he would only ever tell Dad and me.

Sometimes Dad defends her, as if Mom and Notmom are equal! And it stops me; shames me when both my parents always loved me so much.

Doesn’t Dad deserve to be loved now Mom’s gone?

The weekend smell of sizzling bacon reaches my room, bringing me out of fitful sleep. Mom only lets Dad have it for breakfast on Sundays after what the doctor said. I rub my eyes, seeing in the mirror they’re still puffy and red. Body hurting, I walk downstairs. I groggily sense the cold touch of linoleum on my feet. Mom will tell me off again for not wearing my slip—

I grip my nightshirt, cold realization hitting me.

I enter the kitchen to make Zachery the Pop-Tarts he says are the color of galaxies. “Zachery?” He’s at the table, finishing his breakfast. “Why’d you let Dad make you breakfast today? You know I—”

“He didn’t.”

I see her then. Wearing her creased cleaning uniform, she’s in the garden with Dad.

He comes through the French doors holding Notmom’s hand. “Ellie! Sorry we started without you. Thought you might need the rest.”

“Thanks,” I snap. Shaking. “She must’ve come early to make breakfast.”

Dad’s looks away from me, Notmom too. “I should go,” she mutters, making for the hallway.

“No,” Dad says. His eyes—the same sharp blue as mine—grow stern, and in their reflection I’m small. “Yes, she stayed the night, Ellie.”

I walk away, the floor no longer cold against my skin, race upstairs, and slam my bedroom door shut.

The summer holidays stretch like elastic, always threatening to snap back, and Mom’s presence is in everything I see. I wish I’d gone to summer camp with Lisa and Rachel and my other friends, but Zachery needed me. I thought Dad did, too.

Notmom keeps out of my way while I play my music loud, earbuds pushed firm, eyes closed tight. She places drinks and warm cookies on my desk without my noticing, a shadow that moves in and out of the room; like Mom.

The last week of the holidays, I find Notmom’s letter. Her handwriting is like candle flame in a drafty church: uneven, unsure. I know you want to start your driving lessons soon. I stopped taking lessons when my father passed and always regretted it. I hope this helps.

I put it down the letter and money, my hand shaking. Think of how many hours cleaning she must have done to earn it. She wants me out of her hair—no, it’s not that, it can’t be. She told me she wants us all to be free from the sorrow of the past. She told me she understood, but I didn’t listen. 

Tears pat on unscrunched paper, knots unknotting inside my chest. For so many weeks, I hated her, hated myself for hating her without good reason. But it never brought Mom back.

I hold Zachery’s hand as we leave for the first day of the new school year. As we walk to the open door, she holds out Zachery’s lunch that she helped prepare. The lunch box’s luminous stars shine against the darkness behind them, catching the sunlight.

I take it from her. “Thanks, Naomi.”

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Author’s Biography

L. P. Melling currently writes from the East of England, UK, after academia and his career took him around the country. His fiction appears in several places, such as Milk Candy Review, Typehouse, and ARTPOST. He won the short story contest at his Russell Group university, while completing his first degree, a BA in English and Philosophy. When not writing, he works as a specialist adviser for a charity.