Into the Hudson
Mom and I are in the car. I’m wearing my brown and white fleece jacket (my mom has the same one, but bigger, the adult version) and I drink my box of Hershey’s chocolate milk. We exit the garage of our apartment and drive into the grey daylight. She turns the corner. There is a straightaway looking out at the Hudson River. I’m still groggy from sleep, not a morning child, only soothed by my milk box whispering, deflating as I drink. My Velcro sneakers don’t touch the floor mat. A winter hat sits next to me that I have to put on before I get out of the car. I fan out my hands to admire my Wizard of Oz gloves. Each finger is a different character. The Tin Man is my favorite, leathery and grey on my pointer fingers. As we turn the corner, my mom slows down. “Why don’t I just drive this car right into the Hudson?” I stop slurping my milk, the box wheezes to a halt and I stare ahead at the river. It looks cold and deep and far away. The trees outside stand still, brown leaves falling and dying as they fall; a story I heard on the playground that I tell myself whenever I see a lone leaf plummet to its death. I don’t answer. Mom presses her foot to the pedal and accelerates. We are headed right for it. She keeps going, speeding up, driving straight ahead, moving forward fast. I ball my fists and shield each character. I imagine floating coats and cold skin, trying to understand what it would be like to die today, to go with my mom into the water and never return. Maybe this is what she wants, for us to be together. Maybe this is the only way I will ever understand what it is to be a mother. On the first day of school, I say Housewife when the teacher asks what my mom does. “Stay-at-home mom,” the teacher replies and marks it down in a big book. My lunch bag is always decorated with stickers. There are always fruits formed into shapes; an orange rind carved into a purse, the grapes are little pennies. If my mom wants to go, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll go together into the Hudson. At the last second she swerves. We turn left, the way to school, continue our morning drop-off where I don’t want to leave my mother, don’t want to go to school, am afraid to be alone. I frustrate her with my tantrums. I make her angry when she has errands to run and I say I need her to stay with me, just a bit longer, just for a second more. This is the only love that I know in my life. It is warm and it is comfortable.
Brittany Ackerman is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. In 2016 she completed a residency at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, as well as the Mont Blanc Workshop in Chamonix, France, under the instruction of Alan Heathcock. She recently attended the Writing by Writers Methow Valley Workshop in May of 2017 under the leadership of Ross Gay. Her work has been featured in No Tokens, The Los Angeles Review, West Texas Literary Review, Hobart, and more. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her forthcoming collection of essays, entitled The Perpetual Motion Machine, to be released by Red Hen Press in the fall of 2018.
