The Niagara Falls were formed by glacier activity 10,000 years ago.
A clash of pots and pans came from downstairs. I winced but remained cross—legged on my bed, staring at the assorted items I'd deemed essential. Some clothes, toiletries.
A map.
There was so much I didn't know, so much I hadn't seen. My absence of knowledge had become an almost tangible thing, filling me up, suffocating me until I needed to kick up to the surface just to breathe.
Ironically, my innocence was my mom's explanation for keeping me home. The world was too scary, and I wouldn't even know how to protect myself. To hear her tell it, the streets were filled with ravening men who would attack me as soon as look at me.
That was the anxiety talking. At least that was what the counselor had said before we'd stopped going.
"Evie!" my mother yelled from the kitchen.
It would be three more times before she elevated to screams. Four before she threw something. Six before she came up to my room, demanding I make her coffee or whatever else she needed.
I'd grown up fast, fumbling with mac and cheese before I was tall enough to see over the pot, explaining away my excess absences to disinterested teachers. In high school, I'd stayed home and studied to get my GED. Two years of correspondence classes through the community college, and I was desperate for any human contact.
I picked up my book, running my fingers over the cool, glossy surface.
The library was one of the few places approved by my mother. I must have read almost every book in that place, living a thousand lives on paper, traveling around the world in eighty days and through the looking glass. I knew about hope and death, about fear and the dignity required to overcome, but only in theoretical constructs of ink and ground tree pulp. That was my irony: to wax poetic about the meaning of life while being unable to do something as simple as pay rent.
Weary of re—reads, I'd wandered into the nonfiction section. I'd picked this one up on a whim, on a joke almost because the title seemed so silly. Everything You Wanted to Know About Niagara Falls. Who wanted to know anything about Niagara Falls?
Then I read it.
I snuck back every day for a week, enamored by the descriptions, in awe of the pictures of water rushing, enchanted by the majesty and magic of this place both faraway and someday attainable. My mother didn't let me get a library card, so I'd stolen the book and kept it ever since.
Now the paper was thin and pliable, well—worn from years of turning the pages. The binding was loose, the stitching visible between the cardboard and glue. By now it was probably held together by the clear tape that held the library tags to the spine.
"Happy birthday," I whispered.
My present to myself: to finally see the place I'd been yearning for. The place I'd dreamed about even before I'd gotten the book, for all twenty years of my life. For room to breathe. For freedom.
Even my camera couldn't sustain me. I flipped through the photographs on the digital screen, every single one taken in the house or the yard. Nowadays mom got antsy when I walked over to the park. There were only so many times I could pretend a new angle of the flower pot was artistic instead of just plain pathetic. I wanted to see new things, new places—new people.
I piled everything into my bag. I was far too old for the purple backpack. But then, my body was too old for me. Somewhere in the past five years, I had blossomed into a woman, with full lips and fuller breasts, with hair in places I was almost afraid to touch, except when I just had to at night in my bed, and I did—oh, I did, and it shamed me. I shamed myself with the wetness and the horrible, rippling pleasure around my fingers.
My twentieth birthday. Neither my mother nor I had acknowledged it at breakfast, as if even the mention of passing time would crack the fragile votive that ensconced us.
And now, I would shatter it.
I wouldn't be going around the world or even outside the state—at least not today. But the fear felt huge inside my stomach. Her anxiety was rubbing off on me. I had to get out of here.
Everything fit neatly into my faded backpack, but then I was well—practiced in packing it after having done so at least a dozen times. Each time had ended in screaming, in tears, and in me back upstairs in my room.
Not this time. If I didn't follow through now, I would be stuck here. I'd live here forever.
I'd die here.
Feeling queasy, I slung the bag over my shoulder and headed down the stairs. My mother sat at the kitchen table, her thin robe loosely tied, eyes glassy from the pills. The medicine was supposed to help her, but she never got better—only worse. More fearful, more controlling.
All those chemicals had taken their toll on her body. She looked so tired. The weary shadows around her eyes and tension lines around her lips always made my gut clench. I should be here to protect her. I just couldn't, I couldn't.
I leaned my backpack against the leg of the table and sat down across from her.
"Mama."
Her eyes came into focus. She sighed. "Not this again, Evie."
I swallowed. "Please, Mama, try to understand. I need to see more of the world than these walls."
