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By the age of seven, I had developed the unshakable fear that my mother was going to commit suicide.

I would dream at night of finding her passed out on her bed, a bottle of pills still lying, incriminatingly orange, on the spot on the floor to which it had rolled when her hand finally went limp. I dreamed of nooses, smoking guns. I dreamed of the kitchen knives and of carbon monoxide filled garages, and I was afraid.

My mother always called me precocious. I thought I was just a child who had grown up as quickly as she had needed to in the circumstances that she had been given. She called me her little forty year old stuck in a child's body for all of the worrying I did. I worried so much, in fact, that I often missed school because I was physically ill with a sickening dread of the unknown horrors that I was sure would come to pass. My mom's subway would have a terrible accident on the way to work, a strange man would come and kidnap me away from everything I knew, an angry tornado would scoop my school up from the ground. Scenario after terrifying scenario would flash through my head and I would grow pale and weak, my knees loose beneath me before I sank to the ground entirely.

Those were the best days, the days when I stayed home worried. My mother would stay there with me; she told me it was like a girl's day out. With both of us settled in nice and cozy in the apartment, I had not a worry in the world. She would paint our nails, do my hair up in braids. She'd smear lipstick across first her mouth and then mine and we would stroll down the avenue in our Sunday best, out to cheap cafes with cheap coffee to eat sandwiches with the ghosts of our kisses painted in red on the crusts. She was a good mother on these days, her hand squeezing mine tight as we tumbled through the cross walks as if we were invincible, as if not a car in the world would dare to touch us. I would later learn a term to describe it: we were on cloud nine.

But there were only so many best days. There were also the worst days, the days when I woke up and my mother's palms were stained with blood again because she had held the pictures in their frames too tight or smashed them out, I never knew. She would be asleep on the floor with blood and spit and sweat all dried into her hair and onto her hands, her body contorted at awkward angles induced by an inescapable nightmare. I would wake her gently, walk her to her bed. I became an expert at ice packs, at wash cloths and calling in sick to angry bosses who softened at a child's voice.

Our neighbor from across the hall taught me how to do the laundry when she saw me dragging our dirty sheets through the hall hopelessly one day. From then on she would give me quarters - "for sweets and toys and nothing else" - and I would have clean underwear and clean uniforms, even if they were a little wrinkled because I was too scared of getting burned to use the iron.

On the worst days, I would come home from school to a house still dark at three in the afternoon, and every drip of the faucet in the bathroom that never shut off was a shot to my nerves. I would tip-toe to my mother's room and find her bottle of Jack Daniels drained again, find her pill box still full as it had been with sleeping pills and I'd take the pills but leave the Jack, because that was my mother's business but the pills were mine, because how is a girl going to get along when her dad's a good-for-nothing gone since she was born and her mother's committed suicide? Besides, the way I figured it, my mother got plenty of sleep.

Some nights, when we were curled up in our holey, ratty old couch with the scratchy blankets pulled around us so that they itched but we were still together, my mother would rest her head on top of mine and breathe out big breaths. "You'd be ok without me," she'd say, with her face still locked on that blue glow. "I'm sure you would - you always were such a precocious child."

I would just clutch the blankets tighter to me and try to twist to see her face, but I never wanted to disturb her, because that was one of the only times that she ever looked peaceful.