11:00 and all is well. I sit on the living room floor with my daughter, our legs tucked under us, and we sip quick-shop wine from our plastic cups. We are waiting for midnight, for the shiny new year with all its clean, round zeroes, hoping to wipe away the messy nines and eights and sevens of our past. My daughter Emma is too young for wine, only fifteen, but I tell her tonight it’s okay. Somewhere beneath Emma’s too-made-up eyes, her short-cropped hair, I can see the pale curls I formed for her each morning when she was my Shirley Temple, my little girl. She’s still my little girl. And tonight she is hurting and I will rock her to sleep.

"Mom, this really tastes awful," Emma says, smiling sideways at me.

"I know, bug." I take another sip. Emma is stuck with me on this ridiculously momentous night, the turn of the millennium, because she broke up with Kyle last week. Since then she has kept herself hidden from me even more than usual. She walks quietly, slowly, without picking up her feet. I assume Kyle was her first love, although I’m not privy to the details of her life these days. All I know is she asked to stay home with me tonight in a mumbling sort of way that made me respond calmly, off-handedly, "Sure." It wasn’t until Emma left the room that I staggered and had to lean against the wall to catch my breath. It used to be unspoken, simply understood that we would spend New Year’s Eve together. But now she is a teenager with a life outside of Mommy. I’ll take whatever I can get.

Emma makes a dramatic gagging sound and leans forward to set her cup on the coffee table. She picks up the remote and says, "Let’s watch Dick Clark." 

I don’t want the television on. I want her to talk to me and tell me about her life, about herself, this self she has now that I’m not allowed to touch. "Let’s wait until it’s closer to midnight," I say lightly. 

Emma’s sigh has a weight of its own, pure disgust cutting through the air. "Whatever." She stands and carries her cup to the kitchen.

I climb up onto the couch, my knees cracking loudly. I can’t quite accept that I have become this person, this mother, with dimpled thighs and lines around my lips and an inability to stomach the music my daughter plays behind the closed door of her room. When I was pregnant with Emma, all of nineteen and strangely fearless, I couldn’t picture myself growing older. Or at least I thought by now I would be wise and elegant and admired by my daughter. Instead I make weekly late-night trips to buy candy bars and fashion magazines, feeling both guilty and hopeful. I curl up on the couch and read articles like "Ten Tips to Trimmer Hips," leaving chocolate-brown thumbprints on the glossy pages. 

There was a time, about five years ago now, when I thought I might want more. I met Bob, sweet, simple Bob, who kissed my fingertips and brought Emma books on reptiles, her obsession at the time. He found a small piece of me that still ached for a man’s hand on my thigh. But somehow I wasn’t willing, I couldn’t find enough energy, to start life all over like that. Emma and I were fine on our own. So I stopped answering the phone one day. I waited to feel lonely, but instead I felt relief. Eventually, the phone didn’t ring anymore. And that was that.

11:22 and all is well. I have given in to Dick Clark since my gentle nudging is not getting Emma to talk. But she is sitting next to me on the couch, and I can tell she likes the band playing noisily on TV. I risk smoothing down her hair, resting my hand on her shoulder for a second. She offers me a grin. Then the phone rings and I lose her again.

"Hello," Emma says, carrying the phone into the kitchen.

It’s too late for a phone call, even if it is New Year’s Eve, and I walk down the hall to tell her so. I stop at the doorway for a moment, listening to the voice I never hear, the one reserved for her friends, bubbly, energized. Happy. I turn away, about to head back to the couch, when Emma’s voice changes suddenly. 

"Put Jen back on the phone, Kyle," says Emma. "I don’t want to talk to you." 

There is a shaky anger to her words that makes me enter the kitchen. I whisper, "What’s wrong?" Emma glares at me and goes to her room, phone in hand, the door shutting with a thud behind her. I follow but stop at the closed door, slide to the ground and hug my knees. I am the mother. I need to go in there. I try to hear what Emma is saying, but instead I hear Dick Clark describing the bits of Waterford crystal on the massive ball above Times Square.

Now Emma is sticking her head out the door. "Mom, I’m going to Jen’s party after all, okay?" 

"No." I stand, open her door all the way and take the phone from her hand.

Emma lunges toward me but I step back and click off the phone. Emma pauses, then casually laughs. "Jen’s picking me up. I’m going to the party," she says.

"No, you’re not. You’re staying home with me. Tell me about this Kyle." I grab her hand, her fingers stubbornly limp, and pull her to the living room.

When Emma was born, I expected to feel the overwhelming joy, the pure love, that my mother had promised I’d feel. Mom said she instantly felt complete when she held me for the first time. But I felt disconnected, entirely separate from the moist, puckered creature that had been placed across my chest. It wasn’t until six weeks later, as I started sleeping for three hours in a row instead of in twenty minute stretches, that I began to love my baby. We were snowed in together for a week. I watched people shovel and scrape their cars from behind the window of Emma’s room; I held my baby in my arms, pressed into me, all day long. She slept with her mouth on my skin, waking every so often to suck, and curl her toes, and rub her palm along the tip of her ear. I could smell her in my clothes, a tangy smell like cider and tender sweat. I touched her eyelids, swollen like eggshells, and called her my bug in singing mommy whispers. I knew she would be my purpose in life when I couldn’t find one for myself. For nine months, she had been a part of my body; now I was becoming part of hers.

Of course, her body is too grown up now, too round and full for her age. It was the same for me at fifteen. I looked older than I was in a way that seemed to cry out for boys’ hands and lips. I assume this woman’s body is the cause of Emma’s troubles, that Kyle wanted to move too fast for her. I can remember the pressure. I enjoyed the lingering glances, the attention, but I never wanted more than that until college, until Phil. Phil was achingly beautiful; he wrote dark, needy poetry and I longed for him. I gave every bit of myself to him, too easily, too often. He gave me Emma, although he never knew it. Admiration like that can be hypnotic. I want Emma to know that I understand how she feels, that I’ve been there.

11:47 and all is well. Emma has realized I will not let her leave the couch until she starts talking, and so she is finally humoring me, telling me about Kyle. Her hands are drawn up into her sweater sleeves, with only her fingertips poking through, and she picks at her dark purple nail polish as she talks. 

"He sits across from me in Typing class. We’d talk sometimes, and then he started typing me notes instead of doing the exercises. He types really bad, tons of mistakes." Emma smiles, a private sort of smile that doesn’t include me. "But it was sweet." 

"And then you started going out?" I had learned last month not to call it going steady.

"Yeah." She sighs and starts biting her thumbnail. "He’s so cute, Mom. And he really loves me. He loves me so much, and he hates it when we’re apart. He likes to know where I am all the time, who I’m with. He wanted to buy me a beeper so he could always reach me."

"A beeper? Emma, you do not need a beeper," I say firmly.

"Chill, Mom, I know. I told him that was stupid. He got mad, but after a while he didn’t bring it up anymore." Now Emma is playing with the fluffy cowl neck of her sweater, rubbing the material between her fingertips. "He really was sweet sometimes." 

"Too controlling." I lift her chin so I can see her face. "Is that why you broke up with him, Emma?" I smile gently at her. "Or was he pressuring you? You know, to do too much, things you weren’t ready for?"

Emma looks at me, expressionless. The sudden coldness of her eyes stops my breath, takes away my smile. My ears start to pound as Dick Clark’s voice counts backwards from ten. Emma’s lower lip, full and soft and colored burnt orange, starts trembling. I can smell the cheap wine on the table next to me, a tart, fruity smell that hangs thickly in the air. It sickens me and I concentrate on it fully, breathing it in, so that the smell is more real than my daughter’s fingers as they peel down the soft collar of her sweater, revealing her neck. 

The bruises are mostly deep blue, fading into red at the edges. I can tell the marks are the shape of thumbs, thick lines circling her throat like a broken necklace. "Oh, bug," I say faintly. How could I think Emma has the same simple worries I had at fifteen? This is a different world, and she lives in it, is part of it, while I just watch from behind the glass. Emma’s fingers drop to her lap and her neck is covered again. I hear a car horn, loud and insistent, and when Emma looks to the door I realize the sound is not someone celebrating the close of the year. It is Jen, waiting to take my daughter away. My body feels numb. Dick Clark is finishing his countdown as Emma rises.

"He won’t do it again, Mom. I know he won’t." She opens the front door. "He loves me. I’ll be okay." 

The noise from the television is deafening. The door closes and I run toward it. I feel like I’m in a dream, running through a muddy trench, my feet weighted and slowing with each step. I reach the door, fling it open, run down the driveway. I want my baby. I want to hold her, wrap her in warm blankets, kiss her hair, sing her to sleep. But the car is gone.

12:00.