The False Flat

CHAPTER 49

LIFE REALIZATION #23: COLD CHERRY PIE IS STILL THE BEST DINNER EVER

Two weeks before the wedding, my body was covered in a layer of cold sweat. Butch, a large muscled number five, reached for my hand, helped me to a sitting position. I’d been with him for twelve hours. It felt like twelve hours, but it was actually about forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes of complete torture, but wedding present one of three for Grant was complete, and I still had two weeks to find the right lingerie, the second gift.

Butch asked me if I wanted to see—he looked pleased—and I looked down at my lower abdomen. I’d walked into this tattoo parlor, only able to handle the thought of needles because Grant was at a chemo infusion, accompanied by Devina, the only one I’d let in on my secret tattoo gift.

As Butch instructed me on bandaging and keeping the area clean, I thought about the evening to come. Grant and I were scheduled to have a night in with a movie, popcorn, candy, pie, and ice cream, the works. Then we’d celebrate his good lab results the way we celebrated all his little medical victories these days—after good food, really good sex.

The man was hot in bed, or maybe we were hot in bed. Anyway ... hot, and not just in bed, all over. All over. He might not have been able to ride Gaia, but he could definitely ride other things.

I’d pictured Grant pulling my shirt up to reveal the inky masterpiece on my abdomen and going wild. Now, I realized he’d lift my shirt up and see—a bandage. Much less sexy. Oh well, maybe it could work to my advantage. I could tease him with what was underneath, drive him wild with anticipation.

I’d worked myself up on the way to the condo. (We’d been jumping back and forth between our two places, trying to decide where to live as a married couple.) But as soon as I walked into the living room, what I saw sitting on Grant’s couch completely extinguished the fire smoldering in my lower regions.

My mother.

As I stood there, my mouth hanging open like a cartoon character’s, Grant told me that the business trip he’d gone on had actually been a trip to my mother’s house. He’d wanted to go alone; now I knew why. He told me that life was too short not to try. He told me if he’d had another chance with his mother, nothing would’ve kept him from it. And then he walked out the door, leaving me alone with my mother.

How dare he! His mother was not my mother ... but the pain in Aurora’s eyes bent my knees until we were face to face on the couch.

“I’m sorry,” she started right away, as if she’d been rehearsing the words and needed to get them out before they left her mind. Tears fell into her expensive, cranberry-colored sweater. I’d never seen that happen before; I was transfixed. “I thought I was doing the right thing.” She shook her head, squared her shoulders, and blinked away the tears.

“I need to tell you this without blubbering. When Grant told me that you were getting married, and I didn’t know ...” She put her hand over her mouth. “I knew I had to do something. I knew it that day I watched you pull out of your driveway without shoes, when I was trying to hold everything together. But I didn’t know what to do or how to do it.”

Was she here to talk me out of marrying Grant?

She reached for my hand, but shock had numbed me, and I couldn’t grip hers back. She pulled her hand into her lap and held her own.

“When Grant came to the Cities, he told me I needed to stop holding it all in, that I needed to talk about whatever was inside me.”

Grant went to talk to my icy mother, the mother who’d told me to leave him.

“But that’s how I’ve managed, by holding it all in.” She was speaking in her usual analytical tone, softened slightly, and it didn’t fit with the words she was saying. “And I couldn’t understand how he knew. I’d spent my whole life making sure everyone thought I was fine. And then I wondered if you knew, and then I wondered who else knew.”

She paused.

“What happens when I let it all go?” Her voice went shaky, but she wasn’t crying.

I’d asked that same question over and over again the past months. I couldn’t believe she was asking it now.

You can’t know,I wanted to tell her.

“But that’s all there is left, isn’t there?” she went on. “That’s what I’ve decided, at least. I might lose you if I tell you, but I’ll definitely lose you if I don’t. That’s how I lost Tif, but I never tried to get her back.”

Her voice cracked, like her throat had been stripped. I knew that feeling too.

“Do you want some water?” I spoke for the first time.

She nodded, and I went to Grant’s kitchen, filled a glass, wished he were here, then returned to his living room and handed my mother the water. She downed half of it, and her hand shook as she placed it on the table beside the couch.

I wanted to reach out to this very real version of my mother, but I was scared she’d fall back into herself, and I wanted more time with the softened person who lived behind the hard shell.

“There’s no excuse; there is only explanation. It might not make a difference.”

Tell me.

I still couldn’t speak, but I wanted her to go on.

Tell me.

She inhaled, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, her face was firm. “Tif and I had a brother, Samuel. Sam.”

Sam? No, that was wrong. My mother had one sister, Tif, the only family she had until she didn’t.

She nodded, like the disbelief on my face was something she had to answer.

Tell me.

“When I was fifteen, I snuck out to a party my parents had explicitly forbidden. But I was infatuated with this guy Ryan, one of Sam’s friends. He was cocky and disgusting, and he wanted me at that party, so I went. At some point, I wanted to go home as badly as I’d wanted to get there, but Ryan and I had both been drinking, so I called Sam, who was seventeen. He could drive, and I begged him to come get me. He’d told me to stay away from Ryan, so he was furious and wouldn’t come.” She paused long enough to reach for her water glass, and a quarter of it splashed onto her jeans, but neither of us acknowledged it.

Maybe I was wrong when I’d said my mother was on Grant’s couch. My mother didn’t have a past, didn’t have a brother named Sam, would never talk like this.

“What did you do?” I asked, suspended in this moment.

She curled her fingers around the glass.

“I took Ryan’s keys.” She was looking past me as if at a screen that was playing out her memories. “And I drove his car. I couldn’t stop crying because I felt so guilty. I’d done all the things I never should’ve done. And then, the tears kept me from seeing the other car on the road.” My mother started crying then, crying with her past, fifteen-year-old self. Crying for the first time—ever.

A cold sweat broke out on my body because suddenly I knew where this was going. One thing she had told me when I was a kid was that my grandparents had been killed in a car accident when my mother was fifteen, by a drunk driver.

“The alcohol kept me from reacting,” she went on, her voice robotic now. “I slammed into that car. I was fine. Not a scratch. Nothing. But I killed the person in the other vehicle, the old, teal BMW Sam had been given on his sixteenth birthday.” A long pause. “I killed Sam,” she whispered. “He’d decided to come get me after all. I killed my brother.”

No.I held my face in my hands as the words crashed into me, as if I’d been there to feel the impact. The sight was vivid behind my eyes. A flash of teal caught in headlights. The crunch of metal on metal. The thud of a chest hitting a steering wheel. The silence of life extinguished. And then the screams that surely followed and likely lived in my mother’s head.

“I told you your grandparents had died in a car accident,” she somehow went on. “They didn’t die in it. But I killed them, too, when I killed Sam. Technically speaking, my mother killed herself four months later. And I didn’t know how to navigate a relationship with my father after he stopped speaking to me, and now he’s passed. If I hadn’t ...”

The glass cracked in my mother’s hands, and we both stared down at her lap, where blood dripped from her palm. I grabbed a wad of tissues and encouraged her to get up to tend to her injury, but she shook her head.

She held the tissues against the cut. “If I don’t finish now, I might lose my nerve.” Her eyes clung to my face, devoid of expectation. “If I hadn’t done all the things I shouldn’t have done, we would’ve stayed a family. You don’t get over that, Penelope. Brandon was taken from me, from us, because I had taken my brother. Tif tried, God love her, she tried to tell me it wasn’t my fault, but I didn’t want forgiveness. I didn’t deserve it.” She glanced at me, looked away, looked back like she was forcing herself to keep eye contact.

“And I ruined a good man. Your father. He loved us, but he couldn’t cope, especially after I convinced him it was my fault. He, too, tried to tell me it wasn’t, but he was broken, and I was convincing. I stayed. I cared for him as he drank himself into oblivion and cheated because I deserved it. It was my punishment. When he was with someone else or drinking, he wasn’t with me, and he could forget. I could never forget. And after he died ... he died.”

Her head bent forward until I couldn’t see her face. Her body shook, and I wasn’t sure I could keep looking at her. I didn’t know how to digest this new information. It weighed me down, kept me in place, but something was moving inside, a slide puzzle righting itself, the picture that had been distorted for so long finally clearing.

“Nearly everyone I love is gone, and it’s all my fault,” she whispered.

Before I reacted, she slid to her knees, narrowly avoiding a shard of the glass she’d crushed in her hands.

“You’re the only one left, Penelope. Pretending it’s all fine isn’t working anymore. I’m pretending harder than ever, and I’m losing you anyway. How do I stop losing you?” Her last words were louder than the rest, so full of anguish that a piece of me ripped in two. I’d come near hating my mother, resenting her and wishing she were someone else. She was someone else. I just never knew it; maybe she never knew it.

Her head remained bowed. Her question hung in the air.

How do I stop losing you?

This was something else I’d been asking. About Brandon, about Grant, about myself.

How do I stop losing you?

I didn’t know the answer to that question. But without a word, I reached down and lifted her up. I led her to Grant’s kitchen, where I ran her hands under cold water and helped her bandage them.

Then I opened the refrigerator and pulled out the cold cherry pie that I was supposed to be eating with the man I would marry in two weeks.

In the silence of Grant’s clean kitchen, my mother and I ate pie.