Chapter 31
Alyssa
I made a mistake. What was it about the human experience that meant you always realized that once it was too late to fix it?
There was a reason I’d left this town in the first place.
Bad memories felt acrid in my throat and heavy in my mind as soon as I crossed over onto familiar streets, the same sandwich shop at the intersection next to the bank branch that had been there since I was a baby, that I’d memorized as where to turn to get to my first boyfriend’s house back in high school when I was learning to drive.
The field with the windmills in the distance that we’d go by on the drive to school.
Every one of them clenched harder in my chest until I felt like I’d throw up, clutching the steering wheel hard.
Mom’s house had been just a fuzzy memory in my mind, like I could pinpoint the details if I thought about it hard enough but mostly just existed as a dark cloud somewhere in the back of my memories, but as soon as I saw the front of the building, I was right back in it again, sixteen years old and depressed in the bedroom on the second floor, left side, the same dogwood tree in from of the window, not having changed a bit.
I parked the car in front of the house and shut off the music, clutching the steering wheel hard in both hands.
Faded browns were all around, grass the pale yellow-green of a sunbaked field.
Everything felt so lifeless, so colorless, it felt like I was seeing in sepia tones, like Dorothy hadn’t yet made it to Oz.
I’d never understood when I was little why Dorothy wanted to go home so badly.
The ending broke my heart the first time I saw it.
I asked my mom, and she said Dorothy wants to go home because that’s where everyone she loves is, but didn’t she love all the friends she met?
Were you not allowed to find and meet and love new people?
Were we all born in a chain fixed to the earth, and wherever you went, it would pull on you?
Whenever I saw the movie by myself, I’d turn it off right before she got back to Kansas. This time, though, I couldn’t turn the movie off. Dorothy’s house was staring back at me, and Miss Gulch was at the gates.
Mom met me at the front door, and it was surreal talking to her, the woman who had been gigantic in my memories—this figure who towered over me and could make the world turn or stop at will—I’d forgotten she was shorter than me.
Just a little bit. She was just a middle-aged woman with an unstylish bob cut and a tired look like any other random person on the street just doing their best, and she greeted me cordially, politely, like we were pleasant acquaintances at most. The house was nauseating.
A bit messy, but nothing much, same as it always was.
Same old beige paint in the living room that felt like I was twelve years old and helpless and sinking again.
How was that feeling so viscerally woven into every surface?
It was like depression was spun into fabric and everything in the house was stitched out of oppressive memory.
And the next thing I knew, I was up in the bedroom, finishing unpacking the barest essentials, and I lay back in bed and stared up at the ceiling like I had when I was a kid who didn’t even have the will to wish for things to change.
I shouldn’t have left Vermont. It haunted me into the sleepless hours of the first night back, feeling how empty the bed was next to me and how much I wished Jade were there.
Wishing I could see Daniela in the morning and listen to her gush about the project she was working on while we all had breakfast together, wishing I could go to work and see Linda there and share gossip about our coworkers and make small talk in the break room, that Cat would come randomly interrupt me in the middle of the workday to bring me a snack and a conversation just to show me she cared, that I could go visit Charlie’s house for dinner or go to a party at the Birdhouse or hit up a trail with the hiking group, and then go exhausted back to Jade’s house at the end of the day, or have her come to a cute little house in Vermont where I lived, and she’d ask my opinion on the candle she was working on, or we’d put on a movie together, or go out for cake and ice cream, or just sit together with our hands tangled in my lap, and then we’d drag out for hours talking about I really do need to get home now until we gave up and went to bed together to figure it out in the morning.
It would have been worth it, if I’d only known what to do to make it better. I just knew every time I tried, I only ever made it worse, but god, I wished I’d tried. I wished I’d tried.
It was only once I broke down crying at three in the morning that I was finally able to sleep, somewhere between the pounding headache and the ugly tears, and morning found me right back to my childhood, specifically the dull filter over everything that made it feel like I was seeing the world through thick, cold glass.
I tried to make conversation with my mother over breakfast, but she didn’t care about my life—just wanted to talk about her own life and her own problems, like her estranged daughter wasn’t here sitting in her kitchen at last. She talked about this job she’d started recently and about my brother, who was in regular contact but was all the way in California and so wasn’t ever home either, talked about the house and all the repairs it had needed lately, talked about my father and the newest woman he was seeing.
They’d been divorced almost ten years now, and I couldn’t wrap my head around the urge to still follow who he was dating and check in on—his social media?
It must have been, because he lived in St. Louis these days.
And I really hoped she wasn’t driving to St. Louis to stalk her ex-husband’s new partner.
I dwelled on everything, letting myself sink deeper, and even though I tried to look through job listings, I felt like I’d lose my mind thinking about it.
Was I supposed to find work here? Where my mother would be constantly on my back, constantly telling me to do this or that for her, probably complaining to other people about me?
And I’d have to see all the faces from my childhood again around town, and…
The thought lurked constantly just at the edges of my mind, where I kept it held back, pushed at bay.
I couldn’t think about going back to Sawyer—I knew where that would lead—but what else was I supposed to think when everything else in life was a dead end?
Some awful part of me worked hard to rationalize it, saying I’d just go back to him for a few weeks, just enough to find work, find my own place.
I tried to ignore it, but the voice drilled into the back of my head, and it took everything I had to keep it away.
My second night back at the house, those thoughts were the only thing keeping me company in the small hours of the night, and I choked on them.
It wasn’t long before I broke. It was at the familiar fake-wood kitchen table, my mom pouring coffee from the pot out into her ruby-red mug she was still using as her default all these years later, and she’d been talking about this drama at her workplace that was drilling into my skull until I felt like my head would explode.
The thought of that being the most important thing, when I was spiraling, when I was sinking so deep I couldn’t see light anywhere anymore—finally, I broke, and when she looked at me to confirm she was definitely right about whatever it was she’d just said, I gave her the wrong answer.
“Mom, I was dating a woman.”
She blinked quickly at me, almost overflowing her coffee cup, She caught herself and set it down, looking at me like I’d grown a second head. “What?”
“In Vermont. Before everything fell apart and I had to come here. I just thought you should know, I’m… well, I’m attracted to women.”
She blinked slowly this time, screwing her eyes shut and opening them again, like if she just blinked hard enough it would wipe away the nonsense and I’d be replaced by her normal daughter. “I… okay.”
“I really, really, really liked her. I mean, I still do. I didn’t want things to end the way they did, but I screwed everything up, and I made everyone hate me.
Just like I did in Boston. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” I said, my voice crumpling now as I did, too, sinking into my hands to find my face hot.
“I think you would have liked her. She’s very intelligent, hardworking, and she can be serious, but she’s creative and gentle and she was so good to me. ”
She sounded—I wasn’t sure. Annoyed, a little. Flustered, more like. Didn’t know how to respond and was embarrassed about it. “Well, I couldn’t really have thought anything about it, because you didn’t want to talk to me or even let me know that you’d left Boston, gone all the way up to Vermont…”
“You never reached out to me. And even now that I’m back, you haven’t actually asked me anything about Boston, about Vermont, about me, about my life. What was supposed to make me think you cared to know?”
“Alyssa, you’re being ridiculous. I’m your mother. Of course I want to know. I don’t appreciate you taking this time to attack me instead of just telling me what you want to tell me anyway.”
Jesus, what was I even doing right now? Was I trying to alienate my own mother, too? I came out to her, and it didn’t make her angry, so I kept poking until I found a way to make her upset? “I’m sorry,” I said quietly, and she sighed, a thick and frustrated thing.
“I’ve been worried for you. You come back talking about how your partner didn’t let you go anywhere or do anything, and apparently you ran off from there to go have a relationship with a woman in Vermont, and now you’re back here being depressed about it.”