Happy After All

Chapter Twenty-Five

I don’t go to Nathan’s room that night, and he doesn’t come to mine. I think he understands that I need time. Time to go over my realizations, time to come to some new conclusions.

When that man walked into my motel almost three years ago, I thought he was a wreck.

I thought I was living in some kind of accepted space. I was in the after of a painful experience, but I knew it, and I was moving forward.

I was wrong.

I’m just as much of a wreck as he is.

I find a strange sort of comfort in that.

I’m a wreck, but I’m ready to be less of one. I’m ready to make some changes.

The next morning I send him a text, and he’s at my door with coffee twenty minutes later.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

I sit with that for a moment. “I am. I ... I’m better, I think. Better than I’ve been for a while. Who knew, I just needed to ... talk about it.”

I know it isn’t that simple. It isn’t just talking about it. It’s actually sitting in the wisdom of other women. It’s being in that community.

“You know, I think I understand why women got accused of witchcraft so often,” I say.

“Really?”

“Yes. Because our wisdom is powerful. It upends the rules. Changes how you see things. About life, about yourself. At least, that’s what happened to me last night.”

“I’m definitely not going to argue with you about the wisdom of women.”

He looks like he wants to say something more, but he doesn’t. I don’t push him, even though I want to.

“So,” I say. “I have kind of a wild idea.”

“What is that?”

He turns his full attention to me when he asks that question, and I think that kind of focus could become an addiction. I remember Christopher half looking up from his laptop when I’d talk to him, and it isn’t like I wasn’t distracted sometimes too.

This is just different.

This is something totally new. That’s all.

“I want to drive to Bakersfield today.”

I don’t fully realize that that’s what I’m going to say until the words exit my mouth. Because it was only a germ of an idea spinning around in the back of my mind from the time I got out of bed. I really hadn’t decided I was going. Much less including another person in my psychosis. Now I’ve invited him, and I can’t go back.

“Your mother?”

“Yes. I am hurt. By the whole lack of relationship I have with her. By everything. I try to pretend I’m not. I try to pretend it doesn’t matter. I ...” I take a deep breath to ground myself.

“I don’t know if I can explain it. I’ve told myself and told myself that it’s okay. That she is just who she is. She can’t help it, she has a personality disorder. Whatever. I think to an extent, that is a really healthy thing for me to do. I’m not taking her issues on board, I’m trying to make my own life, but the problem is that I’m hurt by it. I don’t know if I just need to tell her that, or what. It feels like I deserve something. I don’t know. Or maybe I just need to see the house that I grew up in. Maybe I just need to see her. I’m very good at running, Nathan. The thing about running is it’s not closure. It’s just leaving things behind. But if you run too fast, you leave the door open, and all kinds of shit follows you. Whether you mean it to or not. Letting shit follow you isn’t the same as working it out either.”

“Right. I mean, I’m familiar with shit.”

“I know.”

“Actually, I really do want to go on this journey to your childhood trauma.”

“That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” I say. “So ... come along with me as I drain some poison.”

He smiles at me, and I want to save the image of that forever. It’s gone too quickly.

“I’ll drive,” he says. “I get better gas mileage.”

“No doubt,” I say.

We bring our coffee and head out to his car. It is a very cute car.

We get in, and I quiz him on his music preferences. And scowl in judgment about all of them, even though I have never met a genre of music I didn’t like. Unsurprising, his tastes are more discerning .

“I love pop music,” I say as we head down the two-lane road that will carry us to the interstate.

“It’s not for me,” he says. “It’s too ... bright and happy.”

“That’s why I love it,” I say. “It sounds light, and it sounds easy, but sometimes the lyrics are devastating. That’s ... life, isn’t it?”

“I think you’re putting too much thought into ‘... Baby One More Time.’”

“You can never put too much thought into Ms. Britney Spears,” I say.

“I didn’t know anyone felt that strongly about it.”

“Have you never been on the internet?”

“No,” he says. Which makes me laugh because I know he’s lying.

As we drive, my phone rings. I look at it, and then I feel my heart slam against my breastbone.

Chris.

Of course. He’ll be rolling into town this weekend, and he was asked to moderate the panel. He’s trying to do ... whatever this is. Damage control of a kind, maybe. I suppose I would know if I answered.

“You can get that,” Nathan says.

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Fucking Fuck ,” I say.

“Oh. It’s him?”

I look over at him, and I see the tension in his forearms, the way his hands tightened on the steering wheel.

I’m satisfied by the fact that Christopher creates this level of tension in him as well.

“You do realize you have to see him this weekend?”

“Yes,” I say, redirecting. “But it won’t be on the phone. It won’t be because he decided to break years of silence. It won’t be in a moment with no one there so he can say whatever he wants. I’m going to stand next to you, and I’m going to introduce you, and I’m going to say that I own a motel here. That I write books now. That I’m very happy to see him. Then I’m going to congratulate him on his new life, and his new fiancée, and his new baby.” My eyes fill with tears, and I’m not even sure why.

“You don’t have to do that,” he says.

“No, I don’t, though I think it would make my life a lot better if I did. I think I would feel better. I think I would feel like I had drawn a line under it, or something.”

“Is that how you feel?”

“No.” I’m aware there’s a terrible irony to that because we are currently speeding toward Bakersfield, where I intend to say some very stark things to my mother, and I’m still not sure what I want to say to Christopher. Or if I want to tell him the truth. I’m not even sure what the truth is.

I sit there, staring at the road and the way it rolls in waves over the farmland, dry and difficult.

“I don’t love him,” I say. “I know that. I’m sure of it. I think I wouldn’t be with him even if ... even if Emma had lived.”

This is my first time saying her name to Nathan. This is my first time trying to honor that world while I’m living in this one. It’s given me a good place to put it. Sometimes I think that is maybe the best thing you can do with grief. Because you’re going to live with it. It’s going to be with you. How do you carry it so it doesn’t get too heavy? I don’t want to forget her. I don’t want to believe that the loss was meant to be. I can accept that there was the potential for a life, for a world, that there is no longer a potential for. That I live in a different world because of that loss. I can honor that while living. While I write myself a new story, while I put myself into a new world, full of new possibilities.

“You think so?”

“I know so,” I say. “The problems that we had, they would’ve been the problems no matter what. The things that he ... I was so broken when I lost her. I couldn’t be the woman he wanted me to be.”

I stare out the car window at the cracked, faded road. The yellow grass and rocky hills. “Fundamentally, the way we deal with hard things is so different. I was too ... lost. In my own grief. I’m not saying it was something I did wrong, but I could never have found a way to meet him in the middle even if I had wanted to. Even if it had occurred to me. He certainly didn’t try with me. He was frustrated. I was lagging behind him as far as he was concerned. He wanted to get back to the way things had been. Then, when I couldn’t meet his needs, rather than continuing to try with me, he found somebody else. That’s the bottom line. I’m not saying he can’t change now. I’m not saying he can’t make a different decision with this woman he’s engaged to now. But unless he’s dealt with the thing that made him treat me the way he did, he’ll do the same thing to her. Even if we hadn’t lost her, I think eventually he would have cheated. Not because there’s something wrong with me.”

Those words are a revelation. A breakthrough. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I say. There is no noise, except the tires on the road. I let out a long breath. “There is nothing wrong with me .”

“No,” Nathan says. “Of course there’s not.”

“I felt like there was. For ... always. Always. How could I not? My dad left because he loved another woman so much that he had to be with her. And not with me. My mom can only love herself. The way I carried a baby was wrong. The way I grieved that baby was wrong. At least as far as he was concerned. I’m not the problem, though. I’m not.”

“Amelia,” he says. “I consider myself incredibly lucky to have found somebody who accepted me the way that I was. The truth is, somebody who’s been made to feel like you do, all of your life, someone who felt the way I did because of my dad, we are way more likely to keep repeating that cycle in every relationship we have. Because we’ll take anything.”

His wisdom is surprising, and definitely true.

“Did you take anything before you met Sarah?”

“Yeah. I had a history of it. I’m over six feet tall and I have a job. So I never had trouble finding women to date me. I had trouble getting them to accept that I wasn’t what they initially fantasized I might be. They thought I was G.I. Joe. That I was going to be their military boyfriend fantasy. Then I spent more time reading books than they wanted me to. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t do the party thing. I didn’t ... I didn’t give them what they wanted. For a long time, I let that affect me. I figured ... it was something wrong with me, because ...”

“You always got treated like there was something wrong with you.”

This is Psychology 101, and I know it. But having it laid out for me like this, having it spoken so plainly, and about my issues, is both jarring and revelatory.

In the back of my mind, there is always this little wheedling voice that says I was the commonality in all these relationships. The truth is, my parents taught me to take nothing. They taught me that sharing the deepest parts of myself didn’t matter. That my feelings weren’t important. That the things I cared about weren’t important. Then I met a man who treated me better than that, because Chris had. For a long time he had. When I met him, I wasn’t critical of some of the other issues.

I should have been. “Thank you for coming with me on this four-hour car ride of childhood trauma.”

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

I choose not to dig too deeply into that, but I also choose not to question it. I let that assurance wash over me. I feel something stirring deep inside me. I don’t want to give words to it. I don’t even want to give it a voice. It still echoes loudly in my head and my heart all the same.

I try to accept the fact that he and I are on that happiness continuum. It’s not forever. Even so, I feel different. Something is shifting inside me. My ability to just accept, to just float, doesn’t seem to exist in quite the same way that it did.

I’ve decided to swim. I can feel myself on the edge of a waterfall. I have to make decisions. About everything. I have to decide how I’m going to deal with Chris. I have to decide what I want to do with Nathan.

First, though, we’re going to talk to my mother.

I make a squeaking noise that’s nearly a scream and cover my face with my hands.

“That’s the mood?” he asks.

“Until further notice,” I say.

He nods. “Fair.”

“I need some music.”

“How about some Britney Spears.”

We are propelled by pop music all the way to Bakersfield. By the time we get there, I feel nothing. It’s an out-of-body experience, driving past the same fields I remember from childhood. The same buildings.

It has changed, but not that much.

I’m different, though. I have changed so much since I was a kid here.

I felt insignificant and lonely most of the time.

It’s never been Bakersfield that’s the problem. Just the way I felt in it. I realize that strongly as we drive through town and make our way toward the street my mother still lives on.

I don’t know if she’ll be home. It might be an exercise in futility.

I could have texted her. I really didn’t want to.

I didn’t want her to rehearse. I didn’t want to have any contact beforehand. I just ...

We roll up to the front of the house. The grass is dead. It’s been so dry. There’s one palm tree in the front yard that’s still alive.

The house is in desperate need of a new coat of paint. There’s a car in the driveway with the hood popped. It’s up on cinder blocks. There’s another car that looks functional.

I take in the little details of disrepair. They speak of solitude.

If I lived near my mother, if we had a relationship, I would take care of some sort of landscape to make it look nicer. I would’ve helped her fix her car.

I would have helped arrange to have someone paint the house.

I realize that I came here to yell at her. I came here to tell her what a terrible mother she was.

Everything in her life already speaks to that. She’s been cut off. By everyone.

I feel that. Deeply in my soul.

The pain of it. In that moment, I feel sorry for her.

Because there is nothing wrong with me.

There is something desperately wrong with her, and she’s never been able to have a relationship with her daughter.

Yes, it gave me issues. I’m angry about it. I have every right to be. What I’m angry about is the lack of a mother who can give me the things most mothers can. I ache for a person who doesn’t exist, and no amount of confrontation is going to fix that.

I came here to say something to her that would satisfy me.

“What does your dad’s house look like?” I ask Nathan as we sit there in front of the house.

“It’s nice,” he says. “He has the lawn cut every week. In fact, he has landscapers. He can afford to keep everything looking great.”

“Do your brothers help him with things? Projects?”

He shakes his head. “They’re busy with their own lives.”

“Have they helped you?”

“They’re busy with their own lives,” he reiterates.

Suddenly I’m just ... over it. Everything.

“It’s awful,” I say. “This isolation. For what? This ... this selfishness. In your case, this idea that a good son looks a certain way. Well, even your father’s good sons aren’t there for him, because they’re self-important just like he is. If they only knew you. Because I started reading your book, Nathan, and it’s amazing. The observations that you make about life in the military ... They’re so compelling.”

He snorts. “People don’t really read for that.”

“I do,” I say. “You’re smart about people. You pay attention to them. You write about them in interesting and compassionate ways, and it says so much about who you are. It is incredibly stupid that your dad doesn’t care about that. You could give your family insight into their own experiences that they probably don’t have.”

He barks a laugh. “They would just say I don’t actually understand because I only served four years.”

“Look what you did with it. Look what you’re doing with it still. You had a woman who loved you. Do they even have that?”

“My brothers are married,” he says.

“Well,” I say. “Still.”

“They have lives that are just like my dad’s,” he says. “My parents were married for forty-five years. I don’t think they knew each other. That’s a really scary thing, Amelia. Maybe you would have stayed with Christopher. If you had a child, maybe he would’ve cheated on you, and you would’ve stayed. Or maybe he would’ve hidden it, or you would have pretended to let him hide it because you didn’t want to break up the family, because you didn’t want to destroy the facade. You can be married to somebody who doesn’t know you for a very, very long time. I saw that, in my parents’ marriage. People accept the worst kind of bullshit.”

“You’re better off,” I say. “You’re ...”

I start to say that he’s happier . But I’m not sure he is. He’s locked himself away from his family, and that’s a win. Except he’s locked away completely.

Not now, though. Right now, he’s with me.

“Well,” I say. “This is what my mother has. Because she’s alienated her only child. Looking at it ... I honestly just feel sorry for her. I don’t want this. If I have children someday, if I ... have children I actually get to ... raise, I don’t want this. I guess I should be glad I can look at her sad lawn, and her dilapidated house, and I can recognize what it means to not be a mother. I can recognize what I don’t want. I ... I was so lucky last night to get to sit and talk to Alice and Gladys. To get to listen to them share their wisdom with me, because I did not ever get maternal wisdom from this woman. Right now, this is wisdom of a kind. I know what I don’t want. I know who I can’t ever let myself become. I’ve been an observer for so many years. I have the people at the Pink Flamingo. I have to make sure I don’t isolate myself from the people who care for me.”

He looks grave. I realize I’ve stepped on something touchy here.

“People care about you,” I say.

“If they don’t anymore,” he says, “it is definitely my own fault.”

“Nathan,” I say. “You’re not a narcissist. You lost your wife. It’s different.”

“Maybe,” he says. “The end result might be the same, though.” He huffs a laugh. “I’m the crazy guy who lives alone on an island. I will be Old Man Hart before I know it. The kids will be afraid to get a ball off my lawn.”

“Well, they should get off your lawn,” I say.

“I’m sure I’ll be shouting that while shaking my fist in ... Hell, I probably only have ten years.”

Time.

Time just grinds relentlessly on.

And kills the grass and fades the paint. And turns your hair silver. And makes rifts widen. Makes pain turn into a dull ache.

Not now. Not with us.

“I’m not going to get anything from this,” I say to him.

“You don’t think?”

“No,” I say. “I already know there’s nothing I can say to her. I already know I can’t ... I can’t say a set of magic words to her and make her suddenly care about all the pain she put me through. That’s not realistic. What I wanted to do was tell her all the ways she failed, but she’s just going to turn it back around on to me. That’s who she is. She’ll resist character development at every turn, trust me. I’m glad I came here. I see it clearly now. I see myself clearly now too.”

“We drove all this way,” he says.

“Yes. That’s already more than she’s ever done for me. I have put more thought and more effort into this relationship than ...” I clear my throat. “I think I just need to let it go. Because I’m living my life. A life I’m choosing. I can’t make my childhood hurt less. All I can do is decide where my energy goes. And it’s not going to be here.”

He nods slowly. “Good for you.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Very good for me.” I feel like I needed the drive, I needed to sit here. I needed to look at this house and feel nothing but pity for the person who lives inside.

I needed to feel, profoundly, that this isn’t my home. I grew up in that house, but it’s not my home.

Rancho Encanto is my home. It is maybe the only place I have ever felt at home. I’m done keeping my roots shallow. I’m going to let them grow deep.

“It’s good,” I say. “We skipped fighting. We skipped the screaming. We skipped the inevitable blame game. Some people don’t change.”

“But you’re changing,” he says.

“I damn well am.”

We’re silent for a moment. “So, is your dad the kind of parent it just makes more sense to be no contact with, or is he someone you can reason with?”

“The complication with my dad was always my mother. I loved her. He sucks. She put up with it. I still talk to him, and I still go over for dinner on occasion. Because she would want that. She wouldn’t want him by himself—she never did. That’s why she stuck it out.”

I wish I could have dinner with his dad. I wish I could tell him what a wonderful man Nathan is.

Then I realize I’m wishing for things that extend far beyond what we’ve agreed to. As we make our way back to Rancho Encanto, instead of shutting that down, I let it simmer inside me. I let myself consider what that might mean.

I feel like I’m getting closer to giving those feelings a voice.

Like I don’t just know how I would write it.

I know how I want to say it.