Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
Mia, Kitty, and Greyson were still in their dresses when I returned to the condo. The three of them stretched out on the sofa bed, a bowl of popcorn between them as they watched TV.
“Hey, girls,” I said, hoping I could sneak past them and into my room before they noticed I’d been crying.
“Hey, Aunt Jo,” Kitty said without looking up. Mia had lifted her head as soon as I walked in, staring at me with that same hard look she’d worn a few weeks ago when I’d asked how she was feeling.
Greyson, always the most energetic of the three, sat up and folded her legs beneath her. “Where’s your mail?”
“What?”
“Your mail. You went to check the mail.”
Right. “Uh, it was all junk.”
Fortunately, Greyson seemed appeased by this. “That’s all we seem to get too. Did you see my dad? He went to check the mail, too, but he hasn’t come back.”
“No,” I said. I bent down to put Mia’s and Kitty’s shoes on the shoe rack, hoping it would keep the girls from getting a good look at me. “I must’ve just missed him.”
Greyson opened her mouth, but her phone dinged, and she looked down at it. “There he is.” She read the message and rolled her eyes. “He says I have to come home now.”
Once Greyson was gone, I excused myself to my room and stood before the mirrored doors of my closet: hair windblown, eyes puffy from crying, legs and dress covered in sand. It was a miracle the girls hadn’t said anything about it.
I slipped the thin straps of the dress over my shoulders and looked away from my reflection. The dress fell into a puddle at my feet, and I kicked it beneath the bed. Maybe when I found it in a few months, I could look back on this night without cringing.
Jo, I don’t— Don’t what? The possibilities were endless.
Jo, I don’t want to kiss you. Jo, I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing.
Jo, I don’t like you. Jo, I don’t want your face anywhere near mine.
Jo, I don’t date. He’d said that before, but then again so had I.
Either way, I didn’t want to know the specifics of what he’d been about to say. I could guess the gist of it.
I grabbed the first pair of pajamas I could find from my closet, a ratty Navy T-shirt and a pair of faded rainbow-striped sleep shorts.
I flopped facedown onto my bed, quieting the loop of Alex’s voice saying, Jo, I don’t, from my mind by staying as still as possible.
It was a game I’d started playing after Dad died.
Spreading out on my bed, I’d close my eyes and think of each body part one by one, telling it to still.
Some days that was the only thing that dulled the constant guilt and ache of missing him.
The only thing that kept all those broken pieces inside from puncturing straight through me.
I’d only gotten from my toes to my knees when my door creaked and jolted me back into being. Mia stood in the doorway with her hands jammed into the pocket of her hoodie.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
Now, at my most vulnerable, Mia wanted to talk? I didn’t think I had it in me to talk about Samson right now, but what other choice did I have? I couldn’t exactly say, Sorry, I’m not in the mood to deal with your grief.
“Sure.” I patted the spot on the bed next to me.
Mia shook her head. “Outside.”
I followed her onto the patio and shut the door behind me.
She paced between my chairs with hunched shoulders, hands still in her pocket.
I remained on the step and watched, waiting for her to gather her thoughts and say something.
She turned and opened her mouth, then shook her head and stalked over to the other chair again.
At this rate we’d be out here forever unless I said something. “What did you want to talk about?”
Mia stopped beside my camellia shrub, drew one hand from her pocket, and flicked at a blossom with her finger.
I wondered what argument she was having with me in her head, because she seemed to grow angrier by the second.
I could trace it in her face: the downward curl of her mouth, the clench of her jaw.
Kitty, she wore her emotions for what they were, but all of Mia’s—sadness, guilt, anxiety—came out as anger.
When she looked at me again, I realized this was different.
This was true undiluted anger. Anger at me.
“Mia—”
“You can’t do shit like that,” she said, her face sharper than ever.
“Like what?” Did she know what had happened at the beach? And if so, why was she upset about it? Hadn’t she and Kitty been pushing me and Alex together all summer?
Mia plucked a leaf from the bush and let it flutter to the ground. “You can’t run away from Kitty when she’s like that.”
Run away from Kitty? “That’s not why I left.”
“Well that’s what it looked like. She already thinks she’s a buzzkill, even without your help. You know what she said? She said, Did Aunt Jo leave because of me? She was fucking falling apart, and even then, she was thinking about you.”
All the breath whooshed out of me. I sank onto the step, too exhausted to hold myself up any longer.
Kitty. Sweet, sensitive Kitty. Who’d always been emotional, even before.
And who wouldn’t be, in her shoes? Especially at thirteen.
Suddenly, viscerally, I remembered the feeling of being thirteen, of carrying a grief so big I thought it would tear me in two.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t think—”
“Yeah, no duh.” Mia turned away from me again. The shadows deepened the angles of her face, making her look older than she was. “You only think about yourself.”
I stiffened. How could Mia say that? I’d given up my living room, my entire summer for them. “That’s not true, and you know it.”
“Then why do you run away? Why did you take down all the pictures of him? Why do you flinch every time Samson comes up? See? There. You did it just now. Why do you always change the subject? How can you act like he never existed? Or do you want us all to forget him?” Her voice cracked, and she let out a frustrated groan, swiping at her tears with the sleeves of her hoodie.
The words stung, but at her tears my anger faded. I stood and took a step toward her, but she hugged her arms to her chest and backed away.
“I haven’t forgotten. Of course I haven’t.
” I thought of my garden, the one we were standing in right now, of the list, the one we needed to finish by his/my/our birthday.
Didn’t Mia see? I was doing everything I could to keep him alive, but there was only so much I could manage without unraveling. “I asked if you wanted to talk.”
Mia laughed. “Yeah, and it was obvious you didn’t want to. Why would I talk to someone I make so uncomfortable?”
“It’s not that. It’s only . . . I don’t know how to make it okay.”
“No shit you can’t make it okay. Nothing is okay. Nothing will ever be okay again. And what I have to say, it would only . . .” She paused and shook her head.
I fumbled for words but only came up with the same ones. “I’m sorry.”
When Mia stepped out of the shadows, her hands were back in the pocket of her hoodie. The hard lines of her face fell, and she looked like a kid again. “Aunt Jo,” she said, her voice smaller than I’d ever heard it. “There’s something I didn’t say. Something about Samson.”
I tried not to flinch at the sound of his name. I tried to keep my face smooth, to shove that urge to run somewhere else. But Mia saw it, of course she did.
The raw pain on her face hardened again. “You know what? Forget it. You wouldn’t understand.”
She stepped forward, and I hoped she would sit beside me and lay her head in my lap, letting me brush my fingers through her hair like she had a few weeks ago. I could comfort her without words. But instead she pushed past me through the door and into the condo.
I sat alone on the step, thinking of Beth at our father’s funeral.
She’d only been a year older than Mia was now, and her expression had been broken as we sat side by side in the church pew.
At Samson’s funeral Beth hadn’t cried. She’d looked like Mia had tonight—sharp and dangerous.
Afterward, Beth and I sat at her kitchen table.
Talking to her that week was a delicate task, like ironing the silk sheets on the boat.
“At least it’s over,” I’d said, referring to the funeral.
“It’s never over,” Beth had said, anger in her face.
“You know that.” I hadn’t bothered to say that wasn’t what I’d meant.
But there was nothing I could say to help her. My words could only hurt.
And now my silence had failed Mia and Kitty.
How could I make them see that they weren’t what made me uncomfortable?
It was me, my words, always the wrong words.
How could I explain that I’d only make things worse?
Or that sometimes, all you could do was close your eyes and stay as still as possible.
That the only thing that helped was tricking your mind into not existing for a while.
It was only when I crawled into bed and turned off the light that I thought about Alex again.
And more specifically, that we had work the next day, which meant carpooling.
No way in hell was I getting in his van and enduring twenty minutes of humiliation.
I sent him a text saying I needed to go into work early and would drive myself.
I knew he’d see through it, but I hoped he’d let it be.