Chapter 29
THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH
STATEN
Knox’s car engine roars to life even amongst the rain, and the thought of him leaving—for good, this time—twists a knife inside me with a poorly disciplined hand.
The moment I step back inside the house—ruining the welcome mat with my failure and the night’s transgressions—my mother is already facing me. A rictus frown is on her face, and sympathy muddles her wrinkle-heavy expression.
The zenith of my sorrow no longer waits in the wings but calls for a timely shower of tears—one that mirrors a similar trajectory to the downpour hell-bent on washing Maple Grove clean off the map.
Cymbals crash in my ears, and despite being uncomfortably soaked, it feels like a brazen bull of heat is engulfing me.
“It’s over,” I whisper with a salt-burned tongue, relinquishing any attempt at keeping my emotions together. It’s the equivalent of crudely patching weather-beaten holes with wet newspaper to keep the elements out.
She doesn’t need me to elaborate. She knows—a mother’s instinct is always right.
“Oh, Buttercup. I’m so sorry,” she coos, shedding her nighttime sweater to embrace me, not even caring to lambast me for bringing in half the tempest from outside.
I burrow into her as if I’m a child again—hardwired to seek solace in the only other person who can eradicate the noise like Knox—but her hug doesn’t feel nearly as comforting as the inherent certainty of well-built arms.
My vision whitewashes, and a delusional part of me is still trying to convince my mind that this is all some hallucinatory halfway.
I create twin fist holds in the back of her shirt, not bothering to apologize for the snot and saliva that discolor cotton. “He never truly loved me, Mom. He—he said all these terrible things to me. I thought we were happy together.”
“I’m sorry things didn’t work out, Staten. I could see how much you two cared for each other.”
“I feel like I can’t breathe. I can’t do this. I can’t live without him. I just want the pain to go away. Please make it go away.”
My mom strokes the length of my spine, holding me tighter than she ever has before.
When she speaks, her tone is saturated in guilt, roughening the usual softness of her voice. “I never wanted you to know what heartbreak felt like. Knox—he—oh, honey, he was in love with you. I could see it in his eyes. Whatever lies he fed to you, they don’t hold any merit.”
My mouth is drier than a communion wafer, and there’s a pit fight happening inside my stomach. I’m reeling in self-hatred and the increasingly suicidal urge to leave all my earthly possessions behind.
I didn’t expect to keep our fake relationship from my mother for so long—partly because I never thought it would evolve into anything real—but now, with no conscience to preserve, the only way I can grapple with my frustration is to jettison every once-airtight lie that has crossed my tongue.
I sever our embrace so I can look her in the eyes, more than prepared for the deserved ramifications of my duplicity. “In the beginning, when he came over for dinner…we weren’t actually dating. You mistook him for my boyfriend, and I didn’t have it in me to break your heart.”
“What?” my mother exclaims, shock sticking to the sallow features of her face.
“I was in love with Leif,” I admit quietly, as if speaking the past back into existence will undo all my progress with Knox.
“Leif Kennedy? Your friend from orientation group?”
I nod. “He never noticed me, and I still wanted him. Knox—he was the first person to actually see me for who I was. I never asked him to. He was never even an option for me, but…but he saw the pain that Leif was involuntarily inflicting on me, and he became determined to prove to me that I deserved better.”
Taking a trip down memory lane isn’t at the top of my to-do list, and against my heart’s caterwauling, I wonder if all those clandestine looks I shared with Knox were anything but. My half-formed resentment jackknifes awake.
“Staten, I had no idea,” my mom cries. “I’m sorry I never realized what was going on.”
“You have nothing to apologize for. I shouldn’t have kept it a secret from you.”
Speaking of secrets, there’s another huge one that I have yet to unveil, and my near-death experience is a bit of a harder pill to swallow than some young adult love triangle Gordian knot.
I brace myself for my mother’s predicted outburst, praying that my good-natured confession won’t result in a manhunt against my dearly departed.
The nerves are paramount; every emotion that’s been imprisoned in its corresponding sector is about to finally be released by a master key. The truth comes tumbling out at a velocity I can’t slow, annihilating the rule-following, guilt-free persona my mother has known half her life.
I guess death has cornered me in more ways than one tonight.
“Mom, do you remember when I was in the hospital?” I ask, my belly seizing, my feet submerged in the metaphorical debris of my mistakes.
A sleet of tears pebbles along her waterlines, caught and accentuated in the leftover lightning zigzagging through the path of least resistance. “Of course I do. It was one of the worst days of my life.”
Well, this might be your second worst.
If I was able to forgive Knox—and I was the one most affected by his…unusual parking skills—then my mom will surely be able to forgive him too, right? It was an accident.
She’s going to be devastated. I tell her everything—I always have, ever since I was a kid.
Maybe it’s because I never had a rebellious phase, but an open line of communication between me and my mom has always been one of the most important staples of our relationship.
We work well because of it. I’ve basically spit in the face of progressive talk therapy.
An aggressive strain of guilt wraps around my heart, disregarding the fragile sticker that I haphazardly slapped on it in an attempt to preserve what’s left. Shards with hairline fractures that accept a disconnected provisional period as its new norm.
Finally, with no feelings to protect anymore, I feel fat bulbs slide down my cheeks at an unregulated speed. “Knox was the one who hit me with his car,” I blurt out, a sob punctuating every dip in my sentence.
I didn’t think it was possible, but her frown flatlines even more. Betrayal rivets to her face, and it doesn’t take long for realization to settle like pulp at the bottom of a murky glass. Miniature crystals bead throughout the canopy of her lashes.
“He…what?”
“It was an accident. He wasn’t looking where he was going, and I came out of—”
“You brought this man into my house, Staten. You lied to me in the hospital. Straight to my face.”
I can see the beginning vestiges of anger peek through her rigid mask, and the undercooked response nestled in my cheek is unable to tame her inner storm. “I just—I didn’t want to worry you.”
She purges all my efforts to keep her heart rate at a cool sixty, her voice a burr that obstructs her throat. “And you think keeping this gigantic secret from me was the way to spare my worry?”
“It was in the past. I’d gotten over it.”
“Well, I haven’t! This was not your secret to keep from me. I had every right to know the truth.”
“Knox isn’t a bad guy,” I weep, still defending his character even when said character sliced me into goddamn ribbons with the negligence of a too-sharp blade.
The walls around me resemble a charnel house the longer I fight for a man who wants nothing to do with me, and gooseflesh pocks my arms in the midst of a defiant updraft.
“Even if it was just an accident, one accident is enough to take you away from me. Do you know what I would’ve done if I’d lost you that day? I can’t…I can’t imagine a world without you in it.”
My mother’s eyes are as dark as wine, eclipsed by an untamable agony that I have no chance against—even if I spent hours crafting the perfect rebuttal. Telling her the truth when tensions were high was an undertaken decision.
“I’m so sorry, Mom,” I cry, already missing the security of her arms, feeling like an outcast amongst the poorly insulated walls of a crumbling house.
There’s a greater evil breathing down my neck, whispering terrible things to me from the safety of the shadows, knowing that I have no jurisdiction where the light runs from pitch-black apparitions.
Do you expect her sympathy now, Staten? You’re a horrible person for keeping this from her. You knew what you were doing was wrong, but prioritizing your own happiness over her peace was never up for discussion.
The hiccup in her vocal cords doesn’t go unnoticed. “You don’t need to apologize.”
“I wanted to tell you so badly. I didn’t want you to have any preconceived notions about Knox at the time—because I had found it in my own heart to forgive him—but to just assume that you’d be so readily accepting holds you to an unfair standard.”
In a matter of seconds, I just…implode. Folding in violently like a star that can’t support its own mass anymore, sucking other deep-space phenomena into its collapsing orbit, and emitting a light so blinding that its own death can be seen from Earth. Supersonic.
My knees hit the hardwood floor without prelude, followed by the splattering of tears that steep into permeable material. How is it possible that I’ve disappointed the two people that mean the most to me in the matter of a single night?
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I parrot frantically, clawing at the clothing that seems too restricting, knowing that the tears won’t stop until I can hold my heart in my hands again without it breaking.
My mother kneels to my level, sweeping me back into a hug that I don’t deserve.
“Shh, Buttercup. It’s okay. I’ve got you.
I’m sorry that I made you feel like you couldn’t come to me with this.
I just…it’s hard for me to switch off from mom mode.
You’re all I have. When I saw you lying in the hospital bed—bruised and battered—the reality of the situation made me lose my mind.
I wasn’t there to protect you when you needed me the most.”
“I need your protection now,” I wail. “I’m never going to be okay again.”
“You will, sweetheart. I know you will.”
It feels like my breath doesn’t belong to me. It’s unclear if my memories do either. The romantic, rose-tinted film I held over my life is curling at the edges like burnt nitrate, and a not-so-delicate reality check is in my favor.
“He’s all I had, Mom. Knox brought out the best in me. He meant everything to me, and he left me.”
“I might not be his biggest fan right now, but he’ll come back to you,” she coaxes, smoothing circles over my back.
I pull away just enough to give her sweater respite from my flume of tears. “How? Why? I’m not enough for him. I was never enough for him.”
“Stop, Staten. None of that is true.”
“I just want him to talk to me.”
“Maybe he needs time to figure things out.”
It dawns on me—even in the midst of imminent destruction—that my mother’s hostility toward my unofficial ex has taken a leave of absence. “You’re giving him the benefit of the doubt,” I whisper in shock.
She uses the hem of her sleeves to clean up a night’s worth of emotional drainage, bringing some much-needed feeling back to my cheeks.
“I guess I am. I…I didn’t realize how much you loved him.
And as furious as I am with him, I’m even more furious that you think you aren’t deserving of him. Because you are.”
I perk up, sniffling. “So you don’t want to kill him?”
If her smile wasn’t evident, she would’ve denied it. “Not tonight, no.”
“Thank you for being here for me,” I say, my gratitude half-muffled by another influx of incomprehensible gibberish.
For the first time since I stepped inside, I can see through the intermission of a teary brigade. Being in my mother’s arms reminds me that she was my one and only support system before Knox.
“I’m always going to be in your corner, Staten, even when you drive me crazy. What’s meant to be always has a way of working out. You just need to give both of your hearts time to heal.”
If only it was that easy.