Chapter 26
For the second time in a day I’m standing outside a door with my stomach twisting about what’s on the other side. Below all that, though, there’s a little nugget of calm. This is the right thing. I ring the bell.
The porch light comes on and Mrs. Leary appears. Her makeup is perfect, her expression blank and inscrutable. “Hattie. Come on in, quick, it’s freezing out here.”
Well, she didn’t slam the door in my face, so we’re already winning. She takes my coat and hangs it on a row of hooks screwed into the wall. Mason’s favorite baseball cap is hanging on the far hook. I half expect it to burst into flames from my sheer awareness of it.
“Thanks, Mrs. Leary,” I say.
“Hattie, I think I’ve told you. Please call me Cat,” she says, wiping her hands on her pants. Does she think my coat has germs?
“Is Mr. Leary here?” I ask, glancing in the living room. At least he likes me.
“No, he has choir tonight.” She puts her hands in her pockets and cocks her head, waiting, lips pressed together.
I should have brought food or flowers or something; that would have justified my awkward appearance.
Instead, I fib. “Sorry, Cat. I was just walking in the neighborhood, and I realized I hadn’t come by and, well, I probably should have already, which is my bad.
” On my way here, I thought I could help her find some peace, somehow, for Mason’s sake.
Let her know that Mason is okay. But how can I possibly do that when she’s looking at me like I’m here to sell her something?
Why should she believe anything I say? I thought the words would come to me and I would know what to say, but her stiffness is so unsettling.
She seems to finally accept that I’m not just going to turn around and run away. “Well, what can I get you? Hot chocolate? It’s just the instant kind with the mini marshmallows, but it’s good in a pinch …” She leads me through the hallway and into the kitchen, where I cough to cover a gasp.
Mason is sitting on the counter.
“Um, what?” I say, distracted. I haven’t seen him since Asha said we had a “special bond,” and now it’s all I can think about.
“Cocoa or Coke Zero?” Mrs. Leary asks again.
“Nothing, thanks. I can’t stay that long,” I say.
“Well, this should be interesting,” Mason says, while at the exact same time Mrs. Leary says something about a glass of water.
My mouth feels like sandpaper. “Sounds great. Thanks,” I manage to get out.
As Mrs. Leary busies herself with the ice dispenser, I try to catch Mason’s eye, but he’s looking at her.
I want to explain to him why I’m here, but of course I can’t say anything without it seeming completely insane to his mom.
He finally looks up, and I smile as if to say, Just relax, I’ve got this. But do I?
Mrs. Leary puts the glass on the counter in front of me and starts unloading the dishwasher. “So how are your parents?” she asks, filling her hands with butter knives and dropping them in a drawer.
“All good.”
“And your brother? Is he, what, in second grade now?”
“Third,” I say, like the sparkling conversationalist that I am.
“Christ, is she going to ask you how you’re enjoying your classes next? Why does she always talk about nothing?” Mason jumps down off the counter and paces behind me.
He’s right. Breaking through small talk feels as rude as smashing a full-length mirror at Mrs. Leary’s feet, but there’s no other way.
“Mrs. Leary—” I say finally.
“Cat,” she corrects me.
“Cat—” Just dive headlong. “I know I’ve never exactly been your favorite person, but—”
“Hattie, what a thing to say!” She closes a cabinet a little too hard and turns to me. “Why on earth would you say that?”
“Uh,” I start, finding it difficult to swallow.
Because you do things like yell “What a thing to say!” at me?
Nope. Can’t say that. “I don’t know. I just always got the feeling that maybe you didn’t like me very much.
” I think about when my brother was little and one of us would try to be firm with him about bedtime, and he would cry in his adorable baby voice, “You spoke to me in a harsh tone!” That’s what Mrs. Leary has. Chronic harsh tone.
Mrs. Leary sighs heavily and rubs her eyelids just under her brows.
“No, no, no. It’s not that I don’t like you.
” She tosses her hands out helplessly and looks around, like the magic words to make me disappear might be written somewhere on the kitchen ceiling.
“I may have felt, and this really wasn’t fair to you, but in any case I felt, a bit, that you might not have always been the best thing for Mason. In terms of his happiness.”
“Mom!” Mason says sharply.
I feel like someone stuck a vacuum tube down my throat and sucked all the air out of my lungs. “Why?”
Mason interrupts. “You know, I was trying to let you do you here, Murph, but I think this is maybe headed in the wrong direction. This isn’t good for either of you.” He’s buzzing around me now, trying to usher me back into the hall. But I’m rooted to the spot.
“Why?” I say again.
“There didn’t seem to be parity in your relationship.
It wasn’t even,” she clarifies, as if I don’t what the word parity means.
“As his mother, I wanted him to be able to get out there, grow, maybe find a nice girlfriend, to have the full high school experience. And now—” She stops, choked on the obvious.
Before I know what I’m doing, I touch her arm. My mind is whirling with what she’s saying. She thought I was keeping him from getting a girlfriend? How exactly? But in the eye of that mental storm, I know she’s wrong about at least one thing.
“Cat, there’s nothing I can do to make any of that better now. But if you’re talking about our relationship, all I can tell you is that Mason was and is very important to me. I cared about him. A lot. More than a lot.”
She smiles then and nods. The air between us relaxes; the only one who still seems tense is Mason. Then Mrs. Leary seems to remember something. “Wait here,” she says, and disappears into the darkened hallway.
While she’s gone, I turn to Mason. “Parity?” I whisper.
He blushes—and now you’ve seen a ghost blush, Hattie, check that off your bucket list—but then just shrugs. “You know how moms are,” he says. “Always overthinking.”
Cat reappears, and in her hand is the unmistakable neon of a pile of Post-its. My sloth facts. “Are these yours? Lucia said she thought they might be.”
I take the pile and look at the one on top: A sloth can hold its breath for 40 minutes.
I was so excited when I found that fact during an internet deep dive on sloths.
It had been getting harder and harder to find more things about sloths that were true but would still elicit a “Holy shit!” out of Mason.
But this one … He must have held this piece of paper, must’ve read the words, was undoubtedly impressed, and all the while some part of him was thinking about me.
The stack of Post-its practically vibrates with his energy.
Instead of responding, I go into the hallway, reach into my coat pocket, and pull out an identical pile of neon paper. It is suddenly essential that Mason’s mom get to feel part of what I’m feeling, that connection to a specific moment when he was alive that we can linger in.
“Here are Mason’s. I think you should have them,” I say, handing her the facts written in his tiny, slanted printing.
“Oh,” she says, taking them carefully like they’re a rare first edition. “Thank you.” She presses them into her palm, and I know she gets it. I wonder if she can sense, somehow, how closely Mason is hovering next to us right now.
“I feel like if Mason were here, he’d want to tell you something,” I say. I look at him.
“You were a good mom,” he whispers.
“You were a good mom to him,” I say.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” I repeat, breathless.
Cat nods and smiles again, and when she closes her eyes for a moment, I notice how tired she looks.
“It’s not your fault,” I say again. She opens her eyes and cups my chin in her hand, like she’s drinking in my face.
“You’re sweet to come,” she says, and leads me back to the door.
“He thought the world of you.” I put on my coat and she fixes my collar, seeming to linger on being able to do the tiniest bit of mothering.
As I head down the front steps and turn onto the sidewalk, I’m not sure I did what I set out to do, but I guess as long as I don’t feel like I’ve ruined everything, that’s an improvement.
I feel her standing at the picture window, watching me, and I turn to wave.
But when I do, it’s Mason, hand pressed against the window toward me, and for a moment it feels like the only thing separating us is a piece of glass.