Chapter Thirty-Four
She knows exactly where to start because she has practiced this identical conversation hundreds of times in her head. She has run and rerun the dialogue, the tilt of her head, the flow and rhythm of her words.
Of course, there are details that are different—it being here and now.
There are the heightened circumstances surrounding this moment—the hospital, the parking structure, the sound of an ambulance.
Her husband, above them, somewhere. But even these, in a way, have been accounted for.
There was never going to be an ordinary utterance of this narrative.
It was always going to be told under duress.
“Oh, I could never work that,” she’d tell Dave.
“Mar,” he said—his voice shaking, broken, breakable—“there’s been an accident.”
She knew, all at once, that it was serious. That her daughter was not OK. She knew in the way mothers always know—even the ones who feel like strangers to their children.
“Where is she?”
“We’re on our way to Cedars,” he said. “Honey, it’s not good.”
She remembers that he sounded like a little boy. That he was not her athletic, strong, strapping husband but someone who needed her care. That he was terrified. She grabbed her keys, and ran.
She did ninety down the PCH, and to this day she remembers nothing about the drive here, nor leaving her car, abandoned in this same space somewhere.
“My daughter,” she puffed out at the help desk. “She’s here; she’s injured.”
“Name?”
“Lauren Novak.”
The woman looked up at her. Did she have the information? She swore, she could see it there, written on her sad, practiced face.
“She’s in surgery,” she said. “Someone will come and get you.”
“I can’t wait,” she said. “I’m her mother.”
She was screaming.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, I’m going to need to ask you to wait.”
She paced for what felt like hours. In reality it was three minutes and twelve seconds. A woman came out in scrubs.
“Mrs. Novak?”
Marcella followed the nurse down the corridor through beeping machines and movement and lights and one man’s loud, desperate moans. She ended up at Dave.
He stood from the chair in the small waiting room—the bereavement room, she later realized—in full hysterics. He was not stunned or stoic or panicked. He was in full, loud, messy grief.
“Mar,” he said, through unencumbered sobs. “She’s gone. She’s gone.”
He collapsed into her, his wife, her mother. He collapsed into her as if she could save him and her. As if she could bring her back.
There was no way. No. Just no. She screamed it. She shoved her husband back. Her savior, her safe space. The man she married and called her home. He had betrayed her. He had been the one at the wheel.
No.
She screamed it until it became unintelligible. Until it wasn’t a word, a single syllable, but a guttural roar. It sounded like the day Lauren was born, she realized. Birth and death.
Sometime later Sylvia showed up. Dave was making arrangements—she couldn’t think about what that word meant, really.
In her telling, Sylvia was calm, collected. But in reality that is not completely true, and Marcella corrects herself now. “Memory is fiction, of course,” she tells her daughter. “Especially for those of us who get to revise it.”
No, Sylvia was not calm. She felt heavy, even to Marcella, in the thick of her own shock and grief.
Marcella could feel her mother’s weight.
For many years she believed that the heaviness was her own grief—her beloved granddaughter—who Marcella suspected, no, knew, she loved more than her own daughter.
At least understood more, cared for more.
But that was not it, not completely. What Sylvia oozed was inevitability.
It was the point she herself had dreaded, the way Marcella has dreaded this one, standing with Lauren at the entrance to Parking Structure A.
The truth, finally.
“There’s a way,” Sylvia said, and that was that.
Marcella stares at Lauren. She has tried to say this gently, but there is only so lightly one can set down the truth. It’s going to make a sound no matter the fingertips.
“It was you, honey,” Marcella says to her.
She can see her daughter trying to digest this, trying to reorder the past in her own mind so that the new narrative slots in, but of course, it isn’t an easy switch.
It isn’t simply Dave’s death for her own but a full reorienting of their family narrative, their collective trauma, as it were.
What does it mean if Dave wasn’t saved? What does it mean that he never needed it, not until now?
“Why did you never tell me?” Lauren wants to know.
And this one is easy. Marcella exhales out the breath she has been holding.
“Because,” she says. “I’m your mother. It has always been my job to protect you.”