Chapter Forty
Lauren leaves shortly after, a mess of tears and anger.
Marcella wants to take it back, too—hell, she wants to take it back just to protect her daughter from this, this devastation, what is coming—but what would it mean to take it back?
Dave is right. Nothing has happened, no car accident, no sudden slip of the wheel.
Just the slow and unrelenting passage of time.
After her daughter leaves, her husband seems to fold into himself, and into sleep, and once his chest is moving—up and down, up and down—she slips out, too.
She doesn’t know where Lauren is, but she suspects that she won’t be at home, not at the beach.
She expects she is talking to her husband.
Marcella likes Leo. He is not who she would have chosen for Lauren, but now that he’s here—and since he has been—she knows he is right.
He is foundational to Lauren in the way she has always felt she was foundational to Dave.
Dave was the fun one, Marcella held the base, and she likes that her daughter will get to fly free.
She gets in her car and begins to drive.
She remembers being in high school and speeding down the PCH, some Beatles song blasting.
She remembers, too, the rush of hormones from her first drives out here with Dave, when they’d pull over, somewhere hidden in the bowels of Topanga Canyon, and undress each other in her back seat.
He was a good lover back then, too. He had practice—more practice than she did, to be sure.
She knew he went with a lot of girls before her, but she didn’t like to think about it.
Not because she was jealous—she knew there were women more beautiful than her with bigger breasts and bigger appetites, but she also knew it didn’t matter. Dave loved her.
No, she wasn’t jealous, but instead curious. She saw these other women like portals into parts of Dave she didn’t yet know. If she could have, she would have gone to lunch with every single one of them.
The sun is slipping lower as she drives out to Malibu, and with the darkening sky, she feels the edges of this moment move in closer. The gripping reality of what they are facing, trying to swallow her.
In her hands she holds Sylvia’s ticket, discarded by Lauren into the folds of the hospital blankets.
Here it is now, pressed to the steering wheel, shiny and light as a feather—unbothered by the weight surrounding it.
If only, she thinks.
If only he had gone to his cardiology appointments more regularly, if only they had done more EKGs.
They would have seen it sooner, wouldn’t they?
They could have caught it? The doctors always said he had time—but until what they never revealed—and bad on her, she never asked.
She was scared to. What if they had meant death?
But now she thinks: What if they had meant intervention?
She pulls up to 31382 Broad Beach Road. She barely kills the lights before she darts inside. She knows she doesn’t have much time, but she also knows Sylvia will be waiting for her, and sure enough, she is.
Her mother—all ninety-one years of her—sits cross-legged on the couch.
She isn’t reading or watching TV. She is simply sitting.
Marcella can count on one hand the number of times she has come home to her mother waiting for her, and all of them have happened after she was grown—after she was a mother herself.
“Hi, honey,” Sylvia says to her. She says it softly, and Marcella feels the tenderness like cold water to the face—foreign and alarming. “Did you see Lauren?”
Marcella nods. She is having trouble speaking, trouble putting into words what she wants to say next.
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia says. “I’m sorry I never told you. You must think I’m selfish.”
Marcella does; she always has. Sylvia never cared how she appeared or affected anyone around her. But what Marcella feels, more than that, is sadness. That they have never had the kind of relationship that would render a confrontation like this unnecessary.
“I tried hard to have the ticket not shape my life, but it did, anyway. I was reckless and careless because everything felt ahead, everything felt like a dress rehearsal. None of it felt as real as it should have.”
It’s not an apology, not exactly, but Marcella listens. This is the closest her mother has ever gotten to one.
“I know you. I knew what that knowledge would do to you. I wanted you to live your life like it was the main event. I thought I could protect you.”
“But you didn’t,” Marcella says.
“No.” Sylvia shakes her head. She stands. “There is no way to protect the people we love. Eventually, life finds us. And then all we have to meet it with is grit.”
“And your ticket,” Marcella says.
Sylvia nods. “There is that.”
“He won’t let her use it,” Marcella says. She comes farther into the living room. She can see her mother now, all the wrinkles that make up her face—her drooping, folded cheeks, the curtains of her eyelids. “He says he doesn’t want to take back all his memories.”
“And what do you think?”
Marcella doesn’t hesitate. “I think that he’s right.”
Is it relief she sees there, on her mother’s face? Or pride? She can’t be sure. But there is a flicker of something, some energy past the melancholy of the moment. Something she hasn’t seen in a very long time.
“She wouldn’t have Leo, but beyond that—” Marcella shakes her head. “We wouldn’t have the last ten years.” And they have, by all accords, been the happiest of her marriage. Even better than the early years, the honeymoon years.
In these ten years, since Dave has surfed and worked less, they have fallen back into each other with a kind of ferocity that surprised her.
Their marriage never floundered, no, but it was taken up with the business of life—of family, of parenthood, of bills and social obligations.
There was less of that—all of that—now. And in the absence they found a robust, active, romantic marriage.
They made love on the weekends, Saturdays, lying in bed until eight, sometimes nine.
They took long walks down the beach together and drove up the coast to Montecito, just for fun, just for lunch.
But the best part was the puttering—all the tinkering and fixing and cooking and reading and scrolling that made up their together time. His presence was her balm.
She had loved it, every minute of it. She didn’t want to chuck it out for something else.
“You could have them again,” Sylvia says, but Marcella knows that her mother is testing her, is playing devil’s advocate, something she loves to do.
“They wouldn’t be the same,” Marcella says, and she sees that same sentiment settle back on her mother’s face.
“No,” Sylvia says. “They wouldn’t.”
Sylvia sits. She gestures to the seat next to her, and Marcella surprises herself by following. She tucks her legs up so the edge of her knee is just grazing her mother’s thigh. Her toes are cold. It’s cold outside.
“I didn’t save your father because I wasn’t sure that if I did I’d ever have you. I couldn’t guarantee it.”
Marcella’s breath catches in her chest, and she places her hand there, as if checking her heart. She doesn’t know this. Sylvia has never told her.
“I thought he left.”
“He did,” Sylvia says. “He died.”
Her mother looks at her, and the smallest smile curls up her lips at the edges. And then they both begin to laugh. Timid, staccato hiccups of nervous energy.
“I could see even then the way of things. And I could see that I didn’t want to interfere. That’s the generous telling, of course.” Sylvia pauses, rubs a knee. “But it’s no less true.”
Marcella thinks about her grandmother in her village, saving her father.
She thinks about her own mother—pregnant and alone, and then she thinks about Lauren.
She thinks about the stories the women of her family have told about their roles without even speaking the narratives out loud.
She thinks about everything she inherited, and everything she passed on.
All the ways they got it wrong. The way they protected each other from the truth. No, from their stories about the truth.
This ticket is not a gift or a burden; it is a fact, a thing. Only in the using do we get to see right or wrong. Only in the telling, actually. She says this to her mother, now.
“It was the same ticket,” Sylvia says. “For you it was a gift and a burden, and for me something to look away from. Who was right?”
“And for Lauren?” Marcella asks.
“Maybe for Lauren it doesn’t have to be either.”
Marcella inhales. And then she hands it to her mother. She presses it into her palm, feels the cool, soft skin there, the balm of Sylvia’s touch. Familiar, if not frequent. “I don’t trust myself,” she says simply.
Sylvia closes both their hands around it, and for a moment Marcella is worried—worried that the power of this moment, the love so evident between them, will transport them.
Worried that they will inadvertently use this ticket.
They could. They could go back to childhood.
They could do it all again. They could see each other, really see each other. They could heal it all.
They are both feeling it, Marcella can tell. If they act now, if they agree together—and then the wind rattles outside, banging against the frame of a window. It startles them both slightly, but enough.
“OK,” her mother says. As if that is all that needs to be said. “OK.”