Chapter 28
“Eden?” Caleb asks, but I’m fleeing out the back door with Houdini tight on my heels.
I don’t know where I’m going, but I need to escape this house and its memories and resentments.
I jog across the deck and stagger down the steps.
Houdini races by me, howling and wagging his tail in delight when he reaches the bottom first.
My mom’s perception of events is running like a replay reel in my head, and I worry she’s right. I did blame her, evict her, crucify her. I blasted our family apart without considering the repercussions.
It’s easy to hate someone after they’ve hurt you. But it’s hard to hold on to that hate when you know you’ve hurt them right back.
“Eden,” Caleb says again, and he must take the steps two at a time because he’s on me before I make it across the yard. “Hey, wait up.” He brings a hand to my hip and the other to my shoulder, but I keep moving, tumbling back in time toward the trail marker. “Eden. Please.”
It’s the “please” that does me in. Gone is the demand in his voice, and it’s replaced with desperation.
I stop, hunched over with my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands as I unleash another sob.
He gathers me to him until I’m a rag doll in his arms and his limbs are the sutures holding me together.
He rocks me back and forth, his lips pressed to my temple, and I think he’s asking questions, or maybe trying to soothe me, but I don’t process any of it.
“It was my fault,” I cry. “I blamed her. I punished her.”
“Hey, hey, breathe.” Caleb bends until we meet at eye level.
“I ruined my family. I was so stupid.” I choke on another sob.
Caleb’s hands are on my face, cupping my cheeks in his palms and wiping my tears, but they’re falling too fast for him to catch. He tilts my face to him until he’s a kaleidoscope of color. I think he’s trying to shush me, silence me, insist I’m okay. Instead, he says, “Tell me.”
I catch my breath in a few short gasps before pinching my eyes closed, blocking Caleb out.
I don’t know if I can tell him. I haven’t told anyone—not the whole story.
No one asked me questions. There were too many other questions to ask in those first days: Will she dance again? Will she walk again? Will she live?
But I’m asking myself the more important questions now and reliving every opportunity I had to prevent our landslide.
“I don’t even remember their names,” I say, and for some reason, I laugh at this, at how insignificant the catalyst was: peer pressure.
“Whose names? Eden, tell me from the beginning, okay?” Caleb sounds so patient, so kind, and I want to do as I’m told. I want to do this one thing right—unspool myself before him and indict myself finally for my part in my family’s free fall.
“I snuck out that night with a bunch of kids from camp.”
“What night?”
“The night of my accident.” I take another deep breath and let it out slowly, wiping my face. “I hadn’t broken a single rule before, but I wanted those kids to like me.”
“The kids whose names you don’t remember?”
I nod.
“Okay,” Caleb says slowly.
“They were doing a midnight scavenger hunt and invited me.” I remember startling at every footstep, jumping at each noise, paranoid the counselors were following us.
I didn’t want to disappoint Sonny. Disappoint Mom.
“We divided into groups, and one of the things we had to bring back was a photo of Sonny’s house to prove we were brave enough to hike there. ”
I replay the memory that infiltrated my nightmares for years.
Caleb knows how the story unfolded but must not have heard the catalyst. It doesn’t surprise me.
This isn’t a tale Sonny would want to share with his nephew, or a memory my mom would ever want to relive.
But I see the moment Caleb puts the pieces together because he closes his eyes, as if the weight of my past is too heavy for him, too.
“I got there last, just as this girl in our group was pulling out her digital camera. But the light was on in Sonny’s bedroom. The rest of the kids ran when they saw him in the window. But I froze—and made the mistake of looking up.”
Caleb reaches for my hands, and I’m grateful to have something to hold on to, his calloused skin now familiar in my grasp.
I glance at the wall of windows that stretches across the second floor.
The glass is dusty, and the reflection at dusk masks the interior from view.
But at midnight, it’s a well-lit stage in an otherwise darkened theater, where all the performers are larger than life.
“My mom was up there with him.” But I don’t need to share the specifics—that my first exposure to sex was witnessing my mother’s infidelity—her on her knees with Sonny’s hands in her hair.
At fourteen, it wasn’t something I should have seen.
And at thirty-five, I still don’t want to talk about it.
It’s taken me a long time to reconcile what I saw and what I wasn’t ready to know.
“I must have been in shock at first, but at some point, I ran. My friends were long gone. And I just wanted to rewind time and erase my memory. But I was so rattled that I didn’t turn on my flashlight or pay attention to where I was going.”
Caleb pulls me into his arms, curling his hands around my spine, building a fortress around the horrors that threaten to spill from my lips: the moment I tripped on the tree root, how I overcorrected and tumbled ten feet over the edge of the trail and landed in a bed of rock with my leg crumpled beneath me.
How I could still see the light from Sonny’s bedroom, but they couldn’t hear me crying for help.
How I was stuck there for hours before anyone noticed I was missing.
“When I woke up from that first surgery, my dad was there, holding my mom’s hand.
And I told him what I saw in excruciating detail.
I looked my mom in the eye and called her names I didn’t yet understand.
” My tears stain Caleb’s shirt, and he hugs me closer with a hand cradling the back of my head.
“That was the last time I spoke to her directly until she left us for good a year later.”
As I replay it, I realize Mom wasn’t wrong.
We spent a year in punishing silence; I cursed her for my loss.
But my fall wasn’t her fault. I could have made other choices.
I could have declined the invite to that scavenger hunt.
I could have thrown a rock at the window, yelled, screamed, and confronted Mom and Sonny.
I could have turned on my flashlight and walked away.
Instead, I ran in the dark despite the danger, after years of eschewing every risk, avoiding all precarious joy in pursuit of my dream.
I could have kept Mom’s secret, or demanded she tell Dad directly; I could have absolved myself of the culpability of blowing us to bits.
Yes, I was angry at her. I blamed her. But I was even angrier at myself—a lethal combination for an adolescent with nothing left to lose.
“Her crime was cheating, but my accident was my fault. And I punished her. I broke my dad’s heart and drove her away.”
“Shh,” Caleb says. “It wasn’t your fault. You were a child. Barely older than Abby.” He presses his mouth to my temple, my brow, my cheek. “Of course you reacted the way you did.”
“I made the worst decision at every opportunity.”
“Yeah, well, it means you’re human. Messing up is what people are best at, especially teens.”
For some reason, this makes me laugh, but it’s thick with tears.
Caleb draws my face to his, cradling my cheeks in his hands.
“I don’t know much, but as a parent of a smart kid, I’ve learned we don’t stop being imperfect when we become parents, and even genius kids have a hard time making good decisions when emotions are high.
You can’t judge your teen self through your adult lens.
Have empathy for that kid who lost everything and forgive yourself for being human. ”
“But I’m still messing it up. We just got into a huge fight. I waited too many years to hash this out. And now she’s sick, and I don’t know how much longer she has, and—”
“You’re here now, and that’s enough.”
Caleb stays with me, holds me until the sun sets behind the mountains and the balmy air turns biting.
When we head to the house, Houdini greets us on the deck with a solemnity I didn’t know he was capable of.
I squat to receive him, and he leans his body weight into me, giving me eighty pounds of comfort to wrap my arms around.
“You’re a good boy, Houdini.” He rewards me with a wet drag of his tongue across my cheekbone.
Dinner is where I left it on the stove, long cold, and none of the lights are on. Caleb makes my mom a plate and heads in to check on her, and I drag myself upstairs.
Over the last three months, I’ve claimed this room despite the painful memories it invokes.
It isn’t a space that keeps its secrets well.
Instead, it’s unveiled them all—the snapshots of Mom and Sonny, the book Birds of the Sierras still open, face down on the dresser beside Sonny’s harmonica, and each shelf crammed with the artifacts of their life together.
But still, there are mementos of me, too—small portraits, a card I sent on Mother’s Day, a painting of me in my wedding gown.
She didn’t erase me, but she had to move on.
Staying here has helped me understand Mom’s encore life.
Maybe she did love me all along. Maybe she didn’t choose Sonny over me.
But it’s clear Sonny chose her. And I’m finally grateful to him for that.