Chapter 22
Fifteen minutes later, Mary stood on Darbi’s stoop, ringing the doorbell over and over again and shouting her cousin’s name. A jogger running by the house gave her the side-eye but said nothing. Mary banged on the door. The curtains in the living room shifted. Jacqui yawned as she peered out the narrow opening, looking toward the steps. “Let me in!” Mary yelled.
Jacqui’s face disappeared from the window. A minute later, the door opened. Dressed in a red bathrobe, Jacqui blinked several times, staring at Mary. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice hoarse.
“No! I need to get back to Kendra and Dean. Right now.”
Jacqui tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. “Who?”
“My husband and daughter.” Mary pushed her way inside and stormed through the living room.
Jacqui trailed behind. “Husband and daughter?”
Mary froze, realizing what she’d said. Darbi was going to kill her, but she couldn’t backtrack now. There was no way she could explain being here so early in the morning, acting like a raving lunatic. Maybe Jacqui could help her get the truth out of Darbi, because Mary was sick of her cousin’s evasiveness. Darbi knew much more than she was saying.
Jacqui stared at her wide eyed, waiting for a response.
“I need to talk to Darbi.” Mary continued her beeline down the hall. Loud snoring came from the bedroom on the right. Mary burst into the room. “Darbi.”
Sprawled out on her back, Darbi flipped to her stomach.
Mary stomped across the rug and leaned over the bed, shaking her cousin’s shoulder. Darbi scooched toward the center of the king, away from Mary’s reach.
Mary grabbed her arm and yanked her toward the side of the bed.
Pulling a sleep mask from her face, Darbi snapped awake. “What’s happening?”
“That’s what I came to find out. I googled my family. Dean’s a professional golfer, and Kendra, well, she doesn’t even exist here. What if that’s the way it is in my real life too?” The horrifying thought caused Mary’s entire body to convulse.
Darbi shot up to a sitting position.
“She’s ranting about a daughter. Must have had a bad dream.”
At the sound of Jacqui’s voice, Darbi’s eyes snapped to her. “Could you make coffee while I talk to Mary?”
Jacqui folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not going anywhere.” She pointed to Mary, who was pacing by the bed. “Poor girl’s having a breakdown. I’m about to call 911.”
“I just need to get back to my real life.” Mary bent down toward her cousin so they were nose to nose. “How do I get back?”
Darbi fell back against the headboard. “I’ve been dreading this.” Her voice was barely a whisper, and sorrow filled her eyes.
Mary’s body went rigid. Her breath caught in her throat. “Dreading what?”
“There is no going back.” Tears streamed down Darbi’s face. “You’re here for good.”
A wave of nausea hit Mary. Her stomach cramped, and she doubled over in pain. Her knees gave out, and she crumpled to the ground. Everything in the room went gray.
She felt the weight of the key in her hand on the day she and Dean had bought the house in Hudson, saw the tears in his eyes the night she’d told him she was pregnant, pictured the bright-red leaves on the maple tree he’d planted the day Kendra was born. None of it had happened in this world she was stuck in.
Kendra didn’t exist. Impossible. Her body contracted as if she were in labor. She breathed in the intoxicating scent of newborn Kendra’s head, and heard the soft kkk sound the baby made while eating. She saw Kendra’s toothless grin on Mother’s Day, when Mary had opened the gift her daughter had made, a ceramic smiley face that Kendra had painted purple instead of yellow because purple was Mary’s favorite color. She brought her hand to her cheek, feeling Kendra’s kiss goodbye at the airport. Mary never would have imagined that would be the last time she’d see or speak to her daughter again. All because she’d wanted to be a famous broadcaster. How shallow. How selfish. She had wanted more from her old life, but she’d ended with so much less. She’d ended up with nothing.
The bed squeaked as Darbi stood. She leaned over Mary, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I tried to stop you from getting your wisdom teeth out.”
“I asked you about going back, and you said we’d talk later.”
“Because I dreaded this conversation.”
Jacqui cleared her throat. “Someone better tell me what’s going on.”
“What have I done?” Mary asked. How could she have wanted to live in a world without her daughter even for a minute? She was a horrible mother. So selfish.
She sat on the couch in Jacqui and Darbi’s living room with her elbows resting on her knees and her face buried in her hands. Her stomach spasmed and bile rose in her throat. She’d been awake for over twenty-four hours straight, and her head pounded from lack of sleep. She’d downed two ibuprofen, but they weren’t helping. She realized she would feel this awful, or worse, for the rest of her life.
Outside, the neighborhood started to come to life, with cars driving by and people out walking. Every now and then snippets of conversations drifted in through the open windows.
Darbi paced the living room, holding a cup of coffee. “It’s why I said the memories could make it a curse.”
Mary’s head snapped up. She glared at her cousin. This was all her fault. Instead of saying “Don’t get your wisdom teeth removed,” Darbi should have told her she’d be stuck in a world without Dean and where Kendra didn’t exist. Mary glanced at a glass vase on the table and imagined hurling it across the room at Darbi. “You should have told me I couldn’t go back!” she screamed.
Darbi recoiled, spilling coffee from her mug. “I pleaded with you not to have your wisdom teeth out. You didn’t listen.”
Mary’s thoughts were like a pinball machine, ricocheting around her mind. Darbi had tried to warn her, but Mary hadn’t believed her. No sane person would have believed that story. Mary didn’t want to accept all the blame. Darbi was at fault too. Did it matter who was at fault? Mary was stuck here. There had to be a way back.
Jacqui rocked back and forth in the chair across from Mary. She’d sat trancelike, not saying a word since Darbi had told her about the Mulligan gene that had allowed her and Mary to erase years off their lives. “Any minute now, I’m going to wake up and realize this crazy story has been the weirdest, most lifelike dream I have ever had. Either that, or you two are pulling some kind of wild elaborate joke over on me.”
Darbi stopped pacing and stood still, huddled behind a potted plant, addressing Jacqui. “I started to tell you so many times. Honestly, I’m relieved you know.”
Jacqui blinked but said nothing. In one of the bedrooms, an alarm clock blared. She headed down the hallway. A moment later the beeping stopped.
“I miss them, too, you know.” Darbi’s face contorted with pain, and her voice broke.
After Dean and Mary, Darbi had been the first one to hold Kendra, and from that moment on, she’d spoiled the girl rotten, bestowing gifts on birthdays, half birthdays, and just because. Growing up, Kendra had often spent hot summer days with Darbi by the pool and cold winter afternoons playing board games by the woodstove. Sometimes Kendra even referred to Darbi as her much cooler second mother. Darbi loved Dean, too, calling him her favorite man on the planet.
Mary’s voice softened. “You need to find Uncle Cillian’s letters. Maybe he mentioned something about how to get back.”
“I’ve looked. I’m afraid they’re long gone.”
Jacqui returned and sat down on the sofa, angling her body so her back was to Darbi. She wrapped her arm around Mary’s shoulders. “Tell me about Kendra.”
As she pictured her daughter’s face, the deep dimples and enormous smile, Mary’s eyes filled with tears. How was it possible that Kendra didn’t exist when Mary had twenty-four years of memories of the two of them together? She thought about the day Kendra was born, January 2, at exactly one minute and nine seconds after midnight, two weeks earlier than expected. She’d launched herself into the world with a content smile. That’s how Dean had described their daughter’s expression. She hadn’t immediately cried, and the silence had worried Mary until she saw the ear-to-ear grin on Dean’s face. The doctor handed him the scissors, and he cut the umbilical cord with tears streaming down his cheeks. Mary’s heart had overflowed with joy. She and the man she loved more than anything had created a person, a blend of both of them.
“She’s a daddy’s girl,” Mary said. Shame washed over her as she thought about the sting of jealousy she’d felt because Kendra had always seemed closer to Dean. What she would do for even a fraction of her daughter’s attention now.
“She never misses an opportunity to tell us she loves us,” Mary said.
Dean had claimed their daughter’s first word had been “Dad,” spoken at four months. Mary had let him believe it, but she knew Kendra had only been babbling “Dadada.” Her first words came five months later at nine months, when she mimicked Mary saying, “I love you.” After she’d grown and moved away to college, Kendra ended every phone conversation with those same three words, and Mary always thought of toddler Kendra lying on the changing table in the nursery wearing nothing but a diaper, saying that phrase for the very first time. She’d never hear those words from her daughter again, never be able to say them to her, either, all because she’d thought she’d missed out on a meaningless career.
“Anyone want an english muffin?” Darbi called from the kitchen, where she’d gone to make breakfast. The smell of bread toasting floated into the living room, making Mary’s stomach turn.
“With strawberry jam,” Jacqui said.
Darbi returned to the living room with two plates. “Kendra was innately kind,” she said. Her use of the past tense caused a new wave of tears to run down Mary’s face. She wiped them away and told Jacqui some of her favorite stories about Kendra.
When Kendra was five or six, Mary and Dean had taken her to Ben & Jerry’s for ice cream. There was a long line at the entrance, where a greeter gave every child a balloon. As they sat in a booth eating their ice cream—Phish Food for Kendra because she always ordered the same exact thing as Dean—a little boy by the door started crying because they’d run out of balloons. Fifteen minutes later, the kid sat in a booth across from theirs, still crying and refusing to eat his ice cream. Unprompted by Mary or Dean, Kendra marched over to the crying boy. “You can have mine,” she said, handing him her balloon.
Mary and Dean had smiled at each other across their table. “We created that kind, bighearted girl,” Dean had said.
At the end of the summer before sixth grade, when Mary had taken Kendra back-to-school shopping, Kendra had refused to hold her hand. They were walking by the cosmetics counter at Macy’s, the overbearing scent of a flowery perfume assaulting them. Mary reached for Kendra’s hand, but Kendra pulled it away, stuffing it in her pocket. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she said. “I’m too old for that now.” A tiny piece of Mary’s heart had broken off that day and never grown back.
“She stopped holding my hand when she went to middle school,” Mary said now. “But we celebrated her transition to womanhood.”
When Kendra was thirteen, she’d woken Mary in the middle of the night and whispered that she’d gotten her period. Mary took her to Bickford’s the next morning to celebrate. Kendra ordered chocolate chip pancakes and hot chocolate with whipped cream, proving she was still Mary’s little girl and always would be—except now she wasn’t, because she no longer existed. Telling Jacqui all the stories about Kendra had made Kendra seem like a real live person, and now the awful truth sucker punched Mary again: she’d wiped Kendra off the planet by being so self-centered. All the fame and fortune in the world couldn’t make up for the hole she felt in her soul.
Jacqui had listened to one story after the other without interrupting, occasionally rubbing Mary’s back. Now that Mary had finished speaking, Jacqui pulled her into a tight embrace. “I’m not saying I believe all this, but if it’s true, one thing I’ve learned is that love always leads you back. We’ll figure it out.”
Mary needed to believe that. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be able to go on.