CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Notes from the dark:
Everything I believed in was a lie. I am wretched. I am broken. And yet Socrates keeps whispering in my mind. He tells me the soul has lived many lives. That memory does not belong only to this one.
If that is true, perhaps love remembers what the mind cannot. Perhaps my sister is somewhere beyond this life, and some part of her still knows me. If I’m still enough in the darkness, if I give every thought to her, will she sense me the way I long to sense her?
Everywhere I turned, I saw something that would have once made me turn the other way.
A child crying for her mama while the woman searched through an overfilled purse for her wallet at the checkout.
Exasperated workers behind the counter, trying to keep their voices pleasant while people complained about stupid shit.
Uncaring drivers on the road who leaned on their horns as though everyone else had nowhere important to be.
And then, every now and then, I saw something that made my breath catch and my heart beat faster.
A woman shrinking beside her man.
The fake face. The fake smile and dead eyes. I caught the fear, the small words, the nods.
It was always the nods that got me because sometimes a jerk of the head was safer than saying something wrong.
I could see it all now.
The signs.
The men.
I could tell which ones unsettled me the most. It wasn’t always the loud ones. Sometimes it was the man who stared longer than everyone else but did it in a way that looked distant and empty.
Like he had already decided the person in front of him was wrong.
We had stopped in another small town for lunch. Tristan found a diner off the main road, and we slid into a booth near the window. He sat across from me, pushing fries around his plate while I watched the room.
He hadn’t sung in days.
Not since the tourists in the last town stared at me. He hadn’t questioned me again, but something had changed. He kept us moving and kept me close. He watched doors and windows now, though I wasn’t sure he realized he was doing it.
Maybe my fear was rubbing off on him.
At the table beside us, a woman held a menu while the man across from her told the waitress what they would both have.
The woman tried to correct him.
“I thought I might get—”
“You won’t like that,” he cut in.
She stopped.
“I had it before,” she said quietly.
“You didn’t like it.”
Her eyes dropped to the menu.
The waitress glanced between them.
“The chicken sandwich for her,” the man said. “No mayonnaise. She complains when they put too much on.”
The woman gave the waitress a small smile.
Then she nodded.
That fucking nod.
My stomach tightened.
Tristan glanced over his shoulder before looking back at me.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve been staring at them since we sat down.”
I shook my head and picked up my glass of water, though I wasn’t thirsty.
At the other table, the man reached across and took the menu from the woman’s hands. She let him. She didn’t protest or roll her eyes. She folded her hands in her lap and waited.
Maybe that was how they were.
Maybe she genuinely didn’t care what she ate.
Maybe I was searching for Oliver in every man who lowered his voice.
“Daze.”
I met Tristan’s eyes.
“What?”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Going somewhere.”
“I’m sitting right here.”
“You know what I mean.”
I looked toward the window.
Outside, a delivery truck blocked part of the road while two cars waited behind it. One of the drivers leaned on his horn. The delivery worker raised a hand in apology and hurried faster.
Everything felt impatient.
The whole world seemed louder lately.
“I’m tired,” I said.
Tristan watched me for another moment. Then he called the waitress over and asked for the bill.
“We haven’t finished.”
“I have.”
“You’ve eaten four fries.”
“They were big fries.”
Despite myself, I smiled.
He caught it, but the concern didn’t leave his face.
We paid and returned to the camper.
Tristan pulled back onto the road while I watched the town pass outside my window.
A woman stood at a bus stop with a child asleep against her shoulder. A man argued into a pay phone. Two teenagers shoved each other beside a convenience store, laughing until one of them stopped laughing.
There had been a time when I could look at people without wondering what happened after their doors closed.
Now I watched too closely.
I noticed hands.
Voices.
The way someone’s body changed when another person looked at them.
The way a smile disappeared.
The way a woman glanced at a man before deciding whether she was allowed to keep speaking.
Maybe there was something wrong with me.
I had spent so long searching rooms for danger that I no longer knew how to stop.
“What were you looking at?” Tristan asked.
“People.”
“I got that much.”
I continued watching the road.
“The couple beside us.”
“What about them?”
“The woman checked his face before she answered.”
“So?”
“So she already knew there was a right answer.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know.”
“How?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came.
“She nodded,” I said eventually.
He frowned. “People nod, Daisy.”
“Not like that.”
“What was different?”
“She wasn’t agreeing with him. She was trying to make it stop.”
Tristan looked at me briefly before returning his attention to the road.
Maybe none of it meant what I thought it did. Maybe the woman really hadn’t cared about the sandwich. Maybe I had carried Oliver out of that house with me and was finding him in places he had never been.
“What’s wrong with me, Tristan?”
His hands tightened around the wheel.
“What do you think is wrong with you?”
I looked down at my hands.
There were so many answers I could have given him.
I had always been different. Too angry. Too loud. Too sensitive. Too quick to take offense and too slow to let anything go.
June used to warn me about it.
Keep your feelings under control, Daisy, she would say.
She didn’t say it to be cruel. She said it because she knew how easily people could use them against me. She had seen me fight with teachers, neighbors, girls at school. She had watched me say things I regretted before the anger had even left my body.
Sometimes she stepped between me and whoever had set me off. Sometimes she dragged me away. Sometimes she waited until we were alone and told me I couldn’t keep treating every insult like a threat.
But when you grew up feeling threatened by everything, it was hard to tell the difference.
“I used to cause trouble,” I said.
Tristan glanced at me but didn’t interrupt.
“I got angry. I fought with people. June used to tell me I had to control myself before somebody decided I was the problem.”
“Were you?”
“Sometimes.”
He waited.
“Sometimes I was,” I repeated. “I could be awful. I would lose my temper and say things. I’d regret them afterward, but by then I’d already done the damage.”
“You were a kid.”
“I wasn’t always a kid.”
“No. But it sounds like it started when you were.”
I looked out the window again.
“I had Rowe when I was sixteen.”
Tristan’s expression changed.
“Sixteen?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t even know how to look after myself, and suddenly everyone expected me to know how to raise a baby.”
“But you did raise him.”
“Badly, sometimes.”
“Every parent probably thinks that.”
“You don’t know.”
“No,” he agreed. “I don’t.”
The honesty hurt, but at least he didn’t argue with memories he had never lived through.
“People looked at me everywhere I went. At school. At the shops. On the bus. They looked at my stomach and then at my face like they were trying to work out how stupid I had to be.”
“You weren’t stupid.”
“I was sixteen and pregnant.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Don’t turn it into something pretty, Tristan. It wasn’t.”
He stopped speaking.
“I love Rowe. More than anything. But I was scared all the time. I had no money. No plan. I kept waiting to feel like an adult, and it never happened.”
Tristan turned onto a narrow road lined with spruce trees.
I looked at him.
“Where are you taking me?”
“I’m pulling over.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m trying to listen to you, and I’m going to put us in a ditch.”
The answer caught me off guard.
The road curved through the trees before opening onto a small lake. Tristan pulled into an empty gravel lot and switched off the engine.
The water beyond the windshield was gray and still.
He turned toward me.
“Go on.”
A humorless laugh escaped me.
“I learned how to feed him. How to stretch money. How to keep him quiet when people were staring at us. I learned what to say to teachers and doctors so they wouldn’t think I was incapable.”
Tristan watched me.
“But inside, I was still waiting for someone to tell me what to do.”
I wished I hadn’t said it. It sounded pathetic once it was out.
For years, I had thought of that version of myself as exactly that. Stupid. Pathetic. A girl with a baby on her hip who kept waiting for a door to open.
I didn’t want riches. I didn’t dream about a grand house or expensive clothes.
I wanted enough money that I didn’t have to count every piece of fruit before putting it in the basket.
I wanted to stop pretending I wasn’t hungry so Rowe could finish what was left on my plate.
I wanted him to have birthday parties where I didn’t spend the entire time calculating what each balloon and paper cup had cost.
I wanted someone to tell me I was doing all right.
I wanted to rest.
More than anything, I wanted to give Rowe the ordinary childhood I saw other children having.
A bedroom with toys on the floor.
Posters on the walls.
A ridiculous race car bed he would outgrow before I had finished paying for it.
“He begged me for one of those race car beds once,” I said. “I wanted so badly to be able to buy it for him.”
Tristan’s face softened.
“It was stupid.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“It was a bed shaped like a car.”
“I gathered that.”
A weak laugh left me.
“I wanted to give him one ordinary thing without checking the price first. Without standing there working out what we’d have to go without.
I spent years thinking that wanting an easier life made me selfish.
Like waiting for someone to help me meant I had failed to become the kind of mother he needed. ”
Tristan’s voice was soft. “Baby, you were sixteen.”
“I know.”
But I hadn’t known. Not properly.
For years, I had looked back at that girl and judged her the same way everyone else had.
Sixteen and pregnant.
Twenty and still struggling.
Still angry. Still embarrassed. Still pretending she had everything under control.
By the time Oliver found me, I was exhausted.
I wanted someone to tell me I was intelligent. That I wasn’t wasting my life. That being angry didn’t make me unlovable.
Oliver knew exactly what to say.
He praised the parts of me everyone else complained about. My temper became passion. My stubbornness became independence. The same mouth that had always got me into trouble made me fascinating to him.
At least, that was what I believed.
I thought he saw me.
Maybe he did.
He saw how tired I was. How ashamed. How badly I wanted somebody older and steadier to tell me I was doing all right.
He made himself feel like the answer to every problem I had.
“What are you thinking about?” Tristan asked.
I looked at him.
“My sister.”
It was easier than the full truth.
“And Rowe?”
“And Rowe.”
He reached across the space between us and took my hand.
I let him.
For years, I had called that younger version of myself stupid. I had never given much thought to how young she was.
Oliver had.
He saw where I doubted myself and made himself necessary there.
By the time I understood what he was doing, I had already handed him every part of my life.