11. Eleven
Eleven
“Anyone home?”
I’m quasi-dry when I walk in the door. Camp’s truck absent from the driveway, house devoid of the usual noise the boys create on a constant loop. “Ly?”
It’s quiet. I drop my camera bag at the door. Drop my keys onto the hook. Then I hear it: the unexpected laugh and low muffle of voices.
Quietly, I move toward the sounds. The hallway of the kids’ bedrooms. Lyra’s door is cracked, just enough for the waves of whispers to come out. Music. Giggles. Words. All of it soft.
“Ly, what’s—” I push the door open and the sentence dies.
Lyra is in her bed. Without a shirt. With Nick. On top of her.
“Mom!” she shrieks, reaching for a blanket and wadding it at her chest. “I didn’t know you were home.” Her cheeks are red, lips swollen.
“Surprise. I live here now.” I eye Nick, who stumbles from the bed and across the bedroom like Lyra’s suddenly contagious. He adjusts his shirt, and I hate that I notice the tent that’s pitched in his basketball shorts.
I’ll be scrubbing that visual away later.
“Nick.” I look at him, my eyebrows raised as I lean in the doorway.
“Ms. Cannon. Mrs. June. Mrs. June Cannon.” He’s terrified. Good . “Do I call you . . . ?” He blows out a shaky breath. “Coach is going to kill me,” he mutters.
We are silent for one, two, three heartbeats, and I decide to put us all out of our misery.
“Nick, tell your parents I say hi.”
He nods, relieved, and grabs his backpack that looks like it hasn’t been opened. They might not date anymore, but it seems studying still means the same thing.
“See you tomorrow, L,” he mumbles, looking at her briefly, hand poorly hiding the situation in his shorts as he moves toward the door. I turn to the side so he can pass, and he avoids eye contact. And, though it’s low, I don’t miss the apology he gives on his way by.
Poor kid.
The front door opens and closes, I look back to Lyra. Blanket still clutched against her chest where she lays on her bed, gaze on the ceiling.
I wrack my brain on what to do. I listened to a podcast once that said giving kids sexual freedom in their teenage years leads to a life of promiscuity. Then she rattled off a statistic, some insanely high number of adult prostitutes grow up in households where the parents allowed what she called “free love.” But, looking at Lyra mortified and closed off in her bed, I hate that advice. For the first time ever, I feel the need to ignore an expert. I have no fucking clue what to do, but shaming her for what she’s feeling and what’s happened doesn’t feel like the answer.
“So, this is awkward,” I say, sitting on the edge of her bed and studying a bulletin board covered in pictures and random notes scribbled with inside jokes and sketches. Lyra in all her shades and phases filling the frames.
She scoffs, focusing on a loose thread in her blanket.
“Where’s your dad?”
“Soccer coach got locked out of the locker room, he took the boys to get him out.”
I nod. Of course. Duty calls and Camp is gone, once again leaving me to deal with all the hardest parts of being a parent. Alone.
I take a breath. Then another.
My mom did a lot of things right, but we never had open dialogue about sex. She knew school handled the basics and let me figure out the rest. I’m sure I could have gone to her with questions, but I never did. Never had to. Scotty taught me everything I never needed to know with vulgar detail and sometimes pictures.
For the first time as a mother, I want to do something different than the examples I’ve been shown. I want to talk to Lyra about this—want her to talk to me.
With a gentle tone I ask, “Have you had sex with him?”
Her eyes cut to mine for a split second before looking away as she hugs the blanket tighter to her chest.
What she doesn’t say, I can see written all over her: They have not had sex.
“I lost my virginity to your dad in a tent by the lake,” I blurt, half laughing at the confession.
“Mom! Gross!” she groans, finally keeping her eyes on me. “TMI.”
I laugh, louder this time, and shrug.
“It hurt like hell, and I cried when I bled after,” I tell her, remembering that night like it was yesterday instead of twenty-three years ago. “I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital and tell the doctor what happened. I knew my parents would kill me. And Camp. And—”
“Please. Stop,” she groans again, but there’s the slightest hint of an amused smile that pulls at her mouth and in turn lightens the mood.
Slightly.
We look at each other, not saying anything. Me understanding what she’s feeling and hoping she knows.
I drop back onto her bed, lying next to her, and stare at the ceiling. The glow-in-the-dark stars Camp hung for her when she was little somehow still hanging on for dear life. We’re quiet for the length of the entire next song that plays. A love ballad, of course. Lines crooning out about fast hearts and slow hands.
“How did you know?”
I turn to face her.
“With Dad. How did you know you were ready? That he was, you know, the one ?”
My breath comes out in a soft pah! and I close my eyes, teleporting to a different time and place and reality. Of me and Camp, seventeen with our whole lives ahead of us. Our love the only thing that mattered. His lopsided grin, nose not yet broken. More gangly than the man he grew into. Cocky, but not as sure of himself.
Then there was me. Red hair like fire, camera slung over my shoulder, too much eyeliner and ridiculous Doc Martens on my feet. The first few months Camp and I dated I was convinced the only reason he was with me was because he was scared of Scotty.
Then, one day, I knew it was more. Camp just loved me. Every weird piece of me. And I knew he wouldn’t hurt me. Not ever. Even if we weren’t destined for forever, Camp would protect me.
And so, one night, camping with friends, we snuck into our tent pitched down by the lake, and it happened. We stripped each other down, clumsy hands and nervous mouths, and said yes to each other.
“Mom? What’s wrong?”
Lyra’s voice pulls me out of that tent and back to her bed.
“Huh?”
“You’re crying,” she says, voice laced with concern.
I swipe at my cheeks, feeling a moisture I didn’t expect to find, and laugh as I swipe my hands across them. “Gosh, sorry. I don’t know. I was thinking about your dad.” I sniff. “I knew I was ready because it was him. Because he loved me, and I was never once worried he would hurt me. Even if we didn’t last, I wasn’t scared. I trusted him.”
I find her hand and squeeze it in mine. “You’re ready if you can talk about it with me. If you can tell me he makes you feel safe and beautiful, you’re ready.”
She grins. “You learn that in a podcast?”
“Actually, I came up with that line all by myself, thank you very much,” I tell her with a light laugh.
I slip off the bed and move toward the door. At her desk, I stop, tossing her the T-shirt that’s been draped over the chair.
“Mom?”
I still in the doorway, looking back at her. Hair newly purple, eyes bright, shirt bunched to her chest.
“Did you know you’d love Dad forever?”
The question burns my face the same way the water of the lake had.
Our marriage ending isn’t about love; it’s about more. Me needing more than he’s willing to give, a point proven by Lyra being topless in her bed when he was supposed to be here. It’s about him, over and over, choosing other people over me. Us.
“Camp Cannon is impossible not to love.”
When she smiles, so do I. Because annoying as it is, it’s as true as it is frustrating.