Chapter 30 Lucy
Lucy
Santa Clarita is only forty-five minutes or so away from Los Angeles.
It could be less if you’re lucky—but you’re rarely lucky.
The suburban city possesses everything appealing about Southern California: The palm trees, year-round summer weather, and there’s curb appeal that Los Angeles couldn’t even dream of.
Roads are paved, lawns are watered, and they even have free parking lots.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with Santa Clarita, but there’s always something less appealing about living where you grew up.
“Mom?” I open the front door to my childhood home. The tall windows bring in the afternoon sunshine, and I see a sprinkler on in the backyard. Various framed photos of me from my graduation sit along the fireplace mantle. “Dad?”
As I kick my shoes off, my dad comes out of the kitchen with a travel mug and his keys in hand.
“Hey,” he says, “what are you doing here?”
“Just figured I’d visit,” I say as we quickly put our cheeks against each other for what would otherwise be a kiss. “Where are you going?”
“I’ve got to bring the car to the shop. It’s been making this weird noise when I go over eighty.”
“Where’s Mom?” I ask.
“Upstairs,” he answers while putting his shoes on. “You staying for dinner?”
“Yeah.” I nod.
“Okay, I’ll make short ribs. That sound good?”
“That’s great.”
“All right.” He heads toward the garage door. This is usually the extent of our conversations anyway. “I’ll see you in a bit.”
I make my way upstairs and see my mom folding laundry at the foot of her bed like she’s done since I was a little girl.
“Hey, Mom.” I enter, taking a seat on the beige accent chair in the corner of the room.
“Hi, Luce.” She’s happy but not necessarily surprised to see me. I still have a house key, and though it’s rare, I sometimes pop in unexpectedly. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming over?”
“I was running some errands. It was more of a last-minute thing,” I say. “What are you up to?”
“We’re talking about going on another cruise.”
“Again?” I make a tired face. “I swear you go every two months.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I mean, nothing, I guess. Good for you guys.”
“We found a great deal for a Mediterranean cruise.” My mom continues folding. “You and your boyfriend should come!”
“Oh.” I shift in my seat. “Marsh isn’t my boyfriend.”
“What?” My mom finally looks up. “What happened? He was so smart, and so handsome…and so tall! Why?”
“Because it just didn’t work out, that’s all,” I say as dismissively as I can.
“I really liked him, though,” my mom continues, taking no social cues. “Your dad really liked him.”
“Dad?” I scoff. “He didn’t even talk to him.”
“That’s what he said on the drive home.”
My dad really is a man of few words. I should know by now that even though he doesn’t engage in a lot of conversation, he watches from afar. He never even mentioned Marsh the last time we spoke, but when it comes to my dad the old adage is true: No news is good news.
“Huh,” I say. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. That’s all over.”
“Did you know Janelle is dating a doctor?”
“Yep,” I say. My mother has told me twice already that my cousin is in a relationship with someone in the medical field. “You told me.”
“You know we were talking about this in Hawaii. We’re curious who you’ll end up with.” My mom goes back to folding.
“What if I end up with nobody?” I challenge her, feeling a bit testy today.
“Then you end up with nobody.”
“And you’d be okay with that?” I run a hand through my hair and watch her pair up socks. “If I just ended up with nobody?”
“I don’t want you to be alone for the rest of your life, Luce,” she says. “But if that’s what makes you happy, then I’m happy.”
It’s a progressive answer coming from my mother, and I’m a little confused.
“What about getting married and settling down?” I ask, amused. “Having kids?”
“Well, when you were younger, yes, of course. I think that’s what any mother would want for their child. But you’re so against it, and who am I to tell you how to live your life?”
“But…” I frown, processing this new perspective on life. Well, at least new to me. “Never mind.”
“What?” She takes a pile of folded underwear and brings it over to a drawer on the other side of the bed.
“Nothing.”
“What?” my mom repeats.
“I just…” I struggle with how to phrase what I’m thinking. “I just thought you always had an old-fashioned view on that stuff. Like marriage and kids…and staying with your partner no matter what.”
My mom lets out a laugh like what I said is the most na?ve thing that’s ever come out of my mouth. “What do you think this is? The fifties?”
“Then why did you stay with Dad?” I ask, and the room suddenly feels a little colder.
It’s a topic that we haven’t dared touch in over ten years.
The last time we spoke about what happened I was a moody teenager full of confusion, anger, and hurt.
I didn’t know who I was. I most certainly didn’t have opinions on what makes a successful marriage other than you love each other and only each other until the day you die.
I’ll admit, I wasn’t built for a productive conversation back then, but now I want to have that conversation. I want to understand what happened.
“What do you mean?” my mom says.
“Why did you stay with him?” I repeat. “After everything with…that woman?”
My mom’s face hardens in real time. Maybe she forgot I knew. Maybe she forgot she knew. Perhaps I just undid what took over a decade of healing with a single question. But she swallows and answers my question.
“Because I wanted to,” she says. “Because I love him.”
Her tone feels different about the situation now than it did years ago. Less defensive, less hurt. Or maybe I’m just more open to hearing what she has to say.
“You didn’t stay with him because you felt like you had to for our family?” I prod, knowing that’s the reason. “Or that it was the right thing to do? Or that it would just be easier to stay with him than leave him?”
My mom takes a seat at the foot of her bed to face me. “Honey, we’ve had this conversation before. What’s this about?”
“I know.” I try to ease my flurry of emotions. “And I know you said back then that you love him, but I’m not a kid anymore. You can tell me the truth. Just be honest with me. It’s okay.”
“Luce, I am telling you the truth…and I told you the truth back then too.” My mom’s face becomes somber.
I try to play back the events of that day, from many years ago, although it’s difficult. So much of that conversation I tried to block out, and what I do remember now feels like a puzzle. A puzzle I’m trying to piece together but I don’t know what the final picture looks like.
“Lucy.” My mom looks at me like I’m just a child who still has so much to learn. “There are so many things about what happened that you don’t know. It’s not black or white.”
“Like what…” I say slowly. What more could there possibly be?
My mom looks up and lets out a laugh. “Are we really going to talk about this right now?”
“Yes, Mom,” I insist. “I want to know what happened. I need to understand. Please.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to open up that door again.” My mom stands and walks back to her pile of clothing. “It was so long ago.”
“I just need to know why you stayed with him,” I finally say. “How can you let someone do something like that to you? Be unfaithful, lie to you, and you just let him get away with it? How can you let Dad cheat on you and just stay with him as if nothing happened—”
“God, Lucy, he didn’t cheat on me,” my mom interrupts me with a roaring sigh.
My face collapses. The ground shatters and the walls cave in. I’m positive I heard her correctly, but I don’t understand.
“What?”
She looks down, shaking her head. The room feels so silent, like you could hear a pin drop over this plush carpet.
“When you were a kid, we were having problems.” My mom looks at me, pain in her eyes.
“Fighting all the time. God, all we would do was fight.” She exhales.
“We weren’t intimate anymore; every single little thing turned into an argument.
It was bad, Lucy, it didn’t even feel like we were married sometimes. We were so unhappy…”
I don’t know where she’s going with this. I feel like I’m trapped in a haunted house that I willingly entered and now can’t escape.
“So, what happened?” I manage to say, not even sure if I want to know.
“We talked about separating…and we did.” She looks down again, like she can’t even look at me.
“What?” I jerk my head in confusion. “You separated? When?!”
“When you were just a kid,” she says. “You were, I don’t know, six? Seven?”
“I don’t understand.” I push on my temples. “How were you separated? We all lived here together.”
“You were so young, you wouldn’t remember,” she says. “But for months your dad stayed with your uncle Frank. He never actually slept here.”
I want to tell her to pause, rewind, and clarify. I have so many questions, but before I can even begin to think of my first one, she continues.
“It was the end for us, Luce. We were getting divorced. It was over. We just didn’t know how to tell the family.
” My mom looks at me. “And then one day he comes home and I could tell he was crying. There was a woman in his department he confided in, and one thing led to another—” She stops herself.
“It only happened once and he immediately regretted it. He told me that he couldn’t do it.
He didn’t want to be with anyone else other than me and he wanted to make it work. ”
A breath escapes me. Every single hair on my body is standing, and I feel nauseated. Sick to my stomach. There are a million questions I could ask in this moment, but none of them would be conducive to a productive conversation.
“Mom…” I barely get out.
“I told him that I did things too…things I also regretted but I was just afraid to tell him.” My mom nods somberly like she’s no longer with me in this room, but she’s there with my dad…or maybe someone else.
I want to travel back to thirty seconds ago before I knew any of this. I regret asking and I don’t want to know the rest, but I need to.
“Why didn’t you go through with the divorce?” I ask.
“We didn’t want to,” she says firmly. “I loved your father. I loved you. We both realized that we were being stupid and we wanted to make things work. So, we did. We were stronger and happier than we had ever been.” My mom’s expression turns grim.
“Then a few months later, your father gets a call from Natalie…”
“Wait…” I say, now catching up to where we are in the story. The part of the story that intersects with the details that I’m finally familiar with.
“He was conflicted. He didn’t know what to do, she didn’t know what to do.”
My stomach twists and my eyes begin to swell. “Jesus Christ.”
“We cried, we fought, but we both knew that we still loved each other. That whatever happened or we did, we would get through it because we would rather go through it with each other than alone.”
I’m having difficulty breathing. Everything feels like it’s spinning, and my eyes become bleary.
I don’t know what to say, what to do, what to think.
Everything that I thought I knew has been completely turned on its head and my life is not my life.
Everything that I believed and stood for has been crushed.
The people who raised me are not the people I thought they were.
I don’t even know what way is up or down or left or right.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I cry.
“Because you didn’t need to know those things, Lucy.
What good would it have done? You were a child.
And it was mine, your father, and Natalie’s decision to continue our lives the way we did.
I’m only telling you this now because you asked…
and because you’re an adult. Because you know that love is complicated and that there is no right or wrong way to live our lives.
That people make mistakes and all we can do is learn from them and try to do better… that love is messy.”
I try to look anywhere else but at my mom, but she brings my attention back to her.
“When your father and I decided to stay with each other, we knew that was a decision nobody would understand, and that’s okay,” my mom says. “Because nobody will understand our relationship except the two of us.”
I try to blink away the burning in my eyes. “How can you still say you love each other after all of that?”
She pulls me in close, and I start crying on her shoulder. I don’t think I’ve really hugged my mom in my adult years; the contact alone is hard for me to wrap my head around, let alone everything else. I let her console me and rub my back while I sob like I’m a little girl.
“I think on some level,” she says softly, “I didn’t know I really loved your dad until it was too late.”
I pull away from her and we look at each other. She uses the side of her index finger to wipe a tear under my eye.
“I’m supposed to understand?” I shake. “This is supposed to be okay?”
My mom’s face is suddenly filled with regret. Perhaps regret for what happened or regret that she told me the truth. It hits me that our parents are just living their lives for the first time too. We expect them to know more than us, but how is that possible?
“Lucy, I thought if anyone would understand it would be you.”