43 EVIE
E VIE
If I’m being honest, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see him again or that—while standing in some nondescript lobby in New York on a shitty March day—it would be the end of us forever.
How much time would be thrown away between us and wasted.
It never occurred to me how permanent it would be, and it wasn’t my intention.
I knew he deserved a better explanation than the one I had given him.
Over and over on an endless loop, I would reimagine words I might have chosen better or other ways that it could have turned out.
But days went by, then weeks and years, and eventually more than a decade would pass before I saw his face again.
You’ll remember a lot of what happened in those years that followed, of course.
You were there, after all. But there are some details from the early days, when your dad and I were first starting out, that I need to tell you about.
I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, you need to understand that eventually I did find happiness.
I want you to know that. Because I don’t want you to think that all the wonderful things you remember from your childhood were in any way artificial.
I loved being your mom, and the years when I got to be at home with you, watching you grow, taking care of you, were some of the favorite times of my entire life.
So what I’m about to explain shouldn’t take away from a single moment of that, okay?
I loved your dad and he loved me. Very much.
And the years when you were little were the happiest times of our marriage.
Having said that, you know that we had our problems. I felt like I disappointed him everywhere I turned.
And I think he felt the same way toward me.
That’s why we separated for a time. Somewhere along the way, we fell apart, as can happen.
Ghosts from our past—or mine, really—began to surface, and no matter how hard I tried to make them go away, they wouldn’t.
Because I never really healed from what had happened early on—not in my childhood, not in my time with Carter, none of it.
I’d simply forced it down into a deep, dark place within me and willed it to stay there, hidden behind perfect photos and coordinated outfits and front porches decorated for fall, all the things I’d never had growing up.
I had never told anyone the full story about Carter.
Your dad knew some, of course, but not all of it.
He didn’t want to. Not until later. So I was able to keep it all locked away where it belonged during those early years.
But when you keep the darkness hidden like that, it always makes its way to the surface eventually. Always. It needs to be dealt with. Otherwise, it steals the light.
Do you see it now? The album title? My name. Or at least, his version of it. Hidden in plain sight for all the world to see. He told me once that it had been a message to me, calling my name, shouting it out into the universe in both title and music.
I had been walking quickly past one of Philly’s last record stores when I saw it for the first time—a large window display covered in Mayluna promotional posters—and I stopped short.
The solid black artwork design, the name of the album in white, lined up for display, repeated in various formats, large and small throughout the entire window, the album’s title, Sigma Five , consisting simply of two characters.
The Greek letter sigma and the Roman numeral five.
Upon seeing it, my knees had nearly buckled while standing in the rain.
On that album, I heard the music and the songs I’d watched them create during late nights on the bus and in that studio in England.
After that album was released, they were everywhere, and I couldn’t escape him.
I’d watched the world fall in love with him while I quietly tended to my life and to a broken heart that seemed unwilling to mend.
So I buried it all in a box in the back of my closet, along with every trace of my life with them—photos, mementos, notes—and promised to never go back to that time in my life again.
Until one day at the end of summer, more than a decade later, when letting go had suddenly become harder than ever.
I don’t know why or what it was about that time that made me suddenly feel a nearly obsessive pull back to him.
It was as if some unseen force kept drawing me back, refusing the past to free me of its clutches, and then instead of whispering to me as it had for so many years, it had begun shouting with urgency.
There is this one night, I can still remember with such clarity.
I’m not sure why, exactly. But memories are funny that way.
It was as if somewhere inside me, I sensed that change was coming and my brain marked the passage of it.
The smell of the grass. The sound of Roxy barking as she played alongside both of you.
The magical way the sunlight caught the glitter.
I’m sure I’m remembering it like something out of a picture-perfect movie—far better than it actually was.
But that’s okay. I don’t mind. I’ll keep it—my golden memory of motherhood.