55. She was there, Pop
Fifty-Five
SHE WAS THERE, POP
Liv
Pop opens the door before I can grab the knob. He stands there, looking disheveled, the little hair left on his head pointing in various directions. There are two different socks on his feet.
“Hey, kiddo.” He holds the door open for me, and I storm past.
“She was there, Pop, for all of it. What the hell?”
His bushy white eyebrows shoot up, like this might be news to him too.
“Did you know? That she was there at my track meets, my graduations, the goddamn spelling bee! Did you know?”
I’m pacing again, back and forth in the small living room space, around the coffee table in circles. Pop quietly takes a seat on the sofa next to the armchair and waits patiently for me to join him. I stop, run my hands through my hair, pulling on the ends until my scalp burns.
“Pop, I don’t understand. If she wanted to know me so badly, then why? Why didn’t she come home? Why did she leave?” My anger subsides, replaced with something more familiar. The well of this emotion runs deep, clawing at my insides. I flop into the chair, exhausted.
“Honey, your mom was a troubled woman. She wasn’t always, but after your dad… she struggled.” He rubs his knobby hands along his sweatpants. “She met a man who…” He shakes his head, sighing, then clasps his fingers together and stares at the floor, searching for the words to explain.
“She met a man who promised her he’d take her pain away.
Gram and I, we tried to help your mom over and over again, but…
drugs, alcohol, and sadness are a tough mix to be up against. Sometimes she’d come home when you were at school, and she’d be high as a kite begging to see you.
Gram would bring her to the nearest rehab that had an open bed before you got home.
” Pop twists his fingers together like the memory alone is too uncomfortable to bear.
“We’d tell her to clean up, come home, and we’ll figure it out.
We didn’t want you to see her like that.
Honey, we loved your mother more than I can ever try to explain, and watching her cycle through her addictions, promising to get better only to relapse, was something I would never wish upon anyone, especially you.
” Pop’s eyes are moist with unshed tears.
I can imagine him, with all the patience in the world, waiting for his little girl to return to the woman she was, only to be let down because the addiction was stronger than the woman.
“She’d get clean, one of us would pick her up from rehab, and all her insecurities would rear their ugly heads.
She was afraid you didn’t want to know her, you wouldn’t like her, you’d be mad, or worse—disappointed.
All these things she knew you’d have been well within your right to feel, but she couldn’t bear to face it.
Couldn’t face the way she failed you.” He scrapes at the stubble under his chin.
“To answer your question, no, I didn’t know she was there for all of that, but I can guess that in those moments she was clean and missing you terribly. ”
I stare at nothing, absorbing Pop’s words, as the grandfather clock tick-tocks down the hall. My face aches from the scowl I’ve worn for the last several hours, and if I bite the inside of my lip any harder, I might break the skin.
Emotions war within me. I’m glad to have been spared the turmoil of never knowing if my mom would be clean when I saw her and stay that way, or if she’d relapse again.
I have to believe for Pop and Gram it was much like cutting open a newly scabbed wound—the blood gushing out all over again, never fully healing.
But anger still burns within me. My mother was not an addict when she sang to me at night. She was not an addict when my dad left us.
And finally, despair. Why couldn’t I have been good enough to keep her from that fate? Been enough to love, to live for, to stay clean for? Why was it so hard for her to choose me?
Pop sits patiently as I process what I’ve learned.
“I wish…” My throat constricts. Swallowing, I try again. “I wish I could have been enough for her. I wish I could have made her happy enough. Then maybe she wouldn’t have chosen that path.”
“Oh, Livie.” He reaches out and pulls my hand into his.
“I think there’s more to this story that you have yet to uncover. But know this: I never doubted, even in your mother’s darkest moments, that she loved you.”
Back in my apartment, exhausted from the emotional trauma of the day, I pour a glass of cabernet and stare into the void.
My mind mulls over everything, trying to piece together the information I now have.
The orange journal is on the table. I read through to her last entry before going to Pops, a little less than half the book left untouched.
A deep voice, rough as a shot of whiskey, rumbles through my mind. Make a wish.
I allow myself to admit that if I could have anyone to sit in the silence with, it would be Luke.
His steady comfort, the way he didn’t need to fill the space with words, it was everything.
I wish I could look out on the lake and let it wash away the things I now carry.
The feelings that I don’t know how to feel.
I wish I could stay under the stars, wrapped in Luke’s arms, believing I could be enough for him.
But what good is wishing for all of that when I’m here and Maple Cove is hours away? My life is here and Luke’s life is there.
I drop onto the sofa, dragging Sunny’s hefty weight over me and tucking him between the couch and my stomach. He’s not Luke, but he’s my constant, my comfort, my guy.
I reach for the journal next, not sure what I’m looking for. Maybe with what I know now, I’ll see her words with fresh eyes. New understanding.
I thought the tears had run dry. Instead, as I read, I cried all over again, mourning the loss of a life I never got to have, a mother whom I never got to know, and the guilt that I am still angry at her for all of it.