20
“Are you okay?” Vi asks as soon as we’re in the car.
I give her a wary look. “Oliver has never ever, ever, ever in my whole life deliberately tried to hurt me. Never. I—” I shake my head, still can’t really believe it. “Never has he even come close to holding what happened with Beckett against me—”
“I know, sweet pea.” Her face pulls like it’s hurting her too. “He’s just tender right now.”
I mean, no fucking shit he’s tender, but what he’s tender about is what worries me.
Or who, maybe.
“Has he been spending time with Maryanne?”
She sighs and rattles her head around. So that’s a yes.
“He used to be just mine.” I find myself frowning.
“Baby, you worked so hard to make him feel accepted in this family—”
“But Maryanne isn’t accepting him; she’s manipulating him.”
“How do you know?” Vi frowns.
Oh gee, I don’t know, Violet. I have a master’s degree in psychology and behavioral science from Cambridge, and I’m a year and a half into my PhD while working for one of the foremost behavioral experts in my field.
But I just look out the window as I sigh and say, “Because she manipulates everybody.”
Vi gives me a long look, both sad and curious. “You still dating that guy back in London?”
I roll my eyes. “You know I’m not.”
She plays offended. “How would I know you’re not?”
I eye her. “Why don’t you just come out and ask what you’re stepping around…?”
“All right.” She nods. “You sleeping with that Sam boy?”
“What the fuck?” I bang my hands on the dash. “No! No, I’m not!”
She glances at me. “But you want to?”
I shake my head, annoyed, somehow feeling condemned over my past and judged for my future all at once. “Well, I mean—yeah!” I stutter. “Of course, yes—have you seen him?”
“I—yeah. I get it.” She nods again. “He is—wow.”
“Right?” I blink.
She eyes me playfully. “Well, does he want you back?”
I roll my head back, pretending I don’t like the conversation. “I don’t know!”
The corner of her mouth tugs in disbelief. “You don’t know?” She snorts. “Yes, you do.”
“Fine,” I relent with a laugh. “Yes, I know.”
“Well?” She blinks, expectantly.
“Is romance dead?” I yell in loud exasperation.
“No, but my brother is—” She gives me a look. “So just throw me a goddamn bone.”
“Does dead brother trump dead father?”
She sniffs a laugh. “Probably not normally, but you didn’t like him that much, so.”
It hurts her to say that; it’s plain all over her face. The way it pulls and pinches. She’s never let it affect us, but it has, on many occasions, complicated things.
She loved my dad. Loves? Loves, I think is the appropriate tense. I don’t think you just stop loving someone once they’re suddenly gone. I think that’s what makes it hard.
Violet loves him. Always has. She’s never loved him in a blind way, though. She knows he was a garbage dad to Oliver and then consequently me as well. She knows, and I remember watching it shred her every time he acted like less than the man she thought he was.
That makes it tricky. It was always hard for me to figure out which was my real dad. The guy she knew or the guy we knew? She’s mourning the guy she knew.
It’s weird, they’re not alike at all. She’s fun and free and creative and brave, and he was, like—painfully straight-laced. Not passionate or interested in anything really, beyond planes. He loves planes. I never saw his nose in a book, I never saw him see something he thought was beautiful and stop to look at it… Just the most restrained man on the planet.
I know she’s trying to avoid it, hiding behind me and Oliver and being there for other people, but avoiding grief is a kind of grief. It’s what we do when we can’t feel what we need to feel to progress. I know that’s true because I do it too. I think I’m doing it right now.
“Are you okay?” I ask her, half in case no one else has and half so she can’t ask me.
She gives me a smile that’s trying to be brave but isn’t; she just watches me for a few seconds out of the corner of her eye.
“You and me,” she sighs. “We’re not that different. I never fit in with my mom and dad. Philip’s an asshole and a dumbass, so your dad was always the only one I liked. And now, besides Clay, Phil’s the only one I got left.”
“You’ve got me?” I offer, and she reaches over to touch my face.
“Yes, honey. I guess do.”
***
She pulls up to the Saks OFF Fifth, just outside of Bluffton.
“Tell me,” she says, as we walk inside. “How’s your mom doing?”
I take a big breath. “Are you asking me the daughter or me the nearly-psychologist?”
“Both,” she says as she picks up a black dress from Roberto Cavalli and holds it against herself.
“From a professional standpoint, she’s experiencing what’s classified as traumatic grief—”
“As opposed to what?”
“Anticipatory,” I say as I inspect a pair of Attico’s Grid studded slingbacks that are too bedazzled for a funeral but I think I’ll buy anyway. “Can I get these in an eight, please?” I hand them to a sale assistant nearby and then I look over at Vi. “She’s in what they call the ‘numbing phase.’ It’s when everything hurts too much to fully comprehend it, so she doesn’t…”
Vi gives me a long, pointed look. “It sounds familiar.”
I’m self-aware enough to have already wondered whether that’s the phase of grief that I’m in, and maybe I’m in an abstract part of it, but my mother’s grief and my grief are incomparable because our relationships with the deceased are also incomparable.
“Mom’s in a phase of adaptation.” And I smirk because she’d hate the word—she thinks it’s unbiblical—but it’s true, she is. “She has to relearn her place in the world without Dad, and I don’t think she’s the sort of person who’d have thought about it much before now. So I think she’s doing okay.” I shrug. “Relatively.” I glance up at Vi. “For who she’s lost and how suddenly she’s lost him, I think she’s doing okay.”
“And what does daughter-you think?” Vi asks, handing me the black Gramercy pleated stretch-jersey maxi dress from Staud.
“I’ve contemplated trying to get her drunk and make her take the Inventory of Complicated Grief so I can gauge where she’s at officially.”
“That sounds like psychologist-you still.”
I sniff a laugh. “We’re melding.”
She leans in toward me and gives me a smile that’s laced with a lot of pain.
“Make sure you’re doing some grieving too.”