Chapter 6
Caleb gets to Mom before I do, sprinting by me to reach her in long strides. By the time my incompetent leg carries me forward, a sea of strangers surrounds Mom, and I can barely push through the crowd.
Caleb is at her side, performing an amateur examination and asking quiet questions as several others stand vigil.
But as soon as I crouch beside her, Mom fakes a smile and says she’s fine.
She lies to me all over again. And my irritation with her—for the years of distance and avoidance and silence about her illness—battles with my worry.
The wait for the ambulance is interminable, even longer than it used to be.
With the main road washed out, the detour is a one-lane road with switchbacks and infrequent turnouts.
Every time Mom winces in pain, it reduces my tolerance for this town—for all its fuck-yous to modern conveniences and hubris about its invincibility.
When the paramedics do finally arrive, I don’t even argue when Caleb climbs into the ambulance after her, taking the rightful place I forfeited.
“Where are they taking her?” I ask before the doors shut behind them.
“County.” Caleb doesn’t spare me a glance, his focus still on my mom.
“No.” Bile rises in my gut at the thought of going back. “Not there.”
Caleb looks at me now, his face hard. But he shakes off my concern as the doors shut with a decisive click.
“Is there another hospital you can take her to?” I ask the paramedic before she steps to the driver’s door.
“Sorry, ma’am. It’s the closest.”
I need to follow the ambulance. I need to take every step toward reconciliation available to me while there’s still time. I know it. But knowing the right thing and doing it aren’t even related.
Abby is at my side as I stare at the retreating ambulance, frozen in place. “Eden, can I please go with you to the hospital? Please? My mom can’t go because she has the kids. But I have to go. I have to. Please, please.”
Her desperation snaps me out of my trance. Tears fall down her pretty face, a backpack slung over one shoulder while she grips the hand of a towheaded little girl.
I remember being her age and the intensity of every emotion.
“Of course you can,” I say, committing to facing more ghosts.
She lets out a hiccuping breath. “Thank you.” She flings her arms around my neck, and in my surprise, it takes me a moment to reciprocate. “They didn’t let me go with Grandpa Sonny and . . .” She breaks into tears again.
“She’s going to be okay. She is. It’s just a fall.” The irony of those words catches me by the throat, but I swallow and hold my own tears at bay while Abby clutches me.
“Don’t cry, sissy,” the younger girl says.
“You cry all the time.” Abby’s voice is muffled against my shoulder. But this makes them both giggle. Abby pulls back just as a woman approaches and drapes her hand on the small of Abby’s back.
The woman has blue feather earrings that hang below the edge of her chin-length blond hair.
She wears no makeup but has flawless skin, and in an instant, I know where Abby got that lucky trait from.
She steps beside her two girls and swings the little one onto her hip, around her very pregnant belly.
I wish my current panic would deaden my receptors for that particular trigger, but instead, it makes me wonder whether Nadia had her baby yet and if Jeff held her hand in the delivery room and cried when he welcomed his child into the world.
Did he tell Nadia all the ethical reasons he didn’t want children, or did he reserve that long list for me?
“Mom, can I please, please go with Eden to the hospital? I can’t wait around without knowing if Grams is okay. Can I go, please?”
Abby’s mom extends a hand to me. “I’m Lina. You’re Nicolette’s daughter? Eden? I’m so sorry about your mom.” Lina’s voice is low and lyrical.
“Thank you.” I take her hand in mine. “If it’s okay with you, I don’t mind taking Abby.”
“You have enough to worry about. Are you sure?” A toddler who looks just like the little girl crashes into Lina’s legs, wrapping his hands around the bend of her knees.
“Dad will be there. I won’t bother Eden, I promise,” Abby pleads.
“They probably won’t let you into her room to see her,” Lina tries as her younger daughter dives out of her arms and tackles the boy. The toddler slams the girl until she flips him, pinning him to the grass with a roar.
“Are they okay?” I ask, although neither Lina nor Abby seem alarmed.
Abby spares a glance before muttering, “They’re fine. Mom, can I go, please?”
Lina rests one hand on her belly. “Yes, but call me when you know anything.”
And that’s how Abby and I wind up racing out of town on the one-lane road, heading toward a place I was lucky to escape.
The landscape has been scarred by new disasters in the years since I left.
A broad crevasse cuts along the embankment, evidence of a landslide in recent years.
Shoots of wild grasses and lupines push through the raw earth, seizing opportunity from calamity.
Roots of an upturned pine splay like fingertips, uncovering the underbelly of a regal creature toppled by a tremor, flood, or drought.
Grand Trees has always been the fault line between fairy tale and nightmare.
I’m grateful Abby joined me, because she doesn’t let me wallow or worry—she’s too busy talking.
“My dad says that Grams is awake and doing okay.” She fires off a text and looks up from her phone.
I exhale. “Good.”
Abby fidgets with a stack of handouts from the festival, folding one piece into a paper airplane before making a fortune teller like the ones I played with as a kid. “Do you believe in magic?” she asks.
“Magic?”
“Not pulling rabbits out of hats or cutting a woman in half. Just things you can’t explain.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Grandpa Sonny said that Grand Trees is magic, and it takes care of its people. But now that he’s gone, I wonder why it didn’t take care of him.
” She glances out the window, but before I can respond, she jumps in again.
“Why don’t you visit more? Grams is always talking about you.
She says you’re busy saving the world, but this is the first time I’ve even met you, which is kinda strange.
I mean, I’m thirteen. And you only live in San Francisco, right? ”
“It took me seven hours to get here yesterday.” California is vast, of course, but even I know that’s a pathetic excuse, and I’m ashamed of myself for the evasion.
But I can’t spill all the reasons Mom and I aren’t close. Anger is a strange thing. My resentment had cooled to ash over the years, but every time I reignite our relationship, I kick up all that residue. We become coated in it, our lungs fill with it, and we choke on the dust.
“And I’m not saving the world. I’m just a nonprofit fundraiser. I raise the money so others can save the world.”
“Isn’t that the most important part? Money is power, right? The people screwing up the world have all the money. If you take money from the powerful people to help the powerless, then bam—you save the world.”
This kid has it all figured out, and I envy her for it.
Abby looks at her phone again, her thumbs flying over the screen before she tucks it in her pocket and folds a piece of paper into an origami crane. “What do you fundraise for?” Abby asks. “And how do you get people to give you money?”
“I worked for the Red Cross for a long time. But I’m an independent consultant now, so I fundraise for a variety of causes: disaster relief, cancer treatment, food banks, the arts.”
“Okay, but how?”
I love her curiosity and tenacity. She’ll make a good lawyer.
“I’m hired to do big campaigns: when a food bank wants to buy a warehouse, or a health charity wants to raise millions for research.
Sometimes I’m hired to put on an event to pitch a bunch of rich people in a ballroom.
Or they need me to fill in when their head fundraiser leaves or coach a new CEO about how to work with donors. It varies.”
“How do you get people to pay you to ask rich people for money? ‘You need money? Pay me to get it.’ It’s like holding them for ransom or something.”
An hour ago, I didn’t imagine I’d be laughing or thinking about anything other than how broken my mom looked at the bottom of the gazebo, but Abby has managed to do both.
“For every dollar they pay me, I raise multiple times that amount.”
“Seriously?” Abby gapes.
“It’s what I’m hired to do.”
“You make it rain is what you’re saying.” She rubs her fingers against her thumb, and I chuckle. “Where do you work?”
“I travel to meet donors wherever they want me, but I work from home most of the time.”
“It sounds pretty flexible.”
“It is. I can’t complain.”
“So you could come to Grand Trees to visit Grams more often if you wanted to.”
I see what she did there. Our little lawyer. I fiddle with the radio, trying to coax any station to come in, but there’s only static. I flip it off.
She continues, unfazed by my silence. “My dad hasn’t seen his parents since he moved in with Grandpa Sonny in high school. But his parents were awful, so that makes sense. But Grams, she’s the best. Don’t you want to visit her?”
I don’t think Caleb would want me to know any of this, and I feel guilty for consuming this information, even if it is offered without provocation.
He moved in with Sonny as a teen? Sonny lived alone when I knew him, so it means Caleb moved in after my mom left us.
It means Caleb was her surrogate kid and my substitute.
No wonder Mom didn’t mention him. She’s always had a great discipline for omission.
“It’s complicated,” I say.
“Adults always say that. Complicated. It’s not like I can’t understand complex concepts. I’m taking geometry in seventh grade.” She crosses her arms and sinks into her seat. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful or anything. It’s just my mom’s favorite phrase, and I hate it.”
“I think when adults say that, it’s a way of saying they don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t want to talk about why you don’t visit Grams?”
“Not really,” I admit.
“Well then, you should have said that. It really isn’t complicated.”
When I sneak a glance at my interrogator, she’s grinning at me. And somehow, she makes me laugh again. A real, deep laugh that brings tears to my eyes. I wipe them away to stay focused on the one-lane road. “Fair point.”
“Grams has more paintings of you upstairs. My favorite is the one of you in your wedding dress. It’s of the back of your dress and the veil, and the sun is setting, and it’s so pretty.” She releases an appreciative sigh.
This well-meaning girl has the instruction manual for all my emotional injuries. It’s a talent. And she’s undeterred by my silence. She flips the heating vent toward her face. “What does your husband do? Does he save the world, too?”
I could tell her I don’t want to talk about it, but I’m afraid she’d use a legal loophole to find the answer on cross-examination. I practice the words that still feel so foreign to me. “We’re divorced, actually.”
Abby pulls her feet up, crisscrossing them until one knee rests on the passenger door. “That sucks. Divorce is the worst. But you don’t have kids, right? It really sucks with kids.”
I swallow a laugh because if I don’t, I might cry. I can’t even fathom what heartbreak she’ll introduce next. “It sure does.”
“Thanks for taking me to the hospital.” She grabs another piece of paper from the festival and folds it into a star. I breathe a sigh of relief that we’d managed to find a conversational off-ramp before she asks me why I don’t have children or whether I still do ballet.
“I don’t mind,” I say, even if she does have a laser pointer to all my points of pain.
She’s surprisingly comfortable around adults, especially relative strangers.
I never was. Perhaps it was the ballet training, which was steeped in deference to authority.
It’s made it hard to exist in the real world as a woman, a people pleaser, and someone allergic to confrontation.
Abby will have a head start in navigating this world.
“I like hospitals. I know that’s weird, though,” Abby says when I’ve been silent too long.
“Why?” I’m thankful I can ask a question now; this hot seat is burning.
“Well, my brother and sister were born at the hospital, so those were pretty good memories. New babies are the best, better than when they become toddlers and ruin all your stuff. But also, the hospital vending machine sells Butterfingers.”
I laugh. “A plus for sure.”
As we hug the river embankment, Abby looks out the window and picks at her cuticles.
The skin is red and raw, with several scabs along her knuckles.
“And like now,” she continues. “I hate that Grams got hurt, but when someone you love is in the hospital and you can be with them, you know you’re in the right place with the right person, you know? ”
“I’ve never thought about it like that.” Life is a series of competing priorities, and I suppose there is comfort in fate forcing your hand.
“I always feel I’m in the wrong place. When I’m at my dad’s, I feel left out of all the family time with my mom, my stepdad, and my little brother and sister. But when I’m at my mom’s, I miss my dad and worry about him being all alone.”
I snap my head to Abby, taking in this new information. Caleb and Lina aren’t together, and he must not be the father of the younger kids. I think of Abby’s beautiful mom, pregnant with another man’s baby, I presume. I guess Caleb and I have that in common, at least.
It also might mean Caleb is single—and it unsettles me that my nerves ignite at the thought.