Chapter 27 #2
There are many things I could say in response, like, Oh, now you want to talk to her.
It may have helped my mental health had he spoken to her while I was still a child under his care.
It would have helped my healing if he had made repairing their relationship a priority.
But now? It’s too little, too late, and too triggering.
He can’t reengage with Mom to address something so personal, especially since it has proven to be the third rail.
“I don’t think that would go over well. And she has a whole community of people here who have pleaded with her, who are caring for her.”
Dad is silent for a long time before he says, “I could help take care of her. I’m good at taking care of people.”
I think of those soundless years after Mom left. I remember how gentle we were with each other, how he held me together until I could stand on my own. He is good at taking care of people, but she’s not his to tend to anymore.
“I know you are. But she’s already refused.”
“Well, maybe it’s because she’s worried it would upset me if she came back. But it wouldn’t. It won’t. I think if you told her—”
“I don’t think that has anything to do with it. She’s settled here.” I keep my voice modulated, even though his fretting is a familiar frustration for me.
“But I feel responsible. I’m the one who chased her away.”
I have to strain to hear him. His voice is thin, and I suspect his throat is constricted with unshed tears. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Some of it was. I’ve had time to think about my part in what went wrong, and I wasn’t a perfect husband.”
I take a deep breath and pinch my eyes closed.
Of course he’s had time to think—he’s done nothing but stew for twenty years.
He’s still rattling around in the same house, in a tomb of doubt about his failed marriage.
But I don’t want to be the audience for his postmortem.
Not now, when I’m working out how to feel about my past without his pain compounding my own. “Dad—”
“I didn’t support her art. I was too focused on my career, and she raised you almost entirely alone. And then I could have worked harder to forgive her. I could have gone to therapy like she suggested.”
This belated self-awareness is a great breakthrough for him, but I shouldn’t have to help him work through his conflicted feelings about his marriage when I was the biggest victim of its demise. “I think it’s finally time for you to let her go,” I say.
It was agonizing to grow up in a household held hostage by heartbreak, and my patience for his lingering pain has been especially thin since Jeff left.
I was blindsided when my marriage ended, but I’m moving on, not clinging to hope for a reconciliation.
I’m not refusing to live my new life because my old one didn’t pan out.
Dad’s marriage ended ages ago; mine ended months ago.
He should be ahead of me in this race toward acceptance.
Perhaps it would be easier for him to move on if he saw all the evidence of Mom’s life here and knew how easy it was for her to start over.
I would have celebrated his awakening years ago.
It would have changed the trajectory of my life had he and Mom put aside their pain to parent me together, or to sit beside each other at my wedding, or to pretend to be fine so I didn’t have to choose between them.
But now that I’ve paved the way, it feels like he’s profiting off my emotional labor.
And perhaps it’s petty of me to mind, but I do.
Or perhaps it’s regret. If I had dealt with my issues with Mom before now, it may have forced him to deal with his as well. We each enabled the other’s inaction.
“I should be the one taking care of her.” The vibrato in Dad’s voice means I’ve pushed him too far. “She’s my wife.”
I take a deep breath and pinch my temples. “No, she’s not. Not anymore.” I don’t typically confront his denial, but pacifying him has gotten us nowhere.
He pauses, and I glance at my phone to see if he’s hung up on me.
This whole conversation is uncharted; my go-to strategy thus far has been appeasement.
I’ve summoned this directness from somewhere new, rerouting the patterns of our relationship to find new pathways. And I don’t know where they lead.
“She’ll always be my wife.” There’s a note of defiance in his shaky voice.
“What are you talking about? She left us for another man. She didn’t want to be a part of our family anymore. It was a long time ago, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can start enjoying the rest of your life.”
My hands are shaking when the timer sounds.
I fling the door open and grab an oven mitt, but when I reach for the pan, I hit the back of my hand on the top rack.
I swallow a gasp as I slide the pan onto the stove before spinning to run the burn under cool water.
When I look up, Mom is leaning on the island, her expression unreadable. I don’t know how much she’s heard.
“I have to go. I’ll call you tomorrow.” I place my headphones on the counter without making eye contact with Mom.
“Did you burn yourself?” she asks, but her tone is icy.
“It isn’t bad,” I assure her, even though it’s more painful than it has any right to be. I let the cool water run over my skin.
“Is that really how you see it? That I left because I didn’t want to be a part of our family?” She braces herself on the counter with her good hand, and her knuckles are white.
I guess both my parents want to use me as their jury and litigate their choices.
“Mom.” I try to sound placating. “I’m sorry you heard that, but it was out of context—”
“There’s no other way to take it. Did you mean it?” Her tone is measured, but I sense rage buried beneath.
What the hell does she want me to say? We’re standing in the home of the man she left us for. How else was I to understand her choice but as a rejection? How else was I supposed to feel but abandoned? I settle on honesty but with as much neutrality as possible. “You did leave us.”
“Physically, I was the one to leave. But you and your father evicted me long before I packed my bags.”
My neutrality evaporates. Because this revisionist history is astounding.
Before everything fell apart that last summer, we were happy.
The night before Mom and I left for Grand Trees, Dad took us to our favorite Italian restaurant.
When I went to bed that night, I could still hear them giggling on our porch as I drifted off to sleep.
I replayed that moment, that nostalgic sound, for years.
How did our family go from solid to shattered in six weeks?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. ”
“You didn’t speak to me for a full year. A full year of silence, Eden. You acted as if I were a ghost in our home. And you learned that little trick from your father, because he didn’t speak to me either.”
I inhale and exhale with intention. I can’t believe I’m hearing this—that she’s found a way to blame us. She’s the one who broke us. Dad and I just had to deal with the aftermath.
“I’m confused. Do you not remember cheating on Dad for who knows how many years and dragging me along every summer as your alibi?
” I shut off the water with an angry flick of my wrist, but my burn throbs in protest. I pace away, turning my back on Mom and staring out over the forest, but I can’t focus through my fury.
“I remember all my mistakes—all of them.” There’s flint in her voice, which makes me flinch. “Yes, I was unfaithful and have lived with that guilt ever since. I groveled to you; I begged your father for forgiveness. I know you probably don’t believe me, but I loved your dad.”
I whip around, gesturing wildly to the house, the forest, the entirety of the life she chose over him. I don’t know how she translates my frantic gestures into an articulate argument, but she purses her lips and takes a beat before she clarifies.
“I loved them both,” she whispers. “Desperately. And that’s not something I’d wish on my worst enemy.”
I don’t even know how that’s possible. How could she claim to love my father while betraying him?
How could she blame our reaction to her rejection as the cause of our destruction?
A breeze rushes in through the open windows, and I shiver at the sudden chill.
I wrap my hands around my biceps as the sound of rustling leaves replays her words.
“I’m not proud of my choices. I still struggle with self-hatred all these years later. I loved our family. And I hate that I was selfish and risked ruining everything. But you and your father convicted me without a trial. I couldn’t fix what we couldn’t discuss.”
“There was nothing anyone could say to fix it.” Some things—families, bones, dreams—aren’t fixable.
Mom glides toward me, sliding around the island until she’s only a few paces away from where I stand at the sink.
“I’m fully aware that we couldn’t fix everything that broke that night.
” Her face is pinched, pained, and etched in deep lines.
She’s aged too many years since the last time I avoided this reckoning, when she would sit beside my hospital bed with the same look on her face, when she would knock on my bedroom door every day afterward, knowing I’d refuse her.
“I understand why you blame me for the accident. I blame myself. Of course I do. But I wanted to make it right. I stayed with you, cared for you for a full year—”
Stars burst behind my eyes, and my rage is so powerful, so sudden and shocking, that I feel faint. “You were my mother. You were supposed to stay forever!”
Mom recoils as if I landed a slap. We’re both surprised by my outburst, the unsaid words of my teen self, spilling from the vault where I’d locked them away. Something warm and salty lands on my lip, and I lick away the tear as more join it—hot, fast, and fierce.
“You’re right. It was my job to stay and fix it.
But I couldn’t get either of you to talk to me or go to therapy.
I knew it was my fault, but it still killed me to watch you reject me.
I felt dead to you both, and at a certain point, I thought you would be better off without me.
It was toxic in that home. We were all suffocating on fury and grief.
I thought you both might finally heal if I was out of the picture. ”
“Well, we didn’t,” I snap. “Believe it or not, your disappearing act didn’t help either of us.”
“When I left, you were healing. But we were broken. I’d lost you. I’d lost your father. And there’s only so long I could withstand the punishment.” Her expression is resigned, her blue eyes rimmed red.
My vision is cloudy, and I wipe the tears away with the heels of my hands. “I wasn’t trying to punish you. But every time I looked at you, I remembered all that I lost. My family. Grand Trees. Camp. Sonny. Ballet. A working leg. I lost everything in one night.”
“So did I,” she says, and the misery in her words pulls me out of my rage.
“I lost my daughter. You were my everything. Everything. And you became a stranger to me. At the hospital, I was terrified we might lose you, that the infection would spread, that you’d lose your leg, or .
. .” She chokes on the last word. “You pulled through, but I lost you anyway.”
Mom blurs in front of me, but I can hear the tears in her voice.
A sob bubbles up from my gut, and I’m having a hard time catching my breath or cataloging all the emotions competing for dominance.
I’m livid that she’s reinvented history to paint herself as the victim.
I’m mourning the years we lost because of her lies and my bad luck.
I’m bitter that heartbreak discolored every loving memory that came before it.
I’m wondering how we got here. How this home, that once was my happy place, has become the scene of our long-overdue confrontation.
Most of all, I’m grieving the alternate ways our lives could have unfolded if she had just stayed.
“You left. You can’t know what would have happened if you had fought harder for me,” I whisper.
It’s quiet except for the wind, our tears, and an intermittent drip from the faucet. It sounds like the aftermath of a battle but feels like a stalemate.
“I hated myself for what I did. I prayed every night for forgiveness, that you would come around, but you didn’t.
I was drowning, Eden. I was in such a dark place.
At some point, I accepted I wasn’t strong enough to be the villain you needed, and if I stayed, I would lose myself, too.
That I wouldn’t survive . . .” She trails off, swallows hard.
“I wouldn’t be well enough to be the mother you needed if you came around.
Sonny was the only person I loved who still loved me back.
And I needed his love to stop hating myself—to keep the part of me that loves from being completely destroyed.
” She taps her fingertips on the counter, a slow, steady drumbeat in tandem with her breathing.
I sense she’s trying to collect herself and coax her breathing into submission.
I’m too lost in the trees to see the forest, too close to my own pain to empathize with hers. She might have a point, a perspective worth understanding. But I was a child whose life was destroyed. And I’m still trying to console—and forgive—that child.
“I invited you for weekends, every holiday, every summer. But you refused me over and over again.” She reaches for my hand, but I pull away like a reflex. “I know I failed as a mother, but I couldn’t figure out how to mother someone who wouldn’t let me.”
There’s a noise from the living room, the crash of the front door flung wide, followed by the unmistakable charge of Houdini’s paws and Caleb’s commands.
Mom and I freeze, unable to make eye contact. I scurry to the sink, flick the water on, and let the cool water run over my burn, which is throbbing in rhythm with my head as I stifle my tears.
Houdini circles my legs, but I don’t have it in me to give him the greeting he craves. Caleb’s footsteps aren’t far behind. “Abby’s at Lina’s tonight, but . . .”
I don’t turn around when he trails off, but I sense the questions on my back and can imagine his expression.
“What’s going on?” he asks, his voice in that low, intimidating register he favors.
There’s another long stretch of silence before Mom chokes out, “Nothing. I’m just tired.”
“Nicki,” he admonishes for the obvious lie.
“Caleb,” she says, “just leave it. You can’t fix this.” I catch her reflection in the glass as she walks to her room, her uneven gait heavy on the wood floor. She shuts her door with a definitive click, and my body shivers in the familiar sound of her retreat.