Chapter Eighteen #2
I feel Marcus starting to argue, but luckily that overpowering suctioning feeling is starting. We are being pulled out of this memory, out of this picture of Zadie and Jason and their friends. I feel relieved as pieces of Marcus disappear, as pieces of me vanish, one by one. Relieved and confused.
I’m wondering why we were ever here to begin with.
* * *
I’m somber the next day. That lonely feeling of having to keep everything bottled up inside lingers, but it comes with the weirdly grateful realization that having Marcus there made reexperiencing New Year’s bearable.
I continue visiting Jason every morning, and later in the week, I finally get an appointment with my doctor for after school.
Dr. Carruthers is an older woman with a thin build and kind eyes, and when I explain to her that I’ve been getting migraines for a few weeks, she’s concerned but in a calm, motherly way.
“My best guess is that it’s the whiplash from the accident causing these headaches,” she says. “The good news is that there are a couple of different options we can try here.”
Dr. Carruthers ends up prescribing a medication that she says is great to take as soon as a migraine attack begins.
When I get home, I’m so lost in my thoughts that, at first, I hardly notice my mother sitting in the living room, frowning and pointing the remote control at the television we never use. When I do notice, I freeze.
“Mom?” My heart plummets because something is wrong. Something has to be wrong.
But when she glances up, she looks normal. Tired, but normal. It’s been ages, years, since I saw her sitting in the living room. It had to be even before Dad left, before any of us knew how much life was going to change.
“Oh hey, honey,” she says. “Thank goodness. I’m trying to figure out how to watch an old DVD.”
“A DVD,” I say, because she might as well be telling me she wants to retrieve a dinosaur from before the Ice Age. It’s so unlikely and so weird that I’m genuinely scared. “Mom, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing,” she says with a little laugh. “There are just some shake-ups happening with the city council, and so I surprisingly have a bit more time on my hands. Something has been bothering me, though, for weeks, so I wanted to confirm with the DVD.”
I look at her, then at the TV again. Is this somehow connected to the dream and the TV we didn’t watch at Jason’s on New Year’s?
No, it can’t be.
I take the remote from her and switch to the right channel for DVDs.
“The disc is already in there,” she says, so I press play, and I feel the world fall out beneath me as I see what DVD it is. My dad is wearing a burgundy suit.
Dad is laughing and mouthing something to someone we can’t see until the camera turns and pans to her. Mom is in a strapless white dress with tiny, intricate beading, grinning from ear to ear as she walks toward my father.
“It’s your wedding video,” I say, hardly able to get the words out over the lump in my throat.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it,” Mom admits, and I stay quiet instead of telling her how many times I’ve seen it.
How often I used to watch it secretly in the early years, soon after the divorce.
Zoom in on Dad’s expression when he’s watching Mom come up the aisle, freeze it on the moment right before they kiss, the way their eyes twinkle when they turn to face the crowd before they leave the church.
Both their arms raised as though they’ve done something massive, accomplished something, been given something.
I used to just stare at the amount of joy in their faces and wonder what it felt like to love somebody that much.
Wonder what happens to all that joy and hope when love dies.
Wonder what exactly makes one person stop loving the other, and whether it could have been prevented and how.
How do you know if the thing you’ve found is really love, and if it is, how do you not let it die?
“Your dad’s sister swears we had this DJ that your dad and I loved there, but I have no memory of that,” Mom is explaining as I hand her the remote again. Instead of skipping to the reception, though, she lets it play from the very start.
I perch on the arm of the chair and watch with her. I’m expecting it to all look different now that I’m older. I’m expecting that knowing how things ended will make it look artificial and fake and temporary, but it doesn’t. They look happy. Their joy looks real. The hope is still on their faces.
Mom looks amazing, regal, poised. And Dad.
Dad looks like Dad, with a questionable fade (involving an Afro-mohawk situation) that we’re still laughing about and pants that are slightly too short.
He reads something during the reception that makes Mom cry, in a world before everything about him just made her impatient and sad and disappointed.
Somehow, here, they match. They are right for each other and enough for each other.
It hurts to see my dad on-screen again, but I like to believe that he’s as happy where he is now as he was on his wedding day. It mattered to him that he was happy, mattered more than what people thought or believed about him.
We sit there for the whole ceremony and then the reception, talking casually about people I recognize and people I don’t. I ask questions, Mom reminisces, and for one moment in time, we go back to the past where everything was messy while being good.
I’m feeling content, softer, when I curl up on my bed and open up Instagram a couple of hours later.
And then I see the newest message from the anonymous account: I want my ring back.