INDY
SIXTY-SIX
I stand next to Nick’s car, taking in the house in front of me. A lot has stayed the same. The house is still white. There’s still the gray roof and the blue shutters. The lawn has been recently mowed, and the flowerbeds and trees haven’t disappeared anywhere.
But the car parked in the driveway is not the same one, and the pots of flowers on the front steps are different from the ones I remember.
I’ve spent the last week trying to figure out what I’m going to say once we get here, and now that I’m standing in front of the house, I suddenly have nothing. My head is empty, and I don’t know what to expect. I don’t even know what I’m hoping to get out of this visit, to be honest.
Nick rounds the car and stands next to me, shoulder against my shoulder.
“Okay?” he asks.
“I honestly don’t know.”
He takes my hand, links our fingers, and squeezes reassuringly. He doesn’t say anything else. Instead, he seems content to wait until I get my shit together.
In the end, I shake my head and start to walk. It’s not like I can stand in the driveway forever. Once we’re in front of the door, I inhale and straighten my back. Nick squeezes my fingers once more, and I squeeze his back, and despite the nerves rattling around inside my chest, I feel calmer.
Whatever happens here today, I still have Nick.
I knock on the door, and we wait. It doesn’t take long until I hear footsteps on the other side, and the door is pulled open.
Mom seems frozen in the doorway as her eyes flit between me and Nick. Her brown eyes. It hits me right here and now how similar the color is. And now I’m wondering how I never saw it before.
I clear my throat awkwardly. “Hi.”
It seems such an inadequate thing to say after all these years, but it’s all I’ve got.
“Go,” she says. She covers her mouth with her fingers. I can see the pain in her gaze. The confusion. The hope. It’s all there. “Nick.”
I slowly let out the breath I’ve been holding trapped inside me the whole time and lick my lips, throat impossibly dry.
“I was wondering if we could maybe talk for a bit,” I manage to get out.
She immediately opens the door wider and waits silently as we step inside. My hand is still in Nick’s, and I’m sure she sees it, but she doesn’t say anything or ask about it, and I don’t offer an explanation.
The moment I step inside it all hits me right in the face.
The house still smells like the home I used to know, and wherever I look, it’s all the same.
The same staircase I ran up and down for half my life.
The same living room where we used to have movie nights.
The same kitchen and the same long dining table with eight chairs around it.
The same view of the bay from the windows.
It’s nostalgia and memories and an ache inside my chest.
“We can sit in the kitchen,” Mom says, wringing her hands.
“Is Dad home?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “At a gallery opening in Vegas.”
We sit down at the kitchen table, Nick next to me, and for the next little while we watch my mother move around, filling glasses with water and putting out snacks until she runs out of things to do and is forced to sit down.
She clasps the fingers of one hand tightly with the fingers of the other.
I take the waterglass just so I have something to do with my hands.
“You look good,” Mom says. “You both do.”
Once again, I’m at a loss for words. What do I say to that?
She sighs, unlinks her fingers and spreads them out on the table in front of her. “I’ve been waiting for you to come back home. I’ve practiced what I want to say to you, both of you, so many times over the years. But I don’t know where to start.”
Nick presses his lips together for a moment. “How did you find out?”
Mom’s eyes dart to Nick before she looks back at the table. “Claire was getting a divorce,” she says. “And your… father didn’t want to pay child support. According to Claire, he had this obsessive belief that since you didn’t look anything like him, you weren’t his.”
“Well, he got that part right,” Nick mutters.
“The DNA test results showed you weren’t either of theirs, so Claire eventually contacted the hospital, and they contacted us.
It was a tiny rural hospital. We were visiting friends in Pennsylvania.
Didn’t exactly expect to go into labor, but there we were.
Claire was living in Bois Run already at the time, so that’s where you were supposed to be born. ”
“But how did it happen?” Nick asks. “Aren’t there supposed to be rules or something for this?”
“Human error,” Mom says. “The hospital had closed by the time this all emerged. We got lost in bureaucracy, meeting an endless row of people, none of whom were interested in taking responsibility. They just kept telling us to contact another department. Eventually we sued. Mostly to make somebody give us those answers. To make sure somebody took responsibility, so something like this wouldn’t happen again.
” She looks up between me and Nick. “I’ve tried to piece it together countless of times over the years.
I’ve tried to figure out when. They took you away periodically to weigh you because you weren’t gaining weight as quickly as you should have.
I was stressed. I felt so overwhelmed because I was suddenly a mother of two.
I had a plan about how I was going to give birth and where and how it was all going to go, and none of it went according to the plan, and it just all got to be too much.
Like waves crashing over my head. I sat in the hospital, and I cried because it seemed like nothing was going my way.
” She exhales. “It was a lot of emotions and hormones and stress, and things didn’t go like I had planned them, and so far in my life everything had.
I’m not… It’s not important, really. Not a day has gone by when I didn’t think of you,” she says, eyes on Nick.
“I held you in my arms, and I loved you so much, and I welcomed you to the world. But when they took you from me and handed me a whole different tiny human…” She shakes her head and presses her lips together tightly for a moment. “I didn’t even realize.”
“And then… after? Somebody decided Nick and I should both stay where we were?” I say slowly.
She swallows hard and licks her lips. Her eyes meet mine, a pleading look in them.
“You were almost three. You called me Mommy. I read you a bedtime story every single night and cuddled with you until you fell asleep. Your favorite thing to do was to ride the tiny scooter we got you for your birthday. You liked French toast and pancakes and hated scarves because they were itchy. I… I knew everything there was to know about you. You were my son. How was I ever supposed to give you up?” Her voice breaks, but then she gathers herself and looks at Nick.
“But then there was this other little boy… You have Gus’s eyes,” she says softly. “I didn’t know any of those things about you. But I felt you in here the moment I first saw you.” She presses her palm to her chest. “It was an impossible situation.”
Nick looks away.
“How come I never knew Nick existed?” I ask quietly. “Why?”
Once again, she’s looking down at her hands, avoiding my gaze. “We tried. For a little while. We didn’t have a plan to separate you.”
“But you did anyway.” My throat goes thick with suppressed anger.
“I’ve regretted all of it,” she says. “But it wasn’t just my choice.
” She leans back, her gaze fixed on some faraway point out the window.
“It’s incredibly difficult to be put in that situation.
” She glances at Nick. “You were my son, but not really.” She looks at me next.
“You were Claire’s, but not really. She was lovely.
Claire,” she clarifies. “Truly lovely. I couldn’t have picked a better mother for the child I carried for nine months if I’d tried. ”
We’re all silent for a bit. I can tell both Nick and Mom are remembering her.
I feel strangely detached from this moment.
She was my mother, but the only memory I have of her is the faint image of her sitting at a table on my parents’ back porch.
I don’t remember if she was looking at me differently.
I don’t remember if she was looking at me at all.
I was too busy staring at the strangely hostile boy across the table from me, trying to figure out how to get his attention.
“Then why?” I ask quietly.
Mom shakes her head helplessly. “Loving a child and raising a child aren’t always the same thing.
And every time we looked at you—” She looks at me.
“Every time we saw you two… we also saw what we had lost. It hurt,” she says quietly.
“We told ourselves it was important that you boys knew each other. We said we’d make it work. ”
“What happened?” Nick asks in a tone much more even than I could ever manage.
“Reality happened,” Mom says. “We’d sit there watching you two. Claire would watch me help Go tie his shoes. She’d see him run to me when he got hurt. I would watch Nick climb into her lap and doze off when he was tired.”
Neither of us says anything.
“Can you imagine what that’s like? To look at your child and know somebody else gets all the moments that should have been yours?
Knowing she feels the same thing about you?
Neither of us handled it particularly well.
We smiled and hid those feelings, and afterward we’d both go home and fall apart. ”
My anger falters slightly. Mom stares down at her wedding ring, absently twirling it back and forth.
“And,” she says haltingly while sending Nick a careful look, “I think she felt guilty.”
Nick stiffens next to me.
“I think… She never said anything, but…” She shrugs helplessly. “I think there was a part of her that felt guilty because we were giving Go and Dia things she couldn’t give Nick.”
Nick’s jaw tightens. I put my hand on his thigh and keep it there. He doesn’t relax, but he stays in place.
“I know it sounds ridiculous, but insecurities usually do when you say them out loud.” She clears her throat. “I’m assuming. She started pulling away. Canceling visits. Making excuses.”
Nick is practically vibrating with tension by now.
“And?” he bites out.
Mom presses her lips together. “We offered to pay your pre-school fees,” she says quietly. “She cut all contact after that.”
“So it’s her fault?” Nick snaps.
“No,” Mom says, unexpectedly composed suddenly. “She took that last step, but I… There was a part of me that was relieved. Every time you two met, you gravitated toward each other.”
My head snaps up. Mom smiles sadly.
“Always. The adults would spend weeks recovering after every visit, but you’d ask about him all the time,” Mom says, looking at me. “When you two were playing together, it was like you were in a world of your own.”
Something painful twists in my chest. “But she left anyway.”
“She left because she thought it would hurt less,” Mom says.
“Did it?”
“In a way,” Mom says softly. “We could stop cutting the wound open every other week.”
“That’s a pretty fucking selfish way to look at it,” Nick says.
Mom lets out a mirthless laugh. “Believe me, I’m aware.” She looks straight at me this time. “I have a lot of regrets. I’ve made a lot of wrong choices.”
After that we run out of things to say. Mom’s eyes move between me and Nick as if she’s waiting. Maybe for more questions. Something else she can answer.
I don’t have anything right now. I’m exhausted, and we haven’t even been here that long.
I’m the first to stand up. Nick sends me a startled look.
“Thanks for telling us,” I say.
Nick gets up, too. And Mom.
She follows us to the front door and watches silently while we put on our sneakers. She looks resigned more than anything else.
Nick opens the door and steps outside. I start to follow him, but then I hesitate. I glance at Nick and then at my mother.
“I’m not… I’m not closing the door on this,” I say quietly. “I’m keeping it open. But I also think we need a bit of time before we… invite you through it.”
It would be easier to walk away. At least, that’s how it feels right now. It would be easier to drive away without looking back and hide all the hurt deep inside. Build a wall between the past and the present and hide behind it.
It would be easier.
But easier doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right choice.
“I’ll be waiting,” Mom says. “Me and your dad. We’ll both be here. For both of you.”
I’d like to think I’m strong enough to do better. I would like to do better.
When I look at Nick, I find him eyeing me with patience. Understanding. There’s a long road ahead. We’re only at the beginning. There’s still time to choose another path if we want to. Whatever we decide, we’ll do it together. Knowing that makes me feel much lighter than I ever thought I would.
He’s opening the door of the car when my eyes move to the bay.
“Wait,” I say. He raises his brows at me and I glance at Mom. “Could we go take a look at the boat shed quickly?”
She nods. “You don’t have to ask.”
She sends me one more small smile before she disappears back into the house. I hold my hand out to Nick, and he takes it. Together, we walk through the trees, down the overgrown path that doesn’t seem to get too much use anymore.
The boat shed is the same, though. Maybe a tiny bit more weathered, but somebody’s clearly taken good care of it over the years.
The doors are locked, and I don’t carry the key with me everywhere I go anymore. Nick rattles the handle anyway.
I clear my throat pointedly. “Private property,” I say.
A slow smile spreads across his lips, and the look he sends me is impossibly soft. He comes to me, every step calm and sure. Once he’s standing in front of me, he takes my face in his hands and kisses me.
“I love you,” he says as he holds me, forehead against forehead, nose against nose, our breath mingling between us.
And I just know that whatever happens, the two of us are going to be okay.
“I love you too,” I say.
And I kiss him again.