Chapter Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Seven
I was at a loss, reeling from the chaos Tina brought.
She and Tate settled into the motel just outside Rockport and didn’t look ready to leave any time soon.
I’d met Tina for lunch at Jake’s cousin’s bar the day after Christmas.
I hadn’t taken Flo. I wasn’t letting Tina see my daughter unless she was clean.
The lunch was difficult to get through. I hadn’t been around Tina in a long time, and I’d forgotten how it felt.
Tina sucked up all the oxygen in the room—it was hard to get a word in edgewise.
She rattled off disjointed stories about the drive to Maine in the snow (they could have been killed, the roads were so bad), about some friend of her cellmate’s who was going to fix her up with a job (what kind of job, she didn’t seem to know), and she talked endlessly about meeting Tate (who was some kind of knight in shining armor, according to Tina).
The only question she asked me was why the hell I’d kept her baby angel granddaughter secret from her.
She wasn’t curious about why I was living in Maine, or what I did for a job, or who Jake was to me.
She didn’t tell me she missed me and she didn’t offer me a single apology.
The more she talked, the more I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
By the time I left, I was wrecked. Tina, meanwhile, was energized and ordering a tequila sunrise from the bartender.
As I drove away, I knew that Tina didn’t belong in my life anymore. And I most certainly did not belong in hers.
And I didn’t like Tate. He was cold and weird, and I was more than a little scared of him. He had a way of looking at me, flat-eyed and without a hint of kindness, that unsettled me. There was also the fact that he’d stolen my address and aided and abetted my mother in violating her parole.
I barely slept for the next couple of days, my stomach hurt, and I was constantly falling down holes into my past, lurching back in time and reliving Tina’s overdoses and the times guys hit her or followed her home, banging at the door and scaring the wits out of both of us.
“Mom?” Flo approached me one afternoon as I hid in the garden.
I’d told everyone I’d gone to gather wood for the fire, but actually I just wanted to be alone.
My house was very full, and so was my head.
I was sitting on the chopping block behind the outbuilding, watching a light dusting of snow settle on the bare crabapples.
“There you are!” Flo said, exasperated, when she spied me.
“Hey, watch out, it’s slippery,” I warned her, as she navigated the icy path.
“What are you doing?” Flo asked. Her cheeks were blazing red in the cold air.
“Just watching the snow.” I forced a smile.
She reached me and put a heavy hand on my shoulder. She adopted a very adult, knowing expression. “Mom. Do you think you might be depressed?”
I gave her a shocked look.
“I read about it online,” she told me. She cocked her head. “Have you got trouble sleeping? Can’t stop thinking about your problems? Lost your appetite?”
I couldn’t help but laugh at her gravity. And the fact that she sounded like an infomercial. “That’s not depression, bug. That’s having Tina in my life.” I grabbed her and pulled her into a hug. “Thanks for worrying about me, but you don’t need to. I’m okay.”
Flo pulled away and put her mittened hand over my mouth to stop me from talking. “No, you’re not. Mom. It’s okay. The world won’t fall apart if you have feelings.”
I was speechless.
“You always act like things are fine when they’re not,” Flo told me, and I could see she was upset.
“It’s weird how together you act when things go wrong.
It’s okay to throw a tantrum sometimes. I mean”—she sighed—“you have a junkie mom who just turned up with her prison-guard boyfriend.” She lowered her voice.
“And you know what? I think maybe he ought to be in prison himself.”
I exhaled shakily. “Yeah. Me too.”
“And you just got caught lying to your kid. That’s got to be hard too.”
“I didn’t lie to you.” I sighed. “We’ve been through this. I was… protecting you. You don’t understand.”
“So, tell me.” Flo pushed me gently sideways and plonked herself down next to me on the chopping block.
I didn’t want to do this right now. I just wanted to be alone. But Flo took my gloved hand in her mittened grasp and leaned into me, waiting. I looked skyward, feeling tears prickle.
“Tell me,” she prodded.
All these years, I’d tried to protect her by not telling her. And now Tina had forced my hand.
“It was really hard,” I whispered, feeling my voice break. “It was hard having Tina for a mom. And…” I struggled to speak. “It’s really hard having her back now.”
I felt Flo squeeze my hand.
“It’s like my past is never over.” Oh God, I hated crying in front of Flo.
I never wanted her to feel like she had to take care of me, like she had to be the grown-up in the room.
I swiped the tears away, feeling the cold leather of my glove against my cheek.
“There are all these trapdoors taking me back down to where I started, like in snakes and ladders.”
“You mean snakes, then. Not trapdoors.” She patted me.
I laughed, my breath a white bloom in the air. “I’m just sad. And angry…”
“Fair.”
“And…” I cleared my throat. “Yeah, maybe I’m a little depressed.
” I glanced at her. “I never wanted you to worry about me the way I worry about Tina,” I said helplessly.
“I hate that you googled ‘depression.’ ” I felt like a failure.
All I’d wanted was for her to have a carefree childhood.
“I wanted you to feel safe. I wanted to protect you from all the shit in my life.”
“Oh my God, Mom. You can’t control everything. Maybe sometimes it’s okay not to feel safe. Like when you’re not safe. Like when the crazy grandma you didn’t know you had turns up with her crazy boyfriend. Maybe then feeling unsafe is totally appropriate!”
I was crying in earnest now. There were so many big, scary feelings writhing inside me. I felt like they might split me right open. “I don’t want you to feel as scared as I did.” I gasped for breath. “As I do.”
Flo took that in. We sat there in the swirling snow, each wordlessly grappling with our feelings. The sound of my crying seemed loud in the white garden.
“It’s scary when you cry,” Flo admitted in a small voice. “But you know, sometimes it’s scarier when you don’t. Sometimes it’s like you have all these secret feelings and I know you’re feeling them, but I don’t know what they are, and that’s scarier. Because what if they’re about me?”
“What?” That froze me to the core.
“Well…” She shrugged. “Maybe I upset you. Maybe you kind of hate me for ruining your life.”
“Flo!” I was horrified.
“I’m not stupid,” she told me flatly. “I know you didn’t dream about working the phones at the medical center or sleeping in a twin bed next to your kid in a tiny apartment.
Or”—she gestured at the white landscape in front of us—“moving to the middle of nowhere because it was the only place you could afford. Because of me.”
“Not because of you. Because of the economy.” I felt a surge of panic. She’d been feeling all this? “Bug, you’re the best thing in my life. The best thing that ever happened to me.”
She snorted. “Sure. Having to drop out of college and raise a kid was the best thing that ever happened to you.” She let go of my hand and held her mitten out to catch snowflakes.
“I saw how Dad was living in Seattle. He and Alyssa have a fancy condo overlooking Puget Sound. They’re cashed up.
You could live like that too if it wasn’t for me. ”
“I don’t want to live like that,” I said, astonished. “And this isn’t the middle of nowhere. This is home. It’s all I ever dreamed of.” Which was true. “But Flo, even if we’d never found the house, it wouldn’t matter. Because I have you. You’re my treasure, bug.”
She seemed unsure.
I pulled her close. “You are. We’re family.
And I needed you so much. When you came into my life, it was like someone turned the lights on in a dark room.
I don’t regret anything, baby. And I’m sorry if I scared you by keeping Tina secret from you.
It’s just that my feelings are so big and so messy—I don’t even know how to explain them to myself, let alone to you. ”
“Really?”
“Really.” I kissed her forehead. “This is hard, but I’m okay. I promise you.”
“You don’t have to be,” she protested. “I don’t need you to be okay all the time. I just…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I just need you to not hide in the garden and not tell me what’s happening.”
“Deal.” I kept my arms around her for a moment, feeling her exhale a shuddery, relieved breath. “I love you, Flo.”
“Well, duh. I know that.”
After Tina had been in town for a few days, hassling me the whole time to let her see Flo, Jake called me at work. At first my heart leapt into my mouth at the thought that Tina had turned up at the house while I wasn’t there so she could talk to Flo. But it wasn’t that.
“Look, it’s probably not my business,” he started. Then he changed his mind. “No, screw that, you’re totally my business.”
“What is it?” I was poisonous with stress, imagining all the ways that Tina could hurt Flo. My time with Tina this week had shown me nothing was different. If anything, now that I was an adult, she scared me even more. “What’s she done?”
“Your mom has had her DO NOT DISTURB sign up at the motel since she got here, so my cousin said the cleaners haven’t been in. Your mother and Tate have barely left the room. The only time she leaves is when you meet her.”
I closed my eyes, dreading what he’d say next, even though I half expected it.
Jake sighed. “Well, today Tate set the smoke alarms off with his cigarette, and when the motel staff went in, they found glass pipes and a bag of crystal meth.”
I was unsurprised. I had the old sucking feeling in my gut.
“My cousin didn’t call the cops.”
“Oh.” I felt oddly disappointed.