Chapter Thirty-Two
The moment Maeve turns the key in the ignition of Faye’s car, it starts raining again.
She flips on the wipers, puts the car in gear, and drives.
The road clears and dissolves, clears and dissolves.
Her mind is blank. She can’t keep a thought in her head.
The kids are at school by now, unaware of what they have lost, what they will lose.
Thankfully it’s Wendy’s day off. Maeve still needs to call and let her own job know she can’t come in.
The wipers rub the windshield, their swishing rhythm toggling her thoughts. Nola Wren and Molly on one side, her mother’s secret on the other. Wendy on one side, Conor O’Kane on the other. Ireland, Maine. Back and forth.
She drives in the pouring rain. Past the house around the corner from the high school where the German boy Oskar lived with his host family.
Past the ghost of the house where Wendy lived, the actual house consumed by fire and replaced by something cheap and dull.
She drives in the circle of her life, around the town she’s never left.
She has fit herself into its shape and forced it on others—Dylan and Opal for certain, but Wendy and Sam too.
She likes to keep things straight. That’s why she’s made lists her whole life.
Things That Make Me Who I Am.
Nothing comes to mind.
She drives, feels the pain of losing her dad, the sting of what’s to come.
They will lose Nola Wren. Back and back she tumbles, like a cartoon character in a vortex.
She thinks about ifs and thens. If she had known this, then she would have done that.
She plays it out, but there’s no going back, no stepping in the same river twice.
She drives until she winds up at the cove house.
Home.
She remembers her grandfather, who is not her real grandfather after all.
But what is that—to be real? Of course he was real.
Velveteen, worn and loved. Yes, she loved him.
Always reciting poems Maeve hardly understood, though she’s beginning to understand now.
Things do fall apart. The center cannot hold.
She feels the flinging off, the falling away.
She rests her head on the steering wheel, but the bumps punch like brass knuckles. She bangs her head against it once, twice. Then Wendy is at the car door, Nola Wren with her. The rain has stopped, but drops trickle down the window, distorting and magnifying what matters.
Maeve gets out of the car, presses Nola Wren between her body and Wendy’s as if she’s preserving a plucked flower. She puts her head on Wendy’s shoulder, her arm around her waist. “Let’s go inside.”
It’s only noon, but Maeve feels she has been awake for days.
When was the last time she was this tired?
Probably when Nola Wren was a baby, in those horrible days after Molly left when they all realized she wasn’t coming back.
She sinks into the couch, throws her head back.
“I don’t know where to begin. This family. I swear.”
“You okay? Where did you go? I saw that your mom was here, but then you all took off.”
While Nola Wren eats peanut butter and jelly and grapes cut in two, Maeve tells Wendy about her mother and Conor O’Kane, about Germany and Ireland and refugee children and lost sisters and drowned friends and how crazy families are with their secrets, how they try to fool each other into thinking they are the best versions of themselves.
She tells her about Molly and the picture she’d kept hidden all those years.
“I don’t know how I was so blind to what she was going through.
And before you say it, I know . . . you tried to tell me.
I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts I didn’t give her a second one.
My mom.” Maeve shakes her head. “That night, she said that Dad would be so disappointed if he knew I had been with you. But really it was her. Jesus, Wen! The guy died in our house! I mean, I must have noticed Molly acting weird after, but I was busy trying to be the perfect straight girl to make up for the fact that, you know, my depravity or whatever, was the reason he was in the house in the first place. But it wasn’t because of me at all!
It was because of Mom.” The kitchen goes dark as rain pelts the windows, disappearing the lawn and rocks in fog.
“God, it’s gloomy!” Maeve says, her elbows on the table.
She takes a bite of Nola Wren’s sandwich.
“This rain!” She groans. “I don’t know what to do. ”
Wendy sits gobsmacked as Maeve recalls how their whole lives have been wrapped around her mother’s deception, though she hesitates on that word. “Or was Mom kidnapped? I have no idea how to even think about this,” Maeve says.
“Whew! That’s a lot,” Wendy says. “Talk about mayhem! And your dad never knew.”
“He kept all those newspapers in the truck in case he needed them for his antiquing. I can only imagine him seeing that picture, thinking in that way of his—he was always so thoughtful—that Mom would want to see it. Of course, she would. I wish I knew what he would have done if he’d found out. She says she was protecting him.”
“Your dad? Protecting him from what?”
The rain stops, and a god ray of sunshine blazes through the kitchen window. Maeve lets it hit her full on, gathering herself in the sudden light. She laughs, wiping her eyes.
“What?” Wendy asks.
“My dad. He said I was like Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird. A ray of sunshine in pants. He was the empathetic one, like Atticus. I can just hear him. ‘Imagine what it was like for her.’ Blah, blah, blah. But it’s true. Mom’s kind of been in her own closet in a way.”
Maybe her father knew something about Maeve after all.
Maybe she tried too hard to be a sunbeam all these years, as if baking cookies and keeping house was what was expected of her.
Even after Sam left and Wendy moved in, wasn’t she still trying to fit into some accepted version of normal?
Putting on a show for Dylan and Opal or her parents or neighbors and bosses, pretending like she and Wendy were some plain old married couple?
If this was a house of cards, how could she continue to live in it while it collapsed around her?
Wendy wipes Nola Wren’s mouth and hands. “NoNo, go play in the other room.”
Maeve watches her run, free of grown-up problems and noise.
They had tried clever monikers to distinguish each other—Mommy, Mama, Mom, Ma—but it had felt too contrived.
They’re just Wendy and Maeve, or “WindyMay” when she clumps them together.
And now Molly is just Molly. Did Nola Wren have too many mothers or none at all?
“Molly says she’s ready to take Nola Wren to the farmhouse,” Maeve whispers.
Wendy slams her soda can on the table. “Oh, come on!”
“No, she’s determined. I saw it.” Maeve pauses, tries to quiet her busy mind.
Her head is peppered with thoughts and schemes and possibilities.
Her eyes flick from side to side. “Remember how we stumbled down that path away from the kegger? We couldn’t see our own hands in front of our faces.
That’s how I feel now. Completely blind. I have no idea what’s next.”