Return to Me (8 page)

“Well, here’s a trick I’ve used. Just figure out what the hiring manager likes and regurgitate it,” Dad said easily.

How many times had I heard my father declare that whenever he needed to rally his team: It’s not about the gameplay; it’s
how we play the audience. I appreciated how Dad didn’t dwell on my failure.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, sighing. “It was kind of a tough week.”

The air-conditioning droned so loudly, there was no need to muffle his voice. Even so, Dad said in a conspiratorial tone, “As tough as the way Mom said it was?”

Glad Dad was home, glad to leave the uncomfortable memory of Stone Architects behind, I pictured the way Mom continually nagged at my father. Now that he was back, I realized how much I had missed him since his move from Seattle. I ignored the dull drumming of hurt I had felt all week from his neglect. Why hadn’t he called? Or answered ours?

“Nah,” I said, rolling my eyes. “We were fine.”

“Hey, sorry I missed your interview,” Dad said as he removed two hundred dollars from his wallet, handing me the bills. “Why don’t you buy yourself a new outfit?”

“Are you kidding me?” I asked, grinning past the unsettling memory of Mom unable to access any cash while he was traveling. Whatever, he was home now, I thought to myself. Even if clothes were virtually the last thing I’d buy with this boon of cash, I was touched at his thought, and threw my arms around him. “You’re the best!”

Exhausted for no good reason after Dad left my bedroom, I lay atop my sleeping bag. Then, restless, I flipped onto my side to pull a photograph of Jackson and me out of the back pocket of my sketchbook, the one he had taken with his arm outstretched before us. On our first-month anniversary, we had gone mountain biking on his favorite “beginner’s” trail. I crashed, which
freaked both of us out until I told him that I wanted to push on. For the picture, I had yanked my T-shirt down my shoulder to display the bruise collecting near my collarbone, an impressed expression on Jackson’s face, a triumphant grin on mine. As much as I loved the quirk of his grin, the shape of his jaw, the picture was a cardboard-cutout substitute for the real guy.

The wind blew the sheep-wool clouds outside my window, the kind I used to dream about resting upon as a little girl. But now the only place where I wanted to rest was on Jackson’s shoulder. I had already spoken with Jackson and hated the pathetic image of myself as the Needy Girlfriend who had to text him every five minutes.

A few hours later, I awoke to my stomach spewing fire and barely made it to the bathroom before I threw up into the toilet. Before I could raise my head to wipe my mouth, Mom was at my side. For once I was glad that her radar for our distress was on permanent high alert. After wiping my face with a cool, damp towel, Mom led me back to my sleeping bag.

The next morning, I was running a fever, and Dad had already run out the door.

N
o fair! Reb is totally faking it so she doesn’t have to help us unpack,” Reid grumbled as he propped the front door open for the movers with his foot while writing in his journal.

My head throbbed from all the commotion—the sound of heavy footsteps clomping on the marble floor and Reid grousing that it was a Sisyphean task to transfer our books from the boxes to the built-in bookshelves in the living room. Like a high-pitched violin above the cacophony, Mom voiced her wonder at the movers’ personal stories along with her orders about where every box should go: “What brought your dad from Samoa, Antonio? Box one-two-one.”

However much I wanted to nap, it was too mortifying to be tucked in my sleeping bag while the movers barged into my bedroom. So I nested in the living room, out of everyone’s way, and
shivered despite the comforter Mom had wrapped around my shoulders as if I were a little old lady.

The few times I ever got sick, I was powerless over my candy-colored visions of people I knew, moving in slow motion as they met their future. As soon as I was well, I would convince myself that I had only been dreaming the fever dream of the sick, that my memory of those dreams was faulty even if I worked to circumvent them. Like Shana in my dreams, slapped around by her college boyfriend when she was sixteen. Instead of telling her as much, I had casually suggested that the Bookster Babes do a community service project for abused women. Even though I didn’t know whether the slap ever happened or not—Shana never said—I could console myself that she would be armed and ready if her boyfriend’s hand contacted her cheek.

To take my mind off these uneasy inklings, I remodeled Mom’s garish bathroom in my imagination, first stripping out the ornate brass fixtures and replacing them with a sleek faucet. That done, I installed a crystal chandelier with extravagant loops of glass that would catch the light and twinkle in a thousand rainbows. There had to be a good store for recycled building materials nearby, what with all these old mansions around us….

My eyes drooped.

Old neighborhoods with brownstone buildings. Brownstone buildings in Manhattan, the kind Mom had hoped we would live in…

My dream drifted to Dad’s voice: “Bits, we need to talk.”

Mom’s breath caught as worry sprouted like invasive
morning glory, entwining every nerve, every terrible possibility. She asked, “What’s wrong? Is everything okay? Is it your mom? Is she okay?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Can you meet me in an hour? At the Starbucks near my office?”

“Is it your job?”

“No, we just need to talk. Can you come here?”

“Thom, I can’t drop everything while the movers are here. Reb’s sick. And I’ve got to get Reid from his friend’s. Remember, only you have a car.” There it was, her perennial accusation in full bloom. Even sick, I could hear the constant chorus of her blame.

“Take the train. It goes direct from Newport.”

“Just tell me what we need to talk about.”

I wanted to wake up now. The sense of foreboding was so overpowering, I had to claw my way out of this dream, this now. I wanted to throw off my comforter, run to Mom’s room, tear the phone from her hands.

“Bits,” Dad said as though he had practiced this a billion times, “I’ve been seeing someone.”

“Oh, Thom,” Mom whispered, cell phone clutched to her ear. “What have you done?”

“We need to talk.”

“It’s Giselle, isn’t it?”

Pause. Then Dad, surprised: “Yes.”

“How could you?” Mom asked, her voice fracturing.

Only then did I pry my eyes open. Only then did I realize this was no fever dream but a vision I had seen and heard as if I were in my mother’s skin. A vision colliding with reality. A
vision unfolding into Now. Mom was racing up the stairs. Her face may have been hidden behind her hands, but nothing could stifle the raw and painful sobs that stole out of her.

“Mom…” I whispered.

Somehow I got to my feet, head whirling, the marble floor freezing my feet swaddled in thick socks. Somehow I stumbled to the stairs, unconquerable as slick, sheer rock face. There was no way I could climb to the second floor. One of the movers looked at me and said, “I think your mom needs you.”

This perfect stranger held his arms out to me and waited in silent question.

I nodded.

He swung me into his arms and carried me upstairs to the dark-stained door, heavy and closed. Inside, I could hear the animal crying of a woman in pain.

“What should we do?” the man asked as he lowered me to my feet.

“I don’t know,” I said. I may have found my voice, but finding my balance was harder. I reached for the wall as my world tilted beneath me. “Maybe you should just go?”

Then I opened the door to find my mother collapsed on the floor. Instinct carried me to her, where I sank to my knees and cradled her in my arms, both of us surrounded by a wall of boxes filled with her hopes for our new life here.

T
his is what a girl does in crisis. When her world is shattering. When she is cut off from her friends back home because she doesn’t have a landline phone or an Internet connection (her dad didn’t think to add these functions before they moved). And the thick, stone walls block cell phone reception as effectively as they do her mother’s sobs.

This is what a girl does.

She goes outside to call the Bookster moms and leaves messages with each one. And because she is afraid to leave her mother alone for too long, she texts her own friends. Then, her boyfriend.

She ignores the barricade of boxes in the living room that need to be put away.

She listens to the eerie silence after her mom stops crying. The silence is worse than the crying.

She falls apart on her own.

Half an hour later, her mom’s friends haven’t called back. Or her own.

So she calls her grandfather, the one her father has ironically called unreliable. She leaves a garbled message. The words are unclear, but the intent is not:
SOS. Your daughter needs you.

Because he does not answer, she rings her grandmother, the one she hasn’t seen in two years, maybe three. She doesn’t leave a message, because what words can bridge the gap of silence between them?

And then, because she has no one else to call, she phones a neighbor.

A neighbor her mom bribed at Starbucks to be her friend. A neighbor she’s met three times.

A neighbor whose last name she’s forgotten or perhaps has yet to learn.

The neighbor flies into her house a mere five minutes later.

The neighbor takes one look at her and says,
Lie down, honey. I’ll take care of this
.

The neighbor sprints upstairs to her mom’s bedroom. And opens the door. And says, “Oh, Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth? Since when had her mom started going by her full name?

The girl asks herself what else about her parents doesn’t she know?

But then the neighbor tells her mom that Thom is a jerk. That all men lose their brains in their forties.

The neighbor says go meet him. Figure out what’s really happening.

The neighbor picks the place to meet—a private bar in a hotel not far from here.

The neighbor says,
You won’t know anyone there.

The neighbor says,
I’ll drive you and wait in the parking lot. However long it takes.

The neighbor says,
Pull yourself together. You are strong. You must be strong for your kids.

The neighbor leads her mom downstairs and puts her cell phone in her hand. The neighbor says,
Call him.
The neighbor opens the front door.

The neighbor says,
Fight.

A
round six, in lieu of dinner, Mom filled her white ceramic cup with water and placed it in the microwave. Watching the carousel spin, I had a sudden image of Reid, me, and Mom, our threesome whirling aimlessly while we waited for Dad to return home to us. I tiptoed to her, though I don’t know why. She always knew when I was near.

“Mom, what did Dad say?” I asked gingerly.

“Do you want some tea?” she asked, as if we were in the middle of an entirely different, entirely meaningless conversation. I trembled despite wearing a thick fleece jacket. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how much of my shivering was due to my being sick or my being in shock.

“Not really,” I said.

“Okay, that’s good, actually. I don’t even know where Thom is.”

“What?”

“Tea. I don’t know where your favorite tea is.”

We both heard the inadvertent slip of Mom’s tongue. Worse, we both knew exactly where Dad was: precisely where he had been these last few months when he was living “on his own” in Manhattan. Disheartened, I sat down at the kitchen table, where I found Mom’s ubiquitous list on her clipboard:
Call Schwab and Wells Fargo, contact divorce lawyer…

Divorce lawyer?

My nausea now had nothing to do with the flu. Honestly, what kind of ice-pick woman discovers her husband has been cheating on her and a scant eight hours later devises a divorce plan? Disregarding my wish, Mom placed another mug of water into the microwave. Then she sliced an apple methodically, first in half, then in quarters. How could she be functioning normally when I felt so hollowed out?

“You should be in bed,” Mom said after I sniffled, and set the plate of apple slices on the table. With a look of chagrin, she grabbed the clipboard and hastily set it facedown near her cutting board. Too late. I had already seen the damning contents.

I was about to demand an answer—
What the hell is this about a divorce lawyer?
—when, from the entry, Reid announced his arrival. “I’m home!”

“We’re in here,” Mom called back as she began cutting a block of cheddar cheese into bite-size cubes.

The hurricane of hunger that is my brother descended on the platter of snacks. Grabbing an apple slice with one hand, Reid shoved it into his mouth. “Mom, you forgot to core the apple!”
He spit out some seeds as he scooped up three pieces of cheese. Mouth full, he asked, “So, when’s Dad coming home tonight?”

Mom froze, one hand midway to the cabinet, the plate she was about to fetch for Reid forgotten. Then, as if the floor had listed unexpectedly beneath her, Mom grasped the counter with both hands, steadying herself.