Untethered (12 page)

Char was the one who had labored to meet every requirement in the Motherhood job description, but Lindy was the one who claimed the title—when it was convenient to her. When it wasn't, she loaned it, temporarily, to Char.

“Char can go with you,” Lindy told eighth-grade Allie about a mother-daughter camping trip Lindy wasn't interested in. “That's the benefit of having two moms—when one's away, the other one can fill in!” But when Allie had to write about her “mother” for a school assignment and floated out the idea of writing about both Char and Lindy, Lindy made it very clear that her daughter had one mother, and her paper had better not suggest otherwise.

No matter how much Char did for the girl, Allie's first thought, when it came to “mother,” was Lindy, not Char. If Char were held at gunpoint, she would ultimately confess that while Allie's devotion to her father only made Char smile, the girl's devotion to Lindy had sometimes made Char's chest tighten.

She frowned at her reflection and decided not to burden Sarah with all of those details. “I thought about giving up,” she told Sarah instead. “I'm all about changing your situation if it's not working, and giving up was one way to change my situation. I thought about deciding stepparenting wasn't for me. Calling it quits with her father, moving back to D.C. Picking my life back up there.

“I also thought about yelling at her, ‘I'm right here! Trying to love you! Why won't you love me back!' I thought about listing all the things I did for her on a daily basis, and reminding her that her mother wasn't doing any of those things.” She winced at the memory and lifted her shoulders. “I obviously wasn't particularly mature about it, or thick-skinned, or gracious, at the time.”

“Things seem to be pretty good between the two of you now,” Sarah said. “From my vantage point, anyway. I've wished I could be as close to Morgan as you are to Allie. So, I guess she came around, eventually?”

“I don't know if she did or not,” Char said, “but I know I did. I was complaining about it to Will one day. I was telling him how this
wasn't the relationship I was hoping for with my stepdaughter. I was telling him that I felt like a complete failure as a stepmom because of it. He had listened to me cry about it for ages, but I guess it finally got to him that day. And he said, ‘Since when was it supposed to be about what
you
wanted?'

“It hit me then—well, my brother hit me with it, as he tends to do—that I needed to let Allie be the driver. To let her decide how close she wanted us to be, and how fast she wanted that to happen. If she didn't want to be as close as fast as I did, I needed to be okay with that. And if she wanted to be close for a while, and then back off for a while, then I had to be fine with that, too. Not take it personally.

“Once I started to do that—not just tell myself I'd do it, but once I really started to feel that way and act that way—things changed. Maybe we got closer, or maybe I just learned to appreciate how close we were on any given day, whether it was a day she confided all her secrets to me or a day she ran past me and went up to her room to phone her mom. Maybe my backing off allowed her to feel safe enough to get closer to me. Or maybe she and I are no closer than we ever were at our most distant, but I no longer care.

“I stopped always hoping for more. I stopped feeling disappointed about what she and I didn't have, and about the fact that there's this other woman out there who she'll always love more than me. I started looking at what we did have—lots of fun moments together, some really great conversations, even if they didn't end in hugs or ‘I love you's.

“And I decided to find as much joy as I could from the things we did have together, instead of finding the sadness in the things we didn't have. Anyway, I don't know if any of that is helpful to you. Maybe it's totally different, my situation compared to yours.”

“Well, you are different, compared to me,” Sarah said. “I'm not nearly as strong as you. I don't give myself ‘change your situation' pep talks and tell myself to take charge. You're more self-assured than I'll ever be.”

“That's not remotely true,” Char said. “You're raising two children who each have some significant challenges. That takes so much strength—”

“You know what I've been thinking?” Sarah asked, interrupting. She glanced down the hall, leaned closer, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I've been thinking that maybe God didn't want me to be a mother. Maybe Morgan senses that, and that's why she won't embrace me like a mother.”

“Sarah! Why on earth would you think that? You're a wonderful—”

“I had four miscarriages before I got pregnant with Stevie,” Sarah said. “Some people would get the hint. And then my pregnancy with him was awful. Bed rest, C-section, prenatal, perinatal, postnatal complications. You name it, I went through it. There wasn't an easy thing about it. And now, he has these issues. When we talked about having a second child, we decided not to tempt fate by getting pregnant again.

“So, we turned to adoption, and look what we have. A child desperate for love from the woman who didn't want to be her mother, and not interested at all in love from the woman trying as hard as she can to be exactly that. Maybe this is God's way of telling us He's not impressed that we pursued having a family after He made it clear He didn't think we deserved one.”

“No! That's not true at all! Of course you deserve—”

“It's funny,” Sarah said. “Or maybe ‘funny' isn't the right word. Ironic? But at church, I'm seen as one of the go-to authorities on
raising children. Dave, too. The Crews: parents of the year, perfect family, adoption success story. As if.”

“You are hardly an adoption failure story, just because your child is going through an unaffectionate stage,” Char said.

“You and I both know that's not the only issue we have,” Sarah said. She let out a long breath. “If you could have heard us, for that first year, before Stevie turned four and they realized his development wasn't going like it should, and everything changed.

“We'd stand there after the service, me and Dave, all smug, and people would come up and shake their heads and ask how we did it. How we got our kids to sit so quietly during the sermon, or act so nicely in Sunday School. And we'd nod and lap up the praise and tell them our many secrets to creating the ideal family. If they all only knew how less than ideal it is . . .”

“How's the other thing going, anyway?” Char asked, touching the inside of her arm to indicate she was talking about the self-harm. She frowned at herself after the question came out. She had asked Sarah about it several times before, only to hear that despite the counseling Dave was working so hard to provide for his daughter, they hadn't been able to get Morgan to stop hurting herself. It felt mean to make Sarah repeat their lack of progress again now, on a day when she was already feeling bad about her skills as a parent. On the other hand, it would feel worse not to ask.

Sarah put a palm against her cheek. “Not good at all. The other day, I found scissors in her room, and a box of Band-Aids.”

“Oh, no!” Char put a hand to her throat. “You mean—”

Sarah nodded. “Cutting. We've been trying everything we can think of. We found a new play therapy place and took her there, and when that didn't work, we took her to one in Ann Arbor a few times. And of course we're still taking her to her regular therapist. We've
been reading everything we can get our hands on, and we're trying all the things the books say to do and her therapist tells us to do.

“We're talking less about Stevie's issues, too, to make that whole situation less stressful for her. And also to make sure she doesn't think we're more interested in him than her.” Sarah moved her hand from her cheek to her forehead, covering her eyes. “All of that, and it's only gotten worse.”

Char put a hand on Sarah's shoulder. “What does her therapist say?”

“He doesn't know,” Sarah said. “He has theories, but no answer. It could be that the bruising stopped working for her as an emotional release, so she had to move to something more painful. But he can't be sure. It's so hard, dealing with an issue like this, where there's no definite cause, no guaranteed treatment.

“It would be so nice to hear, ‘Here's exactly why she's doing it, here's exactly how to fix it, here's exactly how long it will take.' Better yet, ‘Give her these pills and she'll be cured forever.' Instead, we hear there's no way to know exactly why she's doing it. And there's no guarantee that therapy will help.

“Some people go to counseling all their lives and they don't resolve the issues they went in for. Morgan has a long history of neglect. Who knows how long it could take for her to resolve her feelings about that? Who knows if she'll ever be able to resolve them?

“And poor Dave. Sometimes, he feels he's working himself to exhaustion for no reason at all. He wonders about the therapists, too. Any time they give more than one possible explanation for why she's doing it, or more than one strategy for how we can help, he wonders if that means they have no idea at all and they're only guessing.

“And here he is, expected to spend more time at the garage than at his own house, so we can pay for it. I keep offering to find a job, but we'd have to put Stevie in daycare then, so anything I made would basically go to that. We'd end up with two exhausted parents and we'd be no further ahead. So he feels stuck. And it's wearing on him, I can tell.”

“Oh, Sarah,” Char said. “I'm so sorry. You're dealing with so much, you and Dave. I'm sure he must be exhausted. And I could see how you'd both be discouraged, when it comes to Morgan. But don't lose sight of things where Stevie's concerned. There is an end game there at least, right? All the speech therapy sessions, all the OT and PT, all the work you've both been doing with him? It's all going to pay off when he trots off to kindergarten with the other five-year-olds in the neighborhood next fall.”

Sarah let her chin drop to her chest. “I wouldn't say we're earning stellar marks on keeping up with all of that these days. I'm running around every afternoon, taking Morgan here for tutoring one day, and then to her private therapist another day, play therapy a third day, and sometimes more. I've been getting Stevie to his sessions, but I'm not sitting down with him like I used to, going through all his words, doing all of the exercises they send home with him.

“I try to do it during the day, when she's at school, but with all the housework and shopping and everything else, it ends up being an hour here, half an hour there. It's not enough. And Dave's at the garage every waking second to pay for both of the kids' sessions, so he's not working with Stevie, either. That's really getting to him, too. He feels he's ignoring his son for the sake of Morgan. He's worried that Stevie will end up missing his chance to be at school with his friends because we're spending all of our energy on his sister.

“We were going to set aside a few hours every Sunday morning to work with Stevie before church. He gets up hours before we have to leave, and she sleeps in until the last minute, so we thought that would be the perfect window. But we've both been so tired that by the end of the week, we don't have enough energy to walk Stevie through the pronunciation of his own name, let alone all the rest of it. We've been sticking him in front of the TV and going back to sleep ourselves.”

Char squeezed Sarah's arm. “It'll get better.”

Sarah lifted her shoulders. “I wonder. The only good thing I can see right now is that Dave and I are both so exhausted that we don't have the energy to argue as much. The stress of it all was making us . . . hard on each other. We were bickering all the time. Now we can't be bothered to bicker. It's too tiring.” She tried to smile, but she couldn't sustain it. “That doesn't mean we're getting along, though. It only means we're not talking at all.”

“That will get better, too,” Char said.

“Thanks,” Sarah said. “You know, you're the only person I've told about any of this.”

Char opened her arms and stepped forward. “You can talk to me anytime,” she said.

Sarah allowed herself to be embraced for a split second before she pulled back, her body stiff. “I've already said too much.”

In the hallway, the kids' voices sounded.

“Hang in there,” Char said, wishing she could think of a more profound parting message.

“It's not like I have a choice, right?” Sarah said, forcing a laugh, and before Char could respond, Sarah was looking over Char's shoulder and clapping her hands.

Char turned to see Morgan hopping on one foot, both hands on her head. Stevie was behind her, trying unsuccessfully to do the same, while Allie walked beside him, a hand out to catch him each time he lost his balance.

“Okay, Mrs. Cat and Copy Cat!” Sarah sang out. “Let's go make dinner!”

R
emember to adjust your mirrors,” Char said from the passenger seat as she fished in the glove box for the driving log. “Wow. You've gotten almost all of your hours in. You'll be able to take Segment Two in another few weeks.”

Under Michigan's graduated license scheme, a person could take Segment One of driver training at fourteen years and nine months. Allie was fourteen years, nine months, and one day when she started her Segment One class, which involved a number of classroom hours plus practice time behind the wheel. Only after a certain number of practice hours could she move on to Segment Two.

She had pestered Bradley and Char to take her out driving a few times a week ever since, so she could get in all the practice she needed to move to the next segment. After she completed that, she would only have to bide her time until her sixteenth birthday, on which date she could take her driving test and get her license.

According to Bradley, most kids fudged the practice hours, either making them up or not bothering at all. The driving school instructors rarely checked the logbooks, and if they did, they didn't
look too closely to ensure the signatures were real and not forged. Allie would brook no such sloppiness or lack of effort. She kept her training log in Char's glove box, a pen clipped to it, and she had been diligently recording the precise length of each practice session before having Char or Bradley sign.

Char scanned the list of dates and drive times and whistled. “No wonder you're such a good driver.” She tossed the log back into the glove box before her eyes could rest on Bradley's signature, repeated several times on the page.

“Thanks,” Allie said. She put the car in reverse and looked over her shoulder. “So, Morgan says her mom's upset about break next week.”

Char wasn't thrilled about the break herself. Sure, she would be fine on her own. She had lived alone for years. But that was before she had
not
lived alone. Before she had gotten used to the noise and mess, the breaks in her concentration and all the other wonderfully annoying aspects of having to share space with other people.

Before she had gotten used to the rhythms of a family. The heartbeats of not only the people in the house but also the house itself. It pulsed, she swore, even when Allie was at school and Bradley at the plant. There was a hum in the walls. A quiet, peaceful anticipation.

When the girl and her father returned each night, and the three of them were together again under one roof, the quiet hum became louder, whether they were in the kitchen making dinner or in the family room watching a movie or each in their separate spaces, doing their own thing. Not a distracting kind of loud, but a comforting kind. It was the contented thrum of a house that contained a family.

What noise would there be, Char wondered, after she returned from dropping Allie at the airport on Friday night? Would the walls sigh once, longingly, and then go silent?

Lindy had been making noises about spending the week decorating Allie's bedroom in California. “Who knows,” she had told her daughter, “maybe we can get things ready sooner than we thought.” She hadn't answered Char's or Allie's pleas to be more specific, of course. Did she mean Allie might move before school ended? Had she turned down the destination weddings after all, or found someone to stay with Allie while she traveled? Or was this all simply chatter? Char wasn't sure Lindy herself knew what her plans were for her daughter. Or what she wanted them to be.

Char didn't dare admit out loud her house-as-living-creature theory. It would only make people worry about her, about what would become of her when (or if) Lindy finally got around to summoning Allie home for good. So, Char had spent the weeks leading up to break talking about all of the new editing projects she had taken on lately, and how great it was going to be to have an entire week to focus on them.

This had allowed Allie to stop feeling guilty about leaving. It got Colleen to stop mentioning that her parents' condo in Miami had enough room for Char and that, last she had checked, the flight they were taking still had empty seats. And it put an end, mostly, to Will's daily texts:

World-famous engineering professor seeks companionship: only siblings need apply.

Weeklong special in Clemson, SC: utilities and riveting conversation included.

One lumpy pullout. No waiting.

“What is it about the break, exactly, that has Sarah upset?” Char asked. “Or did Morgan say?”

“It's hard to tell with Morgan,” Allie said, flicking on her indicator and pulling out of the lot. “She's always so convinced her parents hate her.”

“Wait. She is? Since when? ‘Hate' is a strong word.”

“I know,” Allie said. “And that's why it's hard to tell. Morgan talks in absolutes a lot.”

“Now, there's an expression I haven't heard lately. ‘Talking in absolutes.'”

“Oh, right,” Allie said. “Dad. Sorry.”

“Don't be. I love the reminder. But if you don't, I won't point it out next time.”

“I do, too.” Allie smiled.

Char smiled back, and for a moment, she could feel the connection between them. “Look, Allie . . .” she started, and then paused.
Let's make up
, she wanted to say.
Let's not let misunderstandings about boys come between us. There are already so many obstacles in our relationship
. But was that the right thing? Or should she say—

“Anyway,” Allie said. “You know Morgan. She's always upset about the fact that she's ‘nothing but bad' or ‘a complete pain' or ‘a total disappointment.' This is just an offshoot of the same old thing. She's a terrible kid. She's evil. She's hateful. And now, lately, her parents hate her, they want her gone, they can't stand to look at her. That kind of thing.”

Char made a fist in her lap, then opened her hand wide. She had waited too long, missed her chance. She would have to find another opening with Allie, another time. “How long has she been talking like that?” she asked.

Allie raised a shoulder as she changed lanes. “Haven't really
been keeping track. It's not like it's something all that new or different. Variations on the same theme, you know? Morgan can be pretty dramatic when it comes to what other people think of her. And not always entirely honest.”

Morgan had created unnecessary anxiety in Allie before with these kinds of statements. The Crews couldn't stand Michigan, she told Allie once, and they were moving to Atlanta. They would be gone in a few days, and Morgan would never see Allie again. Morgan's teacher despised her, she claimed another time, and she was going to be expelled.

No one at the Crews' church liked her—she was the worst of all the adopted kids in the congregation, so Sarah was going to ship her off to some foster care group home in Detroit, and try again with a different adopted child. When each of the stories had turned out to be untrue, Allie had confronted Morgan about the lies, and Morgan had merely shrugged and changed the subject.

“Anyway,” Allie said, “this time, she says they were all going to go on a trip for break, to some beach somewhere, but Mr. and Mrs. Crew changed their minds because they can't take Morgan out in public, they're embarrassed of her, and a bunch of other things like that. So they're staying home, and it's all her fault, and that's why her mom's upset with her. Well, not just upset with her, but hates her.”

“Meanwhile, it's likely a budgeting thing,” Char said. “Or maybe Dave can't take time off work, or . . .” Or maybe, Char thought, Dave and Sarah really were discussing the fact that they can't take her out in public in a bathing suit, with all of her bruises and cuts, and Morgan overheard.

For a split second, Char considered telling Allie this. She had been debating for some time whether to raise the self-harm issue
with Allie. Maybe it would be a good thing for Allie to be aware of. Maybe there was something she could say to Morgan that might help. Maybe Allie would have some insight about it that could help the Crews.

Since discovering Morgan's bruise-covered body in Allie's bedroom in January, Char had done some reading about self-harm online. There were plenty of children Morgan's age who did it, but there seemed to be even more kids Allie's age, especially when it came to cutting, which Morgan appeared to have moved on to. Maybe Allie knew kids at school who had gone through it. Maybe she could ask them what it was that got them to finally stop. Maybe she could relay it to the Crews. Maybe it would work with Morgan.

Char took in the teen beside her. Allie's top teeth held down her lower lip, and Char knew the girl's worry wasn't about the right turn she was about to take. And that was her answer: do not mention this to Allie. She was already concerned enough about Morgan's proclamations of self-hatred. Piling on the information that Morgan sometimes turned those words into bruises and cuts might hurt the teenager more than it would help the ten-year-old.

“Right, or some other totally reasonable explanation,” Allie said, finishing Char's sentence. “I know. And that's what I told Morgan. But she's convinced. And once that girl is convinced of something . . .” Allie shook her head. “Right now, she's convinced she is Morgan Crew, Devil Child, hated by her mother, loathed by her father.”

“I would give anything to hear her refer to herself as Morgan Crew, Child Superhero, loved and lauded by all,” Char said. “But I'm beginning to wonder if that's too much to hope for with her.”

“I'd love to hear that, too,” Allie said. “But yeah, way too much to hope for. That kind of positivity is so not the way Morgan rolls.”

She turned into their neighborhood, and for the next few blocks, they talked about winter conditioning, Allie's chances at making the varsity soccer team, and what was happening in each of her classes. She was doing a project on Denali for Environmental Science, she said. “We should go to Alaska sometime, you and me,” she said. “Check it out. It would be so cool.”

“I'd love it,” Char said. She caught herself smiling too much, and turned to the window to hide it. It was so nice, this time with Allie in the car, the relaxed chatter about Morgan and school. It had been such a long time since they had had an easy conversation like this that Char had forgotten how wonderful it could be. It was the best feeling in the world to have things feel normal again, particularly now, when they had such little time together before Allie went away for break.

“Hey,” Char said, as Allie turned onto their street. “What about going out for dinner tonight, and then seeing a movie?” A celebration, she thought, though she would never admit it to Allie.
We're talking nicely to each other again! We have pleasant things to say to each other! There's hope for us!
“Chinese buffet and giant-sized movie popcorn?”

It was their girls-night-out menu anytime Bradley had to travel for work. Char smiled wider, imagining it. They would keep up their lively chatter over dinner, find a good rom com, and joke about which of them made a better match for whoever the hunky male lead was. The tension that had grown between them would start to melt and they would spend the rest of the week talking and laughing like they used to. Allie would offer to help with dinner for the next few nights, and after, she would spread her books out on the counter and talk to Char while she finished her homework.

By the time they were driving to the airport on Saturday
morning, things between them would be good again. After her break was over, Allie would return to Michigan determined to continue down their path to recovery. She would dump Kate and the boys. They would have Colleen and Sydney over for dinner. The house would resume its contented thrum.

Allie inched the car into the garage, and Char waited patiently for her to respond. It was tricky, pulling into their garage. Not because of any threat to Char's car—Bradley had meticulously organized all of their bikes and other sports gear to leave a foot of free space on either side of Char's parking spot, virtually eliminating the risk of Allie's scraping the side of the vehicle as she pulled in. He had hung a tennis ball from the ceiling to prevent any scrapes to the front grille: as soon as the windshield and ball made contact, Allie knew to brake, shift into park.

No, the trick was emotional, not physical. There were three bays in the garage. One for Char. One for Bradley. One for the convertible they had splurged on after a year in which both the editing world and the automotive one had paid dividends. It had a small backseat, allowing the three of them to do day trips. Their favorite was for ice cream.

Bradley's bay—the one in the middle—was now empty. Which made the convertible sitting in the far left bay all the more noticeable. It was still cloaked in light brown, as it had been since the prior summer, its burlap cover a mourning veil. Allie and Char kept their gazes fixed on the tennis ball as they had done every day since the accident. Looking to the left was too difficult.