A week to bring my outline to life, to create the world, the people, the conversations I’m seeing play out as clear as a movie in my head. I feel like I’m not myself as it’s happening, or like I’m above, around, outside myself somehow. Words come to me, to my fingers, but I don’t think them first. They just happen. I can’t explain it, and even though I see the words coming from my hands on a keyboard, I almost don’t believe it—I feel guilty, sneaky, like I’m stealing from someone or somewhere because it doesn’t feel like this, all of this, could possibly be coming from me.
I don’t stop to question it, though.
I’m running on a manic new energy. I don’t do anything but write, except for the basic necessities. I eat only when I can’t go another word without a bite of something, usually granola bars or a quick sandwich or one of Dottie’s cookies—from a plate that magically appeared on my desk one morning while I showered. Showers are rare, too, so Mia—acting as Dad’s legs, or on her own—must have jumped on a small window of opportunity to make the delivery. There was a bowl of vegetables and hummus and some apples put on my desk, too, probably because a nurse couldn’t in good conscience feed me cookies alone.
If Dad suspects what I’m up to, he hasn’t said anything. He’s kept his distance, even though I hear him whirring and puttering downstairs. He’s still up and about. Trying.
I haven’t had a single interaction with anyone from the outside world. My phone’s been on airplane mode to avoid any calls or texts, and I disconnected my laptop from the Internet. If there are any practical matters to be taken care of, hopefully Dad’s on top of it. I’m trusting in him, but only because I honestly don’t care what’s happening on the business end. It feels separate from me, from this. Even if I’m the only person who ever reads these pages, I won’t regret the time I’ve put into them. There’s nothing else in the world I’d rather be doing right now.
I’ve rewritten parts of Dad’s old chapters, and the new chapters are mostly done, too. Marigold tells Colton the truth about Jonah sooner now; he’s angry and hurt, of course, and even more determined at first to come through the portal, to confront his twin face-to-face. But he has more space to come to his senses, and by the time he finds out about the house being demolished and the portal likely closing for good, he agrees that messing with destiny is wrong. And if someone else has to love Marigold, he’s glad it’s Jonah.
There’s one scene that I can’t stop tinkering with, though, coming back to it again and again in the last seven days: Marigold and her mom, their last moment. It’s down in rough, choppy words, but it still doesn’t feel true enough. There’s something missing, some inner light—or inner darkness, or maybe both.
I stayed up until three last night piecing together an inspiration board on the corkboard above my desk. It’s the worst and best parts of my mom’s letters typed out in quotes, her photos, her charm bracelet and rings. The locket is around my neck as I type—heavier than I expected, a weight that doesn’t allow me to forget I’m wearing it. I contemplate putting on her sweater again for good measure, but I can’t do it. All I see when I look at it now is my perfect day in the woods with Oliver, and the morning after my first kiss with Liam.
My phone is propped up on my dresser next to my desk, the camera turned on, just waiting for me to press Record. I’ve been filming myself in clips throughout the process, addressing fans—or former readers, more accurately, since fans feels like a long shot now—explaining the process, the whys and hows of my deciding on a particular scene or conversation. Just in case these chapters ever do see the light of day, or even if they don’t, I want the world to know: I’m not totally useless.
It’s been two days since I showered and my hair is a gnarly, greasy knot and I’m wearing a faded Calvin and Hobbes T-shirt that’s exclusively for sleeping—but I tap the red Record button without inspecting myself in the mirror first and flip the camera around. If I can’t make this video completely genuine, then there’s no point in making it at all. My eyes focus on the camera lens on the back of my phone. I clear my throat. I feel my cheeks flushing before I say a single word, but I start anyway.
“I never knew my mom, not really. I was three when she died, too young for memories, and my dad rarely talked about her—the details came like bread crumbs. It was too hard on him, and I didn’t want to make him sadder than he already was. So I had to fill in the blank spaces on my own. I built my mom the way I wanted, the dream mom who always did and said everything right, who never would have yelled at me, who would have let me eat two desserts if I asked nicely enough, and would have let me stay home from school some days just for fun. She was so beautiful, this dream mom. She was all I had, and I loved her more than anything.”
I can feel my eyes watering, but I keep going. I don’t shut down the camera. I pretend it’s Oliver on the other end, not just the other side of my empty room. I’ve used that method all week—talk to these nonexistent-but-maybe-someday listeners like they’re Oliver. Like they have every reason to judge me, but I still hope they’ll understand at least some piece of what I’m saying. And maybe they’ll still hate me after they hear my story, but a little bit less.
“Last week, Dream Mom died. I lost a mother all over again. My dad told me that my mom suffered from depression her whole life…He wanted to help; she insisted she could handle it on her own. My mom was a strong woman, but it takes more than that to live with depression. Especially when you have a small child sapping all your energy, needing you, clinging, demanding, crying.”
I stop for a minute to catch my breath. I feel as though I’ve been running up and down the stairs, not just sitting at a desk talking to an invisible audience.
“I lost my mom in a car accident. That’s what I was raised to believe. And maybe it was just that—an accident. But maybe it was my mom at the end of a very thin rope. Maybe it was a dark moment. The darkest moment. My dad and I—we’ll never know. I haven’t found Marigold’s magical portal, and I don’t think I ever will. I can’t ask Mom any last questions, tell her the things I never got to say. All I have is what Dad can tell me, and a pile of letters I read for the first time last week. Notes that my mom wrote for herself in the years before she died. Letters about me. About how much she loved me. Even if motherhood made her unhappy sometimes, if it scared her more than anything in the world. If I could say one thing to my mom, I’d tell her that I loved her for trying—that I still love her now and I always will.”
I look away from the camera to Mom’s notes, needing reminders, black-and-white evidence:
I love my daughter. I vow to be the mother that this beautiful baby deserves.
Making chocolate chip pancakes with Thistle, smearing chocolate on my lips as she screamed and clapped her hands. I let her smear chocolate on her lips, too, and of course it ended up all over her clothes, the table, the chair.
It was the best day ever, Thistle. You’d already made me the happiest I’d ever been, just by existing.
Forgive me, Thistle. Please. Because I’m not sure I can ever forgive myself.
The words feel new every time I read them—just as surreal and beautiful, just as cruel and unfair. I’m gripping the locket so tightly it’s warm in my fingers. My eyes are stuck on Mom’s eyes in my favorite photo of the two of us, making chocolate chip pancakes just as she described. There’s chocolate on our chins, our hands, everywhere, but clearly neither of us cares, because we’re smiling so big our whole faces are being swallowed up. My dad must have been there to catch the moment, and I know now why he’s made me chocolate chip pancakes for all these years—but it must have squeezed his heart again every time, that sugary smell wafting through the kitchen and jolting him straight back to this.
I can smell it now, that sweet batter hot on the stove, just a splash of vanilla and a pinch of sea salt to set off the chocolate chips. I can’t tell if I’m delirious from lack of sleep—from looking at the pictu
re, reading Mom’s words, her heart, literally, in my hands—or if Mia is cooking.
It doesn’t matter, though, because the effect is the same, utterly gut-wrenching, and my hands are on the keyboard, deleting old words and filling them in with new.
* * *
“So you see how it is,” Marigold said, her eyes on her hands, not able to meet her mom’s gaze. “It’s now or never. You try to come back with me, or—”
“This is good-bye,” Violet filled in for her, voice quiet but still steady and calm.
Marigold nodded. The clear yellow sky beyond the window seemed brighter than ever, offensively bright when the world should be darker out of respect for such an awful conversation.
“What should we do?” Marigold asked in a whisper. She was edging closer to Violet, needing to feel that her mom was still as inexplicably solid as ever, still giving off heat, still taking up space. She was here, even if the fact of it would never make scientific sense. She was real, and maybe she could continue to be real, if only…
“I think we both know the answer.”
It was like a fist punching Marigold’s gut, even though these were the words she had expected, this was what she herself—if she had been forced to decide—would have said, even if it was not what she really wanted. What she wanted and what felt right were worlds apart.
“I want you to come, I do,” Marigold said, her voice breaking as she fell into her mother’s arms. “But it feels wrong, doesn’t it? Like it’s going against nature. We already cheated the system somehow, me being here. What would happen if you came with me? Would you be alive again, or would—?”
“Would I be some sad shadow haunting you for the rest of your life? Beyond that maybe, trapped in some strange in-between world forever.”
“Yes. That.” Marigold nodded, tears dripping across her mom’s bright orange sweater.
“There is nothing I want more than to be the mother you deserve, for the rest of your life. To make you chocolate chip pancakes every morning, to be there with you every night, helping you figure out awful calc problems while your dad whistles happily in the background, cooking up his special barbecued chicken. I want it all. I want you. I want your dad. I want our whole life back.”
“But,” Marigold said.
“But,” Violet repeated. “I can’t undo the accident. I can’t undo all the thousand little things we could have done differently. I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I was blinded. Not thinking clearly.”
“It wasn’t just your fault,” I said quietly. “Or my fault, for making you upset.”
“Don’t blame yourself. Ever. I can’t explain why it had to happen that way, but it did, and my sweet darling, that’s life. Life will be a whole lot of stuff that you can’t change or undo or magically transform into something better or happier. We try the best we can, and we accept what we can’t control. It’s the most valuable thing I can teach you. So if I tried to rewrite this…I’d be undoing the most important lesson of your life.”
“It’s a terrible lesson, though. I don’t want to learn it. I just want you.”
“And you have me. Now, and after you walk back through the portal. You’ll always have me. You have me in your mind, your heart. You have me in your blood. I’m in your eyes, the way you see the world. I’m in your lips, the way you speak to everyone around you. I’m in your ears, too, that funny little point we both have at the tip, Elvish ears, your dad always said.” Violet pulled away to look Marigold in the eyes, their faces side by side, like a just slightly distorted mirror image.
“You have everything you remember about me. All the things your dad remembers, too. It’s more than some people will ever have.”
“I want so many more memories, though.”
“Me too. But just remember the most important part: I wasn’t always a perfect mother, but I always loved you, and I always will. I believe with my whole heart this isn’t it for us. There will be more. Someday. When it’s time. There will be more for your dad and me, too. But please hug him every day for me. Tell him you love him. Will you do that?”
“Yes.” Marigold hugged her even tighter, trying to remember everything about the sensation of that moment—how their arms and hips lined up seamlessly, the way her chin fit just right into the crook of her mom’s neck. “I’ll remember that you love us,” Marigold said, “if you promise to always remember that I forgive you. That even if you weren’t perfect, you were the perfect mom for me.”
“I’ll remember that,” Violet said, crying now, too. “I will always, always remember that.”
I don’t notice until I type the last word that I’m full-on sobbing, messy tears dripping down my face and onto the keyboard. Marigold said bye to her mom, and this is the closest thing I’ll get to good-bye, too, and the enormity of that feels too big to comprehend. I leap from the chair, throw open my back window. Cold air whips into the room and I inhale deeply, closing my eyes, the chill feeling so good and necessary. It’s much cooler than the last time I was outside—like I blinked and winter swooped in. But then, it would be December now, wouldn’t it? Which means Dad and I forgot about Thanksgiving. Or I forgot at least, and Dad and Mia didn’t want to disturb me. We usually celebrated with Liam’s family, anyway. Maybe Dad decided it would be too depressing to start a new tradition this year. He was right.
I wrap a scarf around my neck and leave the window open. I sit back at my desk, save the document, close it for now because I’m not sure what else I can do. The camera is still running. It saw everything, the breathless typing and the tears. Thistle a few months ago—a few weeks ago even—would have been incredibly embarrassed about this. She would have flicked it off, deleted the entire thing, started from scratch with much more composure.
But I’m not that Thistle now. And I’m not finished either.
“My dad was depressed for a lot of my childhood. I assumed that was all grief, that it was normal and to be expected. Of course he should be sad. He had lost the love of his life and was left to raise a little girl alone. I thought I could make it better, though. I thought if I let this book be published for the world to see, gave him the success he deserved, the money we needed—that I would make him happy forever. I would make our problems go away. What I did was wrong. It was unethical. And it was also not a solution. I’m not a therapist. There’s no magic fix for these things.”
I take a deep breath. I have so much to learn. Dad, too. The moral of these stories: You can’t always keep fighting through alone. Sometimes the battle is too hard.
“I’m sorry. I hate that I deceived anyone. But I did what I thought I needed to do to make my dad less sad. I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I just want you to think about this: What would you be willing to do for the people you love? The answer might scare you.”
That’s it. It’s all I have in me. I grab my phone and turn the camera off.
I don’t know what’s next, what should happen now. My goal was to finish, and now I have. So I do the only thing that makes sense: I leap into bed and pull the blankets up to block out the rest of the world. And then I sleep.
twenty-one
I spend the next two days making up for last week’s lost hours: I take long baths and afternoon naps and order takeout with Dad, though our meals together with Mia—poor Mia—are mostly silent. I’m too bitter still to say much, but I’m too lonely to ignore him altogether. And for all his mistakes, he did have some valid reasons. He wanted to protect me. Protect Mom.
I sort through my e-mail, too. Angry letters from readers go to a folder that I may or may not ever read. Everything that came in from Susan or Elliot or my publicist before the newsbreak gets filed away, too, because they’re meaningless now. Old news from a different lifetime. There’s nothing left then, no friends or concerned blogger, author, bookstore checking in. Not that I’d expected anything from anyone, but still. It stings.
I wait until we’re between episodes and Mia is on a call in her room when I say it: “I finished the book.”
“Well, I hoped that’s what you were so busy doing up there.” He’s playing it cool, eyes still on the TV screen, but I can see the cautious smile on his face. “I didn’t want to bother you and ruin the process.”
“You knew?”
“I didn’t know. But I suspected.”
We sit quietly for a moment.
“Well?” Dad asks, turning to me.
“Well?”
“Can I read the ending?”
“I thought you’d be mad at me. For writing it on my own. For doing it before we heard anything from Susan or Elliot.”
“I’m not mad at all. To be honest, I think you might be the best person for the job.”
I don’t know how to respond to this, so instead I go upstairs and get my computer.
“I made lots of changes to earlier stuff, too, but just read the last few chapters for now. I want you to be brutally honest,” I say, setting my laptop on Dad’s wheelchair tray, moving the mouse toward his fingers to make navigating easier. “I wrote it mostly for myself anyway, so if it’s bad, it doesn’t even really matter.”
But I don’t really think it’s bad, not at all. Maybe I’m delusional. It’s personal, so it says something to me, of course. That doesn’t mean it’s universally good. But in my bones, I feel it: This is right. The way it should be.
While my dad reads, I pull on my jacket and step out to the garden. It’s cold and dark, though there’s enough light from surrounding homes that I don’t have to flick on the patio lamp. Liam’s house is glowing, every room lit up, and it hits me with a pang for the first time: I miss him. I miss what we had, what we could have been, if he’d handled things differently, if I’d handled things differently, too. But what he did—there’s no going back.
The Undoing of Thistle Tate Page 21