“Well, we could try working together.”
I hesitate for a moment, unsure, but I want to try. “Okay, let’s do it.”
We spend the rest of the afternoon readying my beds for planting, pulling compost from both our piles. We discuss which plants to try out. We argue a little and finally decide on Bibb lettuce, red cabbage, collard greens, chives, and carrots. He says we can do peas and tomatoes on the next round, when the weather is a little warmer.
We put it to Dr. Deb that same day and by our next garden day, we’ve got the seeds and we’re ready to plant.
“How long will it take them to sprout?” I ask him after we’ve planted all six rows.
“Depends.” He looks up at the sky, and I follow his gaze. Blazing blue and not a cloud in sight. “You want to wait for rain or water them in today?”
I’m a little impatient to see them sprout. We’ve spent a whole lot of time on preparation; I want to see some results. Not just for my rehabilitative team, but for us.
“Let’s water them in today.”
He hands me the hose, and I stand over the rich black soil, letting the mist fall over the ground like sweet morning rain.
“Careful not to let the water puddle up,” he says. “It’ll float the seeds.”
I move the spray along, letting the water soak in before I return to the same spot. “How do you know all this about gardening?”
“My mom keeps a garden. Always has.”
I wonder if he remembers when I told him about my grandmother’s garden. I think back to our time in the basement and how different we were then. Me, so wild and desperate to leave, and him, silent and distrustful.
I glance up to see him staring at me with a thoughtful expression, so I turn the hose on him, soaking his shirtfront, and he hops away like a frog, laughing.
Later, as we’re putting our tools back in the shed, he stops and looks at me as he hasn’t in a long time, searching my eyes in the gloom of the shed, without anger or distrust.
“I’ve missed you,” he says.
I’ve missed you. To miss someone, you have to really know them, and I believe, despite our differences, he did know me. The real me. I study the dirt caked under my fingernails because I have no clue how to respond. I wonder if he knows I’m a different person now. Better or worse, I haven’t yet decided.
“I’ve missed you, too,” I say at last, then think up a reason to get out of there quick, before my feelings get any more muddy and confusing.
“Fear Number Four,” Dr. Deb says to me the next week, reading from my list. “Turning into my mother.”
We’re sitting at our bench by the garden, our new therapy spot. We’ve gotten through Fear Number 2: The feeling and Fear Number 3: Losing my mind, which kind of go together. Then we skipped over this one and tackled other fears, which seemed easy in comparison. Because this one is a real possibility. And my mother is a subject that gets the feeling going in my chest. But I have my breathing. I count down the seconds it takes to exhale. Everything has a measure. One breath at a time.
“It’s been a couple weeks since I talked to her,” I tell Dr. Deb. I think about the last time, when my mother told me she met this guy, Mickey or Mikey, I can’t remember. Mickey has a motorcycle and offered to take my mom out West with him on a road trip. She’s always wanted to see the Grand Canyon. They left sometime last week, but she never stopped by to see me.
“What does it mean to love someone, Taylor?” Dr. Deb asks me.
“I don’t know.” I pick at a knot of wood in the tabletop, scraping my fingernail across it. “It means you . . . take care of them.”
“So then, isn’t love also being taken care of?”
“I guess so.”
“Who wants to take care of you?”
My fingernail scratches two Ts in the soft wood—Taylor Truwell. “My dad does, in his own way.”
“What about your mother?”
I shake my head without meaning to. “She tries, but . . . she can barely take care of herself.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“I don’t know.” I imagine where my mother might be right now, in a new city, with a new boyfriend and a new adventure. Does Mickey know about her troubled daughter or that she’s not yet divorced? Does he know she’s an alcoholic, or is she trying to be someone else—someone better—for him? My anger wells up inside me, making my throat thick. That she would be a better person for a stranger, but not for me, her own daughter.
“It makes me mad,” I tell Dr. Deb.
“Why, Taylor?”
“Because she’s . . . my mother. If she won’t take care of me, then who will?”
I stop talking and close my eyes. Dr. Deb waits for me to work through it. I take deep breaths. I am powerful. I am strong. I am in control. Finally I’m ready to continue.
“Sometimes I just think that . . . maybe if I’d been better, easier . . . I don’t know.”
“It’s not your fault, Taylor,” Dr. Deb says. “Your mother’s alcoholism is not your fault. Her choices are her own.”
I study my initials scratched on the wood. I know in my head Dr. Deb’s right, but in my heart I have doubts. In the silence that follows I recall a time when I was a little girl, four or five years old, and my mother and I were at the playground by our old house, and I was swinging up so high that my feet kissed the sky. Higher! I’d scream, and she’d push me, laughing. There were no shadows on her face, no ghosts in her eyes, and even now, the memory of that moment is so clear in my mind. Because the times when she seemed truly happy were precious and so few.
“I’d like to do a role-playing exercise with you,” Dr. Deb says. “But it’s going to take some courage on your part. Do you trust me?”
I nod. I think I trust her. I do.
“Pretend I’m your mother,” she says. “I’m sitting here across from you. You can ask me any question. You can tell me anything and I will listen.”
“Okay.” I try to clear my head and breathe deep. I stare into Dr. Deb’s warm gaze and imagine it’s my mother sitting across from me. She’s sober and listening. What do I say?
“Why do you drink?” I say.
“I drink to escape my reality.”
“What’s wrong with your . . . reality?”
“I don’t know. I only know that I’m unhappy.”
“Is it . . . because of me?” I ask, fearing the answer.
“No, not because of you. You’re the best thing to ever happen to me.”
I’m quiet for a long moment. I don’t believe her.
“If I’m the best thing to ever happen to you, then why can’t you just . . . fix yourself?”
“I don’t know how to fix myself.”
It’s true. My mother doesn’t know how to fix herself. She’s tried rehab and going to AA meetings, but nothing’s worked for her. Maybe she doesn’t know what’s wrong or she doesn’t want to change. Maybe she’s just given up.
“I’m mad at you,” I say.
“Why are you mad at me, Taylor?”
“You’re a bad mother,” I say. Tears gum up my eyes. “You broke your promise to me. You left me again and again. I needed a mother. I need you now and you’re not here. You say you love me, but you don’t.”
“I love you, Taylor. But I’m not a responsible parent.”
I stand up and pace back and forth next to the picnic table. I’m so angry at her, for lying to me and leaving me. For not loving her life—and me—enough to make it work.
“I don’t want to hate you,” I say.
“You don’t have to hate me.”
“I want you to get better.”
“You can’t change me.”
I sit down and bury my head in my arms. Love isn’t enough. Hate means even less. Anger is destruction. I can’t change my mother, and I can’t fix her. I feel more powerless than ever before.
Dr. Deb sits beside me. She rubs my shoulders and smooths back my hair. If only my mother would stop drinking, we coul
d be together, happy.
“You’re strong, Taylor. Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I say. I don’t feel strong at all.
“What are you?”
I take a moment to steady my voice. Whether or not I believe it, I say the words, “I’m strong, I’m powerful, and I’m in control.”
Dr. Deb squeezes me tight. “Yes, you are.”
CHAPTER 20
Every other afternoon I go down to the garden to water in the seeds. The white noise of the spray and the Zen of watching the mist fall on the dirt has a tranquilizing effect on me. I hum the melodies of my grandmother’s songs and remember a few more words each time. A.J.’s always nearby, turning over compost or edging off the grass so it doesn’t encroach on our beds. I offer to give him a turn with the hose, but he says I’m the hydration specialist and that he prefers my singing to his own.
After a week goes by and still nothing’s sprouted, I begin to have doubts.
“Maybe I’m watering them too much,” I say to him. He stands beside me, pitchfork in hand, chewing on a stalk of grass and wearing a straw hat I make fun of but secretly find pretty adorable.
“You’re doing fine.”
“What if they’re duds?”
“All of them? Duds?”
“Maybe they were microwaved.” I read somewhere that microwaving seeds kills them.
He chuckles. “Who would do that?”
“Maybe it was an accident. Someone thought they were tiny bags of popcorn and, oops.”
He nudges my shoulder and smiles disarmingly, which gets the soda bubbles going in my stomach. “Maybe they’re not ready yet. Have a little faith.”
The next day we see the first shoots poking through the soil, delicate green limbs with heavy leaf heads, lifting their faces to the sun. A small miracle. A.J. kneels beside me in the dirt. I think this must be the right time.
“There’s some things I’ve been meaning to say to you,” I tell him, pinching a clump of dirt between my fingers and watching it burst in my hand.
“What’s that?”
“That I’m . . .” I pause and take a deep breath. “I’m sorry. For shutting you out all those months. I’m sorry for a lot of things.”
“Me too. I was being selfish, trying to keep you here.”
“You were just trying to protect me.”
“I didn’t do a very good job of it.”
I nod slowly. We were both wrong, because we both lied and deceived each other and ratted each other out. I remember that night of the bonfire when I screamed at him like I was possessed and then the residual anger I couldn’t seem to shake. Looking back now, it seems like such a waste of time and energy.
“Listen,” he says after a minute, “there’s something I want you to know too.” But instead of finishing, he picks up a handful of dirt and rakes through it with his fingers like he’s searching for worms.
“What is it?” I’m starting to get worried.
He shakes his head. “I don’t want to scare you.”
What could he possibly say that would scare me? “You won’t.”
He smiles again, bashfully this time, like he’s embarrassed.
“It’s just that . . . I like . . . being with you,” he says.
“Being with me? Here, in the garden?”
“Here, there, wherever. I just . . . like you.” He searches my eyes. “But you know that, right?”
I stare at my hands, at the dirt caked into the crevices of my palms, tiny rivers of earth. I remember our one almost kiss in the basement and the feeling I get whenever I see him here in the garden. But I can’t admit those feelings to him. It’s too soon. I’m still figuring out how to be his friend.
“Is that okay?” he asks.
I am powerful. I am strong. I am in control.
I am . . . scared?
“I don’t know,” I say at last. It’s my most honest answer.
“That’s okay.” He squeezes my shoulder and stands up, then hands me the hose to water the new seedlings. “Back to work.”
“I think I might like A.J.,” I say to Margo on the phone that week.
“Finally.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, it’s about time. Have you kissed him yet?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because relationships between the sexes are to remain platonic?” It’s the easiest answer.
She giggles. “Because you follow the rules, right?”
Maybe I should be offended by this, but I’m not. “I don’t know. I guess I’m just . . . apprehensive.” Apprehensive is a nicer word for scared.
“Of what?”
“What if he dumps me?”
“He won’t.”
“But what if he does?” I’m powerful, I’m strong, and I’m in control, but even I have my limits.
“Oh, Taylor, he’s so into you. You should have seen him when you first came off the first floor and that crazed safety bot was guarding you. That’s the first time I ever heard him talk, you know. He was talking about you.”
I broke through his silence, without ever meaning to.
“I don’t know, Margo, it seems like we’re just now getting along again. I don’t want to rush things or ruin what we’ve got.”
“You won’t, Taylor. It’ll be just like now, only better. Like when you smile. It’s still you, only prettier.”
“What if he realizes I’m not that great after all?”
But she’s no longer listening to me. Instead she’s singing, “A.J. and Taylor, sitting in the tree. K-I-S-S—”
“Margo!” I shout into the phone, loud enough to hopefully rupture her eardrum.
“You can’t stop it from coming, Taylor, so when it does, you’d better be ready.”
“When what comes? What are you talking about?”
She sighs blissfully. “L-O-V-E. Love.”
I try to dismiss Margo’s prediction, but over the next few weeks I can’t help but examine A.J. a little more closely. Not at school, where everyone is watching and the safeties are always at our backs, but in the afternoons when it’s just the two of us, in our little green oasis with the dirt below and the sky above, and there seem to be so many possibilities for normal. . . .
We trim lettuce leaves and drop them in a basket for the kitchen to use in a salad. I can’t stop staring at his bare shoulders or the way his muscles move under his skin as he reaches for a leaf, the rusty blond hairs on his arms that glint with sweat in the sunlight. I can’t help imagining how it would feel to draw my hands along the muscles in his back and touch his skin. To have him touch me . . .
The spring air is seriously messing with my head.
We rinse the lettuce and snack on the stragglers. They’re juicy and sweet, and when I stop chewing, I find him staring at me with a curious expression.
“What is it?” I say, thinking I must have lettuce stuck in my teeth.
“You’re so . . . damn . . . pretty.”
I swallow hard and fight the heat that’s rising in my throat. Why does he have to say things like that, without any warning and completely out of nowhere? It only complicates an already complicated situation.
“And when you do that,” he says.
“When I do what?”
“Get embarrassed.”
I duck my head and try to act normal. “Who says I’m embarrassed?”
He shakes his head. “Your face is saying it right now.” He keeps staring at me, which makes me blush even more, and just when I think it can’t possibly get any worse he says, “I was just wondering what it might be like to kiss you.”
I focus on the ground. I absolutely cannot look at him because I have no idea what my face is saying. I don’t know how I feel or what I want.
“I’ve thought about it way too much,” he says. “Sometimes I wonder if we were on the outside and I was just some guy you knew . . . Would you let me kiss you?”
I exhale slowly and decide to be comp
letely honest with him. Even if it’s embarrassing—my inexperience—it’s the truth.
“I’ve known a lot of guys on the outside,” I say. “And I never let them kiss me.”
“Really?” He seems surprised.
“Really.”
He takes a step toward me, closing the gap between us. My heart quickens and my olfactory is on overdrive. I love the way he smells, even when he’s sweaty and dirty, maybe even more then. I watch as a bead of sweat traces a line down his throat, then follow that trail up to his jaw and the scar on his lip. The story of that scar is one I still don’t know, but I want to. I like him—a lot. But I’m so afraid to ruin this great thing we have going. What if things get weird between us? What if I do something to drive him away? What if, what if, what if?
“What’s wrong?” he says. His eyebrows dip with concern. I can barely make any sense in my head, much less out loud, when he’s staring at me like that. I back away from him slowly.
“I just . . . I don’t want to lose your friendship.”
“You won’t,” he says, and I know at this moment, he means it. But feelings are conditional. They change with the wind.
“What you’re feeling, A.J., that lasts for as long as it’s easy. When things get hard, people leave. People you love leave you.”
He shakes his head slowly. “I’m not people, Taylor, and this isn’t easy. Pretending I don’t like you. Especially when I know you must feel—”
“I’m not a fun girl, A.J. I’m difficult and stubborn and sometimes I’m just . . . mean.”
“Yeah, I know.”
I scowl at him. “You’re not perfect either.”
“I never said I was.”
I squat down and bite at my thumbnail, which is gritty and tastes like dirt, but I don’t care. Already things are changing. Feelings breed more feelings, uncertainty and insecurity, and soon enough our nice, steady stream becomes turbulent and unpredictable. I know he’s standing there waiting for an answer, but I don’t want to have to choose. All or nothing is too great a risk.
“Look,” he says finally, after my silence can only mean one thing. “I’m not going to pressure you. You want to be friends. Fine, we’re friends. I won’t bother you about it anymore.”
Counting Backwards Page 17