“True,” Mimi said. “But she believed, rightly or wrongly, that showing up for you was the opposite of love. While she was still using and falling into addiction over and over, she believed that she would cause more harm than good if she entered your life. Her act of love was inaction. Maybe it was wrong, but it was hers, and she suffered with it every single day.”
“How could she just change her name and pretend her old life never happened? That we never happened?”
“She had to change her name. It was easy back then—find a guy on the corner, get a fake birth certificate and that was that. She chose ‘Rosie’ because she believed the rose represented new beginnings. Starting over. And she kept trying and trying.” Loretta took in a long breath. “And that is the hell of the disease of addiction. It is the hell of trying and failing.”
For all the times and years I’d wept over the loss of my mother, I didn’t cry as Loretta told me that story. Inside, my body lurched as if it needed and wanted to sob, but nothing happened. I was parched and exhausted. Losing George. Finding George. Mom in a graveyard. None of it integrated into anything that made sense.
Mimi spoke then, quietly. “I helped her set up in a little home at the edge of town. Loretta moved into her house only a few months ago.”
“My son went to my mother’s house?” The realization fell over me like fog, shrouding the landscape. A shiver ran through me and a soft buzz rang in my ears like a bee or mosquito.
“Yes.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “This doesn’t make sense and yet it makes perfect sense. My son wandered to my mother’s house.”
“After she returned here,” Mimi continued, “she slowly started a new life. She sewed for the town—dresses and little dance recital outfits, alterations. She helped me in the bookstore after hours, shelving and such when no one was around. I took her to AA meetings a few times a week, and she was beginning to find her way, her mind clearing.”
“You know, for years I have been writing letters to her with nowhere to send them.”
“Letters?” Loretta asked.
“Yes, letters. I brought them here to finally toss into the sea in some bizarre ritual.”
“Where are they now?”
“In a box back at the river house. I will keep them now. They’re all I have . . .”
“Oh, Lainey.” Loretta wiped again at her eyes, at the tears that betrayed her calm voice. “Your mom’s body was frail and she was fragile. Everyone here believed she was a hermit or recluse, but she was protecting herself and everyone else.”
“I cannot imagine the hell that must have been.” Like a flash of light out of the corner of my eye, I saw a glimpse of her secret soul, of the addiction that ruled her life. In the graveyard, headstones etched with names and dates and epigraphs, I caught a whisper of her story, one so different from the one I’d made for her or for us.
“Yes,” Loretta said. “I know how hard this is for you. After a betrayal, I know forgiveness doesn’t come easy, if at all. But I’m here whenever you want to ask questions. I will tell you what I can.”
I stood, started to pace around the bench. “I missed her by months? She left it all up to me. To me? If I came back, she’d tell me? That’s not fair.”
“It’s not fair at all,” Mimi said. “But she did the best she could. We all do the very best we can. If she’d known she was dying and you’d be here a few months later, don’t you think she might have decided differently? We do what we can with what we know at the time, and with what we believe.”
A gray heron lighted on the marsh at the edge of the river, its wings settling and gathering around its body, smooth and slow. His long, arched neck curved into a C, and his eyes, two small beads of darkness, settled on the water, still and utterly focused. His twiglike legs didn’t appear strong enough to hold him so very still. I wanted to be like that heron. “Can you leave me be for a while? Leave me alone with her?” I asked.
“Yes,” both women answered simultaneously.
As they walked away on the soft earth, not leaving even a mark, as if they’d never been there, I returned to the gravesite and dropped to my knees. There my mother rested. If I’d returned just months earlier, I would have met her. One year. One night. One hour. Did it make any difference? She was gone, and along with her so many answers.
This was what I’d dreaded, what I’d hoped wasn’t true: her death. But did knowing the truth ease that despair at all? Yes.
There came a loosening of the knot inside me, a shift of the horrid unknowing that had lived with me for so very long, leaving space for something new. But what swept into the momentary emptiness was not more wondering or longing, but grief. It was anguish I’d held at bay for far, far too long. When there had been hope of seeing her again, I hadn’t needed to grieve her loss. But now there was no doubt: she was gone.
A many-armed magnolia tree spread its branches over the gravesite of Rosie O’Hare. I lay flat on the leaf-strewn ground alongside the dirt over her grave. I picked up a handful of the soft, fuzzed husks of magnolia flowers and held them tight in my fist. I’d been looking, all my life I’d been looking, and now I’d found her. “Mom,” I said. “I came back. Too late, but I did come back.”
A flurry of wings and wind blew across my face as the heron, which had sat so still and waiting moments before, flew across the sky. Its thin legs dangled, its wings splayed wide and majestic directly above me, feathers gray and white and black separating sky from earth. Swooping lower and lower still, it finally rested only three feet away, standing as still as the tree, its dark eyes staring at me with intensity.
She did the best she could.
chapter 35
PIPER BLANKENSHIP
It had been a day and a half since I’d lost George. Mom had left for Charleston and I reclined in bed, my eyes now fully open, and I looked at my phone to see the time: 2:10 p.m. The first thought on waking had been, I lost George. And then I remembered with profound relief that I’d also found him. I wondered how long it would be before I would awake with the finding-him memory and not the losing-him memory.
Outside, the little ones’ voices were rising and falling in crescendo with their mom’s voice. If losing George was a nightmare for me, what must it have been for her? I needed to find a way to apologize, to make amends for something that was horrid for me but everything to her.
But then there’d been the beauty of finding him, and then my night with Fletch. Our night together had erased the “first time” with Ryan. The way he’d held me obliterated all that had come before, so that it almost didn’t count, as if Fletch was my first, as if I’d waited for him.
I sat and Owen’s voice joined the chorus outside. Already I recognized his voice. Cowardice rose, the part of me that couldn’t imagine what I’d done, and I wanted to lie back down, to find the cold spot in the pillow and again disappear into the heavy sleep. Instead, I stood and went to the bathroom, looked myself in the face, right into my own ineptness, right into the sorrow I’d brought to all of us.
“You can do this,” I said to me. “Go face your own sins.”
I slipped into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, scrubbed my face clean and rubbed lotion on the sunburn. My nose was already an exposed pink mess. My cheeks flaking now where the sun had sat harsh and brutal for hours as I screamed George’s name. My hair was tangled. I tore a brush through it and set it on top of my head in a knot before leaving the room.
Remnants of lunch were scattered across the screened porch: sandwich crusts and Goldfish crunched underfoot. The dented, empty juice boxes had straws sticking out of them like antennae. Damp towels and coloring books were in a pile on the wicker coffee table. I lifted the towels because Daisy got upset when her pictures were ruined, and I walked outside, my hands clasped in front of me. I watched them—Lainey, Tim, Owen and the kids—wrestling a baby shark from the river on the fishing pole. They
laughed and Lainey stepped back to try to capture it on video with her iPhone.
“It will eat us,” Daisy screamed.
“Baby sharks don’t bite. You’re dumb.” George sounded no worse for the wear at all.
“Don’t call your sister names,” Lainey said in a voice tired but firm.
I should have let them know I was there, but instead I just stood and watched them, all of them, light falling on an ordinary scene of parenthood and siblings on a summer day by the river. Unless you knew. And maybe that was the case with anything—it seemed like something other than what it was: unless you knew the story inside the story. Mimi had once said that, hadn’t she?
Every photo or Facebook post or Instagram with Ryan and Hannah told a truth—unless you knew the story inside the story.
George saw me first and ran to me, his arms spread wide and waving like I couldn’t see him and he had to flag me down.
“Piper!” he hollered. He’d dropped the fishing pole.
“Hey, George.” I squatted to let his arms wrap around my neck. “I’m so sorry.” A small sob, when I thought I didn’t have any more, escaped into his tiny shoulder.
“Why?” he asked so simply.
“Because I lost you,” I said.
“No, you found me.” He poked his little finger into my cheek.
I picked him up, balanced him on my hip and faced the adults.
“Piper.” Lainey said my name first and came to me so quickly and without any hesitation or reluctance. “I’ve lost him, too,” she said as she reached me and hugged me, with George in between us like forgiveness was contained in his tiny body. “Please don’t carry this regret around with you.” George jumped to the ground because Daisy was thoroughly enjoying the fishing pole he’d let go of.
“It was the most awful day of my life,” I said to Lainey. “And I’ve had some awful ones. I would have died a million times over if anything terrible had happened to him.”
Lainey smiled sadly. “Me, too. But it didn’t happen. And he runs off all the time, and this is just the first time he had a goal of where he wanted to go and he did.”
“What do you mean?”
“He wanted to go to Loretta’s house,” she said, but she peered at Owen and Tim, who were mediating between a stubborn George and a pouting Daisy. “I need to tell you something.”
“What?” Fear fluttered in my chest.
“Because Loretta was friends with my mom, she was able to tell me a lot about what happened to her.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Because of you, and how you took George there, I was able to find out that Mom had come back here.”
“What? Is she . . . here?”
“Yes, but she’s passed away, Piper. She’s gone. But now I know. It was Loretta who told me.”
“I’m so sorry. I know you wanted to find her another way. I know . . .”
“No more regrets, Piper.” She took my hands. “George and Daisy love you so much. And so do I. So much. You are such a special and beautiful girl, Piper. A true gem in the world. Don’t let anyone or anything convince you otherwise.”
“Thank you,” I said but couldn’t meet her gaze. “You sound like my mom.”
Lainey smiled. “Your mom is much stronger than I am. And so are you.” She let go of my hands and kissed my cheek before calling for her kids. I approached the dock and shyly said hello to Tim.
“I’m sorry for what you went through,” he said to me as if I hadn’t done anything at all.
“I love George and I didn’t mean to . . .”
Tim held up his hand. “Stop. We are all here and well. I’ve lost him, too. So has Lainey.”
“But not like that.”
Tim gave me a weary smile and returned his attention to his kids. Owen stood a few steps back and untangled the shrimp net.
“I need to run into town and see Mimi,” I said. “I was supposed to have the book club over this afternoon to pick a new book and I don’t want to let anyone else down.”
Owen glanced up then, and I’m not sure which one of us felt more uncomfortable. We exchanged one of those looks that can’t have words. I didn’t know enough to know why we were at odds. I didn’t know enough to even say what was wrong. What I did know: he loved Mom. That much was as obvious as my peeling nose. But what did that mean for me? For us? For whatever life held in front of us, or had held behind us, I had no idea.
I nodded at him and turned to leave.
“Piper,” he called after me.
“Yes?” I turned.
“You did a good thing yesterday, not giving up, finding him like that.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I couldn’t look away from him. We stood there, twenty paces apart, staring and unable to speak. It was Lainey who broke the hard ground.
“Go on, Piper,” she said. “We’ll be here when you get back. We aren’t going anywhere.”
I nodded, but a choked feeling rose inside my chest, that feeling right before the panic hits: the knowing that I will never do anything right, that I would never be anything right. I closed my eyes to it. I wanted to be done with the crying and the needing and the wanting and the disasters. But something told me that I would never be done with those things. They were right there mixed up with the good and the laughter and the beauty and the magic.
The walk into town was quiet, and I carried a large Thermos of water, felt my skin tender under the sun. I’d left my cell phone at home because I didn’t want to check it every five seconds. I didn’t want to know what was going on anywhere but where I was at that minute. I whispered out loud the details of the world: a yellow dandelion growing between the cracks of the sidewalk; a hummingbird swirling around an empty feeder; sunlight falling in leaf-shaped patterns all around me; a picket fence that needed painting but looked better without it; a bicycle with training wheels leaning against a porch; a vegetable garden burdened under its own weight as it bowed to the earth.
By the time I reached the bookshop, the panic had ebbed and I strode inside to find Mimi behind the counter.
“My dear. How are you feeling?”
“Well, I’ve slept for almost two days, so I’m feeling a little better; but I needed to go to the hospital to get IV fluids.”
We talked in low whispers although the store was empty, recounting the day and the night and the horrors.
“And now Mom is gone, too. I don’t know what’s going to happen to her.” I swallowed the fear. “The very worst thing that could ever happen to her might have happened. All she has ever wanted was to save people. That’s what she does.”
“Piper.” Mimi took both my hands like she did sometimes. “Inside the very worst things you can find the power for change. Nothing needs to be the end of it all; anything and everything can have new meaning.” She grimaced with a smile. “I know it sounds like I’m just trying to make it all better with a little Band-Aid of words, but I’ve lived it. I’m telling you the truth. It is awful. It is painful, and your mom will suffer because it hurts. That’s true also.”
I shook my head. “I can’t stand to see her hurt. I mean, I’m supposed to be the one. I can’t stand it for her.”
“That is what we call love,” Mimi said and hugged me.
“How is your love?” I asked her.
“Thanks to your mom, he’s just fine. They gave him that medicine she told the hospital to have ready and it’s like it never happened really. It could have been completely different. It could have been . . . the end.”
“I know that feeling,” I said.
“But it wasn’t, Piper. George is at home right now playing with his mom and dad and uncle.”
“I just need something really good to happen. To all of us,” I said.
“Then let’s not sit around waiting for something good. Let’s do good.”
“Like what?”
/> “You tell me,” she said. “Give me some ideas.”
We batted things around from the preposterous to the boring until we landed right where we were probably meant to land all along: an art show for Lainey. And right there, the world took on a new shape and we had something to move toward.
“We better tell her,” I said. “What if she decides to go home?”
“I’ll let you do the honors,” Mimi said.
The book club meeting didn’t last long, but talking about books shifted something inside of me. The group sat in a circle and although we’d only met once it was as if we’d known each other for longer. Already there were inside jokes and bantering about the scenes in the book, as if sharing one book had allowed us to understand a bit about each other and form friendships.
It was Fletch’s ex who suggested the next book and everyone agreed. It was Sam, a high school girl with long dark hair, who broached the subject of George at the end of the meeting.
“It must have been so scary for you,” she said. “I helped look for him. It was . . .”
“It was scary,” I said. “But the worst thing ended up with some good in it.” I could feel Mimi’s words coming out of my mouth and it made me laugh. “It’s not funny,” I said. “Not funny at all. I just . . .”
“I know. I know,” Rachel, another local high school girl, said. “It’s so bad when a laugh comes out at the wrong time. I totally lost it at my grandma’s funeral. I couldn’t stop. My mom made me leave and I thought my dad was gonna kill me.”
“Well, he’s safe now,” Sam said. “Right?”
I nodded, a prickle of embarrassment crawling on the back of my neck. “He’s great.” I tried to smile.
“I get scared about that every time I babysit,” Rachel said. “Every single time. Now I’m probably gonna tie the kids to me with bungee cords.”
The group laughed in unison and I thought again of Mimi’s words about being who you are meant to be and finding your real friends. I glanced around the circle and I didn’t know if they were real friends or ever would be, but it was some kind of start.
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