Naomi pushes past me and leads the way into the living room, so I guess this isn’t a quick visit.
The box is taped up, and I set it down on the ottoman in the living room. “Can I open it?”
“I don’t care what you do with it,” she says.
I go to the kitchen and come back with a knife. When I rip the box open, I gasp. It’s full of Mel’s whole musical collection.
“I can’t take this,” I say.
“Why not?”
“It’s Mel’s,” I say.
“Does it look like Mel is enjoying its full benefits at the moment?” she asks. “She told me to give it to you. Don’t make me have to drive around trying to find some place to donate it.”
“I . . . okay,” I say. “Thank you.”
Naomi sits on our brand-new gray sofa. She pets it, as if she can tell it’s new. “This is nice.”
“My mom will be happy to hear you said that.”
“How’s she doing?” Naomi asks, surprising me. “Your mom.”
I shrug, remembering the talk we had last night, the things my parents told me that I never knew. “I guess she still has good days and bad days, but mostly she’s doing okay.”
She nods. “Mel was worried about you,” she says.
“Because of my mom?” I ask, wondering if there is a connection to our previous topic.
“Honestly I don’t know why. Maybe because, if she allowed herself to admit it, she’d have seen that you and Luke were acting like a couple of novices in drama school.”
“I . . .” I open and shut my mouth. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Something was up with you two,” Naomi says. “I knew it from the moment I laid eyes on you after all those months.”
“We were newly back together,” I lie.
Naomi waves her hand, like she’s not interested in the details. “Mel didn’t want to ask questions, because she didn’t want to know. She wanted to believe that you two were happy and that you would take care of each other, but I think in her heart of hearts she knew something was off.”
“Is he . . . is Luke okay?” I ask now. “Have you talked to him?”
She nods. “As okay as can be expected. It’s been a rough year.”
I don’t say anything.
“I think he’s heading back to school this semester,” she continues. “It’s soon, but you know that’s his bread and butter. When you lose everything that feels like home, you go to the next best thing.”
I nod, staring down at the carpet. I feel like she’s summed up my life in a nutshell.
“Anyway,” Naomi says, looking me up and down. “What do you do with yourself these days?”
“I’m working,” I say. “Not right now, obviously,” I add, feeling self-conscious about my ragged pajamas.
“Mmhmm,” she says. “Still not done punishing yourself?”
I appraise her with wide eyes. “What?”
“Punishing yourself,” she repeats, like I’m hard of hearing. “The seventeen jobs, the no friends, not going to school, giving up on Luke, all of it.”
I blink at her. “I have friends.” I sound ridiculous, like I’m two years old, but what the hell is she even talking about? She knows nothing about my life. She’s not Mel. We’ve barely ever talked.
“Then why are you acting this way?”
“I’m not acting any way,” I say, feeling my blood get warm. “Naomi, I think maybe you should go.”
She completely ignores me. “I don’t need to know all the details to know that you’re punishing yourself.”
I can’t believe how completely obnoxious she’s being. I open my mouth to tell her just that, but what comes out is, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know everything I’ve done.”
“What did you do, kill someone?” she asks mockingly, and my skin stings with anger, my throat closing up.
I don’t say anything.
“Whatever you’ve done . . . if it’s a crime, turn yourself in to the police. If it’s not a crime, say sorry and move on.”
I can’t believe she said that. She doesn’t even know . . . she has no idea.
“I can’t just move on,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t undo it. He’s gone and he’s not coming back.”
Naomi’s eyes soften, and I think she realizes for the first time that I’m talking about Rowan. “You didn’t kill him.”
“I didn’t stop him.”
“You didn’t heal Mel either,” Naomi says. “Because you couldn’t. No one could.”
“I could have stopped Rowan,” I say, and my eyes are spilling over.
“You didn’t put him in that car. You didn’t get him drunk. That boy . . . that boy did a damn stupid thing.” Her voice is breaking now. “He did plenty of stupid things. Remember when he showed up drunk at the Continental?”
“He was struggling because of Mel’s diagnosis,” I say, swiping a hand over my eyes.
“We all were,” Naomi says. “There’s no point in badmouthing him now, even though I have Things to say. Do you know Mel blamed herself, too? For not being stricter, for not paying more attention, for letting him have that party at the lake.”
“It wasn’t her fault.”
“Or maybe it was, a little bit,” Naomi says, and I can’t believe she’s saying that. “Maybe it was your fault a little bit, too. But you’ve paid for it, and you’ll pay for it for the rest of your life, because he’s gone.”
I’m bawling my eyes out now, crying so hard it’s difficult to breathe. “I just want to go back to that night.”
“You can’t. All you can do is go forward.”
“I’m trying,” I say. “I’m trying to be better.”
“The only way to be better is to be better,” Naomi says, and I wonder when she dispensed with being Mel’s irritable best friend and turned into a life coach. “Making life miserable for yourself isn’t changing anything. It’s not even being a martyr. It’s being stupid.”
I keep struggling for breath.
Naomi continues, “I mean, your refusing to go to school . . . If you don’t want to go to college, don’t go. But if you do, why are you here?”
“I don’t know what I want to do.”
“Bullshit,” she says. “You’re afraid to make another mistake. But guess what? You’re going to make plenty more. Those plaid pants are a mistake.”
She points at my old pajamas, and I almost—almost smile.
“I think something’s wrong with me,” I blurt out instead, and Naomi raises an eyebrow. “There’s something about me. I can’t make the people I love stay.”
“Neither can I,” she says.
“No, it’s . . . me,” I wheeze out. I’m crying so heavily that every time I open my mouth, I taste salt water. “It’s my Big Bad. I chase people away or destroy them or something.”
She gives a dismissive wave of her hands. “Oh, not that nonsense.”
“Mel said everyone has one.”
“Mel also said John Travolta would marry her someday. I’m telling you—it’s in her high school yearbook.”
At first I think she doesn’t get it, so I start to explain. How for so long I have believed this horrible thing about my life—that just by being born, I stole the light from my mother’s eyes. I tell her about my father, how he chased after Mom and constantly left me. How I didn’t just lose the entire Cohen family—I obliterated them.
I did that.
Hurt Luke. Got Ro killed. Abandoned Mel. Hurt Luke again.
“That’s not a Big Bad,” Naomi says. “That’s called life. Shit happens.”
She narrows her eyes and leans forward so she’s looking me right in the eye. “Listen to me,” she says slowly. “I can’t make people I love stay either.”
It’s the second time she’s said it, but the first time it makes sense to me.
That maybe it’s not me, or whatever is inside me, that drives away and destroys and e
nds things. Maybe things happen just because, and maybe it has nothing to do with me.
Except that doesn’t bring anybody back. It doesn’t change any of what has happened.
“I don’t know what to do anymore. They’re all gone. All three of them are gone.”
“Maybe,” she says, “but maybe not.”
At first I think she means that Luke is still alive, but then she says, “Personally, I see Mel all around me every day. I hear her voice. I hear her favorite songs. And Ro—I can’t get through a tennis match without thinking of him.”
“Me, too,” I admit.
“I can’t get through a tennis match at all,” Naomi amends now. “I like gymnastics. Every other sport is unbearable.”
I choke out a laugh. Then I sober up again. “Mel would never forgive me if she knew the truth about what I did.”
“Oh—because there was other stuff she never forgave you for when she was alive?”
“I never did anything this bad.”
Naomi rolls her eyes. “She loved you like her own child, and you know that.”
“But I wasn’t her child.”
“And she still loved you,” she argues. “Maybe you’re right and Mel wouldn’t have forgiven you, but so what? Who was she, God? She wasn’t a saint. You don’t need her blessing on every single area of your life. She was just a woman.”
“She was Mel,” I say.
Naomi sighs, like I’m not getting her point. “Yes, that was her name,” she says. “And she was just a woman, but she loved you.”
Naomi stands then, as if her work is done, as if there’s nothing more she can say that will penetrate my thick head, and maybe she’s right.
I still want Mel’s forgiveness.
I still want her approval and her love and the way she made me feel at home. I don’t know if anybody else will ever make me feel like that again.
Still, I cross the living room floor and hug Naomi tight, the way Mel and I used to hug. She stiffens and awkwardly pats my back.
“Thank you,” I say.
After Naomi leaves, I come back to the living room, ball up on the couch, and cry. I cry for the people I love and for the people I lost. I cry for the mother who wouldn’t wake up and for the one who never will again. I cry because of that night, and because of all the horrible things I still think and believe about myself as a result of it.
I don’t know if I will ever be okay with me, the way Willow learned to be okay with herself. The way Mel was okay with herself.
But I decide right here and now that I have to try.
I have to try, because hating myself didn’t save Ro’s life or Mel’s. It didn’t give me Luke, and it didn’t change the past.
I choose a random CD from the box Naomi brought over and stick it into the old stereo system in our living room.
Ella’s beautiful voice fills the room. For a moment, I am seven and nine and thirteen, dancing in the Cohen living room with Mel. We are twirling and shimmying and laughing, okay and hopeful and alive. Then I am eighteen, alone in my living room. Not yet okay and not exactly hopeful, but completely alive.
It’s not everything, but it’s a start.
27
MARCH
Snow crunches beneath my boots as I walk across campus. It’s a cloudy day, a film of gray covering the sky. I’ve just gotten out of my anatomy class when I feel my phone vibrate with a text. It’s from Willow, telling me that she is going home for spring break.
What about you? she asks. Or are you doing a crazy Mexico trip with all your new friends?
I smile as I text back. No Mexico trip. I’m probably coming home.
She writes back almost immediately. Yay!!!!
While I have my phone out, I decide to take a selfie and send it to Ernie. I know it will piss him off. He hates getting pictures on his watch. But I figure if he gets to troll people constantly, I should get to troll him occasionally.
I’ve also texted or called him every couple of weeks since I’ve been at State. When I told him in December that I was leaving in January to go to school, he’d done his whole “yep, told you you’d get sick of me” bit, but I could tell he was hurt. I promised to keep in touch and make him get good use out of that watch.
“I already get good use out of it!” he said. “I check the time!”
“Now we can also check in on each other.”
He harrumphed and changed the subject.
I find a tree that is stripped nude by winter but has wild, tangled branches that should make a nice background. Then I drop my backpack on the ground, hold my phone up, and smile for the camera.
“Thought you were camera shy.” I nearly drop my phone at the sound. “Or is it shy shy?”
I turn and find Luke standing behind me, looking awkward and beautiful and here.
“Sorry if this is weird,” he says when I haven’t spoken. “I was on my way to class, and I thought I saw someone who looked like you, so I turned around and . . .” He runs his hand over his jaw. “Yeah—out loud, it’s all coming out much creepier than it seemed in my head.”
“No. It’s not weird,” I lie.
“I didn’t know you were . . . here. I thought you said in September.”
“I changed my mind. I started in January.” I can see the wheels turning in his mind. If we’ve been on the same campus for three months, how have we managed to avoid each other all this time? The truth is, I’ve seen him, in the distance, walking with friends. One time he was nursing a cup of coffee over his laptop in the library. When you know to look for someone, it’s much easier to spot them than when you don’t know they’re even in the same town.
“Oh,” Luke says, and I can’t tell whether he’s hurt or surprised or relieved that I didn’t text or call him and say I was here.
“Well,” he says. “It’s good to see you. You look great.”
“You too,” I say, a lump forming in my throat again at our stilted conversation. It’s the conversation of two strangers who don’t know anything about each other. Or maybe it’s the conversation of two people who know too much about each other and have run out of things to say.
“I better get to class,” Luke says, and starts to go. I raise one hand in a wave and turn my attention back to my phone screen, trying not to spiral over this one meaningless meeting.
I’ve just sent the selfie to Ernie when I hear Luke’s voice again. “Actually,” he says, “I’m not really . . . it feels weird to see you and then just go to class.”
My face warms, even though there is absolutely nothing embarrassing about what he just said. “Yeah, for me too,” I admit.
He rubs the back of his neck. “There’s this great fro-yo place not far off campus,” he says. “I mean, if you want. No pressure.”
I swallow. “Sure.”
We make small talk as we walk to Luke’s car in the parking lot of his residence complex. He tells me he’s changed his major to engineering, and I tell him I’m trying out nursing, but I don’t know if it will stick.
“You’d be a great nurse. You’re good at taking care of people,” he says.
I inwardly flinch at the irony. I didn’t take care of Luke, not while we were dating, not when Ro died, and not when Mel did. If anything, I’ve always been great at being taken care of. Especially by the Cohens.
When we reach Luke’s car, he puts our backpacks in his trunk. I climb into the passenger seat and he jumps in on the driver’s side.
A few minutes later we’re at the fro-yo store. I order first and quickly pay for my own yogurt so we don’t have a whole “who’s paying” thing, and Luke doesn’t say anything.
We settle at a table near the window. It’s a little cold for frozen dessert, but this whole encounter with Luke plus the indoor heating at Yo Yo Fro-Yo is making me sweat. I peel off my jacket, hang it on the back of my chair, and then tug down the long sleeve of my shirt as quickly as possible.
Except I’m not quick enough.
Luke leans forward across the
table. “You got a tattoo?”
“Yeah. It’s nothing—just some words.”
“Can I see?” he asks, reaching out his hand and carefully pushing the sleeve back up my arm. I feel all kinds of lightheaded at his touch and exposed by the quiet way he studies the words that cover the dip between my arm and elbow.
Happy, grateful, well-dressed, brave, alive, the words say.
I see Luke swallow as he keeps staring at them.
“I just always loved it ever since she said it that night,” I say, rushing to explain. “It’s not like I think I have the right to her words or anything like that. I just never forgot it, and I always thought . . .”
“It’s nice,” Luke says, retracting his hand and digging his spoon into his cup of yogurt. “She’d have loved it.”
I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.
“When’d you get it?” he asks.
“October,” I say. He glances up at me then, meets my eye.
October, which used to be the worst month of our lives, before August was. Or maybe it was still October.
“I like it a lot,” he says. “You added an extra word, though.”
I’m surprised that he noticed. I mean, duh, he was there when Mel said it. I just didn’t think it made as profound an impact on anyone else as it did on me.
“Yeah,” I say. When I got those words put on my arm, I thought a lot about Mel, but I also thought about me. I thought about the way I’d felt about myself the last year, like I belonged nowhere, like I would never be able to hold on to everyone I loved.
Ever since the talk with my parents, things had gotten better between us, but that didn’t mean everything was always great. This new family that had meetings and laughed together and hung out still felt shaky.
But as the artist started to draw those words on in black ink, I’d decided something: it didn’t matter whether my family broke again or whether it didn’t. It didn’t matter whether I had ever been an official member of the Cohen family or whether I hadn’t. Not because they stopped mattering to me. If anything, they mattered more to me than ever, because I knew now that we had been family, we had chosen each other, and that was a special kind of beautiful.
But I also wanted something I could hold on to, a sense of belonging that never went away.
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