What You Left Behind

by Jessica Verdi

  But then Hope kicks and I feel better, because she’s okay, she’s healthy. My little legacy.

  That’s it. There’s nothing else in the book. Except the checklist.

  Legacy.

  Is that why Meg insisted on keeping the baby? Because she wanted something to leave behind? She could have written a book or donated her college fund to a charity or planted a goddamn tree. No, she had to do the one thing that guaranteed she would even need to leave something behind in the first place, the one thing that would ensure her thirty percent chance of survival plummeted down to a big fat zero.

  I sink to my floor, the journal clutched in my hands.

  Somewhere deep in my brain, sirens are going off, warning signals. Of what, I have no clue. But I go back to the beginning and start to reread.

  When I get to the conversation about naming Hope, the one that sat funny in my gut the first and second and third time around, it’s like the words and letters unscramble themselves before my eyes, forming a clear message.

  I know you, Meg. I know you have a reason for everything.

  But this baby will have a mom and a dad.

  Both of those sentences came from me. Absolute, undeniable, written-down proof that I’m an idiot. I knew Meg didn’t do anything without a well-thought-out reason. Of course she’d thought of all the possible outcomes and likelihoods. She knew from the moment she found out she was pregnant she was probably going to die but still decided having the baby was more important.

  She was so insistent Hope have my last name because she knew all along that Hope wouldn’t have both a mom and dad. All that “everything is going to be fine” talk was total bullshit. She was lying to me the entire time.

  I read through the rest of the journal, this newfound knowledge coloring every word.

  Mabel

  Alan

  Ryden

  This checklist means something, dammit. I’m even more sure of that now that I know Meg was keeping secrets from me. Lying to me. And I need to find out what.

  • • •

  I pull up to Alan’s. I texted him on my way over, and clearly he didn’t have any hot Saturday night plans because he’s waiting for me outside. “Hey,” I say, getting out of the car.

  “What’s up?” he asks.

  I pull Hope’s car seat out of the car, hand it to Alan, and keep moving straight toward his front door.

  “Dude, what’s going on?” he asks, keeping up with my pace.

  “I need to look through your room. Is that cool?” I stop on the stoop and turn to face him.

  He stares at me, looking completely freaked. But he holds the door open. “Be my guest.”

  I know he said there were no journals here, but I need to see for myself. I go straight to his room—I’d been here a couple of times before with Meg, back when she was still strong and barely pregnant. It looks exactly like you’d expect: twin bed covered in a neat blue comforter, books stacked, clothes put away, and hip-hop and Korean movie posters covering almost every inch of wall. There’s also a poster of Grace Park in a bikini that is hot as fuck.

  I check his bookshelves first. Nothing. Nightstand, dresser…clear. All there is under the bed is a big drawer filled with winter clothes. I rummage through them, but nothing is hidden in the piles. There are a few notebooks lined up spine out on the shelf over his desk, but they’re all three-subject books and filled with Alan’s class notes. Not a journal in sight.

  Alan stands in the doorway, Hope in his arms. She’s out of her car seat, awake, blowing little spit bubbles between her lips. She’s as happy in his arms as she is in my mom’s. The kid loves literally everyone except me.

  “I need to check the rest of your house.”

  Alan wordlessly steps out of the way.

  I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never been in most parts of his house before. But I can’t stop. I’m desperate. I go room to room, looking through bookshelves and under beds and in dresser drawers and in closets. Some part of me knows there’s no way Meg would have hidden one of her journals in Alan’s dad’s underwear drawer, but another part of me says to look everywhere.

  When I get to the kitchen, I run into Alan’s mother. I haven’t actually gotten farther than the driveway all the times I stopped by to drop off or pick up Hope this week, so I haven’t seen her in a while. “Mrs. Kang,” I say, stopping short.

  She looks more surprised to see me than I am to see her. Which makes sense. She lives here. It’s not that far off that she’d be in her own kitchen. But I’m probably the last person she expected to burst through her kitchen door, red-faced and ransacking her house for my own personal version of the Holy Grail.

  “Hello, Ryden! How lovely to see you. Did Alan tell you how much we love having little Hopie spend time with us? She’s such a doll.”

  Hopie? “Yes,” I say, trying to calm down. “Thank you so much for taking her in. I really appreciate it.”

  “Of course! Any time.” Her face suddenly loses its glow. “We all miss Meg so very much. It’s been quite a comfort to have little Hope around. Don’t you agree, Alan?”

  I turn to find Alan and Hope standing behind me. “Yeah. I do.”

  “Mrs. Kang, sorry if this is a weird question, but have you seen any of Meg’s journals lying around your house anywhere?”

  Her eyebrows crinkle a little. “You mean those notebooks she was always writing in?”

  “Yeah.”

  She thinks for a minute. “No, I haven’t seen any. Not in quite a while.”

  I nod. “Okay. Well, thanks anyway.”

  Alan walks me back to my car.

  “Yeah, so…sorry about all that,” I say.

  “You going to explain now?”

  I take Hope from him, and she immediately starts to whine. “I just thought…I don’t know what I thought.” I snap Hope’s car seat into the base and buckle her in. “I read some stuff in Meg’s journal…” I trail off. Suddenly I’m really tired. I close Hope’s door and let all my weight collapse against the side of the car.

  I feel Alan’s eyes on me. “No offense, man, but you’re kind of a mess.”

  I don’t say anything. Disagreement takes energy.

  “Maybe it’s time to let this whole thing go, Ryden. I mean, really, even if she did leave two other journals somewhere—”

  “She did.” I lift my head sharply and look at him. “I thought you agreed it was something she would do.”

  “I said it was something she would do, not that she actually succeeded in doing it. But even if she did, and even if you do find them, what do you expect to happen? She’s still going to be gone, man. You’re driving yourself crazy. It’s not worth it.”

  I push off from the side of the car and plant myself in the driver’s seat, looking back at Hope through the rearview mirror. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

  Chapter 13

  Today is Sunday. I don’t have to work. Hallelujah, amen. And there’s no soccer today either. But that means I’m on Hope duty. I have no excuse.

  I got basically no sleep last night, yet again. Between all the crying and feeding and diaper changing, my thoughts were preoccupied with what Alan said. Are the journals really out there? Does the checklist mean anything, or am I so desperate that I’m fabricating some big conspiracy in my head?

  No. Even if it turns out the checklist was nothing more than Meg’s own little journal-organizing system, even if it doesn’t have some giant, major, world-altering purpose, it only makes sense that if Meg checked the first box on the checklist and put the red journal in Mabel’s room, there are two others for me and Alan. And what harm could it do to keep searching for them?

  I call Mabel again.

  She answers after four rings. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “It’s 7:16 a.m. o
n a Sunday.”

  I look at the clock. So it is. “Oh. Sorry. I don’t really sleep anymore.”

  “It’s okay.” Her voice is softer now. Fuck. I don’t want her pity.

  I clear my throat and get straight to the point. “So listen, is there any way you can get access to the storage unit where her stuff is?”

  There’s a pause. “I don’t know. I don’t know which storage place it’s at or the unit number.”

  “Can’t you ask your parents?”

  “I don’t think you get it. They won’t talk about her. Apart from a few photos of me and Meg on the mantel in the living room and the box of ashes on the windowsill—and the massive amounts of wine my dad goes through every night so he’s never sober enough in the presence of my mother to actually have a real conversation—it’s like she was just passing through, a visitor who moved on at the first sign of something better.” Mabel pauses again. “They’ve never been the lovey, fuzzy kind of parents; we all know that. But now they’re… It’s like they’ve decided feeling nothing is better than feeling sad.” She sounds bitter and exhausted.

  Meg wouldn’t want her ashes in a box on a windowsill in that stark, cold house. She would want them scattered at the lake, at our spot.

  I wish we could stay here forever, I said once when we were at the lake.

  Me too, she whispered back. It’s perfect here.

  I wish I could do that for her. But convincing her parents to let me do that would first require them to acknowledge that Hope and I actually exist. Not gonna happen.

  Though the massive amounts of booze actually sounds like a pretty good avoidance tactic—I may have to try that.

  “Mabel,” I say. “Listen. This book you gave me, it has a list written in the back. Your name, then Alan’s, then mine. There’s a check in the box next to your name, but not the others. Do you remember seeing it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Do you have any idea what it could mean?”

  “Maybe she wanted to leave us each a journal.” I can hear the shrug in her voice.

  “Yeah, but why? Why would she have chosen three journals from the hundreds she had? And why wouldn’t she have just given them to us directly?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they were more important to her than the others somehow. Hmmm. Was there anything in that book that was different or unusual? I’m trying to remember.”

  I decide to tell her what I figured out. “I think Meg knew she was going to die.”

  “Well, yeah, there’s that part toward the end of the journal where she says that.”

  “No, I mean I think she knew a lot earlier than that. Maybe even before she got pregnant. I think that’s why she decided to keep the baby.”

  “I don’t understand.” Mabel sounds leery now.

  I explain the “legacy” thing.

  Mabel’s silent.

  “You there?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Just…thinking. She was always so certain that she was going to be okay.”

  “Turns out maybe she wasn’t.” And I never picked up on it. Add that to the list of ways I’ve failed her.

  “She kept the baby because she thought she was going to die anyway?” Mabel whispers. “She martyred herself.”

  “Yeah.”

  More silence.

  “I think,” I say, “she wanted us to know that, for some reason. Or at least she wanted you to know that. That’s why she left the book in your room.”

  Mabel gives a small little laugh. “That’s my sister. Always planning ahead. She used to write these pro/con lists all the time. Did you ever see her do that? They were about things as stupid as whether she should have Mom buy long grain or short grain brown rice. They would be all over the house. Whenever the cleaning lady came she would collect them and leave them in a little pile on the kitchen table.”

  I smile. “So now you see why I need to find those other two journals?”

  “Let me try to figure out how to get into the storage unit,” Mabel says. “I’ll call you back.”

  • • •

  Two hours later, Mabel still hasn’t called. That’s not that long, right? It’s fine. It’s totally fine.

  I toss the phone onto the floor in frustration. It lands in a pile of dirty clothes.

  Stop freaking out, man. You’ll get your answers when you get them. It’s not like Meg’s going to magically be brought back to life if you find the other two journals within a certain time frame or anything.

  True, but there could be information in those journals that will help me with Hope. Bottom line, if there’s a journal out there with a check mark next to my name, I want it.

  Must distract myself.

  I change Hope’s diaper, cover her in baby sunscreen, dress her in her onesie with the ladybug pattern, strap her into a carrier on my chest, and grab her diaper bag. She’s not crying, exactly, but she’s whimpering and fidgeting, like a cat who doesn’t want to stay still long enough for the vet to listen to its heart or check its ears or whatever.

  Mom’s outside, pulling weeds out from between the cracks in the driveway. She’s got her earbuds in and is dancing around to the beat of some unheard song. It’s probably Alanis Morissette. She loves Alanis Morissette. All angry female rockers actually.

  I watch her for a second undetected. She looks so happy, like our lives aren’t completely fucked. A lot of my mom’s friends don’t have kids yet. Some of them are married, some aren’t, and the ones who have kids, they’re little, like a baby or a four-year-old. But most are blissfully child-free. They come over sometimes for “movie night.” The living room gets overrun by six or seven thirtysomething women, most of them still pretty hot, drinking frozen margaritas and talking and laughing and not really paying any attention to whatever movie is on the screen. A few times, I’ve overheard their conversations. They’re usually talking about sex or the gorgeous new barista at the Starbucks on Fourth Street or how the men on the online dating sites are hopelessly disappointing. Not mom stuff at all.

  And it always hits me, in those moments, how my mother’s life would be different if not for me.

  The guys she’s dated, the ones I’ve met anyway, are all losers. They seem fine at first, not particularly spectacular but nice enough. Then they find out she has a teenage son and come to the conclusion that they’re “not ready for that kind of thing.” Now that she’s a grandmother too? Forget it.

  I’ve never seen my mother in love. I’ve seen her hoping desperately for the possibility of love. I’ve seen her with a tear in her eye and a dreamy smile on her face when she reaches the end of one of her vampire romance books. I’ve seen her come home the morning after staying at a guy’s house, all moon-eyed and floating on air, telling me, “This could be the one, Ry. I feel it.” I’ve seen her introduce me to a guy and watch him and me intensely, trying to gauge our reactions to each other, hoping for a “click.” But I’ve never seen her completely, truly in love.

  I don’t think she’s been in love since Michael.

  I look down at Hope. She’s watching Mom dancing around too, and she’s sort of smiling. I wonder if she’s old enough to find things funny.

  Mom looks up then and sees us standing there. “Hey, buddy,” she says, dumping a handful of weeds in a pile on the side of the driveway and wiping her hands on her jeans. She takes out her earbuds. “Where you off to?”

  Anywhere that will distract me from obsessing over Meg’s journals. “Dunno. Just need to get out of the house.”

  She nods. “Well, can we talk tonight? I’ll make eggplant parm.”

  That’s my favorite. She only makes it on special occasions or when she’s trying to butter me up. I know what this “talk” is going to be about—the same thing she’s been trying to get me to talk about seriously for the whole summer. The Great Day Care Dilemma.

  “All righ
t,” I say. “When do you need me home?”

  “Seven-ish?”

  “’Kay.”

  “Have fun!”

  I walk past my car, which Mom moved from the driveway to the street to free up space for her weeding, and head out on foot. It’s really nice out—not too hot, sunny, quiet, with a little breeze. I kick a rock ahead of me, meet up with it, and kick it again. The continuous impact of the rock against my sneaker is oddly soothing.

  Hope’s arms and legs dangle from the openings in her carrier, and her head falls against me as she starts to nod off, her little head snuggling into my chest. She’s like a miniature space heater, warming up my middle. Tentatively, I lift a hand and brush it lightly across her head, being careful to not press too hard on the soft spot. But then she pulls away and starts whimpering again, her face all scrunched up and cranky.

  Fine. Whatever.

  As I get to the end of the street and need to make a decision—right toward the lake or left toward downtown—my phone buzzes. It’s a text from Joni: What r u doing?

  Oh, just walking down the street with my daughter, whom you know nothing about.

  Nothin much, I text back. Chillin. You?

  Same. Want to do something?

  It’s been a long time since anyone’s texted me to hang out.

  I turn toward the lake and look down at Hope. Even if I could concentrate on anything besides whether Mabel’s making progress on the storage unit, and even if I didn’t have a date with doom scheduled with Mom tonight, I still wouldn’t be able to hang out with Joni today. Because I have a kid. How fucking crazy is that? I say the words out loud. Maybe they’ll make more sense that way. “I am a parent. I’m a father.”

  The whole thing makes me want to dive in the lake and never come up for air.

  I really need to find those journals. Or Michael. Or both.

  Not really having the best day, I type. Not a lie. Need to be alone, I think.

  :-( Need me to bring you some candy?