“Everyone else knows what they want—Sadie would be married right now, if she had her way. I know Greyson wants a family someday, and the whole eternal life mate thing. And Connor—” I choked on his name. “They’re all so sure, and I’m just not—and no one understands. What if love, for me, doesn’t fit with all that? Am I the problem? Am I doing everything all wrong?”
“Elaine, no. There is no ‘wrong’ way—you’re young. You have plenty of time to figure it all out. Or maybe you figured it out already, and want something different. Something safer.”
“Safer? What do you mean?”
“It all depends.” She moved into the chair next to mine, placed her cool palm over my fist. “Having a family can be a wonderful, fulfilling journey. But it also means putting the needs of your children before your own, unconditionally and always—and often, the needs of your partner. Most people don’t realize their capacity for that one way or the other until it’s too late.”
“Wow. Yeah, I can totally see the appeal.”
“They forget to tell you that part,” she sighed. “It’s certainly not for everybody, as some of us learned the hard way.”
“Oh.” I watched her closely, didn’t miss the way her mouth tightened at the edges. Skye wore motherhood like a second, silken skin. That she might regret her choices had never crossed my mind. “That must have been rough for you.”
“For me? Oh no, Elaine—Greyson is my light. I wouldn’t give him up for the world. But his father … I was optimistic. I spent a long, long time trying to fit who he was into who I thought he was. It took waking up one day to find him gone to make me face the truth of him. And even then it was years before I found any kind of peace.”
Her words scooped a tiny hole in my chest, forced a wispy image into sharper focus: little Grey with morning-heavy eyes, still blinking his way out of sleep. Unaware he was about to face his first day of forever without a dad. No wonder he hadn’t slept properly since.
Skye was right—you can’t take a hit like that and expect to recover on a standard timeline. Grey was practically a grown man, and he still hadn’t ironed out the finer points of restful slumber. As if he was still afraid to close his eyes, in case the people he loved disappeared while he was dreaming.
I could pretty well fucking relate.
“It was for the best, though,” Skye continued. “It hurt like nothing else, to realize how wrong I was about something that had felt right. But there was a relief in it, believe it or not—realizing my child and I deserved more. No amount of sunshine can fix a man who doesn’t want to grow.”
“Keep expectations realistically low,” I joked, cheeks aching through a hideous grin. “Got it.”
“I’m not saying that,” she chuckled. “But people will ultimately be who they are. When your heart muddles everything else, you have to trust your eyes.” She checked her phone and stood, pulled her gloves on one by one. “I can’t stay longer, or I’ll be late. Will you be okay? I can drop you off at the market, if you need your dad. And we can always talk more, when I get home.”
“I’ll be fine. Thanks, Skye.”
“We’re in all of this together, hon. Whatever you need, we’re here.”
“Was it really palmistry?” I blurted, stopping her hand on the doorknob. Cringing at the bewilderment twisting her face. “How you and Dad met. Greyson said your hands aligned, or—your fates. Something. And then you decided to get married?”
“Oh. Oh. Honey, no.” Her laughter rang like wind chimes, lovely and bell-clear. “Rob was delivering soaps to the shop, and he scraped his hand on one of the shelves. I offered him our first aid kit, and he made a joke about ruining his fate line and how the cut may have just remapped his destiny. Just a tiny, silly moment, but it made me laugh. That was the icebreaker, and the rest is … now.”
“I can … totally see that. I can picture it happening, like I was there.” Dad and his shy grin, his cheesy jokes and easy manner. Remapping his destiny for real with an offhand remark. “Grey made it sound like you got together based solely on your palm prints.”
“Greyson may have gotten a couple wires crossed in the retelling. In the end, it was our hearts that matched.” She paused, regarding me with her head to one side. “Elaine, no one can be everything you need—but the right person will never stop trying to understand exactly what that is.”
She smiled her way out the door, left me staring after her, my face frozen in an automatic, answering grin. It faded in less than a minute.
Unlike Sadie’s, my dreams for the future were murky at best. All of Skye’s wisdom about needs and wants and expectations—how could any of those exist for a girl who breathed moment to moment, with barely time to form a thought, much less a plan? I couldn’t foist that life on someone else, no matter how long they followed me with open arms.
I’d made the day-to-day work on my own so far. I would be fine.
But what if things had gone too far? What if day-to-day was no longer enough?
I shook that one out of my head, pressed my fingers to my aching eyes. There was no “what if.” My mother had made that choice for me. Drawn a crimson line in every shade of sand, when she pulled her own literal cut-and-run.
Most days, I was too much like her to even wish for more. How powerful a wish it would have to be, to overcome that legacy—was I supposed to risk one for the other, knowing my choice might one day run out warm around the toes of my own child? How could I even consider it?
I couldn’t. And I won’t.
I’ll never force anyone to scrub away my blood.
37
How to Be Me
Who Is Lane Ja
Defining My Future Self
Things I Know about Me
Hair: Long, dark, straight, same as always. Eyes: Brown.
Face/Body: No third-party complaints thus far. Sideboob apparently nice enough to almost immortalize WHY. WHY WHY WHY DID I WRITE THAT. UGH.
Personality: Quiet. Mostly nice. Probably used to be better. ←Need to work on that.
Relationship Status: I hate this question.
Life Goals: ????? Something with knitting/yarnwork? Fiber “artist”? Note: Get own wheel someday. Ask Connor PAUL, ASK PAUL for details on warehouse wheel. Also, form ACTUAL life goals at some point. ← (Priorities, much?)
Likes: Fiber art. Gardening. Caffeine. Yoga. Netflix. Reading, sometimes. Is this really it? How is this everything? Why. Why why why
Dislikes: Sleeping. Sadness. Too many things. This list.
I Am: Rob’s daughter. Annie’s daughter. Skye’s stepdaughter. Grey’s sister.
Stepsister
Sister
I want: my mother out of my head
To go gently into that good finally be at peace
I want: to finally be at peace
But maybe not in exactly the same way, or do I wow, this went to the dark place all at once, did it not
I want: to be happier. However I can.
I want: Sadie to forgive me.
I want: Connor to call me
apologize come back to me stay with me love me
Him. I just want him.
Why.
I don’t
I don’t know
I don’t know
That night—or the next morning, really, four a.m., found me at the kitchen table, sorting through what it meant to become Lane. The checklist and the deal breakers. Making a goddamn archive of my life’s minutiae, as if committing things to paper was the key to the girl I was. As if the right combination of words would unlock the gates and set that stranger free. So far it was nothing but garden-variety bullshit: yarn and flowers and general fiber art. Books and yoga. Bitter coffee. A quiet mouth, set in a bare, blank face. Oh, and Netflix. Can’t forget that.
All surface shine and crossed-out gibberish, her girlish shadow swallowed by a longer, darker form.
Lane herself was a gutted building—a hollow shell, home to vermin and empty spaces and things not worth the trouble of h
auling off. Long ago robbed of everything worth anything. Still, even on the worst days, I didn’t want to die.
So I stood up. I placed my feet, one by one, ahead of each other. I did what I had to do to go on, even as every step forward left a scar on my heart.
The dream had been different—somehow better, somehow worse. My mother lay on the floor, sprawled and still, eyelids, lips, and cheeks washed the same watercolor blue. Sadie stood in the corner, nose to the wall. Her back was straight and proud, her hair a colorful riot of tiny satin ribbons, silky and inviting. Ribbons that snagged on my fingers, melding into the flesh, unraveling like stitches in a frogged scarf and taking her head with them. It thumped across the floor, stopping faceup at my feet. Her mouth dissolved and bled away like sand beneath eyes that turned from blue to brown, and suddenly the face was Connor’s.
That had been the end of sleepy time.
The X-Acto waited in my nightstand drawer, an alternate ending to any fucked-up story. What I wouldn’t give for the simplicity of a cut, or the sudden snap of bone—to feel the thrill of a moment as it happened, instead of constantly reaching backward. My whole life spent bending and breaking, weaving memory wisps into patterns that clashed with reality. Hell, look what I’d done to Grey.
My brother. An idea I’d had a long time ago—the promise of another story, beautifully bound and waiting to be written. I’d fallen over myself to fill the pages, scattered them with grand ideas, stitched its seams with delusional thread. Formed him around my concept of love: a safety net, stretched over a bottomless pit. So brilliant and bright, it’d had no trouble eclipsing the real thing.
I’d had it. It had been right there, yet I’d gone ahead and fucked that up too. Ignored the drag of the blade for the phantom ache of a long-missing limb, and for all I knew, it was too late. My hands might never be steady enough to close that wound.
None of that mattered, though. Not really.
Because it wasn’t about Grey, or Connor, or which one of them I loved; it wasn’t about saving someone, or being saved, or finding myself enveloped in the strangest, most unexpected corners of another person’s heart.
It wasn’t about them at all, and never had been.
She’d loved me fiercely. I knew it with a certainty that couldn’t be moved, and yet I still couldn’t fault her for clawing her way out of the world—for wanting nothing so much as the relief of nothing, regardless of the mess it made. It was love itself that took her to that place, opened her heart to rivers of endless, overwhelming grief. Better to cut it out entirely than to welcome even one more drop.
I understood my mother. Even though she’d left me, I didn’t blame or doubt or hate her.
Trouble is, I also didn’t remember her.
I knew her face, of course; it smiled at me from assorted frames, in every room of the house. It stared back at me from every mirror. But I knew nothing of her hands or voice, nothing of her laugh or the swing of her hair. What I knew was a nightly reel of blood and agony—an endless cycle of hell, choked with the stink of death. That last image—that drained body in that white bathroom—that was all I truly had of Annie Jamison. That was the beginning, and that was the end. That was my mother, wrapped around eternity.
Water and rock. If I lost the dreams, I lost her, too.
Who was I, without her blood drying, tar-sticky, on the tiles? Who was I without that final atrocity unspooling over and over at my feet? Was the memory itself the key to that destiny, or was it the only thing holding me back?
And if I did forget—if I could so easily let go of the single, defining thing that made me Lane, what was the point of it in the first place?
What was the point of anything, if it all slipped down the drain?
“Elaine.”
His sleep-heavy voice cracked the silence, jolting through my veins like ice. He stood in the doorway, rumpled and blurred and soft around the edges.
“Oh. Greyson.” I brought my hand to my face, slid my fingers along alarmingly wet cheeks. “Oh. Oh God. I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“I’m getting Rob.”
“No, I’m fine. I’m—”
“I’m. Getting. Rob.” And he was gone.
I gave myself over to exhaustion, let myself sink low in my chair. Rested my forehead against the table, too drained to do anything but breathe.
“Elaine, honey, sit up.” Dad’s hand was gentle on mine as he knelt beside my chair. Skye crouched on my other side, her hand steady on my shoulder. Grey hovered in the doorway, then moved to the stove, gathered jars and infusers, filled the kettle and set it to boil. “What happened? Are you sick?”
“No. It was—” I gulped and shuddered, the thought alone enough to cut. “It was the dream again. But different. Horrible.”
“The dream?” Skye looked at Dad, who’d gone still at my words, his face a reflection of everything cold in my gut as he took the chair next to mine.
“You told me they stopped,” he whispered. “You said you were fine—you had me take you out of therapy. Why?”
“I didn’t want to go anymore. I was starting to forget her, and I knew if I kept healing …” My bravado crumbled, falling to the table to mix with my tears. “Oh, Dad. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do any of it.”
“How can I help you, honey? Tell me how to help you.”
He was getting earnest and agitated, his natural reaction to conflict and crisis both. Dad was an amazing and wonderful person, and he loved me, but his own fragile heart bore bruises enough. When it came to stuff like this, he was just another set of shaking hands.
“You can’t help me. I’ll be fine. You should go back to bed.”
“But you’re not. You’re not fine. You sound like—oh, Elaine. You sound exactly like your mother.”
I raised my eyes—her eyes, her same shape and color and blank, listless sheen, to find his had already overflowed. My father wept in front of me, too unsurprised.
“When you were a baby,” he said, low, “you wanted to be held every minute of the day. Annie would rock you to sleep, and the second she tried to put you down, whether in your crib or the swing or the bassinet, you’d wake up shrieking. She had to wear you in a sling just to get anything done at all. You still need that—you still need someone to wrap you up and keep you safe.”
“I don’t. I never asked anyone to carry me.”
“No, you didn’t ask. But not asking isn’t the same as not needing. And it’s my fault.”
“This isn’t your fault, Dad.”
“It is. Your mother needed help. She needed far more help than I could give her, but she was so stubborn—she wanted to deal with it on her own, and I let her. We both thought love would be enough to get us through. And we loved each other, and we still had you. And she loved you so much.” His voice cracked on the last word. “She said she was fine, that she was getting better every day. I wanted to believe her, so I shut my eyes to anything that told me different. And in the end, I failed her. I failed her, and I’m failing you, and I will never ever forgive myself.”
Dad’s head dropped to the table, and I lowered mine to rest beside it, cooling my cheek against the wood. That he could bleed so easily—that was something. That he felt his wounds, acute and painful, painfully real—that he let them leak into the world, unchecked. It was more than I could do, most days.
My brother appeared in front of me, a mug in each hand. He had no idea what to do with any of this mess, so he just stood there with his tea until Skye took the mugs and placed them on the table.
“Lane, honey, I’d like to ask you something,” she began. “Please tell me if I overstep, okay?”
“Okay.”
“As a mother, I can’t imagine losing a child. It’s not a thing that can be overcome by sheer will. From everything I’ve heard, your mother was a beautiful person, inside and out. But she was broken beyond comprehension. Far more than even your father knew.”
“Obviously.” It came out harsher than I meant it. Dad gave
a thin wail. “Fuck. Sorry, Dad. Skye. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, sweetheart. Are you sure this isn’t too much to hear?” I nodded, and she continued. “Likewise, I can’t possibly know the pain of losing a mother, especially as young as you were, in such a brutal, violent way. We’re here for you, all three of us are—but you need more than we have to offer. Will you let me find someone to treat you? Someone who can really help you begin a healing process?”
A part of me, the stubborn, frightened, sharp-clawed recluse, screamed from the corners of my mind. I was tired, that was all. Once my brain had a chance to rest and recover, I’d get back to the busywork—restock my knit items, crank out some more jewelry. Get myself a spinning wheel and learn how to dye fiber, maybe start my own line of homespun yarn cakes. My art would save me, like it always did—it had gotten me this far, and it would carry me through. I needed sleep, not therapy.
If I could just clear my head, I’d be fine.
But she’d stayed busy too. My mother, smile in place, soothing my father’s worries with reassurances and gentle words, cleaning her bathroom until it gleamed. Moving through the days until her feet wore through, and still she walked, balancing on nothing but bone. Sure, she’d kept going—she strode straight down her path without stopping, ignoring the pebbles in her shoes. Ignoring the offered hands and gathering shadows both as she waded into quicksand, and by the time the mud reached her eyes, it was too late.
In the end, she’d drowned alone.
Still, some part of me didn’t want to heal—it wanted the wounds and blood and memories, and the unending, unparalleled fear that, so far, had kept me going. That part opened my mouth, prepared to fight. What actually came out was as much a surprise to me as anyone.
“I don’t want to die. I don’t. But I can’t handle living if it feels like this.”
“Don’t say that. Please don’t say that,” Dad keened. “My baby. My baby girl.”
He practically dissolved onto the tabletop. His hands curled around mine and held on tight. Skye’s covered his, containing and soothing us both.
Together We Caught Fire Page 24