by Megan Hart
To his mother, who’d never even allowed Ryan a pet fish because of the “mess and the stink” they made, it must’ve seemed like an awful imposition. Still, his throat burned with anger at the way she’d described his wife.
“You act like she was wearing rabbit skins and throwing her own crap. By the time Dad decided to adopt her, she wasn’t like that anymore. She’d spent years being rehabilitated.”
“He spent years trying to fix her, when we both knew she would never, ever be right.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Head starting to pound, Ryan closed the closet door with a thud.
His mother gave him a steel-eyed glare. “She had something about her that ensorcelled him. You, too. I know what it was. I saw the way she looked at him, then at you. The way she moved her body.”
“If you’re suggesting Dad had a sexual interest in Mari, you’re wrong. And more than that, Ma, you’re disgusting.” Ryan spat the words like bullets and watched her flinch from each one.
“He chose her over me!” she shouted, fists clenched and waving in fury. “You both did!”
There it was. Something he’d always known was at the root of his mother’s behavior but had never been brought into the light. “You’re jealous of her.”
“Of course I’m jealous of her,” his mother said as though the words were razors slitting her tongue with each syllable.
He could’ve pointed out that maybe one of the reasons his father had spent so much time at work was to escape his constantly nagging wife. Or that Mari had never been a threat to her. Or even that it was inevitable that Ryan would fall in love with someone other than, thank God, his mother, and that she’d have disliked his wife no matter who he’d chosen. He could’ve pointed out that his mother had spent so much of her life disgruntled and dissatisfied with everything she’d been given that she could never be satisfied with what she had.
Instead, Ryan hugged his mother.
“I love you, Ma.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d hugged her like this—maybe at his wedding, just before walking down the aisle. Maybe longer ago than that, as a little boy. Hell. Maybe never.
“You just don’t know about her,” his mother said. “Not everything. If you knew everything...”
He pushed her gently from him. “If I knew everything, what? Do you think there’s anything I could know about my wife that would ever make me not love her? We have two beautiful kids, Ma. We have a good life. We have a good marriage.”
Had a good marriage, he thought. Before he’d gone and screwed it up. Before he’d taken it for granted.
Maybe Ryan had his own lessons to learn about being satisfied with what he had.
“Your father told me everything he’d learned about that girl. You think the fact she spoke with her hands was romantic, like something from a story. You think that the fact she lived in filth and poverty was somehow something to be worn like a badge of honor.”
“It wasn’t her fault.”
“Well, neither were all those years of care she got, all those years of therapy, anything she can claim as her own effort. Do you know,” his mother said, “your dad did most of that work for free? Because the grants wouldn’t cover the costs?”
“I knew that. Yeah. It’s one of the reasons I thought it would be important to do volunteer work myself. Helping people who needed it but couldn’t afford it.”
His mother pushed him away. “And how’s that been working for you, lately?”
Ryan backed up until he hit the counter and ran a hand through his hair. He hadn’t given his mother any details about his reasons for taking his family to Pine Grove, or about his job or the case. Not about the book. He hadn’t gotten around to asking her for the lost files, yet. All she knew was that a patient of his had died, and her husband was suing him. “I’ve had to quit that for a while. I’ll get back into it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe,” Ryan said, “you’d just like it if we left.”
That hit her where it hurt, but Ryan took no pride in it. She was his mother, after all, and even if she could be the most annoying woman on the planet, he knew that most of the time she acted out of love. Her own twisted version of love, but even so, sometimes that was the only kind there was.
“I didn’t say that. You know I love having you here.”
Sure, because it meant they weren’t with Mari. “We can’t stay forever. My business is going to be over soon in Philly. Another couple days. And in another few weeks it’ll be time for the kids to go back to school and back home.”
“So...stay until then. You know I never get enough of my grandchildren.”
“I thought you said they were spoiled and indulged,” Ryan said.
His mother sniffed. “That doesn’t mean I don’t love them.”
“I know you do, Ma. And I’m glad for the help.” Ryan hesitated, deciding to come at least a little bit clean. “Mari and I have been having a few problems. We needed some distance.”
His mother’s gaze flared. “I knew it.”
“Don’t start.” He held up a hand, but his mother was already off and running.
“I told you, Ryan, if you only knew—”
“Enough!” Both of them looked reflexively at the ceiling, but if they’d woken the kids there was no sound of them from upstairs. He fixed his mother with another hard glare. “I know you hate her. I know you always will hate her. But I’ve told you before and I’m going to say it again, just so we’re clear—I love Mari. All marriages have rough spots, and this one isn’t because of her.”
His mother looked shocked. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s not supposed to mean anything. It means that I screwed up. It’s my fault. I...” Ryan ran his hand through his hair again.
“You look like your father when you do that.”
He stopped. “I had an affair with a patient. The one who killed herself. I lost my job because of it—”
“Oh, Ryan!”
“And I was facing charges,” he continued, cutting her off before she could go into full-on wailing. “But they’re being settled out of court. I’m not going to lose my license. They couldn’t prove it.”
His mother looked stricken. “But you did it. It’s true.”
He nodded. “I needed to get away for a while.”
“So you went...there?” His mother’s lip curled. “Why on earth? You could’ve—”
“Come here?” He laughed harshly. “Right. She knows you can’t stand her, Ma. She’d never have come here.”
His mother’s back stiffened. “I have never treated your wife with anything but politeness.”
He found a laugh at that. “Yeah, well, having you over for the kids’ birthdays and holidays when you ignore her like she’s a stranger is a lot different than asking you to put her up in your guest bedroom.”
“I’m sorry,” his mother said.
It was the last thing Ryan ever expected his mother to say. “She’s a good person, Ma. I wish you could understand that. Hate Dad if you have to. He’s dead now, and anyway, he was the adult who made the decisions, not her. You have to stop blaming her for what she couldn’t help.”
“Oh, Ryan, you don’t understand. I know she can’t help where she came from or what she is. But what you don’t understand is that she will never be...”
“What?” he challenged. “She won’t ever be what? Normal? High-class, like you? I hate to say it, Ma, but if class is determined by how you treat other people, Mari’s got a lot more than most people I know.”
FIFTY-FOUR
MARI’S OFFER HANGS between them for a long moment before Andrew answers.
“No,” he says.
It breaks her heart. Mari sits at the table, her face in her hands. “You don’t love me. You said you did, but you don’t.”
“Mariposa, that’s not the only way to love someone. I mean, it’s not right.”
She knows it’s wrong. She presses the heels of her hands to her eye
s to hold back tears. “Go away, then.”
“I don’t want to go away. You don’t understand...”
She doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t want to hear.
“I need to try calling my kids again. I can’t seem to get a good signal out here.” She’s changing the subject, she knows, even if what she says is true.
She doesn’t care about reaching Ryan, who hasn’t called her once since she’d asked him to leave. Probably pouting. But Kendra hasn’t answered any of Mari’s dozen texts, and that’s more worrisome. Kendra’s attached to her phone at all times, even the cheap replacement. Either the messages aren’t getting through—not so much of a surprise, considering the poor service out here—or she’s ignoring the texts. Mari hopes it isn’t the latter, though she supposes, depending on what Ryan told the kids, it would be understandable if they ignored her.
“You had my daughter’s phone,” she says suddenly. “And the library book.”
Andrew looks uncomfortable. “I didn’t know they belonged to your daughter.”
“Why did you take them in the first place?”
For that he seems to have no answer.
Mari turns her back on him. She thumbs in Kendra’s number with a simple message. Call me, honey. Love you, Mama.
After a moment, Mari thumbs Ryan’s number. Her message to him is even shorter and simpler.
Call me.
She’s not really sure she wants to talk to him, but she supposes at some point, she must. She can’t ignore the situation forever. At some point, Ryan will tire of his mother’s hovering and snide remarks the way he always does. He’ll want to come back. He has to soon, anyway, because the summer will be ending and even though she’s the one who told him to leave, she can’t imagine he’d go back to Philly without her.
He won’t abandon her.
Suddenly, so fast she loses her breath, Mari’s world spins until she staggers.
She falls to her knees on the nubbled rag rug, the knots digging into her flesh so that she thinks of Andrew saying how his parents had forced him to kneel on grains of rice. Only seconds have passed and already her knees hurt. She can’t imagine what it must’ve been like for him to do it for hours.
“Mariposa. Don’t.”
“Don’t you tell me what to do!”
She forces herself to her feet. Forces herself to breathe. But it’s not working. Panic sweeps her and she flings open first the fridge, gasping aloud in relief at the sight of every shelf and drawer filled. Milk, eggs, butter, yogurt, ketchup, mayo, mustard. She catalogs everything with her hands as though only by touching can she make it all real.
Then the cupboards. Everything is there. She could live on this bounty for months, especially if she’s sparing. Even if Ryan never comes back, even if Mari is cut off from everything, she can survive.
At the sink she runs cold water and gulps it until her stomach sloshes and then she leans over, mouth open and throat convulsing, convinced she’s going to vomit. Slowly, breathing deeply, she forces away the nausea. She’s going to be fine. She will be fine.
“Rough time,” she mutters. “Rough time. Rough. Time.”
Breathing in. Breathing out. She grips the sink and sips at the air as she murmurs. She blinks. The world no longer spins.
To her surprise, Andrew pulls her close. He kisses her forehead, not her mouth. Mari closes her eyes, comforted. She remembers something like this from before, though she was much smaller.
“I may have forgotten you,” she says, squeezed up tight and close against him in a way different than Ryan has ever held her. “But right now I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know you.”
His hands stroke once, twice, over her hair. “I’ve never forgotten you.”
She tips her face up to his. “Tell me how you met me. Tell me about the first time you saw me.”
She wants to know what it was about her that made him fight so hard to keep her safe. Mari wants a fairy story. But Andrew only strokes her hair back from her face and gives his head the tiniest of shakes.
“Can you remember the first time you met me?” he says.
She thinks and thinks again, then harder. She looks into his eyes. They’re kind eyes, blue ringed with a darker edge and white flecks in the irises.
“No. But I told you before, a lot of what happened when I was younger is hard to remember.”
“Maybe,” Andrew says, his hands making a ponytail of her hair at the base of her neck, “it’s because I was always part of your life.”
“Were you?” She lets him tug her hair to tip her face further.
He’s smiling, but a little sadly. “Feels like it. Doesn’t it?”
There are more questions to be asked, but there always will be. Mari looks at Andrew. She looks toward the window, the blue sky and the hint of green that indicates the tops of the trees. She doesn’t need to ask him anything else right now.
FIFTY-FIVE
“HERE.” GRANDMA SLAPPED down a thick folder in front of Kendra, who had her feet up on the coffee table. “You should read this.”
Ethan was staring with blank eyes at the television, more mindless cartoons, but he looked around now. He reached for the folder, but Grandma slapped his fingers. Actually slapped them, so the monkeybrat pulled them back with a cry. He looked stunned, which is how Kendra felt.
Grandma might be annoying, but she’d never been mean to either of her grandchildren. She’d certainly never hit them. Now Ethan stuck his fingers in his mouth and stared at her, wide-eyed. He looked as if he might cry.
Kendra frowned. She might tease her brother, she might call him names, she might even poke him herself when he got really annoying. But that was her job and her right as his sister. Nobody else was allowed to treat him that way.
Not even Grandma.
“What is it?” Kendra said, sullen, not even making a motion to reach for it.
“It’s the truth about your mother,” Grandma said in a stiff, formal voice that cracked. She cleared her throat. “The real, whole truth that nobody seems to care to know.”
Kendra didn’t trust her grandmother’s opinion about her mother any farther than she could toss her cell phone without breaking it—which wasn’t far at all. And if Kendra’s dad didn’t want to know what was in that file, it must be something he thought was so awful he didn’t want to know. “What’s that mean? The real, whole truth?”
“You don’t know anything about your mother. And I’ve kept silent all these years because I love your father. And I love you. And Ethan.” Grandma’s voice broke, then. Hard. Tears brimmed up and fell down her cheeks.
Kendra had seen her grandmother cry before, but this was the first time she believed the tears were real.
“I didn’t want to hurt you. So I kept the story to myself. All of it. But I knew. Oh, yes, I knew all along.” Grandma shuddered and her mouth looked as if she’d sucked on a lemon. “But now, it’s time.”
“Why now?” Kendra asked, not even caring if she sounded like a little bitch. “What’s so important about now? I mean, it’s not like we ever thought you loved our mom. We know you can’t stand her.”
Grandma looked as though she’d stepped in something that smelled bad, but the tears still tracked down her cheeks and made stripes in her makeup. She’d hate it if she knew how she looked, Kendra thought. Old and wrinkled and smeared.
“When you’re a mother, you’ll understand what it’s like to want to protect your children and do what’s best for them. Someday, Kendra, I hope you’ll understand what it’s like to be a real mother. One who doesn’t leave her children—”
“Our mother didn’t leave us!” Kendra shouted. “She would never!”
“Of course she did!” Grandma shouted, just as loud. Spit flew from her red lipsticked mouth. “She could hardly do anything else, could she? How else could she behave, given what she came from? What she was?”
Kendra had heard her grandmother say such a thing before. “What do you mean, what she was?”
Ethan had begun to sniffle, his eyes darting back and forth, big as saucers. Usually even the tiniest hint of tears would have Grandma woo-wooing over him, but not this time. Now she barely looked at him. Her eyes bore into Kendra’s.
“Read that file. Then you’ll know. And make sure your father reads it, too.”
“If he reads it, will he take us back h-home?” Ethan cried. Snot bubbled out from his nose.
Kendra grimaced. Gross. She looked at her grandmother, who just shook her head and pointed at the folder.
“No,” Grandma said, “I’m sure that once he reads that, he won’t take you back to her. Ever.”
With that, she made a grand exit, leaving Kendra to stare after her with her jaw gaping in amazement and fury. Ethan burst into full-on sobbing. Kendra cringed away from the glistening snot sliding all over his face but did pull him closer. There were tissues handy on every end table, but she handed him one of the doilies from Grandma’s couch instead. He scrubbed at his face.
“Don’t read it,” Ethan begged her. “And don’t show it to Daddy! Don’t, Kiki!”
Curiosity killed the cat. How many times had Kendra heard that? And what had she ever learned from listening at doors but half stories and mysteries that didn’t get explained? Here was her chance, once and for all, to learn whatever was “the truth.”
“Whatever it is, Grandma thinks it’s going to make us not love Mom. Or make Daddy not love her. Which is just stupid,” Kendra said in a low, hard voice meant to drive the tears right out of her brother’s eyes. She felt like crying herself, but forced it back. She wasn’t going to let Grandma get to her like that.
“I don’t think you should read it, Kiki. Throw it away.”
But she couldn’t.
FIFTY-SIX
THIS DAY HAS no soundtrack, but it’s as idyllic as any movie. Andrew takes Mari up the mountain and through the woods to explore old places and show her some new ones, too. By the time evening starts to fall, Mari’s cheeks are sunburned from their picnic at the top of the mountain, and her feet and calves ache from the hours of hiking. She’s bone-tired but refreshed. She takes Andrew’s hand as he helps her over a fallen wooden fence at the edge of the field. By the time they cross it, the sun’s started dipping below the edges of the trees and the chickens have all gone inside the hen house. Mari hears their muttered complaints, but doesn’t expect to see Rosie stepping out holding a hen by the neck in one hand.