The Frog Prince

by Jane Porter

  I pick up the flowers, see the card tucked inside the paper between the fragrant pink lilies. Glancing upstairs, I pull the envelope out of the lilies and open it. The card reads simply, “I’m sorry. C.”

  I’m sorry.

  Two little words, and those two little words undo me. The tears I fought earlier fall, and I scrub them away without much success, because new tears keep falling.

  I’m sorry. C.

  I glance up the stairs once more, uncertain if I should go up there and thank her or if anything needs to be said right now. I actually don’t think she needs my thanks right now.

  Suddenly I want to go home. I don’t know why; I don’t know what I think home will accomplish, but it’s the one place I most want to be.

  I throw clothes into my bag, pen a quick note of thanks for Cindy, and slide the note beneath her door before I head to my car.

  Home. Visalia. Mom.

  It’s not a short drive home; the trip takes a good four and a half hours without traffic if I’m lucky, and today I’m lucky. I leave my apartment around noon and reach Visalia around four thirty.

  I pull in front of the house. It’s a small house, not architecturally interesting, but there are flowers everywhere—Mom’s famous late spring tulips (pinks and purples of course), along with pansies in the front and irises in the back.

  Mom’s car is gone, but the front door’s open, and I enter the house.

  I’m home. Home. There’s the chintz sofa in the living room, and the acorn-colored framed school photos on the hallway wall. I can see the edge of the kitchen counter as I look down the hall toward the back of the house, the part of the house where we always lived.

  Picking up my suitcase, I take it to my former bed room, the one I shared with Ashlee growing up. Her cheerleader stuff is still up all over her half of the room, along with her homecoming tiara and the Miss Congeniality sash she won in the Miss Tulare County Pageant.

  My side is sparser. There are books and a silk creeping Charley plant. One old doll still perches next to the table lamp. Photos of high school friends and some of the girls I roomed with at UC Irvine jostle for prominence while dusty Seventeen magazines fight for space with rows of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Danielle Steel paperbacks.

  I sit on my twin bed with the white chenille bedspread and see the little girl who grew up here and lay on this bed for hours reading, and who sat for even more hours on the phone in high school, talking to girlfriends. Then there was her diary, the one where she recorded every detail about every teenage crush she ever had.

  I wonder if the red diary is still squished between the mattresses of my bed, and I get up, reach between the top mattress and the box springs, and slide my arm around. My fingers bump something rigid and close around a corner.

  It’s there.

  I pull it out but don’t flip it open. I don’t need to read the entries to remember how I used to pour my heart into it. All those teenage loves and problems, the worries, the hopes, the wishes, the hurts.

  I put the diary back. It’s hard being home. It makes no sense; I shouldn’t feel this way all these years later, but Ted should still live here. Bastard Ted should still be our father.

  In the bathroom I wash my face, put on some fresh makeup, before leaving a note for Mom in the kitchen. I ask her to call me as soon as she gets home.

  It’s after six, and I’m at the Sequoia Mall, getting ready to head to Borders, when Mom calls.

  “You’re in town?” she says first thing. “When did you get here? Why didn’t you let me know?”

  “It was spur-of-the-moment,” I say, not about to tell her I’m newly unemployed over the phone. “Have you had dinner?”

  “I was just going to open a can of soup.”

  I shudder. “Meet me for dinner.”

  “I can heat some soup for you, too. It’s really good. Progresso split pea—”

  “Mom.” I have to stop this, get control of the conversation now. “I’ll take you to dinner. My treat.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come on, Mom. You love eating out. We’ll go to Estrada’s—”

  “They closed, Holly. Years ago.”

  That’s right. Why can’t I ever remember that? Estrada’s made the best hot tostada compuestas in the world. It wasn’t a fancy restaurant; in fact, it was rather dark and plain inside, but the waitresses were so friendly, and they knew Mom, and they knew us kids, and they welcomed us every time with open arms.

  Isn’t that just like a small town?

  “How about the VP, then?” I suggest, knowing it’s Mom’s favorite restaurant and usually out of her price range.

  “Oh, Holly—”

  “Just say yes, Mom.” My voice cracks, nearly breaks. “All you have to do is say yes.”

  “Okay. Yes.”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I’m standing on the curb in front of the Vintage Press when I spot a familiar face, a face so known to me, I feel a pang.

  It’s like seeing me approach, but it’s not me. It’s Mom. Which in some ways is the same thing, because isn’t she the first person I knew? The one I identified with before I knew myself?

  No wonder mother-daughter relationships are so impossible. We’re two women forever tied to each other. I am indebted to her for life, for my life, and I wouldn’t be here, foolish, foolhardy, sentimental, and foolishly brave, if it weren’t for her. I wouldn’t know how to dream or feel or be...

  She sees me. “Holly!” She hugs me, then steps back to look at me and push my hair around, rearranging my bangs on my face. “What are you doing home?”

  I take a step back now, away from her interfering fingers. “I needed to come home.”

  Mom is still looking at me, and there’s that now familiar bewilderment in her eyes, as if she doesn’t quite know what to do with me, and I suddenly have to know what she’s thinking. What she sees when she looks at me.

  “Why do you always look at me like that?” I ask her.

  “Like what?” She sounds immediately defensive.

  “Like that,” I say, nodding at her. “You get that expression on your face—”

  “What expression?”

  “That one.” And I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated with all the secrets and silence in my life, the things that have gone wrong, the things that I believed that weren’t true. “When you look at me, Mom, what do you see?”

  Mom, poor Mom, gets quiet, and her smile quivers. “Love,” she whispers. “I look at you and think, ‘Wow, look at her. There’s my baby.’”

  Christ. Can it get worse? Can I feel any worse? “Mom—” I break off as my voice fails me.

  How can people love each other but still not feel loved?

  How can we say the right words and still feel wrong?

  Because Mom is saying all the things I want to hear, Mom is saying everything I’ve needed to hear, but somehow it doesn’t ease the last twenty-something years, when I needed more...

  She must feel my tension, must see the struggle in my face, but she can’t cope with it. “Shall we go inside?” she suggests briskly. “Get a table?”

  We enter the restaurant beneath the pretty arched awning, through the mahogany-and-glass doors, and we’re seated immediately.

  “You don’t come home very often,” Mom says as the busboy fills our glasses with ice water.

  “It feels funny coming home.” I wait for the busboy to leave. “None of my high school friends have been married. Not even engaged. While I’ve been married and divorced and—” I exhale. “It feels strange. They’re all Catholic, too, and you know it doesn’t help. Catholics can’t divorce—”

  “They do it all the time.”

  “But it’s frowned upon.”

  My mom laughs. Bless her heart. She does have a sense of humor after all. “It’s always frowned upon. You don’t know how many times I’ve felt frowned upon for losing your dad—”

  “You didn’t lose him, Mom. He walked
out.”

  She looks tortured as she shifts her purse from one arm to the other. “Doesn’t matter how or why he left. A good woman is supposed to be able to keep her man.”

  And I understand her perfectly, perhaps for the first time ever. We have both spent our entire lives trying hard, so very hard, and it’s still not enough. And despite wanting to be good, we have been found wanting.

  If we were different people, or this were a Hallmark after-school special, this is where I’d hug her. There’d be a swell of music—lots of strings—but this isn’t a movie. This is my mom and me.

  So we sit there at our corner table in the Vintage Press and smile awkwardly with that intense history of love and loss between us. Probably no one but us will ever understand how brutal it was for Dad to leave and for us to be left behind. No one else will understand in quite the same way, not even my brother and sister, because they’re not emotionally built the same.

  My mom...

  My mom...

  ... is so much like me.

  Maybe that’s why I’ve pushed her away all these years. It’s hard enough living all your own struggles, hard enough to try and fail, without seeing your pain mirrored in someone else.

  “Did something happen at work, Holly?” my mom asks hesitantly, and yet with a measure of parental possession.

  My eyes burn, a gritty, hot sting, and I swallow hard. “Yes.” And I’m just about to tell her when the waitress approaches. Mom knows the waitress, and they chat, and then Mom introduces me proudly as her daughter, the one who lives in San Francisco, the PR daughter, the one who does event planning.

  Mom is proud of me, I think. She loved visiting me in San Francisco, going to my office and seeing where I worked. And now I’ve got to tell her I don’t work there anymore. That I’ve been fired.

  By the time the waitress leaves, I know I can’t tell Mom now, at least not here, not before dinner. She’s so happy at the moment, so excited to be out having dinner with me.

  “Don’t you ever get lonely, Mom?” I ask an hour later, as our dessert dishes are cleared. I had crème brûlée and she had cheesecake, and we’re both stuffed, but it was so worth it.

  “No. I’ve learned to stay busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Puttering in the garden. Scrapbooking. Volunteer work.”

  “That’s good.” But is it? Because, God help me, I don’t want to end up like this. I don’t. I want so much more out of life. And I don’t want to be her age, living alone, trying to find ways to fill my time so I don’t know that everybody has up and gone and left me behind.

  That life has left me behind.

  I don’t want to miss out on anything. I’m struggling with the dreams, all those dreams I still have and can’t let go of, when Mom and I gather our purses and head out.

  It’s nearly the first of May, and it’s a beautiful night. It’s warm outside, and the sky is clear, and the stars spread out above my head everywhere.

  As we walk toward our cars, I take a deep breath, thinking that coming home always undoes me. Here in Visalia I remember everything. I remember Bastard Ted leaving, and I remember my mother valiantly coping, and I remember how Christmas was never the same. I remember the ugly clothes I used to wear when we couldn’t afford better, and that big purchase, the first pair of high heels. I remember falling in them, and I remember people laughing, and I remember always wanting more.

  Next to Mom’s car, I suddenly blurt out, “I lost my job.”

  Mom’s just starting to sit in the driver’s seat, and she grabs the steering wheel. “You were laid off?”

  “Fired.”

  “Fired,” she echoes. “Why? What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But you had to do something if you were fired.”

  I love how she always takes my side. I shake my head, angry. “I’ll see you at home,” I say, and I walk quickly to my car.

  I don’t mean to cry, don’t want to cry, but the tears fall as I enter the house. I shouldn’t have come home. This was the wrong place to go.

  Mom’s hovering in the kitchen anxiously. “Holly?”

  “I’m tired, Mom. I’m going to bed.”

  “You don’t want any tea?”

  I stand in the shadows near my room, dashing away tears. “No. I just need sleep. I’m tired. It’s been a long weekend.”

  “But tea will help you relax better.”

  I want her to stop talking. I can’t bear it right now. I can’t think, can’t feel, can’t. Can’t.

  Can’t.

  But she won’t leave me alone. She turns on the hall light, comes toward me. “You’re crying.”

  “I’m not.” And I step back, and I dash away more tears because I am crying. I can’t stop.

  She reaches for me, and I snap, “Don’t.”

  Mom freezes, and I shake my head, angry, so angry, and I don’t want to be angry with her, God knows I don’t, but when she starts talking, when she has that expression on her face, the one that says she’s trying so hard to please me, I just want to get away.

  I want her to go away.

  I want to run away.

  I’ve needed her my whole life, and I still don’t know how to have her, the mother I want. I don’t know how to let her comfort me or talk to me. I don’t know anything anymore.

  “Holly, I hate seeing you so sad.”

  I look up, fiercely wiping away tears. “Well, Mom, I hate seeing you so sad, too.”

  “I’m not sad.”

  “You are. You live in this horrible little house all alone. You don’t travel or do things. You just wait for us to come home.”

  “Because I love it when you come home.”

  “I know, but we’re adults. We’ve got lives of our own, and I know you want me here, and I know you need me here, and I can’t be here—” I break off, cover my mouth, and I don’t know if other people feel this way about their moms. Does anyone else worry and struggle and feel guilty for growing up and going away? “Mom.”

  “What, Holly?”

  I shake my head. I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain anything, and I don’t understand what I’m feeling or what I want from her. I go sit down at the round oak table in the kitchen, and Mom sits down, too.

  “You’ll get another job,” Mom says.

  I know she’s trying, and I give her credit for that, but she’s not saying what I need to hear.

  What I need to hear is that she knows she’s hurt me, and that she’s sorry.

  That she’s sorry she didn’t see me as I wanted to be seen instead of as the daughter she was so sure she knew. Yes, she knew me as one thing. But I wanted to be the other thing.

  I wanted to be magical and special, strong, tender, invincible. I wanted to be like all the daring heroines in fairy tales. Not the ones who were waiting to be rescued, but the ones rescuing, the ones saving. Not the sleeping princess needing to be awakened, but the warrior woman like Belle, who’d rescue her father from the monster’s dungeon, a brave woman who’d fight a powerful curse.

  That’s the me who has always been here, but maybe she was buried so deep inside that no one—not even me—knew how real she was.

  She is real. And she wants more.

  So much more. She wants the big adventure she’s never had; she wants the victories; she wants to be the confident, daring hero, not the damsel in distress.

  No more waiting like Rapunzel locked up in the ivory tower. No more Sleeping Beauty dozing in a high palace chamber. No more Snow White laid out on ice beneath glass.

  “Mom, I’m different from you,” I say, “and you should be glad I’m different. You should be glad I want to be me.”

  My mother looks at me, and she isn’t crying, but her eyes aren’t completely dry. “Of course I am.”

  There’s the “of course” again.

  “All I ever wanted was for you to be happy,” she adds, and I think for a minute, think about what’s happened and what will happen, about the thin
gs I know and the things I don’t, and I’m not afraid of the future anymore, or the things that could go wrong... because things will also go right.

  I can get things right.

  I do get things right. And slowly I’m figuring out life. Figuring out me.

  Mom’s still sitting here, looking confused and a little lonely. I know that face because that’s how I’ve felt most of my life. That’s the way I thought I was supposed to feel: not knowing we can choose other paths, other thoughts, other directions, other selves, and not looking back but going forward.

  And going forward means doing something for Mom, who has tried so hard all these years to do for me, and because I love her (and fear her), because I need her (and fear that), I’ve made it difficult.

  I’ve pushed her away, worried she’d cut my wings and trap me, worried that in this fight called life she’d always be higher than me on the hierarchy totem pole. But it shouldn’t be a fight anymore, at least not a fight between us. We really should be on the same team.

  If I can’t protect her back, then who will?

  If I can’t defend her against the world, then what good is it being strong and the hero in the fairy tale? If I can’t let my mother know she has succeeded and done well, then how will I ever encourage my own daughter?

  But, God, the words are hard. I still don’t have the words. I’ve never known quite what to say.

  Awkwardly I reach toward her and take her hand on the table and hold it in mine. Mom looks at me, and the tears are there again, the tears that let me know she hurts far more than she should ever have been hurt, that life hasn’t been easy and maybe all she ever wanted was what she said—for me to have an easier path than hers. For me to be... happy.

  “I love you,” I tell her. I don’t know what else to say, don’t know how to make up for all the lost years when we were two strangers trying to find their way home again.

  Mom reaches up to wipe away a tear. I must have been one hell of a tyrant daughter if I can make my own mother—a non-weepy woman—cry. “I know you do, Holly.”

  “If...” I pause, knowing I can’t say, “If we could do things over,” “If we had another chance,” because life isn’t about going back. It’s not a series of reruns and instant replays. There are no second chances, not the way we’d like. Sometimes we biff it and have to suck it up, living with the consequences. And even if I didn’t always get what I needed from Mom, I realize she didn’t get what she needed from me, and that maybe we’ll never be that close, maybe we’ll never be best friends or bosom buddies—but I am what I am because of her.