“I’m your parent and you’re not eighteen years old yet,” she tells me. “So I can make you go.”
“I don’t understand.” I’m getting loud now. I’m still holding my arm. “We’re going to drive to Maine? That’s how you’re going to fix me? We’re going to take a road trip?”
“You like Maine. Every summer you’re the one who says we should stay in Maine. Move there.”
“Caitlin wanted to move to Maine. Not me.”
“No,” she says quietly. “Both of you wanted to move there. Don’t you remember last summer when you two asked me if you could stay with Laney for your senior year?”
“Now you’re just making shit up.” I walk away from her, wishing I could get farther away than the other side of my bed.
This is it, I tell myself. As soon as she leaves, I’m calling Todd. I’m telling him let’s do this. Let’s move to Somewhere, Alaska, and open a coffee shop or maybe go with his idea of a pot truck, kind of like a food truck. Of course I know I won’t have to call Todd and tell him I want to run away to Alaska with him even though he’s a dickhead, because Mom will back down. She hasn’t got it in her to make me go.
“Pack a bag.” Mom reaches for the doorknob. “We’re leaving in the morning.”
I feel that panic again in my chest. A little bit like I can’t breathe. “I’m not going,” I tell her as she opens the door.
“You are.”
“I’m not.” I cross my arms across my stomach. We’re having a stare-down now. “What are you going to do? Carry me to the car? Tie me in?”
She looks away from me and I know I’ve won. I know we’re not going to Maine. We’re not going anywhere.
She looks back at me. “So here are your choices,” she says, her voice still calm. Except now it’s creepy calm. Like she’s crazy, too. “Either you get in the car tomorrow morning with me or I’m having you committed.”
For a second I don’t know what she’s talking about. Committed? Committed to what?
Then it dawns on me. She’s talking about the fifth floor of the hospital. The loony bin.
A girl in my physics class was committed for a psych evaluation last fall. On a suicide watch. She and her boyfriend broke up and she slit her wrists. Sort of. She didn’t do it right, obviously, because it didn’t kill her. My theory? She didn’t really want to die.
“You understand what I’m saying, Haley? I’m your legal guardian,” Mom says. “If I call nine-one-one and say I’m afraid you’re going to kill yourself, once the paramedics see your arm, no one will argue with me.”
The look on her face amazes me. She’s totally serious and I’m caught between being so furious with her that I could throw something at her and being completely fascinated. I had no idea Julia Maxton had this in her. She’s always been so easygoing, so . . . weak.
“Mom.” I say her name like I’m trying to get her attention. “You’d have your daughter put in a psych ward?” I manage. “You wouldn’t really do that, would you?”
She just stands there looking at me and I recognize the look on her face. It’s a Caitlin look. Caitlin’s stubborn look. I don’t ever remember seeing it on Mom’s face before, but Caitlin had to have gotten it from somewhere, didn’t she? And since Caitlin’s genes were Mom’s genes . . .
It’s such a weird thought that it sidetracks me for a minute. Then I remember I’m standing in my bedroom discussing my possible commitment to the psych ward with my mother. My mother who’s supposed to be on my side.
“Pack a bag,” she says. “We’ll leave in the morning when Izzy goes to school.”
And then she just walks out of the room, leaving my door wide open. And I almost laugh.
Chapter 18
Izzy
3 years, 8 months
I’m not expecting Mom to come out of the bedroom so fast. I’m expecting the evil one to scream and cuss some more. I assume I’ll have more time to get back to my bedroom and close my door so Mom won’t know what an eavesdropper I am. Eavesdrop was a vocab word at school last week. Or maybe the week before.
I make it all the way to my door, but when Mom backs into the hall, I’m caught. I think about pretending I’m on my way to the kitchen or something, but I’m on the wrong side of my door. She’s not stupid.
I look in her eyes and she looks in mine and I know she knows I was listening. Or at least trying to. I press my palms against the cool wall in the hallway.
I don’t know exactly what She Who Shall Not Be Named has done. I could only hear part of what they were saying. But I know it’s bad. Bad enough for Mom to tell her that either she’s going to Maine with her or she’s locking her up in the booby hatch at the hospital.
“You’re not leaving me here?” I whisper.
She doesn’t say anything. She just stands there. She looks really skinny, skinnier than I’ve ever seen her. And sad. But I see something else, too, something on her face that I haven’t seen since Caitlin bit the dust. She looks . . . determined.
“Mom.” I say her name like she’s my true love the way people say their boyfriend or girlfriend’s name in the movies Caitlin used to watch. “You wouldn’t leave me. You wouldn’t take her and leave me . . . would you?” I’m afraid I’m going to cry and I don’t want to. I have to be strong for Mom. Caitlin wants me to be strong. She says I’m the only one in the house who’s got his or her S together.
“Izzy.” Mom sighs my name like she’s really tired. Tired of the other one, I’d say.
But the way she says my name makes me think she really is going to leave me and for a second I feel like I can’t catch my breath. I can’t let her do it. If she leaves me, I don’t know if I can stand it. I don’t know if I can survive. I love Dad. I do. And I think he loves me, too. We’re buddies. We both like the History Channel and black-and-white shakes. But how I feel about him is different from the way I feel about Mom. I don’t know how or why, it just is.
“Izzy, your sister—” Mom looks back down the hall.
She Who Shall Not Be Named’s door is slowly closing. Like magically, except that Mom and I both know who’s on the other side of the door closing it.
“Leave it open!” Mom shouts, her voice so sharp it startles me. Like when you drop a glass on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night and it shatters. Or like the crack of a whip. Except I’ve never heard the crack of a whip in person, only on TV.
She Who Shall Not Be Named doesn’t say anything, but the door stops moving.
Mom waits a second. We both stare at the door at the end of the hall. She turns back to me. “Izzy, I need to do this.”
I shake my head. I keep shaking it. I’m fighting not to cry. “Let me go with you. I won’t say anything. I won’t say a word between here and the Maine state line.” I make a motion like I’m zipping my mouth shut. “I swear I won’t. You won’t even know I’m in the car, Mom. You don’t have to feed me or anything.”
“I can’t take you with us.” She says it quietly, I know, so the killer down the hall won’t hear her.
“I won’t be mean to her,” I say quickly, trying to up the ante. Usually you use the word ante when you’re playing cards, but the term is appropriate here. I know I’m using it right. “I can’t promise you I’ll be nice to her because she killed my sister,” I go on. “But, but I won’t be mean. I’ll ride in the backseat and I won’t barf. She can ride shotgun all the way to Maine and I’ll ride in the back and then she won’t have to smell my stench.”
Haley used to say that when she wanted me to scram. She’d say, “Beat it, Izzy. I can smell your stench.”
I don’t think I really stink. My armpits smell a little sour sometimes, but they don’t smell like they smell after you reach puberty. We talked about that in health class. How hormones make your armpits sweat and sometimes even your lady parts. That’s where good hygiene comes in handy. Or so Mrs. Wooters told us. I’m not all that excited about smelling, but I really want boobs so you have to take the bad with the good, I guess.
Mom’s still standing there in front of me, but she keeps looking toward the bedroom door that was closing of its own accord a second ago. “I hear that window open and I swear by all that’s holy, Haley Grace, I’ll zip-tie your wrist to mine,” she shouts down the hallway.
Mom sounds so loud, so scary, that I try to make myself smaller against the wall. I’ve never heard her talk to one of us this way. She’s usually all calm and . . . reasonable. That tone in her voice doesn’t sound reasonable and it scares me. What if she’s the one who needs to go to the psychiatric ward?
Mom slowly turns her attention back to me. “I want you to stay here and go to school and take care of Mr. Cat.” She smiles down at me, her sad smile, but not her pitiful smile, that smile of hers that makes me feel so bad for her. “We won’t be gone too long, Izzy.”
“It’s not fair.” My voice is shaky. I can’t stay here with Dad. I can’t do it. I’m scared. Not of Dad. Just of not having Mom. A mom who lies in her bed and cries all day is better than no mom.
She just stands there and looks at me.
“How long?” I ask.
“I don’t know. It should take us five or six days to drive there, but after that, I don’t know how long we’ll—”
“A week to drive?” I just stare at her. “A week to drive? You stay a week, maybe ten days. A week back. That’s a month. You’re going to leave me here by myself for a month?”
“Izzy, you won’t be alone. Dad will be here. And I won’t be gone a month,” she tells me. But I can tell in her voice that she’s not absolutely, positively sure that’s the truth.
“You’re not coming back.” My voice is getting squeaky.
“Izzy. Sweetheart.” She looks down the hall at the door. It hasn’t moved.
I wait for her to remember I’m alive.
“Please, Mom?” I grab her hand. I can’t help it. I’m crying. “Let me go with you.”
“Izzy, Izzy.” She pulls me against her and I relax and let her hug me. “I can’t. I would if I could.” She kisses the top of my head. “It wouldn’t be good for you. Haley, she’s . . .”
She’s what? I want to scream. A murderer? A bitch? A big meanie?
“I want to go,” I say against her. I know I’m making her T-shirt wet. I’m probably slobbering on her. “Please, Mom. I need to go. Please.”
“It wouldn’t be fair to you, Izzy. You need to have a normal life. You need your friends and your cat and your bed.”
I look up at her.
She pushes the hair that’s stuck to my face back. “I’ll do this with Haley and then I’ll come back and when school is over, you and I will go somewhere together. All by ourselves. We could go to Oregon and see Crater Lake. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
I think about it. I know she’s trying to bribe me, but that would be so much fun. To go somewhere by myself with Mom. I’ve never gone alone with her anywhere. I mean, I go to my tae kwon do lessons and to the market, but I’ve never gone on a vacation alone with her. I’ve never been in a hotel with just Mom. It would be the best trip of my life. I look up at her. I feel myself weakening. Wanting to say okay.
But I can’t. I can’t let her leave me here.
I pull away and duck into my room. I wipe my snotty nose on the back of my hand. I grab my purple zip-up bag off the floor that’s filled with Legos that I was thinking about selling on eBay. I still kind of like to play with them, but I know I’m getting too old for them. I should be growing boobs soon; girls with boobs don’t play with Legos.
Mom follows me into my room. She stands in my doorway, keeping one eye down the hall. On She Who Shall Not Be Named. “What are you doing?” she asks me as she watches me dump the Legos on my bed.
I don’t say anything. I put shirts in the bag.
“You’re not going with me, Izzy. Your father and I talked about it and you’re staying here.”
“I’m not staying here.” Jeans go in next. A sweatshirt. My Little Mermaid sleep pants. My SpongeBob sleep pants. My Looney Tunes sleep pants. I love sleep pants and sleep pants are important on a road trip. You can wear them to sleep in, but you can also wear them in the car. I add a pair of sleep shorts with rubber duckies on them, just because you never know if you’ll need sleep shorts.
“Izzy, I’m serious. You can’t go with me.”
“What’d she do?” I stick Bunny in the bag. “What’d she do that’s so bad that she has to leave?” Next, I throw a book in, the first in a troll series I’m reading.
Mom leans against the doorjamb, still keeping an eye on She Who Shall Not Be Named’s door. “She try to do herself in? Is that why she stole Nana’s pain pills? She’s trying to end it all?” I say it mean.
I realized I sound uglier than the murderer down the hall and I feel ashamed. I don’t want to be like her. Ever. Tears roll down my cheeks and Mom leaves her post at the door.
“It’s going to be all right, Izzy,” she says, hugging me.
I wrap my arms around my mom like I never want to let her go. Because I don’t.
Chapter 19
Julia
50 days
“I guess I’ll see how it goes,” I say to Laney on the phone. I’m standing in the middle of my bedroom. I’m trying to finish packing, but I can’t seem to do two things at once: talk and pack. In my old, pre-Caitlin’s-death life I could do ten things at once. “But I’ll let you know where we are. My plan is to take about a week, maybe go see some sights on our way. I don’t know. The Grand Canyon or something. I guess it depends on which way we go.”
“See who throws whom off a cliff first, you or Haley?” she teases.
“I hope not,” I say, feeling a moment of wavering. “Is this really a good idea? Taking my obviously troubled daughter on a cross-country trip? Once I get her in the car, then what? What if she refuses to speak to me for three thousand miles? What if she doesn’t? I have no idea what to say to her. God, Laney, she’s so much like I was.”
“Minus the black eye pencil,” Laney quips.
“Minus the black eye pencil,” I agree. “If I had been in her position, at her age, I’d have been wracked with guilt too. What do I say to her? How do I help her get through this?”
“You can do this,” Laney tells me softly into my ear. “I don’t know what to tell you to say, but I know you’ll know when the time comes. You’re a good mother, Jules.”
I hear footsteps and glance up to see Ben walking in the bedroom.
He goes to close the door.
“Leave it open,” I tell him, moving my cell away from my mouth so I’m not shouting in Laney’s ear.
He stands there looking at me.
I say into the phone, “How about if I give you a call tomorrow night?”
“Promise me. No incommunicado, Jules. You have to promise me.”
“I promise. Thanks for calling back. I know it’s late.”
“Never too late. Never. I’m glad you’re coming, Jules.” She sounds emotional. “You’re doing the right thing.”
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but at least I’m doing something. And the fact that Laney thinks I’m doing the right thing makes me feel better. Less like a lunatic, at least. And Laney didn’t have any doubt that I could manage to drive my daughter and myself across country and manage to find Maine without being raped and murdered, our bodies left alongside the road. “Thanks, Laney. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” I hang up and toss my cell on the bed.
“What’s with the door?” Ben gestures to it. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“We’ll just have to talk quietly. I don’t trust her. I wouldn’t put it past her to run away.” I go to my nightstand and unplug my Kindle from its charger. The battery was dead. I hadn’t opened it since Caitlin died, which seems odd when I think about it. I’ve always been an avid reader. I used to read a book a week, sometimes more. I don’t know why I want to take it with me. “I sent an e-mail to Joe, resigning,” I tell him.
“You didn’t even call hi
m? Jules.”
I ignore his tone, a mix of condemnation and disappointment. “I wasn’t up to it.”
He watches me wind up the charger. “So you’re really doing this?” he asks, still glued to the same spot, in our bedroom, but not really in our bedroom, hovering near the open door. Not quite fully committed. A reflection of our relationship?
“I’m doing it.” I nod harder than I need to and we meet each other’s gazes. He’s upset with me. But I’m not sure exactly why. I don’t think it’s because he’s certain getting Haley into counseling right away is our best course of action. I feel like my taking Haley to Maine is . . . an inconvenience. An inconvenience because he’ll have to do something with Izzy. An inconvenience because he’ll have to tell his mother what his crazy wife has done with his crazy daughter.
I don’t like the idea that somewhere deep inside, the idea that I’m going to tick off his mother gives me a little thrill.
He rubs the bridge of his nose between his thumb and finger. “Jules . . .” He says it in a sigh. As if he’s trying to get up enough energy to care.
I wish he’d yell. At least then I’d know he did care. I don’t mind if he disagrees with me. I just want him to feel something, anything, strongly. I want to think that this . . . his seeming lack of caring, about anything, is a result of the loss of our daughter. But I know that’s not true. I saw signs of it before Caitlin died. Months ago . . . years ago.
Like our sex life, I can’t exactly put my finger on when things changed. Or why. I think it must have happened sometime around when Haley went to high school. I took the part-time job. Ben started putting more hours in at work and fewer hours in at home. His explanations (or excuses?) were completely reasonable; the family business took a big hit when the economy floundered and then didn’t recover. He and his brothers went back to working on properties instead of managing from the front seats of their pickups. And when Ben came home, he was tired; he didn’t want to hear about my boring day filled with numbers from my accounting job, or tracking down the right kind of glitter for the new skirts I was making for Caitlin’s cheer team. And to be fair to Ben, I didn’t press it. He was giving more time to his business and his brothers and mother, but I didn’t challenge it. If I’m painfully honest with myself, maybe I even contributed to the fractures in our relationship. We stopped going out on dates by mutual consent; we were both so busy. Dinner out was expensive; the money could be better spent on braces or a new refrigerator. Both of us were full of excuses and explanations to justify ourselves and our behavior toward each other.
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