I sit down next to his rocking chair, and he says, “Well, what’s the story? Someone break your heart?”
I shake my head. “Someone died.”
“Sorry,” Ernie says, sounding sincere for possibly the first time since I’ve met him.
“Thanks. It was a long time coming.” I add the disclaimer because I’ve spent the last week trying to numb my pain by telling myself that I knew this was coming. And yet everything still hurts.
“Doesn’t make it any better,” he says. “Hell, I’ve been dying for eighty-seven years and I’m still no good at it.”
I smile. “That’s a good thing, Ernie.”
He harrumphs. “You missed a lot while you were gone,” he says.
“Tell me,” I say.
“The granddaughter sent me this watch thing. Except it doesn’t tell the time. It’s blasting music, showing pictures. It’s terrible.” He pulls it out from his pocket and shows me.
“Ernie, this is really cool. It’s the latest fashion.”
“Why does a wrinkled potato like me need the latest fashion?”
“You can talk to your great-grandkids with it, you can turn on your music without having to get up and go to your speaker. So many cool things. I’m going to show you how to use it, okay?”
Ernie seems skeptical, but he patiently sits through our tutorial. Thirty minutes later he knows how to check and respond to messages and also to check the time, which he claims is the only thing he really needs it for.
“Now I can text you, and you can text me back,” I tell Ernie.
“If I have something to say to you, I’ll say it when you’re here. Unless you’ve wised up and decided to stop coming after all.”
“No, I have not,” I say firmly. “And you better respond to my texts. It’s rude not to.”
He mutters something under his breath.
“What was that?” I ask.
“I’m saying maybe my brother got the better end of the deal, not having to deal with this nonsense. Gareth Richard Solomon IV, the lucky son of a bitch.”
I try not to laugh.
“I haven’t told you the best news,” Ernie says now, after we’ve put the watch away for the day. “Clarisse has asked to be moved from next door. Says living beside me has been a nightmare, worse than all her previous marriages combined.”
He slaps his thigh as he roars with laughter, but I only shake my head.
“She seems like a nice lady. Maybe the two of you could have been friends if you’d been kinder to her.”
“Oh, come on,” Ernie says. “What’s the point of making it this far in life if I can’t have a little fun every now and again?”
“Kimberley said she would send the fart machine,” he continues now. “So whoever the next goddamned sucker is, he’s in for something special. I give him a month.”
Maybe I’ve fallen out of the rhythm, being away from Ernie for a couple of weeks, but instead of laughing with him the way I might have, I just feel sad. Why is he so determined to keep everyone away? He chases off all his neighbors, tells me repeatedly not to come back, and acts for his family like he doesn’t care if they visit or not.
He’s never denied what he’s doing, either. He straight up told me weeks ago that he wants me to go before I get sick of him. And maybe I should be the one who’s worried about him getting sick of me, but I’m all he has, and I care about him. If Mel taught me anything, it’s that being all someone has and caring about them counts for a lot.
“You know there’s nothing you can do to chase me away, right?” I tell him now, but he just snorts.
At the end of my two hours with him, I squeeze his arm. “I’ll see you in a couple of days, Ernie.”
He doesn’t say anything as he watches me go.
Over the next few weeks I fall back into a rhythm. Camp, Ernie, tennis lessons. In the last week of August, Willow’s dad calls me into his office at Tennis Win and asks if I’m interested in a paid part-time coaching position. I’d pretty much be doing the same hours, but I’d be paid for it. It’s basically a no-brainer. Except it’s not why I started volunteering at the club. First, they lost an instructor when they lost Ro. Second, I wanted to make someone love tennis as much as Ro did. He never got to come back to Winchester and become head coach, the way he always said he would if he didn’t make it as a pro or when his tennis career was over.
So I thank Mr. Hastings for the offer and say I’d rather keep volunteering. He looks at me like I’ve sprouted a second head.
“I’m essentially offering to pay you for exactly what you’re already doing,” he says.
“I know. I just don’t feel comfortable taking it,” I say. “This is my way to . . . give back.”
He stares at me for a second, then shakes his head. “All right. Let me know if you change your mind.”
I promise I will, but I know I won’t.
The next day, Diana calls me into her office to talk to me. In my mind, because the meeting with Mr. Hastings was a “good” thing, this meeting with my boss has to be a bad thing. It’s the only way the universe maintains its balance.
“You wanted to see me?” I say, sticking my head into her office.
“Yes. Come and have a seat,” she says, motioning to the empty chair on the opposite side of her desk. “So—all of us here at Camp MORE have been so impressed by your work over the summer. Now that camp is ending, most of your fellow leaders are going back to school or college, but I understand you’ll be in Winchester for another year?”
I nod.
“Great. Before you commit to something else, I wanted to talk to you and see if you would be willing to be part of the team that runs our day programs during the school year.”
“Really?” I ask.
She smiles at me. “Really.”
I take the job. I’m not stupid enough to think I don’t need some sort of job for the next year, and this is different from the tennis thing. Plus, this would be forty hours a week, and between my other job with Ernie and continuing to volunteer, almost every hour in my day will be accounted for.
The last day of camp is full of tearful goodbyes, full of hugs and colorful drawings offered as gifts from the kids. I’m sad the summer’s over, but I’m sad in general, so I barely feel anything.
On Sunday, two days after the end of camp, I stand in Willow’s driveway and hug her before her parents take her to the airport.
“Everyone remembers my best friend Jessi from the camping video, right?” she asks, pointing the camera at me. I try not to stiffen or act like a weirdo. “Well, she’s here saying goodbye now. She brought me these Red Vines and a gorgeous new camera bag that I can’t wait to start using.”
She puts her arm around me and pulls me into the frame with her. “I’m so sad, I don’t wanna leave anymore.”
“You’ll love Houston,” I say, a lump forming in my throat as I realize I am losing my last friend.
“Probably,” she says. “But it won’t have you or Brett.”
She’s sniffling suddenly, and then her camera goes down and we’re hugging.
“Ugh, I’m ruining my makeup,” she says.
“No, you’re fine,” I say, wiping some mascara off her cheek.
“Did Brett tell you he’s coming to visit me next weekend?”
I shake my head.
“That’s making me feel a little better. I’m also excited for us to no longer be under the watchful eye of the parental units,” she whispers. Her parents are puttering around inside, but they do not need to hear this.
“Aren’t you still recording?” I ask, and I laugh as Willow says an uncharacteristic curse word before turning the camera off.
“Promise to keep me up to date on any Luke developments,” she says. She is still hopeful that Luke and I will get back together, even though I’ve told her we haven’t spoken since the wake.
“There won’t be any, but okay.”
“Be nice to yourself,” she says now, throwing her arms around me
one more time. A few minutes later I walk back to my car, wave one more time at Willow, and drive home.
25
Mom 2.0 calls a family meeting a couple of days after Willow leaves, and four days after Camp MORE ends. I’ve been part of several Cohen family meetings, where they discussed things like chores and the dog not being allowed on the furniture and other random things families argue over.
Naturally, my family has never had one of these. At least they’ve never had one involving me. For all I know, my parents have had dozens of them in the past.
I flop down on the couch after dinner, wary and unsure of what to expect. If I’m being honest, I’m also feeling slightly defensive. After all, we’ve never talked about the fight we had the day I came home from Luke’s at five in the morning. When Mel died, my parents acted as if I hadn’t said any of the things I’d said, and we all sort of went back to our version of normal.
Strangely, even though my mother called the meeting, she looks nervous, too. In the last couple of months I’ve started to notice that her eyes blink fast when she’s anxious about something. It’s such a tiny thing, a random detail anyone could miss, but all it does is remind me of how much I don’t know about her. How little time I’ve spent with my own mother.
Dad sits beside Mom on the loveseat and looks at her, letting her take the lead.
“I’m sure we all remember the incident from a couple of weeks ago,” she begins now, looking pointedly at me. I fold my arms across my chest, bracing myself. I know I should feel bad for going off on them like that, but to be honest, I don’t really regret anything I said. And I’m not sure I can offer a convincing apology, if that’s what this meeting is about.
Since Mel’s death, I’ve felt numb. Distant from everything and everyone. Like I’m on an island by myself. One without touch or sound or sensation of any kind. I feel . . . mute.
“It was pretty . . . unpleasant,” Mom says now. “Which is why I want to apologize.”
Her words draw me back to this moment, and I’m not entirely sure I heard right. “Apologize?” I repeat.
Mom nods. “I owe you an apology for the past eighteen years, but for that morning too. Jessi, I know how much it hurt you, my being so absent from your life for so many years.” She blinks hard now, and I see her eyes welling with tears. “It’s the thing I regret most in the world—the thing I’ll always regret, to have wasted so much time.”
“You were sick,” I say, feeling guilty. It’s true that she was clearly not well, and my words during that argument weren’t very understanding.
“I know I was,” Mom says, “but I was also so stubborn and hardheaded.” She looks at Dad, then back at me. “Honey, how much do you know about our lives before we had you?”
I shrug. “I know you met in grad school, that you traveled a bunch before you opened EyeCon. That you were happy.” My eyes drift to the pictures mounted on the walls, most of them pictures of my parents before me or pictures of me alone, growing up. We don’t have a lot of family pictures of the three of us.
“We were happy,” Dad says now. “But we also overcame a lot.”
“Mom’s family?” I guess, and my mother nods.
“I told you a while ago how they felt about your father and our marriage.”
“They had a lot of outdated views,” Dad says. “I wish we’d told you about it sooner, but we thought we were making it easier for you, keeping you from the ugliness of that, letting you grow up to see that people of different colors can love each other. Because they can.”
He looks at Mom as he says it, and for all the things I’ve doubted in my life—whether my mother loved me, whether the Cohens saw me as one of their own, whether I could ever truly belong anywhere—that was the one thing I’ve never doubted: how much they loved each other.
“Another of their outdated beliefs was about mental health,” Mom continues. “You didn’t treat depression in my family; you ignored it or rose above it.”
“I owe you an apology, too,” Dad says. “Because I let my own pride get in the way. You see, soon after your mother had you, I knew she was sick. It was like night and day how different she was. She lost her appetite, her drive, her joy.”
I swallow. This part I know all too well.
“After the first couple of months I started pushing for her to get help, but she was so resistant. I tried to get her into therapy, tried to get her to see a bunch of doctors, but she wouldn’t do it. And she started to resent me for it, to pull away from me. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her, so I . . . I stopped pushing so hard. And this—the way she was—became our norm. I convinced myself that as long as she wasn’t in crisis, I didn’t need to worry. I told myself, she still makes it to work most days. She’s not suicidal. She just needs rest and time.”
The familiar refrain from my childhood makes my head spin.
“It obviously didn’t help,” I say, surprised to hear the anger in my voice.
“I know,” Dad says. “I still brought it up sometimes, tried to talk her into seeing different doctors, discussing treatment options.”
“I wasn’t . . . ready,” Mom says. “Most days I could convince myself that I was just tired, just overwhelmed, but on the days when I could admit that something was wrong, I bullied myself into believing I was weak, that I should be able to snap out of it. You don’t know how much you internalize from the family you’re born into.”
It reminds me of what Luke said while we were camping over the summer. About how he’d learned things from his father he didn’t know he had. My mind flits to him briefly and I wonder how he’s doing, how he’s coping without Mel, whether he thinks of me.
“Like your father said,” Mom continues, “I wasn’t suicidal. I was mostly functional. I just wasn’t happy or present, and that didn’t sound sick to me. It sounded like something I should be able to fix on my own . . .
“It was the day Mel was diagnosed, when I saw what it did to you, that something changed. I didn’t make the jump to getting help right away—that came a few months later. But seeing you that day . . . you were so heartbroken at the thought of losing Mel, and I realized you wouldn’t have anything to grieve if you ever lost me, your own mother. Because I hadn’t been there for you. I hadn’t . . .”
She’s crying too hard now to keep speaking, and Dad rubs her knee.
“You got help because of me?” I am incredulous. “Even though I was the reason you were sick to begin with?”
My parents exchange a look.
“Jessi, you were not the reason your mother was sick,” Dad says firmly. “Yes, her issues started postpartum, but that’s biological, neurochemical, nothing to do with you.”
Mom crosses the room and takes my face in her hands, her hands that are warm for the first time that I can remember.
“You were the bright spot in my life, the thing that kept me going,” she says, tears still streaming down her face. “I loved you. I love you.”
I broke you, I think, but as if she can read my thoughts, Mom shakes her head.
“Don’t you ever believe anything else,” she says, her hands still cupping my face.
My eyes are filling, and I blink hard and fast.
“You said something the other morning—that it was too late,” Dad says now. “Too late for us to change how things are in this family, but I think your mother’s progress the last few months shows that it’s never too late. That there’s always hope . . . as long as you’re willing to try.”
It’s similar to the conversation Mom and I had at the start of the summer about me being back in Mel’s life despite all the time that had passed.
Mom lets go of my face and sits down on the couch beside me, reaching for my hand like she’s afraid to let me go.
“I guess that’s what we want you to think about,” she says. “If you’re willing to give us—this family—another chance. We’ve failed you, and we might not deserve it, but we’re asking for it.”
I’ve waited all my l
ife to hear this. Literally, all my life. Even now, when I’m eighteen and old enough that my family should matter less, it still makes my heart beat faster. Still makes me wonder if there’s a chance that everything can get better. But then I remember how much time has passed, and I remember that Mel is gone, and Luke and Ro and Sydney. I remember that the pillars of my life for so long have crumbled, and I don’t know if I have the energy to try to rebuild it.
“Just think about it,” Mom says now.
Right in this moment, her eyes don’t have the determination and fervor of Mom 2.0. But neither do they have the sad, vacant look of the mother I’ve known for eighteen years. They look desperate and present and a little bit hopeful. The strangest thing, though, is that they also look the slightest bit familiar. Like the woman in the pictures from when my parents were newlyweds and traveling around the world. They look like someone who’s slowly coming back from the dead.
“Think about it,” Dad echoes, so I promise them I will.
26
When I wake up the next morning to a ringing phone and see Naomi’s name on my screen, my first reaction is panic. I reach for it, chest tight, and answer.
“Jessi,” Naomi says. “Where do you live?”
“Me?”
“No, the pope,” she says impatiently. “What’s your address? I have something for you.”
“Oh . . . um, okay,” I say. I tell her my address, and when she says she’ll be over in half an hour, I climb out of bed and try to make myself presentable.
True to her word, the doorbell rings exactly twenty-nine minutes after she called. My parents are both working today, and my new gig at the community center doesn’t start till next week. Quite frankly, I’m prepared for this week to be a bitch.
What I’m not prepared for is the big brown box Naomi hands me when I answer the door.
“These are for you,” she says in lieu of a greeting. It is reassuring in a strange way to have the curt Naomi back. The one who doesn’t call me honey or give me pitying looks. The one who is too much of a hard-ass to cry even if she’s hurting just as much as I am.
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