by Tawna Fenske
It’s too late, Grady.
And it was, wasn’t it?
Her whole being fought the idea, both for her father and herself. She took a few calming breaths as she finished spreading peanut butter, summoning courage to ask the big one. The question she really wanted to ask.
“Why did she leave?”
He didn’t answer. As the silence stretched out, she set the knife down again and looked up at her father.
His head wasn’t in his hands anymore. He was watching her, rheumy, bloodshot eyes staring at her like he’d never seen her before.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Only she can answer that.”
“You’ve spoken to her?”
“No. Never. I didn’t even know for sure she was still alive.”
But Willa knew. Had an address and everything, though she hadn’t done a damn thing about it. She was too scared, too paralyzed by the past and her fears for the future, so she stayed stuck where she was, treading water, fighting for air.
That was how she’d been living, too, wasn’t it? Her career, her relationships, her life—all of it was conducted in survival mode.
No more.
“I’m going to see her.”
She hadn’t planned to say that. Hadn’t really planned to do it, either. But the second she said the words out loud, she knew they were exactly right. “I’m going to get some answers.”
“Good.” Her father nodded, anchoring his palms on his knees like he could draw strength from them. “I think you should. I think it’s not healthy to let things fester.”
It was her turn to snort. She opened the jelly jar and stabbed the knife inside, then pulled it out with a thick glob of strawberry on the end. Breathing in and out, she finished the sandwiches and set the knife on the counter.
Then she met his eyes again. “You need help, Dad,” she said. “Real, professional help to deal with your drinking. I’m done.”
He stared at her. It wasn’t the first time she’d said those words to him, but it was the first time she’d said them with such force. The first time she’d meant them with every fiber of her being, and she saw in his eyes that he knew it.
She braced herself for the denial. The I don’t have a problem or I can stop anytime I want. She’d heard the denials so many times, she could parrot the words right along with him.
“Okay,” he said, nodding once. “Okay.”
“What?” She must have heard him wrong.
“All right,” he said, his voice firmer this time. “You go see your mom. You find out what you need to find out. And when you come back, we’ll go.”
“Go,” she repeated, still sure she’d heard wrong. “You mean you’ll go to rehab?”
He shook his head, lowering it slowly to his hands again. “I don’t know where I’ll get the money, but—”
“I’ve got it,” she said. “If you’re serious about going, I can make it happen.”
“I’m serious,” he said into his hands. “This is it. What they call rock bottom, right?”
Willa squeezed her eyes shut, feeling his despair right along with him. “Yeah,” she said. “I think it is.”
“I want it to stop,” he said. “I’ll go. Scout’s honor.”
For the first time in years, she actually believed him.
…
Why was she doing this?
Two years she’d known about her mother. Two years of knowing but not calling, not writing, not even telling anyone close to her that she knew her mom wasn’t really dead.
Why now?
But as she gripped the arms of her airplane seat as it lifted into the air, she knew the answer. Knew it but didn’t like it.
Grady.
He’d shaken something loose inside her, something she’d kept buried for years. How had he managed to do in a couple of months what she’d spent years avoiding? Not just the two years that she’d known the death was a lie but her whole life spent running from feelings of hurt and abandonment and sorrow.
She glanced out the plane’s window as the landscape disappeared below her. Was this what he was seeing? She’d tried not to think about him, not to wonder where he was or what he might be feeling, but she couldn’t help knowing his schedule. Right about now, he’d be getting on a plane with Tony and Jimmy and maybe Ryan and all the other smokejumpers she’d probably never see again.
The thought made her heart ball up like a wet tissue as the plane climbed higher into the clouds. So this was what flying felt like. It was scary and foreign and new, but the glimmers of sun streaking through cotton-ball clouds made her heart feel lighter. Why had she never done this before?
Before she knew it, they were touching down in Florida. Orlando, of all places. Willa had never been, never wanted to go, not even before she’d learned it was the place her mother had chosen over her.
Gathering her things, she trudged off the plane with her carry-on slung over one shoulder. No sense paying for a checked bag, and besides, she wasn’t staying long. Just long enough to look Denise in the eye and ask her why.
Why did you leave me?
Why didn’t you come back?
Why didn’t you love me enough?
She tried not to look at the dollar amount as she signed the paperwork for the rental car. Tried not to remember how her business was blowing up in her face. After losing the TechTel deal, she’d worked overtime pleasing her other clients. It all felt like patchwork, like everything could fall apart at any moment.
Would she ever stop feeling like that?
Yes, yes, of course. After this, she’d keep her eye on the ball. She wouldn’t get distracted, let herself get carried away by frivolous things.
Grady wasn’t frivolous.
Well sure, that’s not what she meant. But relationships—the kind that seized your heart and soul and all your attention—those were for other people. Not for her. She’d always known that.
Double-checking the address, she eased the nondescript economy car into an open spot against the curb. 3268 Piedmont Court, just like it said in the PI’s report. The house was squatty and brown and sagged a little on one side. A scraggly palm tree jutted up from a bed of pink rocks, surrounded by a sea of limp lawn pockmarked with scrubby tan patches. Even with the air-conditioning on full blast, she could feel the sticky heat from outside the car.
Maybe she should have called first, but then she might’ve chickened out. She needed to do this in person. Sometimes the element of surprise was what it took to ensure honesty, and that’s what Willa craved most.
Hands shaking, she tugged the key from the ignition and got out of the car. She started to smooth her skirt but stopped. Did she really care about making a good impression on a woman who’d abandoned her husband and child, letting them believe all these years that she was dead?
But Willa did care, that was the hell of it. So she straightened her skirt and stepped onto the curb. She made her way slowly up the walk, hands shaking at her sides. Maybe her mother had moved. Maybe she was at work or visiting friends or remarried with sixteen children who—
Rrrrrrrrring!
She pressed the doorbell before she had a chance to back out. Deep breath in, out, in, out. Footsteps thudded inside, then the click of a dead bolt being unlocked. The door flew open and then—
“Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying.”
The woman’s bleach-blond hair made a frizzy halo around her head. Deep lines bracketed her eyes, her mouth, the spot where her dimples might be if she smiled. Willa knew those dimples. She saw them each time she smiled in the mirror, which wasn’t often. She knew those green eyes, too, the same ones she’d seen lit from inside those months she’d been with Grady.
No one was smiling now. Her mother’s face showed no flicker of recognition.
“Hello, Denise.” Willa hesitated. “Mom.”
<
br /> The word came out parched and brittle. The woman’s mouth opened, then closed again, then opened. No sound emerged. Not at first.
“Willa? It’s you?”
Willa nodded, not trusting her own voice. Denise’s eyes were familiar, but it was her voice she would have known anywhere. Even cracking with cigarette fatigue, it was the same voice Willa heard in her dreams, singing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” as she drifted off to sleep.
“Holy shit.” Denise blinked. “Holy fucking shit.”
Willa laughed. She couldn’t help it. The whole thing was so absurd. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Pretty much sums it up.”
Her mother nodded, still in shock. “I never thought— I had no idea—” She stopped herself, shaking her head. “I’m guessing you have questions.”
“A few.” Understatement of the year.
Denise’s brow furrowed. “Will you come in?”
Willa hesitated. She’d pictured herself standing her ground, talking to her mother on the porch.
But so much of her life wasn’t turning out how she’d pictured, so she nodded. “Sure.”
Denise stepped aside and Willa moved past her, breathing in the unfamiliar scents. Fabric softener, burned toast, maybe a hint of dog, though she didn’t see one anywhere.
Nothing familiar at all. Not tied to her childhood, anyway.
“Right this way,” Denise said, leading the way down a hall. “The place is a mess. Sorry.”
Sorry? For a few magazines scattered across the coffee table or for a lifetime of worry and sadness and—
“Can I get you something to drink?” Her mother turned at the end of the hallway, gesturing Willa toward a couch in the tiny living room. “Tea or water or soda? I don’t have any wine or beer or anything. Haven’t kept alcohol in the house for years. I can’t—” She stopped there, turned to face Willa. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
This time, Willa felt sure the apology wasn’t for the clutter. Remorse washed over Denise’s face, and her fingers balled white-knuckled in front of her.
Willa looked down to see her own hands clenched in front of her. She released her hold, head spinning from the surreal quality of it all. “Why?”
What a clumsy question, so completely inadequate. The lines in her mother’s face deepened like trenches as she crumpled in on herself. Denise gripped her own elbows, a form of self-comfort Willa knew well.
“Have a seat,” her mother said softly.
She gestured toward a gray-and-cream-checked couch that held two twitchy-tailed tuxedo cats. One cracked an eyelid and peered at Willa as she sat stiffly on the edge of a cushion. A low, soft rumble-purr came from the other end of the sofa, and a wave of homesickness stole her breath away. Homesickness for a home she’d never actually known. How stupid was that?
“So.” Denise sat stiffly on the edge of a faded navy chair, her knees almost close enough to touch Willa’s. “You found me.”
“I assume you didn’t want to be found.” Willa’s voice came out tense and waspish, and she forced herself to take a breath. “Since you faked your own death and everything.”
“I didn’t— It wasn’t like that.”
“No? Then what the hell was it like?”
Denise looked down at her lap. “I wanted what was best for you.”
Willa laughed, a bitter, dry, brittle sound. Of all the ridiculous things to say. “What I wanted was a mother,” she said. “A mother who wouldn’t abandon me, then let me spend my whole childhood thinking she was dead.”
Denise closed her eyes, looking older than she had two minutes ago. “You’re right,” she said. “I deserve that.”
“Why?” Willa demanded again, desperate now for an answer. A real one this time. “You owe me that much, Denise.”
Her mother flinched but then nodded. Her mouth moved like she was weighing the heaviest words imaginable. When she finally spoke, her voice creaked like it hadn’t been used in years.
“I loved your father,” she says. “You need to understand that.”
Willa said nothing. What could she say to that?
“And I loved you, too,” she said. “More than anything. But I wasn’t supposed to get pregnant. It wasn’t meant to happen.”
Willa clenched her hands together in her skirt to keep them from shaking. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Her mother took a ragged breath. “I’m bipolar,” she said. “I also suffer from schizophrenia and chronic depression. The holy trinity of mental illness.”
Willa stared. The words themselves weren’t a shock, but she still didn’t understand.
“The three conditions together can be a nightmare,” her mother supplied. “But they get ten times harder with pregnancy.”
Willa stared at her. “I don’t remember any of this. You seemed like you had it together.”
“You were five years old,” Denise replied, shaking her head. “And I was broken. So broken that no one could have possibly put all the pieces into any semblance of normal. I wasn’t holding it together at all, trust me.”
Willa pressed the heels of her hands into her knees, trying to understand. “So you had me anyway, even though you weren’t supposed to.”
Her mother nodded. “Post-partum depression—that’s a real thing a lot of women face. But for me, it was hell. Years, not months. I couldn’t function. Sometimes all I could do was lie on the couch sobbing while you cried in the other room. Once, I almost burned down the house. You were two and I just left the stove on and walked away. We could have died, both of us.”
Willa held her breath. None of this was familiar to her, but the haunted glaze in her mother’s eyes told her there was truth in those words. No one could fake that look.
“We were always broke,” she said. “Your father, he did his best—tried to cobble together enough money for medications, for the kind of treatment I needed. But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.”
Denise blinked hard, fighting tears with a fierceness Willa knew well. “I finally reached a breaking point,” she said. “I pawned my wedding ring. It wasn’t much, just a tiny little diamond.”
“I remember that ring,” Willa whispered. “You used to let me play with it.”
Denise nodded. “I didn’t get much for it, but it was enough to get me a plane ticket to Florida. To my parents’ house.”
“Grandma and Grandpa.” The words were bitter and thick on her tongue. She hadn’t thought of them in ages, hadn’t seen them since that day in her living room when they’d come to tell her that her mother was dead.
“They had money,” she said. “My father was a psychiatrist. You probably didn’t know that.”
Willa shook her head, trying to understand how that changed things. “They got you help.”
“They paid for the rehab center,” she said. “Inpatient treatment, almost a year in a lockdown facility. I was…I was not well.”
A tear slid down her mother’s cheek, and Willa fought the urge to comfort her. Anger bubbled under the surface of her skin, but sympathy swirled thick in the bitter mixture. “I could have visited you there. Or you could have called. Or—”
“The doctors said no.” Her cheeks reddened, and she looked down at her lap. “My father…he said if I wanted to get better, I needed to do it without outside distractions.”
“I was a distraction.”
Her voice came out flat and hitched up on the last syllable.
A distraction.
She pushed aside the memory of saying that to Grady. That was different.
Her mother shook her head and met Willa’s eyes again. “I didn’t mean it like that. It just… I called your father once from the facility. He said—he told me you were doing great. Both of you, he said everything was fine.”
Had it been? Maybe then, maybe at first. Maybe before the drinking started in e
arnest. “So then what happened?”
“I got better.” Her gaze dropped to her lap, color flooding her cheeks again. “And then I had a setback. Heroin. It’s common for people with mental health challenges to self-medicate; did you know that?”
“I did know that.” Willa pressed her lips together, tamping down the anger. “I knew it because you left me with a goddamn alcoholic. We were homeless; did you know that?”
Denise’s eyes filled with tears and shame. “I didn’t,” she said. “I mean, he always drank. Not like that. Money was his vice, not alcohol. The gambling debts, they were just getting worse. I knew I was more of a burden to him than a help. I couldn’t work; I couldn’t contribute. Hell, I couldn’t even parent my own kid.”
“So you just left,” Willa said. “Without a call or a note or anything.”
Denise flinched again. “I didn’t know until afterward. That my father told you I’d died? I didn’t find out for more than a year. I’d relapsed again and was living on the streets. By the time he told me, the damage was done.”
So much damage. Willa could scarcely breathe. “Grandpa just—just—lied?”
“He thought it was best for all of us,” she said. “He really did, you have to believe that.”
Willa wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. “You still could have called. Or written or something.”
Denise shook her head, green eyes shimmering. “He convinced me it was best for you. That you didn’t even cry when he told you.”
The words felt like a punch to the gut. “I cried every night for years. Do you have any idea what that felt like?”
Denise’s eyes filled, but she blinked back tears. “I was afraid if I stayed in your life, I’d do something awful. Burn down the house or overdose so you’d find me on the floor with a needle in my arm. I was so broken, Willa.”
Willa clenched her hands into fists, heart twisting with equal parts sympathy and anger. “So was I.”
She was still broken, wasn’t she? The only time she’d started to feel whole was with Grady.
She pushed the thought aside, needing to focus on this moment. “I needed you.”
Denise bowed her head. “I thought you were better off without me.”
