by Amber Smith
“And you wanted one of those golden retrievers, not a stray. But then what happened? Tell her,” Dad teased. “Thirty minutes later, your mother was sitting on the kitchen floor with the puppy, calling her Roxie, feeding her ground beef she cooked special just for her!” He laughed like I hadn’t seen him laugh in years.
Mom busted out laughing too. But as her laughter slowed, she sighed, and said, “She was with us through everything, wasn’t she?”
Dad’s smile faded then, and so did mine.
We knew what “everything” meant—she was there through the good, short-lived times, there through the bad years that fell on either side of Mom and Dad’s split, and then there through the excruciating—Mallory and everything since.
“I just don’t know what to do without her,” Mom managed to get out before losing her voice to the tears she was trying hard to hold back.
Dad gave me a look—we both knew Mom was talking about Mallory now. He put his arm around Mom’s shoulder, and I got on the other side of her and held her hand. It was a strange configuration, one we hadn’t been able to contort ourselves into until now for some reason.
“None of us do, Mom.” I wanted her to know that she wasn’t the only one hurting—that Dad and I were in pain too, just like she was. But I also wanted her to know that she wasn’t alone, like she seemed to think.
She clasped on to my hand and breathed the words, “I know.”
We stayed there like that until the sun was going down. When we returned to the house, I made us grilled cheese sandwiches and we sat at the table, the three of us at the same time, and ate our first meal together, without Roxie, without Mallory.
I went to bed before them.
I couldn’t sleep, though; I just kept tossing and turning. I got up in the middle of the night and saw that Mom’s bedroom door was cracked. I stuck my head in—I wanted to see if she was awake too, but she wasn’t. She was lying there, still in her clothes from earlier. But Dad was there too, still in his clothes as well; even his boots were still on. He was spooning Mom, with his arms around her.
I tiptoed across the room, careful not to wake them up, and I crawled into bed next to Mom, something I hadn’t done since I was six years old.
Without a word, Mom placed her hand on my arm and pulled me closer.
CHRIS
WHEN I RAN TRACK AT school, I remember Coach telling us about practicing mindfulness while running, not to let your thoughts wander. Focus on your breathing, your footfalls, she told me. There was even this metronome app for musicians she said I should try—the repetitive tick-tock would help keep the pace.
That was always my one downfall, she had told me many times: distraction.
Maia was one black-hole-size distraction.
I woke up at 5:00 a.m. like I used to, put on my sneakers, and went for a run without anybody trying to stop me or ask me where I was going or when I’d be back. I’d come home when I was good and ready, shower, and then go through the daily chore of getting dressed without having an anxiety attack.
Because I had a new plan now, a real one—to not let anyone get in my head and distract me from the important stuff, which was going back to school and making it to my eighteenth birthday. After that the next milestone would be making it to graduation, and after that, making it to college, where I could finally begin my life. I’d gotten into a good routine. I made it farther every day, building my endurance.
I’d even started running twice a day: in the morning at sunup and again at sundown.
I was thinking maybe I’d run a marathon in the fall—that would look good for college. I had my eyes and my thoughts and every last shred of energy I possessed focused toward the future. That was all that mattered. And it was working.
When I started running again after I got hurt, I was at an eight-minute mile. Which you hear about all the time as some kind of standard, but it is nothing special. I honestly wondered if I’d ever be able to run on a team again. When I got to Carson, I was at seven minutes, which is still barely competitive, but it was progress. All summer long I’d been stuck at six. I tried to cut myself slack—I hadn’t been training with a team in over a year, I had my injuries slowing me down, and I had Maia. Even on my best days there I couldn’t break it.
The fastest I’d ever run in my entire life was at a meet right before I got hurt. I ran a 4.51.34 and won by five whole seconds.
That evening, on my second run of the day, I ran a 4.50 mile. I had once thought that Maia was the right person at the wrong time. But now I was thinking that it was my whole life that was at the wrong time. The right time was coming, though. Every day that passed brought me one day closer to it.
By the time I got home, it was getting dark, the streetlights blinking on as I turned onto my street. I went into the kitchen for a glass of water, and Mom was there at the table hunched over her day planner, working on her schedule of showing houses and meeting clients.
“Hi,” she said to me as I walked in. “Dad’s working late, so I was thinking of ordering some pizza?”
“Okay,” I replied.
“All right, good.” I could feel her eyes on me as I went to the cupboard, then to the refrigerator. “He’ll be home soon,” she added, almost as if she needed something else to say.
“Okay,” I repeated.
“Chris, sit,” she finally said, closing her planner. “Will you?”
I took the seat opposite her.
“So, how are you doing?” she asked.
I shrugged.
She nodded, and said, “I talked with Isobel the other day. She told me about your girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend anymore, Mom. And I really don’t want to talk about it. Ever.” I started to back my chair away from the table, but Mom reached her hand into the space between us, as if she could pull me closer.
“Wait, Chris. Don’t—don’t leave. You don’t have to talk about her, okay?” I sat back down, and Mom continued. “I just wanted to tell you I know what you’re going through.”
I laughed, shook my head. “I really doubt that.”
“Believe it or not, I remember what it was like to be seventeen. I remember being so heartbroken and devastated and feeling like I’d never get over my first love—”
I had to stop her there. “I thought Dad was your first love.”
“He was—and he was with someone else.”
“But you got him in the end,” I pointed out. “That’s nothing like this.”
She sighed. “Yes, I did get him, but that was years later. Isobel likes to tell a melodramatic version of the story, but they had been broken up for a long time before we ever got together. I still had to get over him. And I did.”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek to stop myself from speaking—I didn’t want to have this or any other conversation with my mom, but I was desperate for advice, even from her. “How?” I muttered.
“Oh, I went off the rails for a while. I did all kinds of crazy things—I used to be cool, you know,” she said, grinning at me.
“Yeah? What crazy things?” I asked, more as a dare than a suspension of my contempt.
“Oh god, I partied, and drank. And smoked pot,” she whispered. “I even vandalized the gas station once,” she added, immediately amending with, “None of those things are cool, by the way.”
“You vandalized?” I prompted.
She nodded. “Yep, graffiti. Me. Can you believe it?”
The quote—it was her. Of course it was.
I wanted so badly to smile, to let her know what it meant—that she had built that link between me and Maia. But at the thought of Maia, I felt a pain in my chest. “Well,” I said, standing up. “I’ll try to avoid spray paint.”
“My point is, you’re not alone,” she said, standing as well. “It feels like the worst thing in the world right now, I know—I remember. But it will get better, I promise.”
“That’s just it, though. It’s not the worst thing, Mom,” I said, and I
was even surprised by my bluntness. “I’ve felt worse than this before.” I didn’t need to clarify—the stricken, pained expression on her face, the way her shoulders bowed inward just a little—she knew I was talking about her.
She cleared her throat and picked her planner up off the table. “I’ll let you know when the pizza gets here,” she said as she walked past me into the living room.
MAIA
THE RUMBLE OF NEIL’S PICKUP coming down the driveway echoed in the barn like young thunder. I closed my eyes for a moment before I went to the door. He was on his way to the house, but stopped in his tracks when I called his name.
He walked toward the barn slowly, squinting his eyes, turning his head like he was trying to see the whole situation better, in a way that was more than suspicious; it was almost like he was afraid.
“Hey,” I called out to him, waving my hand.
He stopped several feet away from me, and said, “Well, I’m here. What is it?”
“Come in,” I told him, pushing both of the barn doors open all the way, letting the light inside.
He crossed the threshold, still looking at me like I might pull something shady, but then, once he was inside, he stood still, looking around. It was nearly the same as when he had last been here. Close enough, anyway. He turned in a circle, and then his eyes set on me. He shook his head and raised his arms toward the ceiling.
“Why?” he said, his voice shaking. “Why did you lie to me?”
“I don’t really know,” I said, but that wasn’t true. I did know. I knew that I had been in so much pain that I’d felt the only way to get rid of it was to push some of it off on someone else. He was there. It was as simple as that.
“Not gonna cut it,” he snapped.
“Because I was jealous of what you had with her. And I was angry and hurting and scared,” I answered—all of those things were part of the truth. “I hated that she belonged to you more than she belonged to me.”
He looked down at his feet. “She didn’t belong to anybody.”
“You know what I mean,” I insisted. “I was so angry that I never got a chance to make things right with her, and I took it out on you because things were right between the two of you.”
“You know she didn’t think like that,” he argued.
“Do I? I feel like I don’t know anything.”
“Yes you do,” he countered. “So maybe you weren’t tight in the last year. So what? That doesn’t take away the other sixteen years that came before!” he shouted, gaining steam. “And don’t think I don’t have regrets too. Things weren’t right between us either.” He paused to take a breath. “There’s so much I wish I would’ve said to her. A million things!”
“I—I didn’t know that,” I tried to tell him, but he kept talking.
“You know, you were right about what you said to me that night.”
I knew immediately what night he was talking about.
“I loved her,” he admitted. “Yeah, maybe it was obvious. Maybe you and everyone else in the world thought I was pathetic. But you were wrong when you said she’d never love me back.”
“I know,” I said.
“You don’t get to take that away from her. You don’t get to take that away from me. Because she did love me. No, maybe not in the same way, but she could’ve. If I ever worked up the nerve to tell her, maybe she could’ve.”
He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, even though I knew “sorry” didn’t come close to being enough.
He turned his back to me and walked up to the big wall of photos.
“What was your question?” he asked, clearing his throat. “In your message. You wanted to tell me something and ask me something. I’m guessing this was what you wanted to tell me, so . . .”
“Right. You said before that you knew which ones were important, which were her favorites.” I paused, swallowing my pride, my guilt, and all those other troublesome emotions that I usually let hold me back.
He pointed out at least a dozen photographs, which I couldn’t have picked out if I’d tried (and I had). Not one of them was among the pictures I had singled out over the past three months.
“You look disappointed, or something,” he told me.
“No, it’s just those weren’t the ones I was thinking were most important.”
“You know what she would say to that,” he said, but he was stating it as a matter of fact, not a question.
“No. What would she say?” I asked.
“I dunno. She’d probably say something like . . .” He switched his voice to be higher and wispier like Mallory’s, and he got this far-off look in his eye. “What you think the important ones are is the only thing that matters.” He smiled sadly, and said in his regular voice, “Something about the eye of the beholder, or whatever. I don’t know. Sounds like her, though, doesn’t it?” He let out the smallest of laughs, and then shut his mouth tight.
“Yeah,” I agreed, laughing. “It does.”
“Well,” Neil said. “I’m really glad you’re a pathological liar, Maia.”
He was standing there, uncomfortably, putting his hands in his pockets, then touching his eternally over-gelled hair, then crossing his arms. He looked younger, somehow, than the last time I was this close to him. Or maybe it was that I suddenly felt a lot older.
He was making his way to the door, when I asked, “Hey, what’s your favorite, then? If that’s really the important thing, like you said.”
He stared at the wall for a moment, held his finger in the air as he walked over to the corner next to Mallory’s darkroom, where there was a metal chest of long, narrow drawers. He was opening them, one by one.
“I didn’t know there was anything in there,” I said, following behind him.
I looked over his shoulder—he was lifting sheets of tissue paper that separated all these black-and-white prints, drawer after drawer, searching for one in particular.
He pulled out a stack of photographs wrapped in a folded sheet of white paper, and set them on top of the drawer. He opened it to reveal dozens of the same picture—two tree trunks side by side, and they had a strand of barbed wire that was embedded into the bark, the trees having grown up around it, so close together that they had even grown around one another.
“This one,” he said finally. “She took it last winter when we were up in the mountains.”
“Take it,” I told him.
“Really?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at me uncertainly.
“I mean, isn’t that what she would’ve wanted?”
He nodded, whispering, “Yeah, I think so.” He took his photograph, holding it gingerly, like a baby, as he crossed the barn and headed out the door.
“Hey, Maia?” he said, stepping into the light. “Mallory never hated you. That was my lie, okay?”
I think maybe somewhere deep in my heart I knew that, but I was thankful to hear it anyway.
After Neil left, I searched the metal drawers for the graffiti picture and found it almost right away. There were dozens of this one too. I picked up a copy of the photograph and held it gently at the corners.
My entire motive for asking Neil over was to find out what these words meant, but he had already told me without even realizing it. They meant whatever I wanted them to mean. They meant that anything, everything, only means what you say it means. You are who you believe you are, no more, no less.
In a moment of clarity, I knew exactly what I had to do.
I’d already decided I was going to call in sick to work today—I couldn’t handle the clearance aisle or fitting room duty. I needed to start living again. I needed to stop thinking about how badly I’d fucked everything up and do something about it. Because getting a fresh start doesn’t mean you can just forget about everything that came before.
• • •
After waiting in the shadows of her porch, I ambushed Isobel when she got home from work that night.
“Good
god, girl!” she shouted when she saw me standing on the top step. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was waiting for you because I wanted to ask a favor.”
She side-eyed me, handing me one of the tote bags she was carrying, so she could open the door. “A favor involving Chris?” I followed her inside as she turned the kitchen light on and set her armfuls of things on the table.
“Sorta.”
“Go on,” she said as she took her shoes off and lowered herself into one of the dining chairs.
“I have something I want to send him, only I don’t have his address.” I flashed her my best fake Bargain Mart smile. “Please?” I added, my smile nearly collapsing. “It’s important.”
She narrowed her eyes at me, then reached over to one of the kitchen drawers and pulled out a notepad and slapped it onto the tabletop. She reached into the drawer, her fingers disrupting its contents, until she found a pen.
• • •
The next morning, I was waiting at the post office when it opened. On the back of Mallory’s photograph I had written Chris a message:
I think I finally understand what it means. Please call me.
Love, Maia
I hoped the photograph would signify to Chris that in spite of everything, he saw me for who I was and I saw him in the same way. I sent a silent prayer out into the universe as I slid the envelope across the counter and into the hands of the postal worker. I paid extra to have it delivered overnight. I watched closely as she weighed the envelope and placed the postage in the upper right corner before tossing it into a bin behind her.
“That’s it. You’re done,” she told me, since I was still standing there.
I left. I went home.
I’d wait to hear from him.
I could do that. I was capable of waiting.
CHRIS
MOM SLID A LARGE RECTANGULAR envelope across the kitchen counter in my direction. “This came for you today.”
I stared at the handwriting in the center of the envelope that spelled out my name. Then my eyes tracked a line to the upper left-hand corner. To her name.
