by Amy Spalding
“I just . . . I had to find out.” Suddenly the truth seems smarter than any excuse I could come up with. “Why you left me. I wanted to make sure you wouldn’t do it again, so—”
“Devan,” she says in this waterlogged voice. I’m really not prepared to see Reece Malcolm cry. “Oh, God, kid. There isn’t some big mystery. I was fifteen when I got pregnant, sixteen when you were born. Your age. Could you take care of a baby now?”
I shake my head.
“That’s it,” she says. “It’s no more complicated than that.”
“But—that didn’t mean you had to, like, walk away completely.”
“It, well . . . it sort of did,” she says. “The agreement I thought I was signing—”
“You thought you were signing?”
“My mother thought I’d regret giving up custody of you,” she says. “So it turns out the papers never made their way back to the lawyer. But I was under the impression I had to stay out of your life, which I thought was for the best. I can barely function with people my own age, as you’ve seen. I had no business being around you.”
“That’s totally not true,” I say. “All Dad did was ignore me—at least it seemed like it—and Tracie was awful, and he never stopped her, and you would have been better, I know it.”
“Maybe,” she says. “I had a lot of growing up to do. Anyway, I can’t fix the past. If I had some magical way to give you an instant happy childhood, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But all we have is now and everything after.”
“So if you’d actually signed those papers, I wouldn’t have been sent here,” I say as it dawns on me. “When Dad died. That’s how you found out your mom didn’t give them to the lawyer? So you could have told them that. That your mom interfered or whatever the legal word is, and you didn’t know you had custody of me.”
“I could have,” she says. “But I figured I wouldn’t have gotten the call if you didn’t need me. I offered to work something out with your stepmother so you could stay, if that was what everyone wanted, but—”
“Oh my God,” I say. “That would have been awful.”
She laughs. “Worse than this?”
“Shut up,” I say. “I actually totally love it here.”
“Except for worrying I was looking for a way to get rid of you?” she asks. “You should have talked to me.”
“Don’t act like that,” I say. “Like you’re easy to talk to! You are like the absolute opposite. Ask anyone.”
I’m just responding, not lashing out, truly, but she sniffs really hard and I realize I hit her hard with that. I don’t feel all that guilty, though.
“I know you’re right,” she says. “I wish you weren’t.”
“I’m sorry I went through your stuff,” I say. Maybe it’s dumb, but I didn’t think about how I was invading her privacy until now, just taking care of myself. “I didn’t mean—”
“You’re forgiven,” she says. “And I’m truly sorry for what I said. I was just . . .”
“Mad?”
“Quite. But everything else, too, you know. Worried about you. Worried about this kid. Worried about my fucking relationship. Worried all the goddamn time, about all the people I could potentially fuck up. Sometimes I think you’d be better off with anyone but me.” She stares at her hands in her lap before glancing up at me. “And this isn’t how I wanted you to find out.”
I’m not entirely sure what she means, since a lot has come out in the past twenty-four hours. So I stay quiet.
“I know if my mom had turned up pregnant when I was sixteen—”
“We aren’t you and your mom.” I don’t want her pretending it’s the same when they had a whole life together. We’ve only had September and everything after.
“Trust me, this I know.” She makes really direct eye contact with me. “Mom and I have never been that close. I was hoping we’d be more than that.”
“Seriously?”
She laughs really hard. “Yeah, seriously!”
I decide to take advantage of this very truthful afternoon. “I, um, you . . . you said once that getting pregnant with me ruined your life.” I hear it echo in my head for only the millionth time and shiver a little. “If that’s how you feel—”
“Well, yeah. It is how I feel. But you are an amazing person, Devan, and I love you more than I have the capacity to express. Would my life have been easier if I hadn’t gotten knocked up at fifteen, though? Of course.”
“That’s not my fault,” I say.
“No, it isn’t,” she says. “I never should have said that, either. And I apologize.”
“It’s okay,” I say, because the apology is nice, and the thing about loving me is maybe the best thing I’ve ever heard. No, not maybe. It just is. And not just because I guess we’re sorted out, me and Reece Malcolm, or because the mystery isn’t a mystery and therefore doesn’t need solving, or because I feel it now in my heart, how safe I am here in this house. In my house.
“We’ll figure this out,” she says. “Last night I heard myself yelling at you and was horrified. I have to stop treating good people the way I do. Which includes you and Brad.”
“Brad’ll be a really good dad.”
She nods many many many times. “Yes. Thank God one of us is nurturing.”
I laugh even though I guess that’s mean. Luckily she joins in. “Maybe you can try?” I say.
“You can be my guinea pig. Sure.”
“Are you getting married?” I ask.
“I’ve never really wanted to,” she says. “Which is a hard thing to explain. But I love what I have with Brad. We’re good as we are, I think. Well—I’m buying him a TV and he’s promised to enjoy going to concerts without me. So we’re getting there. He’s around for good.”
The doorbell rings, which makes us exchange Raised Eyebrow Glances. I like it when we’re mirrors of each other.
“I hate people who don’t call first,” she mutters, jumping up to glance out the window before opening the door. “Hey there.”
Her tone has shifted entirely, and I lean over to see who could have earned such a 180. Oh my God.
“This isn’t a good time,” I say, running to the door. It all comes out in a lump, thisisn’tagoodtime. But Sai is normal Sai again. He just grins with a slight shrug of his shoulders.
“I knew you’d say that. It’s why I didn’t call first.”
“I admire your tactics,” my mother says to him, which makes his full smile break out. Too bad there isn’t a vaccination against its effects.
“I’ll be right back,” I say to my mother. Then I walk past Sai and close the door behind me. “What?”
“I wanted to give you something.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a key. “I remembered what you told me about your old choir room and . . . I thought . . .”
I take it from him, wondering what this means, wondering if we can call our fight over so soon after what happened last night, wondering if we don’t have to keep avoiding each other, wondering if after hours in New City’s choir room would be as healing as—“Hey!”
“Yeah?” he asks with his stupid cocky gorgeous grin.
“This is, like, a blank key.” I hold it out at him. “It won’t open anything.”
He’s still grinning. “Yeah, it was a nice move, though, right?”
“You came all the way over here to give me a stupid blank key?”
“I, uh, I actually came over here to tell you I, uh . . . ” He runs his hand through his hair, shuffles his feet, steps back from me a little. Is Sai nervous? That seems physically impossible. “I broke up with Nic.”
“Oh, I’m—I’m sorry?”
“Hoping you wouldn’t be.” He crosses his arms across his chest. “Or maybe you hate me now, dunno, maybe I deserve it.”
“I don’t hate you,” I say. “But you do deserve it.”
“Man, yeah,” he says. “Everything you said last night was true.”
“It’s not okay,” I say. “How you’ve bee
n. And I don’t know when it will be.”
He nods, looking down at our feet. “Dev, I’m sorry.”
“Except.” I step closer to him and place my hand on his arm. “I don’t care if we don’t wait for things to be totally okay.”
I kiss him so hard the wind is knocked out of me. Or maybe my heart and lungs stop for other reasons entirely. It seems brave but I know it isn’t. Boys don’t show up with worthless keys and breakup stories for nothing. I’ve barely caught my breath when he kisses me back.
“You have to stop,” I tell him once I can breathe again. His face falls, and I let him be panicked a few seconds before continuing. “We’re in clear view through that window and, trust me, my mother is spying on us.”
He laughs and pulls me farther from the window before kissing me again. I’ve imagined kissing Sai more times than I would admit to anyone (even myself), but now that this is real, it isn’t anything like that at all. Obviously it’s better than what my mostly inexperienced brain conjured up, but also it’s actually happening. There are so many small things, not just his lips against mine, but how electric his fingertips are against my face, how natural it feels sliding my arms around him and pulling him closer, how his hands keep moving: my face to my hair, the small of my back, my face again. Also—and maybe this is stupid—he’s still Sai. He is still a boy I like talking to who cares about things and isn’t afraid to be himself and gets really excited about books and who, I know, is there for me.
“You wanna go somewhere?” Sai takes my hand and pulls me to him, grins the whole time. The truth is he’s such a dork, too. “Take a drive? Hunt down a key? Get pizza? Oh, man, I heard there was some crazy show at some theatre down in—”
“I think I’m staying in,” I tell him. “My mom”—it comes out just that naturally—“and I have a lot to talk about, and I think we’re just going to hang here.”
“Maybe later?” he asks.
“Maybe, yeah,” I say. “I mean—you’re okay and everything, right? Your dad—”
“I’m okay,” he says. “Call me later? If you’re free.”
I rise to my tiptoes to hug my arms around him. “I’m glad you came over.”
He kisses my cheek. “Me, too, Dev.”
It hits me that he’s one of my best friends, wrapped up in something else, too. I want to tell him that, but we have a lot of other things to talk about first. I’m still a little mad at him—he hasn’t done everything like he should have. Not to me, not to Nicole. But I’m okay working on that later and being with him now.
I can say I go right back in to hang out with my mother, but that would be a big lie. Sai pushes me up against the side of the house, and I truly truly truly lose track of how long we stand there kissing. My lips are sore when I finally detangle myself, so it might have been a while. We say good-bye again, successfully this time, and I head inside. My mother looks up from her laptop, not even concealing her smirk.
“Stop.”
“Stop what?” she asks in what isn’t close to an innocent tone. “How’s that going, by the way? Better?”
“Um.” I feel my face flush as I take my red key chain out from my purse and slide on the blank key. “Yeah. I mean—it’s actually going.”
“It’s about time.” She laughs and closes her laptop. “What do you think about Lysander?”
“What about Lysander?”
“For the kid’s name.”
I make a face. “He’d get beat up every day for having a name like that.”
“It’s not that weird,” she says. “It’s Shakespearean! And it’s Los Angeles. Though Brad agrees with you.”
“Maybe it’s good Dad named me,” I say, throwing his name around like we talk normally about him all the time.
“Oh, your father did not name you,” she says. “Did he tell you that?”
“No, I just—I assumed.”
“They had some terrible name picked out for you—”
“Lysander?”
“You’re hilarious. I liked the name Devan. Who knows, I probably read it in a book the week before. I told Mom to demand, and they agreed.”
“I’ve always liked my name,” I say. “Especially now that I know it could have been Lysander.”
“You’re dead to me,” she says. “Hey—on that subject?”
“Me being dead?”
“You being dead, sure.” She picks up a Merrily program from the coffee table. “I noticed at Parents’ Night you’re using my name, and I’m assuming it’s some clerical error New City made.”
“Did you go to my show last night?” I ask, not only to change the subject, but because I remember something Travis said.
“I did. I figured with the way we’d left things you might have a better show if you didn’t know I was out there.”
“I’m really glad you were,” I say, and she grins.
“Me, too.”
“It, um, did start as a clerical error or whatever,” I say. “I should have told you. I just—I know it sounds stupid, but it seemed good being Devan Malcolm instead. Dad never . . . ”
She watches me for a few moments as I fade out. “Your father—”
“What about him?” I ask, but it comes out in another lump.
“He was a good guy,” she says. “He tried to do a good thing. He genuinely believed I was the eighteen-year-old I pretended to be, and I know he wanted to be a good father to you. He wasn’t an asshole running around taking advantage of young girls or whatever you’ve decided.”
“He was an asshole running around cheating on Tracie, though,” I say, thinking about Sai and his dad.
“Yeah, but I think hooking up with someone who sneaked into a college party’s a more forgivable offense,” she says. “Anyway. I have no idea what he’s told you and what he hasn’t. But I guess it’s more than time we talked.”
“He didn’t tell me anything. Just . . . I was reading Destruction, and I noticed the dedication, and—I guess it sounds dumb—but it did make me wonder if you were my mother. I mean, back then I thought everyone was. I was desperate to figure it out. But Tracie saw it.”
“I always wondered if you’d see the dedication,” she says. “I’m not sure why I did it. Just—to put something out in the world, in some ways it reminded me of you.”
I have no idea why that is the thing that makes me burst into tears.
“Come here,” she says, and I obey, letting her wrap her arms around me. She stays quiet as I continue to cry. It’s as if a book opened, one I shoved onto a shelf so I could get through each day since Dad died, since I came here in constant fear this time was somehow limited. For the first time ever, it actually feels good to cry.
“Do you miss him?” she asks me softly.
I shrug. “I miss that it can’t ever be okay. I kept thinking, like, one day we’d figure out how to relate to each other or he’d understand the things that were important to me. It was bad enough I didn’t have a mom, but . . . not having a dad when he’s living in the same house as me totally sucked.”
She strokes my hair, still holding me close to her. I’ve wanted a moment like this since I was little. “I have something,” she says.
“Something what?”
She jumps up and pulls me to my feet, leading me upstairs to her room. I sit on the bed while she digs around in the bottom dresser drawer, a place I never thought to look. Good thing I’m done with the spying thing. I’m freaking awful at it.
“You can open this.” My mother flops down next to me and hands over an envelope. “If you want.” It’s unopened but yellowed with age, and it’s addressed to Reece Malcolm at East 77th Street in New York. And even though I don’t recognize the return address, the handwriting is like a ghost.
“Dad,” I don’t mean to, but say aloud. The envelope is thick, like there are photos inside of it. “Why didn’t you ever open this?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” she says really quickly. “You have to believe it’s not that I didn’t care. It
was so goddamn hard, kid. I didn’t see a reason to torture myself.”
I open the envelope, even though the act feels like walking into a museum and smashing something. The photos slide out right away, and I stare at them, because we weren’t exactly the type of family who hung baby pictures all over. Also, to be fair, when you move a lot, photos are a huge pain because frames are fragile, and you get sick of putting stuff up on walls just to take it down.
Reece,
I hope you’re doing okay and that by now you got into NYU like you hoped. I don’t know if you wanted to hear from me or not but I thought maybe you’d like to hear how Devan is. She’s great, and you can see from the pictures that she’s the cutest kid I’ve ever seen. I think she looks a lot like you.
Good luck with everything, but I don’t think you’ll need it.
—Jeff
I blink back tears, because I don’t want to cry over this. My mother’s right. Despite everything, Dad was a good person. And I’d rather dwell on that than the sad parts I can’t change.
“I used to be way cuter,” I say so my mother will know I’m not up for another serious moment.
“Weren’t we all.” She takes the photos from me. “If you didn’t peak as a child as far as cuteness goes, there’s something wrong with you.”
She walks back to her dresser and riffles through the box in the bottom drawer again. Finally she lugs it over to the bed and pulls out a few photos, which I realize are of her as a baby. “Bad news for you how alike we looked.”
“Totally not bad news.” I hold a couple of pictures side by side. “Can I keep these?”
“Of course.”
“Can I keep the letter, too?”
She kisses my forehead. “Absolutely.”
It’s then that I notice two new photos on her nightstand. One is of Brad looking serious as he tends to the stove, and the other is of me. I’m in my Merrily costume—the stupid pajamas—and I must have been talking to someone because I look caught up in a moment of happiness.
