“How?”
“Don’t matter how. I’ll figure it out. Party’s still going on. No one’s paying attention. I…” He shakes his head. “Just don’t worry about it. It’s the least I can do. I’ll take care of it.” He stoops to pick up the gun. For some reason, I expect him to pluck it gingerly, to take the very edge of the grip between his thumb and forefinger, to hold it from its tail like a dead rat.
But instead he grabs it up, points it at the ceiling, flips open the cylinder, and empties each chamber. Checks that it’s empty, then double-checks. All done with cool efficiency, bloodless confidence. He puts the ammo in his pocket and jams the empty gun into his waistband. When he turns to look at me again, it’s with the look of a gunslinger.
“I can’t stop you from killing yourself. If that’s what you truly want, no one can stop you. I can’t be around twenty-four hours a day, looking after you. But if that’s what you want, don’t you think you owe it to your mother to talk to her first?”
Mom: Where are you?
Mom: Where are you?
Mom: Where did you go?
Mom: You’re not answering. Pick up when I call you!
Mom: Left you another voicemail. Where are you?
Mom: Called Evan. He said you were there a little while ago. Where are you?
Mom: I’m calling the police.
Me: On my way home
Mom looks older than her usual old. She’s frail and weak, still in her work clothes even though she usually changes as soon as she gets home. I think she wants to be very, very angry, but relief is etched into every line of her face.
“Where have you been?” She comes down hard on been, biting into it, bruising the word, punishing it in a way she cannot punish me.
“I went to see Dad.”
It hangs in the air between us, hovering like a will-o’-the-wisp before settling.
“I see.”
She turns from me and heads into the living room. I follow.
“You can’t just disappear like that. Especially after what you pulled in school today. And you have to answer me when I—”
“Mom, I had to talk to him about Lola.”
For a moment, she’s frozen in the center of the room. Then the moment cracks like thin ice and she regains her poise; she sits on the sofa. “That’s still no excuse,” she says. I can tell she’s rattled, though, and a spring of pity for her bubbles up from deep inside me. This has been a day of too much for her—for me, too, but I can handle it—and she’s not ready for even more.
But Dad was right: I need to talk to her. I need her to understand.
“You need to let me know where you are,” she says, now wringing her hands and staring at the coffee table. “You can’t just run off.”
“Mom, I remember.”
Her hands pause for an instant, then resume. She does not look up at me. “Well, next time remember to text me back, or at least to—”
“That’s not what I mean, Mom. I mean, I remember that day.”
She nods. She nods. She nods again. And again. Her head bobs fiercely and still she does not look up. Her hands tighten on each other, squeezing each other dead white.
I don’t know how to do this. Mom and I don’t talk. Not really. She brings it up, I retreat. I bring it up, she retreats. We’re never in sync. We’re like a broken strobe light.
“How long?” she asks, a whisper I strain to hear. “When did you remember?”
Oh. Hands jammed in my pockets, I shrug. “Always. I’ve always remembered. I just never told anyone.”
Finally, she looks at me. Her chin trembles, jaw working in spastic tics. “Oh, Sebastian. God, Sebastian. Why?”
“I don’t know.” But I do know. Because I was four. Because I understood I’d done something very, very Bad. I knew it made people upset and angry. So it was easier to pretend I didn’t remember doing it. The kind of logic only a four-year-old can appreciate, the kind of logic I stumble to explain to her. “And then I was stuck with it. And every day, week, year, whatever, it just seemed easier and easier to pretend.”
She opens her mouth to speak, but can’t. Flaps her hands instead, gesturing me closer, and I sit next to her and she throws her arms around me and pulls me in close. There is still strength in her too-old limbs; she crushes me to her and whispers, “Oh, Sebastian,” over and over.
“I have to talk about it, Mom.”
She pulls back and shakes her head viciously. “You were a toddler, for God’s sake. It’s not your fault. You can’t blame yourself. Stop it.”
“I need to talk about it. I need to know what it was like. For you. Dad told me. I didn’t realize I needed it until he did, but I need to know. I barely knew her.”
“Stop it.” Shaking her head again. So violently.
“I just want to know, Mom. Please.”
“Sebastian, you’re my son and I love you and I would do anything for you, but I can’t do this. I’m sorry,” she says with finality, withdrawing to the other end of the sofa. “I can’t talk about this. I can’t relive this. I’m not strong enough.”
“You think forgetting her makes it better? Pretending? Look at you! You’re a hermit, Mom! You never leave the house, except for work and your therapist. You got rid of the pictures and all the mementos, but you can’t get rid of her, no matter how much you try.”
She stiffens. “Good night.” She heads to the hallway.
“Mom!” I’m up off the sofa. “Stop doing this to yourself! To us!” I use my last weapon. “Dad can do it. Dad told me what I wanted to know. I just need—”
She spins to me so suddenly that I take a step back, connect with the coffee table, nearly spill backward onto it. Her eyes, red-rimmed, pin me in the air, and her face twists into an ugly, contorted mask.
“You need? You need? What about what I need? All I’ve done is think about what you need for ten years. Your father couldn’t handle it; he left. He got to go. I had to stay. Stay here, in this house, walking past that door every day and every night, remembering. I didn’t get to escape, Sebastian.”
“Mom…” I hold up my hands, palms out. “Calm down.…”
“Calm down? Calm down? No, Sebastian.” She steps closer to me. “This is what you want. You want to talk. You want to know how I feel.”
Mom’s throat works; I’m close enough to see the tendons clutch and spasm.
“Dad said you used to bring her into the bedroom every morning to—”
“Stop it!” she screams, hands to her temples, as though her head has split open and she has to hold it closed. “Just stop it!”
It’s such a sudden change that I should be shocked, but I’m not. I realize what I’ve done—I’ve injected a memory too strong for her to ignore, too powerful, too primal. And I should stop here, but I can’t.
“I can’t! I’ve spent my whole life not talking about it, and where has that gotten me?”
“It got you this far! You have friends and school and—”
“Friends? Are you crazy? I have one friend, Mom: Evan. Aneesa isn’t talking to me because I ruined that, and you know why? Do you know why? Because I’m so messed up that I can’t deal with other people like a normal human being!”
“You’ve had therapy,” Mom snaps. “You can have more. You’re the one who refused to see someone else after Kennedy retired. I can’t wipe your nose for you anymore, Sebastian. You’re not a—a child.”
Baby.
“Jesus Christ, Mom, look at you! You can’t even say the word baby. This is healthy to you? This is normal? This is okay?”
She snorts and spits out her words, staccato: “No, it’s not, but I’m doing the best I can.”
“Well, you’re doing a shit job of it.”
Eyes wide and flashing, she purses her lips into a tight ring of anger. “You don’t get to tell me how to be a parent.”
I’ve pushed her too far. I’ve backed her into a corner from which there’s no escape and no respite. And I recognize this. Some part of me that
still thinks recognizes this, but I keep battering at her anyway.
“Your way isn’t working. We can’t keep pretending—”
She throws her hands up in the air. “Jesus, Sebastian. I’m doing the best that I can. What do you want from me?”
“The truth!”
“The truth? The truth is that I’m barely holding myself together, okay? The truth is that I alternate between being so sad I could melt away and so angry I could explode. Are you happy now? Does that make it all better? Do you think that’s going to change something? That’s going to undo it?”
I should stop. I shouldn’t keep going.
“She’s dead, Mom. She’s your daughter and she’s dead. So yeah, you’re angry and sad, but come on, you’re holding back, you’re always holding back, and I do, too, but I don’t want to anymore, I just want you to—”
“I hate you!” Her arms locked at her sides, fists clenched, eyes screwed tightly shut, she screams it at the top of her voice. “Are you happy now? Is that what you want to hear? I hate you I hate you I HATE YOU! You killed her! You murdered my little baby girl! I hate you, Sebastian—God, I fucking hate you!”
And she shoves me in the chest, but I’m locked in place, so she just collapses there on the floor. She’s a ball of tears and snot and horror and agony and fear and the sort of pain that starts in the gut and spreads out in both directions until it consumes you from head to toe, inside and out.
And there’s nothing for me to do but to kneel beside her. “That’s okay,” I tell her.
I tell her, “That’s okay,” and then I say the words I’ve been waiting to say since I was four years old, the words I’ve said to everyone in my life except for her, the words I can’t stop saying until she’s around, when a blast door slams down over my tongue and the words are stuck on the other side.
I say, “I’m sorry.”
She howls like a wolf cut loose from the pack. The howl is an awful thing, a living thing with its own corrupt and bleak soul, a hopeless thing, lost, its destination burned to the ground, its home blighted.
Sobbing, she claws at her eyes, and I remember that moment from ten years ago, Dad shoving her. Gentler, I take her wrists in my hands and pull her fingers away from her face. Her eyes are swollen and red, painful, rimmed with tears and running makeup.
“Don’t,” she says.
“Mom, I have to talk about it. I have to, okay? I can’t go on like this. I’ve been—” thinking of killing myself is the end of that sentence, but not something I can say to her. Not yet. Not even now.
“I’ve been so sad,” I say instead.
She folds me in her arms. I fold her in mine.
Later, she’s fallen asleep on the sofa. We’ve been talking for hours, and it’s past three in the morning, and I’m so tired I can’t sleep, so I sit up in the easy chair and watch her instead.
“Shouldn’t have said it,” Mom mumbles, rousing.
“What?”
She blinks her eyes clear. It takes a few seconds for them to focus on me. “What I said. Before. I shouldn’t have said it.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. I’m your mother. And besides, it wasn’t true. It isn’t true. None of it.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Sebastian…”
“Be honest with me, Mom.”
She sits up, fruitlessly tries to straighten her wrinkled and disheveled work clothes. Gives up.
“It was true,” she admits. “Once. At one time. For a moment. And I couldn’t say it, couldn’t let myself think it, because it was awful.”
“I hated myself, too.”
She strokes my cheek. “Don’t hate yourself, sweetheart. It gets you nothing. It gets you nowhere.”
“I know.” Now.
She sighs and rubs her eyes. “After it happened, maybe a year later, I told myself I was going to be one of those moms.… One of those moms who bounces back from tragedy, who changes the world. Like the ones who started Mothers Against Drunk Driving. But I learned something. I’m not strong, Sebastian. Those people are the exception. I’m not exceptional. Most of us hide. Most of us just curl up and hide. So I did nothing.”
“You kept us together.”
“I couldn’t even do that. Your father left.”
“Yeah, but you still let him see me. Even when I didn’t want to. You did your best.”
She shrugs. “How do you feel now?”
“Tired.”
“Me too.”
We laugh together. “Good thing it’s Saturday tomorrow.”
“It’s Saturday right now,” I remind her.
She rises, smooths her skirt. “Well, it’ll still be Saturday later, after we get some sleep.”
“There’s just one more thing.”
I can almost hear her throat constrict, can almost hear her thinking, What the hell else could there be?
“Why did you get rid of everything?” I ask. “Why did you just delete her from our lives?”
She walks away. Before I can react, she’s back, with her purse, rummaging inside.
“All the pictures and stuff are at Gramma’s house. There was no way I threw it out. Not a chance. I just couldn’t be surrounded by it. And I didn’t want you surrounded by it. This is all I have with me.”
She produces her phone from the depths of her purse. Flicks it on. Scrolls to a photo. “This is the one I let myself look at. This is the day we brought her home from the hospital.”
It’s a picture of Lola, tiny and wrinkled, her face a tight little fist, her eyes screwed shut against the world. Somehow, though, she’s relaxed. At peace.
Content.
Holding her is four-year-old Sebastian, beaming at the camera as it goes off.
“That’s good,” I try to say, but my voice is drowned in tears.
“She loved her big brother from the beginning,” Mom manages to say, and kisses my forehead.
People have been telling me that “time heals all wounds” my entire life. I never really believed them—scabs and scars form, I figured, but I didn’t imagine that the wounds themselves ever truly healed. They just lurk beneath the new surface, as raw and as sensitive as the day they were made. They’re just not visible any longer. They’re just not exposed.
I’m still not ready to believe time heals wounds, but I think maybe something else does.
We heal wounds. Not time.
Us.
Evan has never said anything about the gun, so I assume Dad managed to sneak it back in somehow. I have no idea how. I see him every week now, and one time I asked him. He just shrugged and said, “I have my ways.”
I said, “So… you’re a ninja?”
He did a little karate chop. And he smiled.
He actually smiled. It was small and brief, but it was there.
A school is a big place; it’s easy to avoid each other. A school bus is big, too—one of you in front, the other in back, the distractions of friends and the driver’s terrible choice in radio stations. A school bus can be a stadium, and you can get lost in there, if you’re willing. If you try hard enough.
So, a day or two before Halloween, on a Sunday, I bike up to Aneesa’s for the first time in a long time. I haven’t seen her since I told her to get out of my room. I actually only said, “Get out,” never specifying. In that moment, I meant my room, my house, my heart, my life. She honored my request and vacated them all as best she could.
When I knock at the door, Mr. Fahim answers. I wonder what he knows, how much he knows. I wonder at the character of his knowledge; how did Aneesa tell the story? Was I the sick and injured prince or the outraged and out-of-control dragon?
“Ariadne,” he says with a slight quirk of his lips. “Aneesa isn’t home.”
“Oh.” I turn back to my bike.
“You’re welcome to wait for her, if you like.”
I don’t like, but I have no choice. If I leave now, I’ll never work up the courage to come back again. I need to do th
is now.
Reluctantly, I trudge inside. Everything has finally been unpacked. Artwork and photographs hang on the walls. The Fahims have completed the metamorphosis of the house no one wanted to buy into a home.
“We haven’t seen you around here lately,” Mr. Fahim says, gesturing for me to sit in one of the living room chairs. He takes the sofa.
“Well, school…” I let it drift and hang, smoke in the open air.
“Aneesa has been making new friends. I assume you’ve been busy with old ones.”
I let him think that.
“Do you believe in the afterlife?” he asks suddenly.
“I’m not sure.” I don’t want to offend him. And it’s a tough question for me. I’d love to see Lola again, but I also figure I probably don’t deserve that.
“Many don’t. Because it offends them to imagine all this”—he gestures around us, to the world beyond the room—“is a mere test. But it isn’t a test. It’s a trial. To determine if we are worthy. So it’s nothing we should shrug off, regardless of what follows. How we are now, to one another, dictates our eternity.”
I follow him, but I’m not sure how it’s relevant, until I realize what the whole point is: He knows. Either Aneesa told him or someone else did. He knows.
“What I mean to say,” he goes on, “is this: Life is short, but its brevity does not mean it’s meaningless. Work out your differences with Aneesa, whatever they are.”
“I’d like that.”
Mr. Fahim sighs. “I like you a great deal, Ariadne. And I understand better than most, I think. I’m very happy with Sara. I adore my wife and the life we have. So I don’t mean to insult you, when I say that… in an ideal world, I would see Aneesa with a Muslim boy. You understand?”
I shrug a noncommittal yes.
“But this is not an ideal world. You two are good together. And I would be happy if someday—in the future, you understand—if that turned into something more.”
“I don’t think that’s in the cards, sir.”
“It’s still Joe. And I’m sorry to hear that.” He takes a deep breath and glances around, as though for spies. “I am her father and I’m not supposed to say such things, but I will.” He gazes directly into my eyes. “Her loss.”