“I’m divorced and I haven’t disappeared, have I?” she said softly.
He frowned, trying unsuccessfully to wrap a piece of her hair around his finger. He used to fall asleep that way, curling a strand of her hair around his finger and tugging on it gently. But after the divorce Mom had cut her hair shorter and shorter, first in a chin-length bob, then having the back as short as a boy’s but with the front still long enough to tuck behind her ears, and now all of it in short layers. I hated it. She didn’t even look like herself anymore.
“You haven’t disappeared but like right now you’re going away,” Cody said.
“Not away,” she corrected. “Just out. For a few hours.”
“With a man who isn’t Daddy because Daddy is in New York, frozen.”
“That’s so stupid,” I said, breaking my own ten-minute-old decision to not talk to either of these people. “Do you really think that Daddy just sits around while we’re here? He has a life, you know.”
Even as I said it, I was wondering if my father and Ava and Baby Zoe were scrunched together on their couch watching old movies and eating popcorn made on top of the stove and sprinkled with parmesan cheese.
“He’s busy with his assignments,” I said, because I had to say something or else I might start to cry. I didn’t like thinking about Dad doing all those family things without me. “He’s flying around the world and writing about important things that really matter to the planet—and humanity.”
I glanced at my mother. Surely even she knew that column of hers was stupid, a waste of time to write and to read. Surely she knew that my father did something worthwhile with his lengthy articles about rain forest destruction and the commercialization of the environment. On my bedroom wall, nestled between a shrine to Saint Teresa and another to Mary Magdalene, my own patron saint, I hung the cover of the Sunday New York Times Magazine with his article about the death of Yellowstone from over-tourism, framed and even autographed. The father of a saint should be doing good for the world.
“Oh, yeah?” Cody said, close to tears. “Well, I think what he writes about is stupid and I wish he had disappeared in that dumb avalanche. I really do.”
“Oh, honey, I know you’re mad at him but you don’t wish that. You love Daddy,” Mom said.
“No, I don’t!” Cody yelled, and he ran from the bathroom and up the stairs, slamming his bedroom door loud.
“I hope you’re happy now, Madeline,” my mother said, following Cody.
“Have a nice date,” I said, in a fake sweet voice.
Her date was a man who made expensive drinking glasses. A glass sculptor, he called himself. His name was Jamie and he had silver hair that was way too long, hanging almost to his collarbone in dramatic waves. It was their third date. To me, his glasses looked warped, the way the windows on our house looked. They were rimmed in vivid colors and sat on different colored stems. On their first date, he had brought my mother two champagne glasses; one was deep orange and ruby, the other emerald green and cerulean. That’s what he called the colors. To me, they seemed like ordinary colors.
“The idea of it! Melting glass!” my mother had gushed, grinning all stupid while I thought about how ugly those glasses were. “Once,” she had babbled, “my ex-husband and I visited the Big Island of Hawaii and hiked through Volcano National Park to watch hot lava flow out of the volcano and into the ocean below. Of course, I realize now that one of the things fundamentally wrong with our marriage was that Scott enjoys such things: trekking in Nepal, rock climbing in the West, scuba diving, while I don’t like any of it.”
Even though it was true, I couldn’t believe she was spilling all of this personal stuff before they’d even left the house. Although my mother could ski, she avoided expert trails and stuck to bunny slopes. She did not like to swim to points too distant from the shore or venture any place too high above the ground. Like Cody, she was afraid of most things. I had thought for sure this guy wouldn’t stick around. But now they were going on their third date. Maybe he was even going to be my mother’s boyfriend.
When Mom returned to the bathroom, I was practicing putting on mascara. Every time the wand came near my eyes, I blinked them shut or poked myself so that now I had eyes like a raccoon with black mascara circles around them. “Who could kiss a guy with long stupid hair like that?” I asked
“Do you have a comment about every single thing?” Mom said. She was doing something weird with her hair, plopping globs of wax on it and making it stick up all over her head. She looked like someone who had been electrocuted. Ava used rosemary mint shampoo that came in a bottle shaped like waves, not the cheapo drugstore kind. Ava did not look electrocuted.
“What are you doing?” I asked my mother, disgusted.
“I am trying to have a life!” she shrieked.