Leah’s Journal
Boots. He is all the reasons why I wanted Maisey to marry Greg, who is all the things I didn’t know to look for. How would I have known? You taught me what a good man is, Walter. Responsible, polite. Successful. Kind.
Boots was none of these things. His contempt for society and authority was so thick, you could spread it with a butter knife. What was he still doing in school at nineteen? I’ve asked myself this question. The answer, I’d guess, is that he found it fun to torment the teachers in the same way he liked to torment small creatures. Besides, he had a school full of girls who had stars in their eyes every time they looked at him and boys who tried to emulate him.
He was a god in school. In the real world he was only a wannabe god, and that makes for a dangerous man.
That night at the dance, he swaggered in late, in his leather jacket and Levi’s. His eyes swept over the gym, the couples dancing, the little knot of girls chattering, the teachers who were supervising, and for some reason, landed on me. My date was elsewhere. Hiding in the bathroom or bailed out the side door, maybe. I wasn’t exactly at odds with the other girls, but not friends, either, which left me very much alone.
Easy prey. I see that now.
But when he crossed the room to me, when those glorious eyes zeroed in on mine, I was exalted. Boots had singled out me. Chosen to talk to me. I don’t even remember what he first said. My heart was flooded with the wonder of his attention, my brain misfiring in all directions.
And when he patted his pocket and said, “Shit. I left my smokes at home,” I was in a position to help him out. My intention was to give him a cigarette. That would be enough from a lowly mortal girl like me.
But he smiled as if I were suddenly the most beautiful girl in the room.
“Well, come on then,” he said. And right then and there, he grabbed my hand. Just like that. In front of teachers and students, at the snacks table, he claimed me.
Me.
He led me outside in the warm dark, back around behind the school, my hand encased in his. We smoked a cigarette together. He was free with his hands, touching my hair, my shoulder, slipping an arm around my waist. He didn’t kiss me. Not yet. I would have let him, I was already so far gone, but he was smarter than that.
He led me back into the gym and sealed the deal by dancing with me. My social status climbed through the roof in a single evening. Before the night was over, I’d been invited to parties by people who had previously ignored my existence.
I was in love. And he was—who knows what he was. Of all the girls at his disposal, why me? What did he see in me that made him choose me? I wondered then. I wonder now. I suppose it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he did and that I was happy to be chosen.
And that, dear Walter, is the first of my many sins.
Chapter Sixteen
When we get him home, Dad wanders through all the rooms like a visitant ghost, insubstantial and looking for something that no longer exists. He stares at the fireplace, all cleaned up now and emptied of ashes. He shuffles into the kitchen and looks at the place where Mom fell, running his fingers over the edge of the island where she hit her head. I fill a glass with water and hand it to him. He accepts it, but doesn’t drink, looking from the glass to me and back again as if he doesn’t know what it’s for or what to do with it.
He lurches into movement again, this time into his study. He sits at his desk and carefully sets down the glass, but his hand is shaking, and water sloshes over the edge and forms a puddle that he doesn’t seem to see. He opens and closes the center drawer without touching anything. Gets up and opens the closet that holds the file cabinets. I’ve locked them back up, and he rattles the drawers but seems content just to know they are secured.
Wordless, he brushes past me. Down the hall to the bedroom he has always shared with Mom. At the doorway he hesitates, draws in a ragged breath, and sways like a tree in the wind. Elle and I both launch ourselves toward him, ready to break his fall, but he steadies before we reach him. One low, wretched sound strangles in his throat as he walks to the bed, pulls back the covers, and climbs in without bothering to take off his shoes.
I can’t help noticing that he’s chosen Mom’s side, not his own, or the way he turns and buries his face in her pillow. Feeling like an intruder all at once, I back out and close the door behind me. Elle’s eyes are glassy with tears.
“Is he okay?” she whispers.
My best answer is a shrug. “He’s just . . . lost, I think. Has no idea how to be without her.”
I remember feeling that way myself when I first moved away from home. As fiercely as I craved my independence, my right to be myself and create the margins of my own life, my mother’s competent fingers had been in every corner, every piece of my personal pie. Existence on my own had loomed like an uncharted wilderness. My salvation, then as now, was the country known as Elle.
“We need a plan,” I tell her. “Get a pen.”
She scampers off in search of pen and paper. Elle loves lists. I don’t need them, but there’s still something comforting about writing things down in black and white. Of course, her lists are given to great detail, and mine are random jottings, but we’ve been making these documents together since she learned to print her first words.
When I arrive at the kitchen table, she’s already there. In front of her, geometrically arranged, is a notepad and a pen, two glasses of water, a calendar she’s unearthed from somewhere, and both of our phones. Phones are useful during these planning sessions, since they hold our calendars, our address books, and all the other apps that make life both easier and more complicated all at once.
“Ready,” she says. “I suggest we do a Maslow.”
In case I’d forgotten that Elle is way too bright, this is a reminder. Of course, Maslow is partly my fault. I mentioned him once when she was four, talking to myself, really.
I’d been contemplating taking a college class, had actually signed up and everything, all in a quest for self-actualization. Meanwhile, there was barely enough food in the refrigerator to get us through the week, and I was a month behind on the rent.
“Who’s Maslow?” Elle had asked, plunking her sturdy, warm little body down in my lap and staring at my computer screen. “Is he a computer game?”
I’d pictured Maslow traveling around like Pac-Man, snarfing up self-actualization diamonds. First I thought it was ridiculous. Then I thought maybe it was genius. Probably an idea that somebody will come up with in the future and use to make a shit ton of money.
“Maslow is dead,” I’d told my daughter, completely unprepared for dewy eyelashes and a trembling lip.
“Like Goldwing?”
“Yes, like Goldwing.” Elle’s very first goldfish had passed just the week before, and her grasp of the permanent reality of death had been immediate and thorough, leading to a spate of nightmares that had just begun to taper off.
“Did somebody flush him?”
“What? No. No, he was buried. Long before you were born. In California, far, far from here.”
“Did you know him?” She was all curiosity, which was infinitely preferable to inconsolable child grief, so I told her about Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs.
“He was famous,” I told her, “for figuring out something that is actually pretty simple. We need food and shelter first, before we need anything else, because without those things we will die. Then we need people to love. Once we have people to love, then we can learn to love ourselves and start working toward the things we are good at, the things that make us happy.”