dirty slut.
I lie there for a while, curled in a ball and wracked with it like some stupid Shakespearean tragedy character, crazy Ophelia eating her own hair, but eventually crying that hard makes me feel grossly like I’m going to barf, so I force myself into the bathroom, which is where my mom finds me when she comes upstairs what could be minutes or hours later, I’m not sure.
“What’s wrong?” she asks urgently, flying through the doorway and dropping right down onto the tile beside me, getting her arms around my shoulders and squeezing tight. She smells like sandalwood, her flowy cardigan soft and cool against my damp, blotchy skin. “Molly, babe, what happened? What’s wrong?”
I blink at her through my tears, surprised: Even back before communication went solidly to crap in our house, the two of us weren’t really huggers. It’s basically the sum total of the physical contact we’ve had all summer and right now it only makes me cry more, way too hard to answer her with words. My breath is this awful shuddering wheeze, this feeling of being physically crushed like how they used to kill witches in Massachusetts, slabs of rock piled one after another on my chest. I feel like I’m running a marathon I haven’t trained for at all.
“Molly, babe,” she says again, warm breath at my temple. It’s like some weird dormant instinct is taking over for her, stroking through my hair and rubbing my back like I can’t remember her doing since I was really, really little. “Shh. You’re okay,” she promises. “I’m here; your mom’s here. You’re okay.”
Your mom’s here. You’re okay.
It’s the same thing she said the night I told her about Gabe, I remember suddenly—me breaking down and coming to her in her office, the feeling like I was the last person on Earth. I used to think that was what set this whole awful game of dominoes in motion to begin with, that none of this would have happened if she hadn’t gone and used me like she did.
Now? I’m not so sure.
We must think of it at the same time, though, because my mom draws back and shakes her head. “You don’t have to tell me,” she promises quietly, and it sounds like an absolution. “We can just sit here. You don’t.”
So that’s what we do, the two Barlow women, on the floor beside the bathtub, the tile cool and clean. Eventually, the tears stop coming. Neither one of us says a word.
Day 88
I drag my sad, sluggish self downstairs for a run the next morning, the fog rolling off the lake like clouds of milky chowder. I’ve barely made it out the door when I freeze.
It’s not eggs this time, coating my mother’s house all slick and sludge-slimy.
It’s toilet paper.
Toilet paper that got rained on overnight.
I sit right down on the lawn when I see it, rolls upon rolls of super-absorbent two-ply soaked through and clinging to the shingles and shutters and gingerbread scrollwork in mushy, sodden clumps. It’s clogging all the gutters. It’s hanging from the trees.
“Well,” my mother says, sipping her coffee; she came outside when she heard my laughter through the open window, a deranged cackle that didn’t sound anything like my normal laugh. I sobbed once as she stepped through the front door to investigate, then pulled it together. The wet grass is seeping through my shorts. “You have to give her points for narrative consistency, I suppose.”
“Mom,” I snap, and this time she softens. She offers a hand to help me up. “You can call Alex,” I tell her miserably. “You can call Alex to fix it this time. I give up.”
My mom looks at me with something like compassion, her slim hands surprisingly strong. “You know what you gotta decide when you’re a writer?” she asks when I’m standing, damp green grass sticking to the backs of my legs.
“Whether or not to turn your teenage daughter’s sex life into a best seller?” I reply. It’s an instinct, but a vestigial one, and my mom can tell. She rolls her eyes, but kindly, still holding on to both my hands.
“Which stories to tie up at the ending, Molly,” she tells me. “And which ones you have to let go.”
I look at her for a moment, at this woman who chose me eighteen years ago. Who raised me and broke me and just lifted me off the ground. “Can I ask you something?” I begin, feeling stupid and embarrassed but also like this is a vital piece of information, something I should have known long before today. “What’s your favorite flower?”
My mom looks surprised—that I’m asking, I guess, or maybe that I care. “My favorite—lilies, I guess. I like lilies.”
I nod slowly. “Lilies,” I repeat, like it’s a word I’ve never heard before. “Okay.”
Day 89
I find Tess hosing off the rubber lounge chairs in the morning, a dozen of them lined up like soldiers in the sunshine along the pool deck. I have to force myself down the stairs from the porch. Up close she looks terrible, face swollen and shiny and tender from crying, a zit sprouting on one cheek. Her hair is lank and greasy. I think I probably look way worse.
“Hey,” I say, one hand up in an awkward wave like it’s the beginning of the summer all over again, like she’s a stranger I’m vaguely afraid of. Like I’m a stranger she probably hates. “Can I talk to you a sec?”
I’m not far off: Tess looks at me for a moment, something like wonder passing over her puffy, distorted features. “No,” she says.
“Tess—”
“Don’t, Molly,” she interrupts, shaking her head at me. She drags the hose across the concrete, begins to wind it up. “I mean it. I don’t want to hear it, I really can’t.”