When I get back home, Mom’s waiting for me in my room, the picture I made on her lap. It’s of her and the sculptor kissing by The Wooden Bird in the foreground and Dad, Jude, and me as one blur making up the background.
Her mascara’s making black tears. “You followed me,” she says. “I really wish you hadn’t, Noah. I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have seen that.”
“You shouldn’t have been doing that!”
She looks down. “I know, which is why—”
“I thought you were going to tell Dad about me,” I blurt. “That’s why I followed you.”
“I told you I wasn’t going to.”
“I heard you say on the phone ‘something happened with Noah last night.’ I thought you were talking to Dad, not your boyfriend.”
Her face stiffens at the word. “I said that because when I heard myself telling you last night that it was your responsibility to be true to your heart, I realized I was being a hypocrite and I needed to take my own advice. I needed to be brave like my son.” Wait, did she just use me to justify her traitorous actions? She stands, hands me the drawing. “Noah, I’m asking Dad for a divorce. I’m going to tell him today. And I want to tell your sister myself.”
A divorce. Today. Now. “No!” This is my fault. If I hadn’t followed her. If I hadn’t seen. If I hadn’t drawn the picture. “Don’t you love us?” I meant to say don’t you love Dad, but that’s what came out.
“I love nothing more than you and your sister. Nothing. And your dad is a wonderful, wonderful man . . .”
But now I can’t focus on what she’s saying because a thought’s taken over my entire brain. “Is he going to live here?” I ask her, interrupting whatever she was saying. “That man? With us? Is he going to sleep on Dad’s side of the bed? Drink out of his coffee cup? Shave in his mirror? Is he? Are you going to marry him? Is that why you want a divorce?”
“Sweetheart . . .” She touches my shoulder, trying to comfort me. I pull away from her, hating her for the first time in my life, real live squawking hatred.
“You are,” I say in disbelief. “You’re going to marry him, aren’t you? That’s what you want.”
She doesn’t say no. Her eyes are saying yes. I can’t believe this.
“So you’re just going to forget about Dad? You’re going to pretend everything you had with him is nothing.” Like Brian’s doing to me. “He won’t survive it, Mom. You don’t see him at that hotel. He’s not like he used to be. He broke.” And me too. And what if I, in turn, broke Brian? How can love be such a wrecking ball?
“We tried, Dad and I,” she says. “We’ve been trying very hard for a very long time. All I ever wanted for you kids was the stability I didn’t have growing up. I never wanted this to happen.” She sits back down. “But I’m in love with another man.” Her face slides off her face—no one can keep their faces on today—and the one underneath is desperate. “I just am. I wish things were different but they’re not. It’s not right to live a lie. It never is, Noah.” There’s begging in her voice. “You can’t help who you love, can you?”
This silences the racket in me for a moment. I can’t help it, that’s for sure, and I suddenly want to tell her everything. I want to tell her that I’m in love too and I can’t help it either and that I just did the worst thing I could’ve possibly done to him and I don’t know how I could’ve done it and can’t believe how much I wish I could take it back.
But instead I walk out of the room.
THE HISTORY OF LUCK
Jude
Age 16
I’m lying in bed unable to sleep, thinking about Oscar kissing brown-haired Brooke while I karmically fermented in the closet. Thinking about Grandma’s and Mom’s ghosts uniting against me. Thinking mostly about Noah. What was he doing down by Guillermo’s studio today? And why did he look so frightened, so worried? He said he’d gone running and was totally fine and it was a coincidence we ran into each other on Day Street. But I didn’t believe him, like I didn’t believe him when he said he didn’t know how all the files I bookmarked about Guillermo got deleted. He must’ve followed me down there. But why? I had the strongest sense there was something he wanted to tell me. But like maybe he was too afraid.
Is he keeping something from me?
And why was he going through my stuff the other day? Maybe it wasn’t just curiosity. Also, the emergency money—what did he use it for? I looked all over his room when he went out tonight, found absolutely nothing new.
I sit up, hearing a suspicious noise. Ax-murderers. They always try to break in at night when Dad’s away at his conferences. I push off the blankets, get out of bed, grab the baseball bat I keep underneath it for such occasions, and do a quick walk-through of the house to make sure Noah and I will live another day. I end my patrol in the doorway of Mom and Dad’s bedroom thinking what I always do: The room’s still waiting for her to come back.
The dressing table’s still decorated with her antique atomizers, French perfume bottles, bowls shaped like shells filled with eye shadows, lipsticks, pencils. Black hair’s still webbed in the silver hairbrush. The biography of Wissily Kandinsky still rests facedown on it as if she’s going to pick it up and resume reading from where she left off.
But it’s the photograph that draws me in tonight. Dad keeps it on his night table, I imagine, so it’s the first thing he sees when he wakes up. Neither Noah nor I had ever seen this picture until after Mom died. Now I can’t seem to get enough of it, of Mom and Dad in this moment. She’s wearing an orange tie-dye hippie dress and her blustery black hair’s blowing into her face. Her eyes are painted dramatically with kohl like Cleopatra’s. She’s laughing, it seems, at Dad, who’s next to her on top of a unicycle, his arms out to the sides for balance. His grin is gleeful. On his head is a Mad Hatter–style black top hat and the sun-bleached blond hair beneath it goes halfway down his back. (The silent exchange between Dad and Noah when Noah saw the hair: Oh my Clark Gable.) There’s a satchel around Dad’s torso filled with a stack of vinyl. Matching wedding rings glint on their tan hands. Mom looks exactly like Mom but Dad looks like another person entirely, someone who might actually have been raised by Grandma Sweetwine. Apparently, this unicycle-riding super-kook asked Mom to marry him after knowing her for only three days. They were both in graduate school, he, eleven years older. He said he couldn’t risk her getting away. No other woman had ever made him feel so damn happy to be alive.
She said no other man had ever made her feel so safe. This super-kook made her feel safe!
I put down the photograph, wondering what would’ve happened had Mom lived and Dad moved back in with us like she’d decided. The mother I knew didn’t seem so interested in safety. The mother I knew had a glove compartment full of speeding tickets. She mesmerized lecture halls of students with her drama and passion, with ideas critics called daring and groundbreaking. She wore capes! Went skydiving on her fortieth birthday! And this: She’d secretly, regularly make plane reservations for one passenger to cities all over the world (I’d overhear her doing it), only to let them expire a day later—why? And for as long as I can remember, when she thought no one was looking, she played chicken with the stove, seeing how long she could keep her hand over the flame.
Noah once told me he could hear horses galloping inside her. I got it.
But I know so little about her life before all of us. Only that she was, in her words: a hellion, who was shuttled from one unhappy foster situation to another. She told us art books in the town libraries saved her life and taught her to dream and made her want to go to college. That’s it really. She always promised she was going to tell me everything when I was a little bit older.
I’m a little bit older and I want her to tell me everything.
I sit down at the makeup table in front of the long oval wood-framed mirror. Dad and I boxed up all the clothes, but neither of us could bear touching the dressing table. It felt sacrilegious. This was her altar.
When you talk to someone through a mirror,
your souls switch bodies
I dab her perfume on my neck and wrists, and then I’m remembering being thirteen years old, sitting right here before school, methodically putting on all the makeup of hers I wasn’t allowed to wear to school: the darkest red lipstick she had called Secret Embrace, black kohl eyeliner, bright blue and green shadows, glittery powders. Mom and I were enemy combatants then. I’d just stopped going to museums with her and Noah. She came up behind me but instead of getting mad, she picked up the silver-plaited hairbrush and started brushing my hair like she used to do when I was little. We were framed in the glass together. I noticed our hair was twining together in the hairbrush, light and dark, dark and light. Through the mirror, I looked at her and she at me. “It’d be easier with us and I’d worry less,” she said gently, “if you didn’t remind me so much of myself, Jude.”
I pick up the same brush she used that day, three years ago, and comb it through my hair until every gnarl and knot is freed, until there’s as much of my hair webbed in the brush as hers.
If your hair tangles with someone’s in a hairbrush,
your lives will forever tangle outside of it
No one tells you how gone gone really is, or how long it lasts.