He tilted his head curiously. “Last time I checked, there were eight million other people living in this city. Remember when we were convinced old Mrs. Collins had died and that her apartment was haunted?” he said. “Then two years later we saw her wheeling her cart through Prospect Park?”
In spite of myself, I had to laugh as I remembered how Ben and I had both screamed and run in the opposite direction when she’d called our names.
Now Ben was laughing, too. His laugh was low and deep and had always made me feel like I was the most interesting person in the world. No one else had ever made me feel that way, but my delight immediately morphed into sadness.
“So, you doing okay?” said Ben after he stopped laughing. “Still the longest-suffering member of the famous Francis sisters? What else is new?”
I wanted to tell him everything—about Belle’s death, my impending divorce, and why that had come about. Even the situation with my mom. All of it.
Except that wasn’t who Ben and I were anymore. It wasn’t who we’d ever be again. As friendly as he was being, the reality was that if either of us actually wanted to be friends again, we would have called, or emailed, or reached out in any other way that didn’t involve a chance encounter.
“Listen, I’ve gotta go,” I said as evenly as I could.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry,” he said. I’d hurt him; I could tell from the way he was squinting.
Don’t try to fix it, I ordered myself. You don’t owe him anything. “It’s fine,” I said. “Send my best to your dad.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do that.”
“Okay,” I said, but I was still standing there dumbly. One foot in front of the other, Laine, I reminded myself. Couldn’t be easier. “Bye,” I said, and before he could see me cringe at how stiff and stupid I sounded, I set off toward the apartment.
I’d counted out eight steps when he yelled, “Lainey!”
Lainey. How dare he.
But in spite of myself, I spun around. He was in the same place, hands shoved in his pockets, except his face was kind of twisted up. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he looked regretful. “What is it?” I said.
He shrugged, but I knew that shrug. It was the opposite of I don’t care. “It was really good to see you,” he said.
Yes, but it was also terribly painful. So painful that I almost wished I hadn’t bumped into him in front of a vacant bagel shop. This was why people in recovery didn’t have the occasional drink; it only made it harder to stay on the wagon.
“You, too,” I said. Then I took off for my mother’s before I could give in to the temptation to turn back around and see if Ben was still standing there, watching me walk away once again.
TWELVE
LAINE
When I got back to the brownstone, I headed to the top floor, assuming my mother was already up there like she said she was going to be—not that I actually expected her to be doing much of anything without my help. But the place was empty, save all that mess, and I’m sorry to say I was relieved about that. I couldn’t stop seeing Ben’s face, which was really a composite of younger him and older him. And I needed to get him out of my head before I interacted with my mother.
After our blowup, I’d had to twist myself into knots to keep thinking good thoughts about her. Every time she gave me advice—even if it was just to grab a sweater before I headed out—I found myself wondering if she was manipulating me. And I couldn’t help but take a magnifying glass to every situation that involved anyone of a different race. I couldn’t find evidence that Ben was right—but that was probably owing to my own blind spot, I reasoned, since I understood that it was impossible that she wasn’t unintentionally racist at least some of the time.
Although I didn’t quite realize it at the time, staying in Ann Arbor after graduation must have been another way to avoid second-guessing everything she said and did, not to mention my responses to her. Time and distance did what they do so well, and eventually my anxiety eased, mostly resurfacing at pivotal moments. When I first brought Josh home, and she whispered loudly, so everyone could hear, “He’s a keeper, Laine!” my immediate reaction was to question whether she somehow felt more warmly toward Asian men, and why she couldn’t summon that same warmth toward Ben.
By that point, it didn’t matter; our relationship was nonexistent. She’d asked why Ben hadn’t come to my college graduation party, and when I’d told her we’d had a falling-out, she’d nodded knowingly and never brought it up again. Oddly, that hurt even more than her pressing for details. Don’t you care? I wanted to shout. You spent years welcoming him into your home. You knew he was more important to me than anyone. How can you act like he never existed?
I didn’t say any of that, though. Because after having my heart broken by Ben, the last thing I needed was another fight.
As much as I wanted to start cleaning the upstairs apartment right away—if anything could soothe me, it was bringing order to chaos—I knew I needed to make sure she hadn’t wandered into the neighborhood in a negligee. But when I let myself into her apartment, I found her dozing on an armchair in the living room. Relieved, I left her there and quietly headed back upstairs.
I’ll never know if it was nature or nurture or both, but I’d always had a proclivity to organize. I can still remember waking early as a young child, long before anyone else in my house had stirred, and going from room to room to clean. I can’t recall what I did, exactly—probably put the shoes in the foyer, maybe placed the dirty dishes in the sink and put the toys in the toy box. But I can still see my mother’s bleary-eyed expression changing into delight when she wandered into the living room. “What an angel you are,” she said to me. Piper was fussing in her arms, but she put her in the rocker anyway. Hadley had just emerged from our bedroom, and my mother ignored her, too, as she hugged me. “You’re so good, Lainey,” she said, kissing the top of my head. “I hope you know that.” I was not well spoken like Hadley. I was not irresistible like Piper. But in that moment, I was the center of her attention. And that was even better.
I didn’t know why I craved my mother’s attention; maybe it was the same reason some children who were rarely allowed to have sugar were inclined to secretly hoard candy under their beds. But once I learned how to get it, it was the party trick I used over and over—scrubbing the brownstone from top to bottom while they were in the Berkshires, locating my mother’s purse after she’d spent an hour searching, straightening Piper’s room for her so she and my mother wouldn’t fight. I never resented a minute of it; there was something inherently comforting knowing that however messy the outside world was, everything between our four walls could be just right, at least for a little while.
Maybe that was why the sight of the boxes and papers all over the upstairs apartment—which looked even more plentiful in the full light of day—didn’t intimidate me. Unlike the contents of my childhood home, these were not the things my mother cared about. Otherwise she never would have boxed them all up. This would be easy.