Rachel hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“Stay with me. Just for a few days.” He kissed her temple, her cheek, the corner of her mouth, trailing small I love yous over her skin. “Let me take care of you.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rachel’s dad used to say that instincts were your heart trying to be heard over your head. If you ignored them too often, they would eventually go quiet. Her instincts, her heart, used to fantasize about running away. She thought about it when she wandered through a bookstore until they took down the open sign. Or when she ate her muffin slowly at a coffee shop so they’d keep refilling her mug. It happened the day she dropped Faith off at culinary school. Rachel had roamed around the city for hours because she didn’t want to go home.
But those were fantasies. Her head would remind her of how grateful she should be for her life. Over the years, it happened less and less. So when Nathan asked her to stay, it felt like her heart, tired of being ignored, had put those desires into someone else’s mouth instead, hoping this time she would finally listen.
“The tow truck just left.” Nathan handed her a coffee mug. “The guy sold me a used tire, so we’re not stranded anymore.” They’d woken up on the couch after a heavy night’s sleep and migrated to the sunroom for breakfast, which seemed redundant given the entire house was one big atrium. Someone had designed it with sunrise backdrops in mind.
“I was about to go shopping,” he said. “We need actual food and a change of clothes.” Nathan had found a collection of Tshirts and sweatpants Joe had left in a drawer upstairs, but the weather had settled into a brisk fall chill. They both needed something warmer. Nathan was bursting out of clothes that were a size too small.
“I should go with you.”
She sat up, but Nathan touched her arm to stop her. “I can go. You look tired.” He stroked her cheek. “Do you want to talk about yesterday?”
She wondered if he realized his hands were extended, palm up, as if he might need to catch her. “I had a panic attack.”
“I know,” Nathan said. “I also know they can have triggers.” He hesitated. “Did something happen to you? In a car?”
“No, not like you mean. It’s a long story.” She was stalling. People who love you think they want to know everything about you. Like the unseen parts are wrapped gifts they’re eager to open. But Rachel knew it was more like reading someone’s diary or going through their internet search history. Once you know, you can’t unknow.
“When Faith was two, I left her with my dad so I could go to college. My freshman year, I came home to visit them over Christmas and again the following summer. After that, I stopped going home at all.”
A mother can decode their child’s pain by the way they cry. Faith’s was a breathless whine when she was hungry, and a hiccuping staccato when she wanted attention. The high-pitched scream that burst from her tiny body when Rachel came home for the holidays was pure pain. It was Where were you? and Why did you leave me? and Please don’t go, in one long, scream. All Rachel could do was hold her arms down in the center of the bed so she wouldn’t hurt herself.
Later, her father would say that Faith was never like this. “She’s just tired, most likely.” But Rachel knew better. She heard the damage she’d caused in Faith’s wail. It was an echo of the pain she felt when someone mentioned her mother’s name.
Ramona Thomas was a woman who dreamed of singing on Broadway but paid the bills by fixing the soles of rich white women’s shoes. She’d named her only daughter Rachel because it was her favorite from the Bible, a fact she’d written in a notebook filled with unfinished song lyrics and her bitter resentment, which coated her life like oil. All of it was bound to catch fire eventually.
Rachel was three when her mother left. Too young to have anything but the memory of her smell: vanilla and Pink Oil Moisturizer singed with a hot comb. The memory of her touch: firm but careful. The memory of a sweater: burnt orange, like sunsets, with little fuzz balls Rachel used to grab. Her voice was a melody that started to fade as soon as she left—like a song Rachel listened to less and less as she got older.
“I hated my mother for a long time.” Rachel didn’t look directly at Nathan while she spoke. She kept her eyes on the lake and let the water’s motion lull her into a calm. “But after Faith, I think I finally understood her a little more. You can’t straddle both sides of your life. Living in one means losing something from the other. That’s just the way it is.”
Despite her father’s assurances that Faith was fine, the tantrums were worse when she returned home for the summer. Rachel spent the first two nights rocking Faith to sleep, only for her to jolt awake, look at Rachel’s face, and start crying all over again.
“That’s when I had my first panic attack,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was. I’d sit outside her room and listen to her breathing while my heart was burning up inside my chest. I was nineteen years old. I remember thinking that we couldn’t live that way. That this couldn’t be what we were to each other. Nothing but damage.”
Her hands were trembling like she’d never left that narrow hallway. She pressed them hard against her legs. “I stopped going home. Phone calls would trigger another attack. Dad wrote letters, but I could never bear to read them. I got high a lot. It helped. But I couldn’t look at old pictures or be around kids.” She paused. “I wonder if that’s how my mother did it. Erased me from her life so that it was easier to stay away.” She glanced at Nathan but wasn’t brave enough to read his face. “Two years later, the dean of students told me that my father was in the hospital with pancreatic cancer. They’d put him into a medically induced coma.”
Nathan made a wounded sound, a strangled loss of breath. “I’m so sorry.”
“Please don’t be.” She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t deserve sympathy. I never will.” She took a deep breath. “I read all his letters. There was nothing about him being sick. It was all about Faith and—” The memory bled through and made her choke. She swallowed hard and kept talking, but her words stopped and started, tumbling together. She’d dropped her classes and returned home, but he was already gone. Faith was with a neighbor. She was five and there was no tantrum this time, but she didn’t eat for several days. Like she wanted to hurt in ways her mother couldn’t see.
The little money Peter had was put toward unpaid medical bills so large they looked like mortgages. The landlord gave her six weeks to get current on the rent. Rachel applied for retail jobs, but the hours never worked with Faith’s school schedule. After-school programs were full. Sitters were too expensive. Eventually an eviction notice went up.