Upstairs, I shut the door and collapsed onto the bed, fighting back tears. Caleb took a seat beside me, the mattress sinking slightly with his weight. My hip collided softly with his, and I instinctively rested my head on his firm shoulder. He hesitated for a moment longer than I would have liked, but then he caught my head in his hand, holding it in place and gently twisting my hair.
“I want to be honest with you,” I said, my voice muffled by his shoulder. “But I’m worried how you’ll react.”
His body stiffened; his hand stilled. “React to what?”
With an inhalation of firm resolve, I sat up to look him in the eye. I hated the misgivings I saw there, hated that I had given him reason to doubt me. I tamped down the fiery pain in my heart and began to speak. “Poppy Parnell released a special episode this morning. None of the episodes have been easy to listen to, as you can probably guess—she’s taken the single most horrible thing that’s ever happened to me and repackaged it as entertainment—but this episode was the hardest by far.”
Caleb reached out and squeezed my hand. Heartened by his support, I continued.
“It was all about my mom: her childhood, her mental health, that cult she joined. There were so many things she could have said about my mother, and she focused entirely on making her look insane. It was such a transparent attempt at dodging responsibility for her role in Mom’s suicide. Poppy thinks she can get herself off the hook if she can prove Mom was crazy all along.”
Caleb winced. “Oh, Jo. I’m sorry you had to hear that.”
“But that’s not what made it so hard. The hard part is that she’s right. Kind of, at least. Mom . . . had troubles. It’s one of the reasons I never told you about her. Talking about it was too painful.”
Caleb rubbed slow, encouraging circles on my hand with his thumb. “Do you want to talk about it now?”
I gulped and nodded. “I do. If you want to listen.”
“Of course I want to listen,” he said quietly.
So I told Caleb everything I could think of about my mother, from the fantastical games she would play with us on her good days and about her ethereal, woodland-nymph brand of beauty, to her dark moods, the times she would lock herself in her bedroom or our playhouse out back. I told him about our thirteenth birthday party, when Mom baked a perfect three-tiered cake and decorated it with small marzipan characters; I told him about the time Mom smashed all the drinking glasses in the cabinet.
I concluded with a ragged breath. “What if it’s hereditary?”
“You’re not going to turn into your mother, love,” Caleb said gently.
“But what if I do? Will you leave me?”
“Of course not,” he said, taken aback.
“You can’t promise that,” I said, shaking my head.
“Listen, love, I’m not laboring under the belief you’re perfect. You’re not. You kick me in your sleep, kill all my houseplants, and are a shit housekeeper.”
“And you’re a slob, selfish with the remote control, and have embarrassing taste in reading material,” I countered quickly. “Oh, and I know about the cigarettes you hide in your sock drawer.”
“You do, eh?” He frowned. “The point I was winding toward before you interrupted me was that I love you, flaws and all. Sane, not sane, it doesn’t matter to me because I’ll love you always, no matter what.” He paused to smile crookedly. “And I hope that you can still love me, even though I’ve been outed as a slovenly, selfish, illiterate smoker.”
“Of course I do,” I said, tears starting to drip down my cheeks. “But those minor shortcomings you listed just proves you have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m talking about real darkness, Caleb. You can’t promise that you’ll still love me. You have no idea.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, I just learned that you lied to me for years. And I’m still here professing my love. I think it’s safe to say that I’m in this for the long haul. No matter what. Anything that happens, we’ll face it together. I love you heaps, Jo.”
Something cracked open inside, and I flung my arms around his neck, sobbing. “I love you, too. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve you, but I promise I’m going to spend the rest of my life making this up to you.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” he said quietly into my neck. “Just be honest with me from now on. That’s all I ask.”
By that afternoon, I had yet to hear from my sister, and I was beginning to wonder if our tentative reconciliation had been nothing more than a by-product of grief. Perhaps nothing had changed. The latest Reconsidered episode had me longing to talk about my mother with someone who remembered her, but I was reluctant to call my sister, afraid not only of her legendary temper but of the questions the podcast had raised. I had nearly convinced myself that our entire reconciliation was a fluke when Lanie called to invite Caleb and me over for dinner.
I was glad to have Caleb by my side; it was one thing to hug my sister in the room we had once shared, but it was another to eat an entire meal in her home with her family. It would be the longest I had been in the same room as Lanie since before she moved out of Aunt A’s house at seventeen. Caleb took my hand as we mounted the pristine steps to Lanie and Adam’s mini-mansion by the country club, and I squeezed it gratefully.
My sister answered the door wearing an apron ordering me to “Kiss the Cook,” and I couldn’t help but stare. Even stranger than the notion of Lanie living in this home with its picture windows and manicured lawn was the sight of her wearing a kitschy apron with a fleck of chopped garlic clinging to her cheek. This person standing in front of me, smiling a pleasant, lipsticked smile, was not the same sister who had locked me out of our bedroom so she could get high or who had stumbled down Benny Weston’s stairs; I wasn’t even certain she was the same sister I had grown up with, the one to whom I had once whispered all my secrets in the dark.
“Thanks for coming,” Lanie said, embracing each of us in turn.
“Thanks for having us,” I said, holding out a bottle of red wine.
“Thanks,” she said, glancing quickly at it. “Come in. I’m finishing up dinner, and Adam ran to the store—we forgot the tomatoes for the salad.”
Stepping inside the living room, I noticed the decor was a near-complete rip-off of Adam’s parents’ house. Either the original Mrs. Ives had done most of the decorating, or the new Mrs. Ives had taken her cues literally from Adam’s mother. The walls were a muted taupe, the furniture matched, and accent pillows were carefully placed around the room. Ann sat in the middle of the floor, the carpet littered with small, colorful plastic blocks. She looked up as we entered and announced, “I helped Mom with the crescent rolls.”
“That’s great,” I said, nodding enthusiastically, unsure how to speak to an eight-year-old girl. “I’m sure you were a big help.”
Caleb, who had no such hang-ups about speaking with children, glanced down at her. “Quite a Lego collection you’ve got yourself there.”
“I’m working on a city,” she said. Pointing to a few small amalgamations of blocks, she narrated, “This is the town hall. This is the school. And this is going to be the skyscraper.”
“Ambitious,” Caleb said, folding his long legs beneath him on the ground. “I like it. Mind if I help?”