“The truth!”
“The truth? The truth is that I’m barely holding myself together, okay? The truth is that I alternate between being so sad I could melt away and so angry I could explode. Are you happy now? Does that make it all better? Do you think that’s going to change something? That’s going to undo it?”
I should stop. I shouldn’t keep going.
“She’s dead, Mom. She’s your daughter and she’s dead. So yeah, you’re angry and sad, but come on, you’re holding back, you’re always holding back, and I do, too, but I don’t want to anymore, I just want you to—”
“I hate you!” Her arms locked at her sides, fists clenched, eyes screwed tightly shut, she screams it at the top of her voice. “Are you happy now? Is that what you want to hear? I hate you I hate you I HATE YOU! You killed her! You murdered my little baby girl! I hate you, Sebastian—God, I fucking hate you!”
And she shoves me in the chest, but I’m locked in place, so she just collapses there on the floor. She’s a ball of tears and snot and horror and agony and fear and the sort of pain that starts in the gut and spreads out in both directions until it consumes you from head to toe, inside and out.
And there’s nothing for me to do but to kneel beside her. “That’s okay,” I tell her.
I tell her, “That’s okay,” and then I say the words I’ve been waiting to say since I was four years old, the words I’ve said to everyone in my life except for her, the words I can’t stop saying until she’s around, when a blast door slams down over my tongue and the words are stuck on the other side.
I say, “I’m sorry.”
She howls like a wolf cut loose from the pack. The howl is an awful thing, a living thing with its own corrupt and bleak soul, a hopeless thing, lost, its destination burned to the ground, its home blighted.
Sobbing, she claws at her eyes, and I remember that moment from ten years ago, Dad shoving her. Gentler, I take her wrists in my hands and pull her fingers away from her face. Her eyes are swollen and red, painful, rimmed with tears and running makeup.
“Don’t,” she says.
“Mom, I have to talk about it. I have to, okay? I can’t go on like this. I’ve been—” thinking of killing myself is the end of that sentence, but not something I can say to her. Not yet. Not even now.
“I’ve been so sad,” I say instead.
She folds me in her arms. I fold her in mine.
Later, she’s fallen asleep on the sofa. We’ve been talking for hours, and it’s past three in the morning, and I’m so tired I can’t sleep, so I sit up in the easy chair and watch her instead.
“Shouldn’t have said it,” Mom mumbles, rousing.
“What?”
She blinks her eyes clear. It takes a few seconds for them to focus on me. “What I said. Before. I shouldn’t have said it.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. I’m your mother. And besides, it wasn’t true. It isn’t true. None of it.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Sebastian…”
“Be honest with me, Mom.”
She sits up, fruitlessly tries to straighten her wrinkled and disheveled work clothes. Gives up.
“It was true,” she admits. “Once. At one time. For a moment. And I couldn’t say it, couldn’t let myself think it, because it was awful.”
“I hated myself, too.”
She strokes my cheek. “Don’t hate yourself, sweetheart. It gets you nothing. It gets you nowhere.”
“I know.” Now.
She sighs and rubs her eyes. “After it happened, maybe a year later, I told myself I was going to be one of those moms.… One of those moms who bounces back from tragedy, who changes the world. Like the ones who started Mothers Against Drunk Driving. But I learned something. I’m not strong, Sebastian. Those people are the exception. I’m not exceptional. Most of us hide. Most of us just curl up and hide. So I did nothing.”
“You kept us together.”
“I couldn’t even do that. Your father left.”
“Yeah, but you still let him see me. Even when I didn’t want to. You did your best.”
She shrugs. “How do you feel now?”
“Tired.”
“Me too.”
We laugh together. “Good thing it’s Saturday tomorrow.”
“It’s Saturday right now,” I remind her.
She rises, smooths her skirt. “Well, it’ll still be Saturday later, after we get some sleep.”
“There’s just one more thing.”
I can almost hear her throat constrict, can almost hear her thinking, What the hell else could there be?
“Why did you get rid of everything?” I ask. “Why did you just delete her from our lives?”
She walks away. Before I can react, she’s back, with her purse, rummaging inside.
“All the pictures and stuff are at Gramma’s house. There was no way I threw it out. Not a chance. I just couldn’t be surrounded by it. And I didn’t want you surrounded by it. This is all I have with me.”
She produces her phone from the depths of her purse. Flicks it on. Scrolls to a photo. “This is the one I let myself look at. This is the day we brought her home from the hospital.”
It’s a picture of Lola, tiny and wrinkled, her face a tight little fist, her eyes screwed shut against the world. Somehow, though, she’s relaxed. At peace.
Content.
Holding her is four-year-old Sebastian, beaming at the camera as it goes off.
“That’s good,” I try to say, but my voice is drowned in tears.
“She loved her big brother from the beginning,” Mom manages to say, and kisses my forehead.
People have been telling me that “time heals all wounds” my entire life. I never really believed them—scabs and scars form, I figured, but I didn’t imagine that the wounds themselves ever truly healed. They just lurk beneath the new surface, as raw and as sensitive as the day they were made. They’re just not visible any longer. They’re just not exposed.
I’m still not ready to believe time heals wounds, but I think maybe something else does.
We heal wounds. Not time.
Us.
Evan has never said anything about the gun, so I assume Dad managed to sneak it back in somehow. I have no idea how. I see him every week now, and one time I asked him. He just shrugged and said, “I have my ways.”
I said, “So… you’re a ninja?”
He did a little karate chop. And he smiled.
He actually smiled. It was small and brief, but it was there.
A school is a big place; it’s easy to avoid each other. A school bus is big, too—one of you in front, the other in back, the distractions of friends and the driver’s terrible choice in radio stations. A school bus can be a stadium, and you can get lost in there, if you’re willing. If you try hard enough.