“Grace,” her dad said again. “We’re worried about you, that’s all. We—”
“Because if memory serves,” Grace continued, ignoring her dad, “the whole point of me giving up P— Milly was so that I could live my life, right? ‘Oh, Grace, you have your whole life ahead of you!’ How many times did I hear that come out of your mouths? And now everyone reminds me that I had a baby, I can’t go to school, I can’t make friends with a boy—”
“You can make friends—” her mom started to say, but Grace kept going. She felt like someone had released a steam trigger on the top of her head.
“Okay, let’s say he’s not a friend, then,” Grace said. “Let’s say that Rafe is a boy that I do like. Do I not get to date? Do I not get to kiss a boy ever again? Did I blow my big chance at falling in love and starting a family because I made one mistake?”
“Grace,” her mom said, and Grace could hear the wobble in her voice. “You did not—”
“Well, good!” Grace shouted. “Because if I can’t move forward and like someone and make friends and, God forbid, fall in love again, then I don’t understand why I gave up my baby in the first place! Unless it was only to make everything okay for you!”
She didn’t even realize she was crying until she went to move her hair off her face and realized that her cheeks were wet. Her parents looked shell-shocked, stricken. Grace suspected they would have looked less horrified if she had slapped them.
“I think we need to meet with a counselor,” Grace’s dad said after almost fifteen seconds of near silence, Grace’s breath the only sound in the room. She felt wild, feral, like she had when Peach had forced her way out of her. She felt, Grace suddenly realized, alive.
“Fine,” she said. “Make an appointment. Because I have a lot to say and I’m tired of not saying it. And,” she added, “you can tell Elaine from down the street that what I do is none of her damn business. I mean, that’s what you would have told her last year, right?”
Grace didn’t bother to wait for a response. Instead, she turned and ran back upstairs, locking herself in the bathroom and turning on the faucet as hard as it would go. She waited until she was sure no one could hear her before she started to cry.
MAYA
Maya kept trying to think of a word that would describe how it felt to have their dad back in their house full-time while her mom was in rehab. She tried to come up with something, but at the end of the day, all she had was one word.
Weird.
It was weird to see her dad making breakfast in the morning, eggs that looked too slimy to eat but both Maya and Lauren choked them down anyway. By the end of the day, all of them were too tired to figure out dinner, which led to pizza boxes on the coffee table while the three of them sprawled out, gnawing on the crusts while watching reruns of House Hunters.
Their mom went to rehab straight from the hospital, her head bandaged, her hands shaking. Maya thought she looked like a frightened child, what with her big eyes and small bones, and Maya hugged her good-bye and couldn’t decide if she wanted her mom to come home soon or stay away forever.
The counselor at the hospital said that it was better if she didn’t come home in between the hospital and rehab, that she might see her house and suddenly decide not to go, conclude that she could just drink less at home and not need any sort of counseling. “Yeah, no,” Maya had said when the counselor said that. This was after Grace and Joaquin had come over the morning after the accident, when the three of them had sat side by side and put their feet in the water and smoked a joint that, Maya later realized, was one of the only items she had left from Claire.
The rehab was in a place that, according to the pamphlets, looked more like a spa vacation. But their dad assured them that it was “a wonderful facility” that “will finally give your mom the help she needs. That’s great, right?” Maya and Lauren had sat next to each other on the couch in the hospital lobby and nodded. What else could they do?
Their dad had been horrified to hear about the wine bottles hidden around the house, the empties stashed at the bottom of the recycling bin in the backyard. He had sat between Lauren and Maya on their living room couch while Maya explained everything in a monotone that didn’t even sound like her own voice. “How long has this been going on?” he asked.
“A while?” Lauren finally offered, and their dad had let out a long, low sigh before lowering his head into his hands. Maya wasn’t sure if she was supposed to comfort him, so she didn’t do anything.
“Okay,” he finally said. “We’re making some changes around here.”
And now it was the three of them rattling around in the house that suddenly felt too big. Maya had never realized how much space their mom had taken up. One afternoon, she found herself automatically going upstairs to suss out the latest stash of wine bottles, and only realized upon opening the closet that that wasn’t a problem anymore.
Their dad wanted Maya and Lauren to start going to therapy, too. “Why?” Maya had asked. “We’re not the ones with the drinking problem.” Privately, she thought that was yet another result of her mother’s selfishness: she was the one with the drinking problem, so why did Maya need to waste a hour of her week in therapy?
“Dad’s being weird,” Lauren said one night. They were doing homework in Maya’s bedroom, Lauren sprawled on the floor while Maya sat cross-legged on her bed. Neither one of them thought about using the desk, and even if they had wanted to, Maya’s laundry was spread all over it. Laundry felt like a luxury at this point, something that people with fewer worries and more time did for themselves.
“Dad’s weird because he’s afraid we’re going to be cripplingly and emotionally damaged,” Maya replied, her pen between her teeth as she flipped back and forth between her physics textbook and her lab book. “Plus, dads are weird in general.”
“Are you going to go to counseling?” Lauren asked. From the floor, she sounded very far away.
“Fuck no,” Maya said. “Mom’s the one with the problem. She can use her own precious time to sort it out.”
Lauren was quiet for another long minute before she said, “How come you’re always home right now?”
“What?” Maya shut her textbook and went back to her workbook. Why couldn’t they put all the information in one book, instead of making you need at least three for each class?
“Where’s Claire?”
Maya ignored the dull pain that shot up her spine whenever someone mentioned Claire. “We broke up.”
“What?” Lauren sounded scandalized. “Why? I thought you two were totally in love with each other.”
“Were. Past tense. Love is fleeting, things change, et cetera.”
“Why?”
“Because we had a fight and we both said mean things to each other.” Maya left out the part where she was mostly the one who said mean things, and Claire was mostly the one who said the truth.