“I don’t understand.”
“We thought you might want to go home for a visit. See Scarlett, hang out with your old friends for a few days. I heard you were homesick,” she says, and she picks up the photo, a conscious decision to look at my mom and me and to let me know she’s looking. She examines our details: how I held on to my mom’s leg, like an anchor. Or maybe Rachel is not looking at me at all but is trying to get a sense of my mother, of her husband’s first wife. I want her to put it down—I don’t like how her fingers are leaving tiny smudges.
“Who said that I was homesick?” I ask, which is a stupid question. Of course I’m homesick, the longing sometimes so overwhelming that I’ve even marveled at how accurate the word is, how the feeling comes over me like the stomach flu. Violent, unforgiving. No cure, just waiting for it to relent.
“Scarlett’s parents called your dad,” Rachel says, and finally, finally puts down my photo. It takes all my willpower not to move it so it’s facing the bed, not the door. To wipe the glass clean with some Windex. Erase her fingerprints. Reclaim it as mine. “But how could you not be? This has been a huge adjustment. For all of us.”
Is that regret flickering across her face? Does she wish she never married my father, that there was an easy way to undo their joint mistake?
“Wait, what?” Scarlett’s parents called my dad? Did they tell him about my plans for their basement? What did Scarlett tell them? I’m not sure if I should be angry or thrilled, because right now, I have in my hand a plane ticket, an actual plane ticket that will take me from here to home, to Scarlett and to a life that’s familiar, in under six hours door to door. We didn’t fly out here when we moved. Instead, Dad and I caravanned our two cars through too many states. The world flat and devoid of life: miles upon miles of nothing but dust. The occasional stop at McDonald’s to eat and pee, a gas station to refill, a cheap motel to sleep. My mind as blank and empty as the roads. As numb as SN feels playing Xbox.
We barely talked, my dad and I, on the trip. He might have tried, I don’t know. Only once did Rachel come up, over lunch at an Arby’s, as if he were answering a question I hadn’t even asked.
“Rachel’s an extraordinary woman. You’ll see. Don’t worry, you’ll see,” he said, though I hadn’t said I was worried. I hadn’t said anything at all.
“Apparently, Scarlett’s mom said she was concerned about you. And frankly, so am I,” Rachel says now. “Go. Enjoy. And then come back to us refreshed. Your dad has…well, he saved my life. He’s totally real and normal and understands what I’ve been through, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. We’re so different, but together we’re stronger. Whole. But I don’t want you to think that I don’t realize that this—all of this—has come at a cost to you.”
She’s matter-of-fact. Her voice a normal decibel for once.
“Everyone in this house understands how hard it can be to start over,” she says.
I look at my ticket. I leave Friday morning, get back Sunday night.
“What about school?”
“Theo will email you notes and stuff, and we’ll let your teachers know it’s an excused absence. You deserve this.” Rachel pats the bed next to her, invites me to sit. I’ve been pacing, I realize now, midstep, on my second lap around the room.
I sit, stare at the ticket. Coffee with SN/Caleb on Thursday, his mask unveiled, I hope, and then I’m off. I’ll miss my weekly “Waste Land” meeting with Ethan, but he’ll understand. Scarlett and I will watch bad television and pop microwave popcorn and eat real pizza, not this whole-wheat-crust crap they have in California. I will talk and she will listen, and there will be no need to explain everything or have anything explained; we’ve known each other too long for all of that. I even want to drink that green tea her mom always brews, the one I used to think tasted like pee but that now makes me think of home.
“Thank you,” I say, and force myself to look Rachel in the eye. My dad didn’t do this, I realize. Big gestures are not his style, or at least, they weren’t before he married Rachel. And a plane ticket was never something that could be so casually purchased. “I…”
My eyes water, and I stare straight ahead to get the tears under control. Not here, not now. The tears only seem to come when they are least wanted, almost never in the quiet depths of night, when the emptiness is so real, it feels like a phantom limb. When tears would actually feel something like relief.
“No problem,” Rachel says, and stands up. “But just so you know, there is one condition.”
I wait for it. What could she possibly want from me? Rent money? For me to make up with my dad?
“You have to come back.”
Me: OMG! OMG! OMG! 2 sleeps!
Scarlett: Woot! Woot!
Me: What did you tell your parents? Obvi they freaked.