“Fine.”
Tariq’s eyes glared into darkness, the whole way to where he left me. And again I kept wanting to say something, and again I kept not knowing what it would be.
Mom was awake, waiting for me at the kitchen table when I came in at two in the morning.
“Didn’t hear a car,” she said.
“Tariq dropped me off down the block.”
“Why?”
“Thought you’d be asleep. Didn’t want to wake you.”
She looked doubtful. “Sit.”
I sat.
“Did you call any of those numbers for therapists the doctor gave you?”
“No,” I said.
She flung a tea bag into a mug, poured hot water over it. Then she stopped and sniffed me. “Oh my god. You smell like a—have you been drinking?”
“No, Mom. Some jerk spilled a bottle all over me.”
“And these clothes?”
“Bastien loaned me some of his.”
“Open your mouth,” she said. I did, and she sniffed, and then stared into my eyes like she could spot a lie there.
“I hate drinking,” I said.
“Good,” she said and sat. “Repeat after me: He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.”
I did so, swiftly and free of any slurring. I could have asked her about her own drinking. I did not. We sat in silence and watched our tea steep. This was the mother I remembered from my childhood: huge, unstoppable, a human bullshit detector. There was something comforting about being in its crosshairs. As a little boy, I had been in awe of those moments where she caught me doing something bad, and enjoyed, on some strange level, the stern punishments she administered. You will be better when this is over, they seemed to say, and when it was over, I was.
But the ER doctor’s sentence still echoed in my head: Since you’re a minor, we do have the power to force you into a treatment program with your mother’s consent.
“Being a parent is terrifying,” she said. “You have no idea. Every day, you live with the possibility that you’ll make some terrible mistake that will ruin your kid’s life forever. You wonder if you’ve already made an awful mistake and not even known about it, passing on some gene that’ll cause cancer or Alzheimer’s or something. There’s never a clear answer. No one else can help you because no one else has ever been in the exact same circumstances with the exact same kid. You do too much, you cause a problem. You do too little, you cause a problem.”
“You’re a great mom,” I said.
“I’m an alcoholic,” she said, and sipped her tea. Me, I came damn near to choking on mine. I was touched that she’d trust me that much, but disturbed, too. That kind of trust was terrifying. “I’ve been mostly sober for about seventeen years.” I am almost seventeen. “Sometimes I falter. Lately, I’ve been faltering.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been causing you—”
“Shush,” she said. “That’s not why I’m telling you all this. I’m telling you because lots of doctors think alcoholism is genetic, and since I’ve kept it a secret from you and your sister all these years, you don’t know that you have that predisposition. You might start down a road you don’t otherwise know to avoid.”
“I hate drinking, Mom. I’m not in danger of starting down that road.”
“It isn’t just alcohol. Addictive personalities are addictive personalities. It means you don’t know when to stop. If something makes you feel good, you’ll do it until you’re sick. Or worse. Like with eating.” And here she patted her own ample stomach. “Or not eating.”
Or love, I thought, thinking back to Tariq and my terror when he put his hands on me and begged for it.
“That’s what I mean when I say being a parent is terrifying. You’re always on the lookout for how you’ve failed. When you were little, I was constantly looking for signs that you’d inherited my problem. Do you remember when you had that ancient cassette player, and I got you that Beyoncé single you liked?”
“Yeah,” I said. “‘Crazy in Love.’ I listened to it over and over again, for hours, every day, until you had to take it away from me.”
“And spent weeks worrying about whether I’d made it worse.”
“You totally did. I was so mad at you.”
She laughed, then got quiet again. “You and your sister were always so different. I only ever had to tell you something once. She used to pester me about the same things all the time. I told you your father was a crab fisherman in Alaska, and that was enough for you. She asked me every other day where he was, why he wasn’t with us, how she could get in touch with him.”
“Lobster,” I said, trembling. My voice was barely audible. “You said Dad was on a lobster boat.”
“He was probably on both,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Or neither. Anyway, your sister always wanted a relationship with him, and over the past year, as she got more and more unhappy with Hudson and school and her life, I started to realize that I had hurt her by keeping her in the dark. So I gave her his mother’s old mailing address, which was the only connection I had.”
“Tell me about him,” I said.
“Your father.” She looked at her hands. Shut her eyes. “Your father was strong and smart and handsome. Confident. The world was his. He was never in doubt about anything. Which is actually an incredibly frustrating trait for someone who is wrong all the time. Full of big ideas about how to change the world, but never wanted to do a damn thing to make them happen. Convinced everyone was out to get him. Hated society, whatever that means. Wanted to go his own way.”
“Am I like him?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I see him in you, physically. But I can’t be objective about either of you. I’m convinced you’re a hundred percent Perfect, and that he’s a hundred percent . . . the opposite of that. There’s no rulebook for being a parent, Matt. Rulebooks are bullshit.”
I looked around the kitchen, at the rabbit-shaped saltshakers and the Salvation Army mugs with faded witty slogans, at the dirty stove and the sink full of dishes, the garbage can so full the lid wouldn’t shut, and I realized that for all its smallness and its shortcomings, it was home. It was safe and warm and full of love.
“Everything you’ve done as a parent has come from a good place, right? And overall I think Maya and I both turned out pretty well.”
She looked at me, hard, a look that said, Really? You think so? You with an eating disorder you think I’m too stupid to see and your sister a runaway? Or maybe she was just exhausted and had said what she needed to say to me and was out of things to say. I had to work hard not to read her mind or her body language or her pheromones, but I managed.
I checked my phone. Maya’s bassist, Ani, had posted a status update that said Destroy All Monsters! RIP and my first thought was sadness for my sister’s sake, because of how much that band meant to her, and my second thought was hope that maybe this would mean she might come home.