He didn’t move. Didn’t shake his head. Didn’t raise his voice. Let the end come gently and swiftly. “I need you to quit now,” he said. “I need you to quit, and pack your bags, and go right now. And hope to God this doesn’t come back.”
I nodded and backed out of his office, my heart beating wildly. There was this terrible thrill before it plummeted deep. But for a moment, I felt it, and I knew what it was: It was truth, and I had done it. Rising to the surface, like air bubbles in boiling water, because I had turned on the stovetop and watched the red coils burning.
CHAPTER 17
I could not avoid this week’s call from home. My mother called every Sunday at ten A.M., without fail, like the faithful summoned to church. My sister got her calls on Sunday evening because of her work schedule. I’d asked her when we were together last Christmas if Mom felt the need to check in with her weekly as well, keeping tabs on her general life progress, and was relieved to discover that she did. It was moments like this when I felt closest to my sister: one of the few elements still tethering us together.
Rebecca had laughed and said she’d rather get her calls over with earlier, like me, and get on with her day, but I thought she was lucky. Meanwhile, I’d have to spend the rest of Sunday replaying the conversation, considering my atonements.
Last week I’d avoided my mom’s call by saying I needed to catch up on an assignment for my teaching certification classes, and she’d understood. Two weeks in a row, though, and she’d grow more concerned (was I falling behind? was I balancing everything okay?). The irony being that this week, I did really need to catch up.
I answered on the first ring—better to get it over with, to face it head-on. “Hi, Mom.”
“Good morning, Leah. How goes the education of the next generation?”
“Fine. It’s a busy time of year. We’re entering midterms, so I’ve got a lot of grading.”
I started cleaning up the kitchen, straightening Emmy’s knickknacks. I found it best to multitask while on the phone with my mother, to defray the nervous energy. Ever since I left Boston, I’d felt I had something to prove to her.
“Rebecca’s having a particularly busy time, too,” she said. “Something about a highly competitive fellowship application. I don’t know the specifics. Maybe she’s told you about it?”
“No,” I said, “she hasn’t told me.” No matter what my mother claimed, she knew exactly what my sister was working on. This was her reminder that I should keep up more with my sister. A seemingly endless hope she had for us, though Rebecca and I had never quite had that type of relationship. My mother had decided, years ago, that competition fueled success. Rebecca and I did not enter into this agreement willingly, instead veering so far from each other that we could never be considered on the same playing field.
As I’d gotten older, I could understand why our mother pushed so hard. She raised us by herself after our father left when we were five and eight. He had another family somewhere, one I had no interest in meeting. A second try, a do-over. My mother had a pretty decent settlement, and the checks kept coming until I’d turned eighteen.
But she did it on her own, raising us. She put herself through nursing school after he left, and she made sure we were always prepared to stand on our own feet. So we would never be blindsided, as she once was. I don’t remember much about that time, other than our neighbor watching us more often than not, but I wondered if Rebecca did. If that was why she was a little more driven, a little more stoic, a little tougher. If she saw who my mother had been before, and fought against it. If she remembered the days or weeks or months before my mother picked herself up and pushed on.
For as long as I could remember, Rebecca was always the independent one. She achieved everything my mother had hoped, going to med school, excelling during her residency, never worrying about who would support her. Never being caught without a fallback plan when life didn’t turn out as expected. Never having a boyfriend turn on her, turn her in. Never living at the whim of another—on a pullout couch, in a basement apartment, all exposed nerves.
My mother always said Rebecca was the practical one—that she could buckle down and get things done. In a crisis, she was the one you’d want.
I, on the other hand, felt too deeply and relied on other people too heavily. I let things get to me, let them simmer and grow until they took me over. I threw myself into a job, a story, a relationship, with no fallback, and was surprised each time I got knocked down, scrambling for anything to hold on to. Sometimes I wondered if I was an affront to my mother’s brand of feminism.
But when I graduated from college with my degree in journalism, she was just as happy as I’d remembered her being at Rebecca’s graduation. Look at you, she’d said. How you’ve channeled your faults into strengths. As if one had been merely masquerading as the other all along.
I figured she was talking about my attraction to the morbid, as she called it. Always wrinkling her nose when she said it. There was something vaguely distasteful about the books I chose, all gory thrillers, and the crime documentaries I watched, the way I’d browse the obituaries—all distant memories I could solve. And now I had channeled that into something worthwhile, built a life around it. The words I’d overheard years earlier, warming me on the inside: Rebecca helps the ones who can be saved, and Leah gives a voice to those who cannot. We were still two sides of the same coin, a pair, a unit.
“Have you met anyone, Leah?”
“I’ve met a lot of people, Mother.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
I thought of Kyle. Of Davis Cobb. “I went out on Friday with a woman I work with. We had a good time.”
“Great,” she said. “Have you decided on next semester, then?”
She didn’t seem to understand that this job wasn’t temporary. Still clinging to the idea that I was on a brief sabbatical, that I’d get it out of my system and then return to my predicted life.
“I signed a contract for the full year,” I said. “Which I’ve told you before.”
“Right. It’s just, I was speaking to Susanna—you remember her son, Lucas?—and she said he’s been freelancing in New York. Apparently, there’s a lot of movement there, if you’re looking for a change. If things went south with Noah, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want to work together anymore.”
I pressed my fingers into my temples. Grabbed a rag and started scrubbing the counters. “It’s not about Noah, Mom.”
“Leah,” she said. “Why don’t you come home for a little while. Take a long weekend, some time away.” But I was no longer listening.
I looked out the window, saw a shadow fall across the front porch—hadn’t heard the footsteps on the stairs or any car coming up the drive. I dropped the phone to my hip, heard my mother’s voice call my name from far away.