I get in the truck, and the heat of her envy cools with the memory of her belly pressing against me. I have a great life. I am living a big life. But the thought rebounding through my heart and mind is: what if I had a family that could have helped me with my baby? Could I have kept her if my parents had a supermarket to pass on to me? Could I have kept her if Warren was a high school jock? The utter ridiculousness of the thought, of Warren, with his eyebrow piercing and his tattoos, tossing a football, pushes the tears down and away. I let the small laugh break out. That is not my life.
I drive the familiar roads, my nerves stretching thin at the thought of seeing the trailer, where my mother and I tore away from each other and never returned. I am not the same person I was when we were there together. I am different in more ways than just my clothes, I hope. Will Dylan see the same girl he knew, or will he see how much I’ve changed?
I stop in front of the land where the trailer had sat and stare over at the now vacant space. I had expected to see the shell, the burnt-out husk, rusting and rotting back to earth. But the land is empty, all the debris and trash cleared away. Somebody must own the land. It should have been mine—it was the only thing we ever owned—but when she died I just walked away and never looked back. I don’t remember anything ever being said about the land after.
I thought there would be ghosts here, all my demons, but it’s just a piece of land with the grass brown from the cold, peeking up out from under the blanket of snow. There is no remnant of my life here, as if all those years have just been swept away. Nothing says lives were lived here; nothing echoes the spirit of my mother. Time rolls over me, and when I finally pull myself back, it is heading toward dusk. The light has faded with the dropping of the sun below the tree line.
The sight of the Winthrop farm has my heart beating an erratic rhythm. I park behind Dylan’s truck and step toward the door. I’m playing the future conversation in my head, hearing my words, telling him how I’ve changed. I ring the doorbell.
Bong, Bong. “I got it.” His voice comes through the door, and I close my eyes for the split second it takes him to open it.
“Hi, Dylan.” My voice catches, and I draw my bottom lip into my mouth, not sure of what his response will be. His hair is longer, brushing along the edge of his collar, and he has the slight hint of a beard on his cheeks and chin.
His mouth opens and closes, then opens again, like he’s a fish out of water. Then he moves and pulls me into his arms, burying his face in the hollow of my neck, completely lifting me off the ground and into the house. He holds me, and I nearly draw my legs up to wrap around him, but force myself to leave them dangling. I take in all of his smells. All the chaos in my head goes quiet. The rhythm of my heart steadies. He bends, and my feet touch the ground. When he pulls away, he looks at me for a long minute. I think he’s going to kiss me. I see the longing. I see the way his eyes travel over my lips before coming back to meet my gaze. He doesn’t kiss me, though, and I am relieved and disappointed at the same time. A kiss would have been awkward. It would have been wrong, with Trey in my heart.
“Wow,” he says, and we laugh, letting the tension break around us, his hand still holding mine. “Where have you been?” There is a playful irritation in his voice, as if we are children who have been playing hide-and-seek and I had the best hiding place ever.
“Everywhere.”
“Are you back in the area for good?” he asks, then adds, “You just look great.”
A blush rises up my cheeks, and I drop my head, letting my hair fall forward.
“No, I’m just visiting.” I look up at him, pushing my hair behind my ear. He draws me into the warmth of the house and closes the door. I have dropped backward in time, to when we were young teens, when I first realized that he was maybe the love of my life. I had spent so much time in this house, and I remember how I used to feel here. It had seemed so fancy back then.
It isn’t pristine, it isn’t flawless, the way I hold it in my memory. There are shoes beside the door, and although everything is clean, there are papers stacked on the desk. It is just a home that people live in; it’s just a simple house.
“I’m out in San Diego now,” I say, claiming it like that beautiful city is somehow mine.
“No way,” he says, and I nod. We are moving through the kitchen toward the living room. The house is filled with all the same smells as every other house I’ve visited this week—turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pies. “Well, I love San Diego.”
“You’ve been?” I ask
“Sure. I have an uncle out there.”
From somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I remember that now. “That’s right, I remember.”
“Look who’s here,” he calls out, dropping my hand as we leave the kitchen behind.
A fire is roaring in the fireplace, and his parents are sitting on the sofa, Jake with the newspaper and Vaude with a book on her lap. The cozy scene is straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Vaude rises to her feet and rushes toward us as I store the snapshot image in my head.
“Alison!” She pushes past Dylan and curls around me. Jake folds the paper and sets it aside. Vaude releases me, and the first of the questions come. Where have I been, what have I been doing, am I back in the area? We have the conversation that I’ve had over and over since I got back to Illinois. I tell them about my roommates, about my classes to become a nurse. I tell them about how incredible my life has turned out to be. I don’t mention Trey and feel a double edge of guilt, toward Trey and toward Dylan. I don’t know where my loyalties lie. Trey is wonderful and I love him, but all I want right now is for Dylan to reach out and take my hand again.
My thoughts swirl with his eyes on me, and the whole life I am talking about doesn’t even matter. All that matters is Dylan sitting here beside me, looking at me like that.
“How are you?” Vaude asks, and my mother’s shadow falls across the room.
“I’m okay. I miss her, but I don’t know if she ever would have gotten well.” I look at Jake, the recovered addict, and I see the sadness deeper in his eyes than I would have thought. He had tried to save her, too. We both failed. My mother was too broken to mend the cracks.
“She was trying so hard, there at the end. I’m so sorry she relapsed,” Jake says.
I don’t want to talk about my mother, but this is the first time since then that I have spoken with any of them. I feel like I owe them answers to their questions.
“What happened to you after that?”
“I moved in with a foster family for a while, then I moved to St. Louis. I found my grandparents.” I tell them about the box of letters and how I went to see them that first time.
“From St. Louis to San Diego. How did that happen?” Dylan asks.
“I met a friend, and she was headed to California and asked me to come.”
The tapestry is painted in metallic hues, gold and silver and copper. It glitters in the firelight. “Do you get the Dillard’s Look Book?” I ask, turning to Vaude.
“I do,” Vaude says.
“I want to show you something,” I say, preparing to drop the biggest bomb in my arsenal, weaving the last golden thread into the tapestry fluttering through the room. Vaude goes to get it, and I hold my tongue, letting the mystery thicken and deepen. She comes back, the glossy magazine in her hand. “Look at the second page.”
Vaude flips the cover open, and for a second, there is no understanding in her eyes, then she looks from the magazine to me, and her eyes grow wide.