The blight of my argument with Dylan leaves me cold and numb. I try to remember Trey, to focus myself around him, but I can’t. I try to see the lines of Trey’s face, but every time I think I almost have him, the lines shift and it is Dylan I see. My heart aches. My soul weeps.
Never look back, they say. I should never have come here. I should have never come back to see Dylan. I have a fantastic life now, and this place just makes me . . . feel. I haven’t felt such jumbled emotions since I was pregnant. Why does he have hooks in me?
Leslie is still awake when I get back to their house, and I sit with her for a long time on the couch in the living room. Sullen and silent. I am slouched on the sofa, and she is sitting at an angle, looking at me from the corner of her eye.
“How was everybody?” Caution coats her voice.
“I shouldn’t have gone.” My breath rushes out, and even I hear the hopelessness in my words.
“I’m sorry. It didn’t go well?”
“You know what the problem is?” I ask finally, and she waits while I pull my courage and honesty together. “I love him. I love everything about him, and we are never going to work. I’m out there now, and he’ll never leave Illinois. I can’t live here again.”
“Why not?”
“It would be like going backwards, and I can’t do that.”
“Do you think life is a straight line?”
“Yes, it is.”
She nods and makes a little noise in her throat, and I can tell she doesn’t agree.
“You think it’s not?”
“I didn’t say that,” she says, “but I think maybe it’s different for everybody.” We sit in silence for a few minutes. “Did I ever tell you how I met Mr. McGill?”
“No.” I give a half smile and wait. This is the Leslie I love best, the teacher Leslie, the mother Leslie, Leslie talking.
“Well, I was nine the first time I ran away from home.” She says it with practiced nonchalance.
“Really?” I can’t imagine her ever being in a state of discontent.
She nods and puts her big, square hand on mine. “I packed my sleeping bag, a sleeve of crackers, and a can of chicken noodle soup into my backpack, and I hiked all the way down to Northside Park.”
I laugh a little, imagining Leslie as a child, packing her one can of soup and moving to the park.
“Yeah. I wasn’t very prepared. But Northside Park had that giant tunnel. I don’t think it’s still there, but you’d get in and walk, and it would spin.”
“Like a hamster ball?”
“Yes,” she says, accepting my description. “Well, I set up my sleeping bag and was eating my way through my crackers, having realized that I couldn’t open the can of soup, and even if I could, there was no way I could heat it up. Cold chicken soup.” She shivers at the thought. I laugh. “Then Dan,” she says then adds, “that is, Mr. McGill.” She gives me a small smile because I have never called him Dan, although he has invited me to; it just feels off, when I say it even in my own head—he is Mr. McGill to me. “Well, he had been playing baseball and was riding his bike past my new home and saw me, all huddled in there with my backpack and crackers. He must have seen something in me, knew that I shouldn’t be there, or that I was in trouble, so he sat down with me and asked if I was okay. I told him I was running away.”
“What did he do?” I ask because she has paused, apparently lost in her own memory of that first meeting.
“He told me his mother had a room in the house for runaways, and nobody was using it tonight if I wanted to come use it. We walked all the way back up here. This is the house he grew up in.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. And that room at the end of the hall, your room . . . well, his mom set me up there and told me I could stay as long as I wanted.”
“Weren’t you scared? Going to a stranger’s house? What if he wasn’t a good kid?”
“Oh, I knew who he was before that; I just hadn’t met him. Charleston was a small town back then.”
Charleston is still a small town, I think. “What did your mother do?”
“She didn’t do anything. Mrs. McGill called her, and they had a long talk.” She shrugs. “She came to get me the next morning.”
“My mom would never have let me stay somewhere else.”
“Well, Mrs. McGill and my mom were old friends, so she knew I was okay. It gave her time, too, to think about the way we were dealing with each other.”
“Did you just not get along?” Was her mom a drunk, too?
“No, we didn’t. My mom was a very motivated businesswoman. She was a paralegal, and she was determined that I would be a lawyer.” She laughs at the memory. “Can you imagine? I wasn’t a very good student, and she always had a tutor for me in the summer, but I didn’t want to spend my summers studying. I wanted to be outside with the other kids.”
What would that have been like, to have parents who encouraged you to excel instead of just accepting, expecting, mediocrity? Is there no way to parent well? Is it always a battle between mothers and daughters? Will Emily be strong-willed? Will she rebel against the parenting Meredith and Tom offer? Is that just the nature of growing up? Was my relationship normal, maybe more extreme, but typical of mothers and daughters? It feels like some big truth of life, and silence rolls over us.
“After that, every time I ran away, I came here. They always had room. Even if there was another kid here, they would set me up with a pillow and a blanket on the sofa, and the next morning my mother would come, and we’d start over again.”
“How did you know he was the one?”
“That was years later, when Mrs. McGill got sick. I was in my second year of college and not doing it well, and when I heard she was sick, I came to be with her. I think Dan fell in love with me then. I think he saw how much like his mother I was. We got married right before she died. Right here in this house, at her bedside.” There are tears in Leslie’s eyes. What a wonderful woman that other Mrs. McGill must have been to inspire her son to find somebody just like her. I give her a hug, thinking about the women we wished were our mothers.
