chapter five
We pause under the restaurant’s awning to get our bearings. It’s nearly dark, just a little bit of lavender light left in the sky. We spot the ocean, a deep blue swath to our left. Then we walk fast. The speed feels good, like we’re outrunning something terrible.
Peach, as it turns out, really is super tired. We only get about a block away from the restaurant before she starts crying, whining that she wants to sleep at Lemon’s house but rubbing her eyes like she does when she’s exhausted. Mama picks her up, and Peach immediately passes out on her shoulder.
Mama and I walk in silence. I don’t dare interrupt it, even though there are a million things I want to say.
We should leave tomorrow.
We don’t need them.
We don’t need this.
We only need us.
I walk close to Mama’s side, trying to press the three of us together. Her warmth almost pushes out the cold crackle in my chest, that hollow feeling I got as soon as Lemon asked me if Mama was still married. Claire clearly didn’t know about Mum at all. I can’t decide how I feel about that—on the one hand, it means Mama didn’t tell Claire anything about Mum on the walk into town, when they were strolling by themselves and laughing and smiling, so she can’t trust or care about Claire that much. Who doesn’t tell a childhood best friend about their wife? On the other hand, it’s like Mum doesn’t exist. Like she’s just a memory who interrupted Mama’s fun. Claire and Lemon didn’t know what to think about our abrupt departure, I could tell. But they had to know it was something bad, and I couldn’t even look at them. I know exactly what I would’ve seen if I had.
Pity.
I’ve seen it a million times. Not that we’ve ever told anyone we’ve met on the road about Mum—you don’t tell complete strangers about how all the color seemed to disappear from the whole world—but I remember that look at Mum’s memorial service. Dozens and dozens of eyes, all red-rimmed and wide and sad, their owners whispering about how terrible they felt for us, how grief was a heavy burden for someone as young as me.
Grief doesn’t feel heavy, though. It never did. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t seem to cry at all at the service. I tried. I wanted to, but I felt all dried up. If anything, I think grief feels too light. I always feel like I’m about to float away, like there’s nothing to hold me to the earth anymore. I hate that word, too—grief. It’s terrible. Wrong. It makes me think of tiny packages of Kleenex and droopy carnations and frozen casseroles with too much cheese. Grief is a section in the greeting card aisle. It doesn’t feel like anything to do with me or Mama or Peach.
Hollowing. Now that’s a good word. Emptying. That’s what it really felt like when Mum died, like a piece of me got scooped right out.
That’s how other people look at us too—that’s how I know Claire and Lemon would’ve looked at us in the restaurant if we told them about Mum. Like we’re missing something.
And the way Mama is staring into space, her eyes misty and sad, I know she’s thinking all the same things. I just know it. By morning, I’m sure, we’ll be packing up and heading somewhere new.
The next morning, I wake up before the sun, my heart already pounding in anticipation. It’ll be sort of a pain, repacking after we just unpacked yesterday, but totally worth it, in my opinion. We don’t have a ton of stuff. Mama always rents places that are furnished and have the basic kitchen supplies, so really all we have to do is clean out the closets and toss everything into our trunks. Then Mama and I will load them into our truck and we can get out of here, away from that infernal ocean and our nosy neighbors.
Where we’ll be going is the real question. Surely, Mama sees now how we just need to go home, back to California, back to our house on Camelia Street. We don’t need nosy childhood friends asking her about her spouse or her partner, reminding her of everything she lost—we just need to go where we’re safe, where everyone around us already knows and will leave us alone about it, where we won’t risk all sorts of unknown dangers and strangers and possibly friends and attachments who will just hurt us in the long run.
Friends and attachments Mum will never know, never get to experience.
No, it’s time to go home. Mama sees that—I know she does.
When the sky starts to lighten, I toss my covers back and climb down from my bunk. Peach is still completely out, but she’ll be up soon, so I get dressed quickly and go to find Mama. I want to talk to her alone about going home. Peach is always in on our decisions about where to move to next, and I have a feeling that this time she’s going to put up a fight about leaving her fruit friend.
The house is still quiet, the first shades of lavender-gray light peeking in through the windows. Outside, it’s cloudy again and the wind swirls, whipping through the waves and the surrounding evergreens like a ghost.
“Mama?” I call, but she doesn’t answer.
I head to her room at the other end of the house, but her door is open, her bed empty and neatly made. Mama is a big believer in making beds every morning, so they’re ready to sleep in that night and you don’t have to fuss with them when you’re good and tired. You can just slip right in between the sheets. It would be a good strategy if we weren’t leaving today. I figured Mama would be up earlier than even me, like she always is on moving days, already packing up linens and folding her clothes, stacking her books into her trunk.
“Mama?” I call again, wandering into the kitchen, but she’s definitely not in the house. In the living room, I notice the front door is open, sea wind slipping in through the screen door, filling the room with salt and chill. I go to close everything up, but then I see a flash of blue on the porch. I go out, screen door creaking as I fling it wide, and there’s Mama, sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs with her laptop open and on her legs. She’s wrapped in the quilt she made for Mum the Christmas before Mum died. She called it the Sister Quilt, because it was sewn out of all of Peach’s and my baby clothes, with a soft border of aqua blue, Mum’s favorite color.
“Mama?”
She startles, fingers flying up from her laptop keyboard.
“Hey,” she says, then looks back at her computer screen. “I didn’t even hear you come out. Did you sleep okay?”
“What are you doing?” I ask instead of answering.
She releases one of those exhausted but happy kind of sighs and keeps on typing. “I’m writing. Can you believe it? I’ve been up half the night.”
“You… you’re writing a book? A new one?”
She wiggles one hand back and forth before attacking the keys again. “Getting there. That’s the plan, at least.” She smiles at the screen, eyes wild and bright, exactly the way I remember her looking years ago when she’d get caught up in writing, like she was lost in a whole other world and she was happy to be there. Mum called it The Zone, and we both knew better than to try to interrupt Mama when she was in The Zone.
“But aren’t we—”
Leaving is what I want to say, but she looks up at me sharply, eyes soft but her mouth pressed into a tight line, like she knows exactly what I’m thinking and is begging me not to say it.
“Why don’t you go get some breakfast started?” she asks. “I’ll be in soon.”
Then she turns back to her computer, lost in her brand-new romance.