Ethan’s mom was gone for a month that first time.
Thirty whole days and I think we spent nearly every one of them together.
I let him carve his name in my tree house and he drew me a picture that we planned to paint on the walls.
We swam in his pool so much that my fingers and toes stayed pruney even while I slept.
I showed him how to cut through our neighbor’s backyard when we heard the ice cream truck and he showed me how to catch a stray cat with a box and a can of tuna fish.
He made me let the cat go and I wasted what turned out to be our last week being mad about it. I was just getting ready to forgive him when his mom came back.
After a brief argument on the porch between Joy and Mrs. Kelly, Ethan heard his mom’s raised voice calling for him—half the neighborhood heard her—and he came running.
He was gone for six months.
The next time she drops him at his grandparents’ house, the Kellys aren’t home, so he has to sit huddled on the front steps of their porch alone for hours. Well, he’s only alone for one. I take him my very last Halloween candy bar, a Butterfinger that I’ve been saving.
It’s one of the only times we ever talk about his mom.
“Why did your mom leave you with your grandparents?”
He shrugs, nibbling at his half of the bar while I’ve already finished mine.
“Don’t you know?”
He shrugs again and this time his shoulders stay up high by his ears.
“My dad said it’s ’cause she’s sick. Does she go to the doctor?”
It’s hard to tell if he shrugs or not with his shoulders up so high.
“No, she said she doesn’t need doctors, she just needs to be by herself for a while. She always gets better.”
I work at the candy stuck in my teeth. “But then she gets sick again?”
His shoulders completely cover his ears at this point. “She tries not to, but it’s hard.”
“Are you gonna get sick too?”
He shakes his head violently. “I didn’t like being sick like that. It made me throw up and then it made my mom cry and bring me here.”
“How come—”
“I don’t want to talk about my mom anymore.” He draws his knees up to his chest, hiding all but his eyes from view.
After that we started planning different ideas to paint my tree house and I told him it could be his tree house too. His shoulders stopped hunching up and the next day he showed me the snow globe his mom had gotten him from the Santa Monica Pier. He said she was coming back for him, swore it fiercely, and even then, a part of me hoped he was wrong.
Over the next few years, Ethan came in and out of my life in bursts. I’d get weeks or months with him at a time, but she always came back, and he always left. I told myself that I was the one thing he would have taken with him if he could, and in his way, he told me that too.
Every time he left I found a flower on my windowsill. Sometimes it’d be a single pink bougainvillea from one of our neighbors’ yards or a tiny golden sunflower. And when there were no blooms to pick, he would draw them for me. The real ones withered, but I have a shoebox under my bed full of flowers scribbled on receipts or napkins that never will.
Back then I hated Ethan’s mom for the wrong reasons. Not because she neglected and endangered him, but because whenever I saw her, it meant that I was about to stop seeing him.
As suddenly as he’d show up in my life, he’d be gone just as quickly.
And he never said goodbye.