Mom was at the kitchen table when I woke up, still wearing a pair of flannel pajamas. I could tell something was wrong—her hair looked particularly wild, as if she hadn’t even run a hand through it since waking. She stood when she saw me, retrieved a mug from the cupboard and poured me a cup of coffee.
“Thanks,” I said, sitting down. “But I’m going to need a pound of sugar and a cup of half-and-half before I can drink this.”
Mom didn’t say anything.
“What is it?” I asked. It struck me that the house was too quiet; there was no sound of another person waking up, moving around. Dad could still have been down in the basement, zonked out, mouth open—but somehow I knew he wasn’t. “Where’s Dad?”
She passed me a piece of paper, something that had been ripped off a notepad. The note was in Dad’s handwriting, but I had to read it several times before I understood.
Please understand that I had to take care of some things.
You’ll hear from me soon.
Love you both—Curtis (Dad)
I stared at the note for a long time, turning the paper over to look for the rest of the text. It bothered me that he hadn’t even used a full sheet of paper, and he obviously hadn’t done a rough draft first and then a final draft, taking his time to make it neat and polished. His signature was mashed up against the edge of the page. Had he been that desperate to get away, that he couldn’t even be bothered to write a proper note? Obviously—otherwise, he would have bothered to say a real goodbye. I remembered his hug the night before, uncomfortably tight, and how I’d wriggled my way out of it. He’d known, of course. He’d been saying his real goodbye then.
I set the note down on the table and looked at Mom. “Now what?”
She blinked.
“Oh, is this where you pretend you weren’t in on it from the beginning?”
“I’m not sure—”
“Really, Mom? I figured it out,” I said, putting air quotes around the words. “The Great Kiddie Transfer of 2013.”
“Olivia!” She looked genuinely hurt, which hurt me, too—because I knew it must have been true.
I gave the coffee cup a little shove of rejection, causing liquid to spill over the rim and onto the tablecloth The coffee was absorbed by the creamy fabric, fanning out in a murky, brownish stain. “So, what? He just called you and said, I’m sick of living with this kid, it’s your turn. Right? Did he tell you I’m so awful he just couldn’t take it anymore? Or did you two set some kind of date from the beginning, some kind of your-turn, my-turn agreement, an equal division of labor?”
Mom put one hand on top of mine and then grabbed the other one, too, squeezing both of them tight. “Of course not! Don’t even say something like that. And you’re forgetting that I wanted you here from the beginning. We both wanted to be with you.”
I looked up from the coffee stain and met Mom’s eyes. “You knew he was going to leave me here.”
“No.”
“Mom! I know you probably think you’re protecting me or something, but you’re not. I’m old enough to know what’s going on. This is my life, too.”
Mom looked as if she were going to be sick. “I didn’t know anything. We had a long talk last night, and he said that he was just so overwhelmed—”
Since Mom was still holding my hands, I wiped my nose on the shoulder of my sweatshirt. I hadn’t even realized I was crying, but the snot was flowing like a toddler’s, dripping dangerously close to my lip. I’d done this—I’d overwhelmed Dad, probably with all my stupid fears and my failing P.E. grade and the fact that I was always hanging around instead of giving him space. Why wouldn’t he want to be by himself?
“Just a second,” Mom said, and left the room. I wondered if she was going to return with something Dad had left for me, maybe a box that held all the secrets of my childhood and would explain everything for me, the way it might happen on television. Your father wanted you to have this, she would say, and somehow everything would be okay. Instead, she came back with a new box of Kleenex, ripping off the strip of cardboard along the perforated edge. I took the tissue as permission to cry like an idiot, so I did.
“I didn’t want him to leave,” Mom said, wiping her own eyes with a tissue. “I told him you were both welcome to stay here as long as you wanted, even permanently.”
“You did?”
“Of course.”
I’m not sure why, but this made me cry even harder—deep, ugly sobs that required a small stack of Kleenex. Finally, catching my breath, I asked, “Did he take all his stuff? I mean, is he really gone, and not just out for an oil change or something?”
Mom nodded. “I saw the note when I came downstairs. I looked in the basement, and everything’s gone. His suitcase, his clothes. He even stripped the sheets off the hide-a-bed and put the couch back together.”
“Where did he go?”
Mom shook her head, and I saw what I hadn’t seen before. She looked unbearably sad.
“He didn’t tell you where he was going? I mean, last night, when you had the heart-to-heart about dumping me off here, he didn’t happen to mention where he was going to go?”
“Liv! When you say dumping you here, you have to know that hurts.”
“Well, what did he do—just turn around and drive back to California?”
“I don’t know where he went. He just needed some time alone, I think. That’s what he told me, that he was going to take some time to figure a few things out.”
“So he could be going back to California. He could be going anywhere.” I had stopped crying and started to shiver, not because it was cold in the room, but because all of a sudden I felt cold from the inside out. What was Dad doing? What was his plan? “I’m going to call him. I have to talk to him.”
Mom wiped her eyes with the heels of her palms and gave me a shaky smile. “I’ve already called him three times this morning. It goes right to voice mail, so his phone must be off. But look—it’ll be okay, honey. He said we would hear from him, so we’ll just have to wait.”
It seemed like such an obvious thing to say, the kind of thing you might say to a child who needed to be pacified at the dentist’s office. Just wait and be a good girl, and I’ll give you a sucker later.
“But aren’t you worried about him? I mean, he just went off alone, and no one in the world knows where he is. He’s basically unstable—” This last part just slipped out, not the way I’d been planning to mention it.
Mom’s eyebrows shot up. “He’s unstable?” she parroted.
I backpedaled. “Well, you know. Not unstable unstable, but...”
“What does that mean?”
I bit my lip. Suddenly, I had the very shitty feeling that I should have told her earlier—not just the first night when we’d arrived, and not from a phone call on the road. I should have called her when I was standing on the asphalt near the cafeteria entrance, squinting up to look at Dad on the roof. I wasn’t sure where to begin, now.
“Olivia?” Mom was leaning so close, I noticed that she had tiny red lines in the whites of her eyes, either from crying or not sleeping, or both.
I shrugged my shoulders, which felt unconvincing, so I also shook my head. If I protested again, I knew, it would just be a trifecta of foolishness. “I mean, I thought we had been doing fine, but he...” I trailed off.
“Olivia? I’m not kidding. If there’s something you need to tell me...” Mom’s voice held a warning note. We hadn’t lived together in so long, and the time we’d lived together after Daniel died had been so strange, so I’d almost forgotten that it was Mom who was the taskmaster, the more demanding parent. Daniel and I used to be able to get away with things from time to time with Dad—not because he didn’t care but because he honestly didn’t seem to notice. Once I’d let Dad take the rap for a glass that Heidi had knocked down—a glass I’d left sitting on the edge of the coffee table without a coaster underneath it. Hearing the crash, Dad had simply said, “You know, I think that was the glass I was drinking out of after dinner.” While Mom went on about his carelessness, I’d done nothing more than listen, guiltily.
Now she placed a hand on each of my shoulders and said, “You need to tell me what’s going on.”
I took a deep breath, and I told her about that day at school—or at least, almost all about that day at school. I mentioned that I was in the bathroom at the time my name was paged over the intercom, but not that I was in the bathroom because I’d been cutting P.E. It seemed like the sort of detail that would get in the way of the real story, not to mention cast significant doubt on the narrator. I told her that Dad had come calmly down the cafeteria stairs with the principal, but didn’t mention that he’d walked right past me, looking dazed and disoriented at first, before giving me a big, sunny wave as if I were his first visitor at the mental institution.
Even without these details, it was a frightening enough story, and Mom kept saying, “Oh, Liv” and “Honey.” She wrapped her arm around my shoulder, her hair tumbling against mine. I felt the tears on her cheeks mingle with the tears on mine. This was the way she’d held me when I was younger. This was how she’d held me the night Daniel died.
I pulled back to look at her. “There’s more. But it might not be anything at all....”
“What?” Mom demanded. When my eyes drifted downward, she put a hand on my chin and angled my face upward, so we were eye to eye. “What else?”
“I didn’t want to worry you,” I said, and it was true. Maybe there was no good way to deliver bad news, or even potentially bad news. How was this any better than a phone call in the middle of the night, like the one that had disrupted our lives? Here, Mom. Your life has been going pretty great, and now I’m going to hand you this live grenade, and see how that changes things.
But what choice did I have? Was there really any other option, at all?
I tried to keep my voice steady. Once the words were out, I knew, I couldn’t take them back. “Mom,” I told her. “I think Dad might be planning to kill himself.”