4

Liz was eight years old when her father left and never came back. And forever after, she blamed herself.

“Daddy,” the little girl had asked, “where are you going?”

He stood there in front of her wearing his overcoat and holding a suitcase. The television was blaring some rerun of Friends in their messy little house in Trenton, New Jersey, and Liz’s three-year-old sister, Deanne, was screaming at her five-year-old brother, George, to give her back her Pop-Tart, and the family dog had just pissed on the carpet. Liz’s mother was nowhere to be found.

“I’m going away,” her father replied. “I can’t take any more of this.”

He turned and walked out the front door. He never came back.

Standing there alone in her living room, a Cheerios box overturned on the couch, the little o’s filling up the valley between the cushions, Liz blamed herself for her father leaving them. Her mother had asked her to watch the children and clean up the living room because she had a headache, and she’d told her she’d better be quick about it, because Daddy was getting fed up. Liz, however, had not done what her mother had asked. Instead, she’d sat there watching television, becoming lost in the make-believe world of Monica and Rachel and Ross. She hadn’t told Deanne and George to keep their voices down. She’d just let them rant and rave. She hadn’t cleaned up the Cheerios or the dog piss. And so Daddy had left.

From that moment on, Liz grew up believing that if she didn’t always make things right, everyone else would leave her, too.

Certainly that had been the case with her first boyfriend. Peter Mather had been a freckle-faced redhead whom Liz had started dating during her last year in high school. They both went on to the College of New Jersey, where Liz had studied music and dance, and they stayed together all through their freshman and sophomore years. Liz had even allowed herself to imagine marrying Peter. He was studying engineering, so he was certain to get a good job, which was a good thing, since she’d be off auditioning for shows and trying to make a career for herself as a dancer. She would tell Peter that when she made it big—dancing on Broadway in some big successful musical hit—she’d support him and pay him back for all the years supporting her.

But at a party during their junior year, Liz had walked into a room to find Peter going at it with some girl with long blond hair and big breasts. Lots of tears had followed, but at the end of her grief, Liz had decided to forgive Peter. Men will be men, after all, and, after all, he’d been drunk. She was devastated, then, after telling Peter that she forgave him, he looked at her and said he was leaving her. “I’m bored in this relationship,” he explained. For the last two years, Peter told her, Liz had been boring him more and more. He’d only stayed with her because all his friends had girlfriends and he didn’t want to be the odd man out.

Liz just wasn’t good enough, Peter explained—or pretty enough, or smart enough. At least, that was what Liz had heard. Maybe those hadn’t been the exact words he used, but those were what Liz heard. Once again, she hadn’t taken care of things—she had let things go, she hadn’t taken care of someone else’s needs, she had been boring and inattentive—and someone she loved had left her. Soon Peter was dating the big-boobed blond girl, who Liz imagined was never boring and always very attentive.

After that, Liz moved back home, commuting her last two years of college. It was a good thing, too, as Mom was drinking more. Deanne and George tended to avoid and ignore Mom’s problem, but Liz did her best to intervene. If they didn’t take care of Mom, Liz argued, they’d lose her. Liz tried so hard to make things right for Mom. She took care of her mother through every one of her drinking binges, cleaning up the messes that she made, calling everyone Mom had offended and apologizing for her. When Mom finally got sober, after a long and agonizing ordeal, she said she owed her life to Liz. For once, Liz had done what she was supposed to do, and she had the results to show for it: she hadn’t lost her mother.

But her mother became determined that she’d never lose Liz either. “I still need you, honey,” Mom had said when Liz had announced she was taking the job on the round-the-world cruise ship soon after her graduation from college. The idea of Liz being so far away for so long unnerved Mom—and it unnerved Liz, too, who worried Mom would backslide and start drinking. An email from Deanne, which Liz received somewhere off the coast of Iceland, confirmed Liz’s worst fears. Mom had indeed hit the sauce again. She’d wrecked the car. Liz blamed herself for going away, for not sticking around to keep Mom in line. See what happened when she didn’t do what she was supposed to do? Her guilt threatened to ruin the rest of the voyage for her.

“But baby,” Liz’s best friend, Nicki, counseled her, sitting on the upper deck under a full white moon as the ship sliced through the cold waters of the North Atlantic, “you can’t blame yourself. You can’t go on living your life for your mother. You have your own life to live! This cruise was a golden opportunity for you to see the world and to do what you love most—dance! You can’t go on being your mother’s keeper.”

When Liz met David a short time later, she saw the wisdom of Nicki’s words. If she hadn’t taken the job on the ship, she never would have met David.

And to her relief, Mom’s relapse didn’t last. With the help of her friends in AA, Mom had once again committed to sobriety, and Liz was proud of her. Still, she wondered, deep down, if she had been the cause of Mom falling off the wagon, and if without her around, the same thing might happen all over again.

But she had hesitated only a moment when David had asked her to marry him and move with him to Florida. Nicki’s words came back to her. You can’t go on living your life for your mother. An amazing man had just asked Liz to marry him. He was kind and decent and extraordinarily wealthy. She said yes gladly.

Take that, Peter Mather!

Mom hadn’t been happy when she learned that Liz had eloped. She was furious, in fact. But what upset her more was that Liz was moving permanently so far away from her. At least before, her mother had consoled herself that the cruise ship gig would eventually end. Now Liz was taking up residence more than a thousand miles away. Liz had tried assuring her mother that if she ever needed her, she would come to her. David could afford to fly her anywhere at any time. But Mom was still brooding about it. There was an edge to her voice every time Liz called her. Liz constantly worried her mother would start drinking again.

Liz had rocked the boat, quite literally, by going off on the cruise, and Mom had suffered. Now she had married and moved away—leaving Mom on her own to fend for herself. Sure, she had Deanne and George, but George was a pothead and Deanne was still in school.

Once again, Nicki’s words: You can’t go on living your life for your mother.

But Mom was only as fragile as she was because Dad had left her, and Dad had only left because Liz and her siblings had been too much to handle.

That was the guilt that festered in Liz’s heart of hearts.

And that was why she didn’t want to rock the boat with David. That was why she was so timid with him, so reticent about asking him hard questions or requesting he take down his first wife’s portrait right away. She wasn’t going to make a big deal about comments made by an unhinged young man. If Jamison needed to be fired, that was David’s decision. But Liz wasn’t going to speak of it again. If she did—if she proved to be too much trouble, if she didn’t do what she was supposed to do—she believed subconsciously that David would leave her, just as Daddy did all those years ago.