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I LAY THERE IN THE hotel room bed, the television droning on in the background, and willed myself to get some sleep. I didn’t know how much longer I could take without some rest, but my mind was racing a million miles an hour too fast to allow for any of that.
I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do. I didn’t know what the fuck I was supposed to think. My brain felt as though it had been pulled taut, the discomfort of what I had seen at the house too much for me to take.
That place had been so different the last time I had visited, and I had tried to tell myself it couldn’t be that bad. But, as I looked around after Nate had left, I had realized just what bad shape the place was really in.
And it was all reflected in my mother, too. I had told myself, the last time I had seen her, just how well she was doing—I needed to believe it if I was going to be able to keep travelling and stick by my life out in Europe and across the world. She had seemed so spry, practically bouncing off the walls with excitement when I had shown her around Bologna for a weekend. We’d sipped negronis together on the cobbled streets and chatted about our favorite Italian food, carefully avoiding all talk of back home. I thought I knew the reason why, but maybe she had just been doing her best to hide this from me. In retrospect, it seemed more likely.
She was so small, all of a sudden. Wrapped up in the covers in her bed, looking like a bird with a broken wing. I would have to go back to the house in a matter of hours to make sure she was doing okay, but I didn’t even know if I could face walking in there right now. It didn’t seem right. The whole home, the home I had spent so much of my life in, was falling apart at the seams, and what it seemed to hint at for the rest of my life there was too much for me to take in.
I hadn’t been able to stand the thought of staying there that night. I needed a break, somewhere I could go to hide out from the reality of everything I had seen. I knew I should have stuck around for mom, but I would be back as soon as I got the chance. Right now, I needed time to breathe, time to think about what I had seen.
And what I had seen...shit, there seemed so much for me to take care of, I didn’t even know where to start. I wished I could just reach out to my mom and tell her I was going to fix it all, that I would do anything it took to make sure she didn’t have to live like she had been. But, in order to do that, I’d need to acknowledge I had allowed her to stay in the home which had been falling down around her, and I hadn’t known a damn thing about it.
I had left a note on her bedside table, letting her know I would be back first thing in the morning. I would tell her I had been dealing with something for work. I knew she would be hurt if she found out I had taken off to the one hotel in town for the night, just for a break from all of this.
I wouldn’t be surprised if news of where I had spent the night got back to her. I needed to remember where I was right now. Maple Valley had never been the kind of town where you could keep things to yourself if you wanted to—the world would know in a matter of moments everything you had done, everything you said, and who you’d been with when you did it, too.
In fact, when I had arrived at the one hotel in town—a couple of miles from the center, looking exactly the same as I remembered it when I left—I found Tara, a girl I had gone to high school with, working the counter. She had the same curly reddish hair down to her chin she’d had when she had been in freshman year, and the same slightly crooked smile as she saw me come through the door. She furrowed her brow at me for a moment as she tried to place me, and then, her face lit up as she figured it out.
“Oh, Ellie!” she greeted me. “It’s so good to see you. You back in town to visit your mom?”
“Yeah,” I replied, trying to stifle a yawn. I didn’t want to seem rude, but the last thing I needed right now was to have some in-depth conversation with her about what I was doing here and how long I would stay in town. I wanted to be alone. But I doubted she was going to let it happen so easily.
“How long has it been since you were last back?” she asked, shaking her head as though doing her best to remember.
“A while,” I replied. “Do you have a room for tonight, I just need—”
“You should come out with me and the girls!” she told me. “We could go for a drink, catch up.”
Tara and I had never been friends in high school—not enemies, either, not anything at all—so I knew this was just her way of trying to coax me out to get more gossip from me. I didn’t want to be the center of attention, not in that way.
“Could I get a room for the night?” I asked her, raising my eyebrows a little more pointedly than I had to. I just...I just wanted to get some rest, and I couldn’t do that with her hovering around and trying to get stuff out of me.
“Sure, of course,” she replied, finally getting the point and pulling out a key from behind the counter. “One night, right?”
“Yeah,” I replied. I might end up staying longer, but for now, I was just in for one night. One night to get my head together, to work out where I stood with all of this, one night to put all the pieces in a line so I could work out how best to handle all of this.
I paid up and headed down to my room, and flung myself down on the stiff mattress as soon as I was inside. I put on the TV to fill the quiet, and stared at the ceiling for hours since.
I couldn’t believe I had been gone for so long. And I couldn’t believe I had allowed my mom’s house to get so bad. I should have come back sooner. I should have done everything I could to take care of her. When I thought of how hard she had worked to take care of me, everything she had done...
I couldn’t take it. I needed to double my efforts. No, triple them. Nate said he would help, but I had to be the driving force behind all of this, no matter what. I had to prove to my mom I still cared about her—I had never stopped caring about her, even though I had been a million miles away from her. I loved her. I wanted her to be okay. I just couldn’t face coming back to this town, the memories of what had happened too dark and too heavy for me to handle in any way.
Even now, lying in the dark, the pain and the pressure of it, the thought of what had happened that fateful day, hung heavy on my head. I wanted to be able to leave it all behind and forget it had ever happened at all, but I would never be able to. Something as heavy as that, you didn’t get to leave it behind. Not ever. Even if you ran to the other side of the world to try and get away from it.
I blinked and I realized a tear was leaking down my cheek. I had hardly even noticed till now. I wiped it away quickly, and reached over to my phone to check the time.
It was nearly three and I was still wide awake. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to get anything in the way of sleep right now, but I had to try. My mom needed me. She needed me to be in fighting form so I could take care of her now I was here. I couldn’t fail her. I had already let her down so much, in so many ways, and the thought of letting anything else hurt her was too much for me to take.
She had spent so much of her life doing everything she could to take care of me and make sure I had everything I needed and wanted, and this was how I repaid her? I felt so guilty I could hardly think straight. My stomach churned as I considered it, the reality too heavy to think about. I had left her here, and now, she was hurt. It was a miracle it hadn’t gotten any worse, given how much of a mess the house was. She could have wound up breaking her legs, or worse.
I couldn’t even let myself think about it. I needed to get some sleep if I was going to be any good to anyone tomorrow.
Would Nate come back the next day? I hoped so. He seemed to have a better grasp of all of this than I did, and it was a relief to have someone around who seemed to know what they were doing. Would he really help out with re-doing the house? It seemed unlikely he could be a doctor and have enough DIY skills to manage that on the side, but maybe I would be surprised. I had already been surprised by his presence in this town at all, and I was willing to let myself be even more shocked by him.
He was cute, after all. I turned over in the bed and looked at the wall, at the empty space next to me on the stiff double mattress I was lying on. I had been so focused on work for such a long time, I’d hardly given myself a moment to think about dating, attraction, even sex. I knew my job demanded too much of me to get distracted by anything in that vein.
There had been a few guys I had casually dated, nothing much more serious than that, but I had never really given myself the time to get into anything more. The thought of letting someone get as close as I would have to if I wanted a real relationship was more than I could take, and I didn’t enjoy even the thought of being that vulnerable with someone. I had a whole lot of secrets in my past, a whole lot of secrets wrapped up in Maple Valley, and I had never much taken to the idea of handing them over to someone else. I wanted to keep them close. Make it so nobody could use them against me. I needed to be careful with my soft spots, with the parts of me I wasn’t sure anyone would be able to handle.
But now I was back here, they all came rising to the surface once more, and I couldn’t hide from them, even if I wanted to. Even if I needed to. Everything I had tried to push down and escape was back, wrapping around my mind like ivy growing up an ancient tree, and I didn’t know how to unpick it.
At least I was away from the house for a night. The house where it had happened. The memories, no matter how much I had tried to push them down inside my head, were still there, lingering and ready to rise to the surface whenever I most needed them to stay the hell away from me.
Maybe if Nate was here, I would feel differently. The distraction of another person might be enough to have me feeling a little better. And there was something about the fact he was already in Maple Valley that made me feel as though he already knew me on some level, even though I had no reason to think it. My mother might have told him about me, what had happened, what we had been through. I had no idea. I wished I could reach into his mind and find out what he had discovered about the kind of person I was, and do my best to right any wrongs he might have believed about me.
I shouldn’t have cared what he thought about me. I wouldn’t be here forever, after all, and he seemed like he had one foot half out the door as it was, more interested in getting back to New York than making a life for himself here. If he really was as much of a city boy as he made out, I didn’t know how he could handle the reality of a small town like this one. The way the everyone seemed to know your business, the good and the bad.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he was already seeing someone here. I was sure every woman my mom’s age had rushed to set up their daughter with a man like him, a doctor, and a handsome one at that. If he was still single when he got here, there was no way he would remain so by the time he left, they wouldn’t allow it.
Well, they could have him. I’m sure he would be a good catch for someone, someone who was likely to spend a little longer in this town before they made a break for it—someone, in other words, who wasn’t me. I closed my eyes, and tried not to let the image of his strong arms play through my mind again. I needed to get some sleep.
Not stay up all night thinking about the cute doctor who seemed to want to spend more time with me.
