chapter 21

LAINEY MCKAY

 

 

 

Shadows played along the edges of the bedroom ceiling as I lay flat on the cool sheets and stared up. The fan whirred and, outside, Piper’s voice rose above my children’s laughter. I wanted to be there for them every second, but sometimes this wasn’t possible.

Before I’d had them, I’d had a fantasy of what a mom could be, what kind of mom I wanted to be that was the opposite of what I’d had. To me, the fantasy mom was someone out there ready and waiting for her child to say, “I need . . .” and that mom ran as fast as she could to her child’s side. I played this game a lot after my mom was gone. What would Mom do now? I would ask myself when I was left out of a party or needed a dress hemmed or a boy picked someone else. This dreamy mom always did the right and good thing. Probably none of the things I did now, but I sure as hell was doing my best.

I stood and stretched, peering out the window. George was on the tire swing and Daisy held a tiny pink fishing pole over the river, wiggling it back and forth. Piper stood between them, her head moving back and forth as if torn over who to pay the most attention to. The doorbell rang. I turned away from the idyllic scene and went out to answer. There on the front porch, a box had been left, the big box that had made it across the country from my little art studio in California.

The edges were crushed and the top was slightly caved in, as if someone had sat on it while they read the paper during their cigarette break at the warehouse. A little thrill filled me and the lethargy I’d awoken with fell away. I dragged the box into the living room just as Bonny came from a bedroom with a screwdriver in her hand—replacing doorknobs, one by one, in the entire house. She never sat still; her leather binder with marching orders kept her moving. Maybe her way of keeping her mind busy with her body.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“My art supplies. The ones I shipped from home. I thought it would take a couple days, not over a week.” I knelt next to the box and started to tear at the tape. The top of it flapped back and I peered inside. “It’s all here. Now I have no excuse not to work.”

“Much bigger than that little box you used to carry with you in the summer.”

“Not much different, though.” I took out a paint palette. “But you’re right—it’s bigger. Like the supplies grew as we did.”

We laughed and Bonny picked a canvas from inside the box, a square, cream-colored canvas stretched across a plywood frame, two feet by two feet.

“Where will you set up?” she asked. “You can choose anywhere you want.”

“Ideally right there,” I said, pointing to the right-hand corner of the living room under the large windows. “But I don’t want my art stuff to hog the house and I don’t want my wild injuns to get into the paint . . .”

“You know,” Bonny said, “I had an air unit installed in the garage because I was thinking the new owner could make it into a bedroom one day. It’s still raw and unfinished, but you could do what you want.”

“Are you kidding? The garage has air?”

“It’s not empty,” Bonny said, “but we could shove most of the stuff to one side.”

“This is so wonderful.” I hugged her. “Be careful. I might not leave.”

“That’s my goal,” she said and she squeezed me back, her arms tight around my shoulders. “To keep you here for good and all.”

“You aren’t staying here for good and all, Bonny. You aren’t stuck.” Her emotions, usually so hidden and camouflaged behind her beautiful smile and inspirational quotes, had been raw and out in the open since the Emory phone call. There was nothing I could say to help, but still I tried.

“I just meant I love having you here, that’s all.” She stared off toward the river and spoke as if there was another person at the far end of the room. “All my plans, lined like neat little soldiers, decided to mutiny. They’ve headed out to do whatever they please while I’m left standing here. I’m lost.”

“You haven’t lost everything,” I said.

“Of course I haven’t.” She turned to me and there was that smile as if it had never left, so practiced. “I’ve just lost my mooring, my imagined future. I don’t feel like I’ve lost everything. Not even close. Just what I wanted and thought I needed. I will go home and try again. Begin again, as they say.” It sounded like she was giving a pep talk to a team about to head out onto the field to win the championship game and they were losing by too many points to win.

“You do not have to go back to Lucas.”

“It might be the right thing to do—to try to fix the mess I’ve made.” She shooed her hand through the air like her feelings were mosquitoes. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She reached into my box to help me unload. Her hands emerged with a shoe box, which she set on the round entry table. “What’s this?”

“Letters,” I said and lifted the top. “All the ones I’ve written to Mom since the day she left. I stopped keeping a journal after Dad read ours. I could never write in one again. I kept seeing the Girl Detective book in Dad’s hands, the way he read out loud all the things we thought were so private, and I never could get the words to flow again. But then I started writing to Mom and could get my feelings out that way.”

“That night,” Bonny said. “That horrible night when he read all the things we’d written about your mom out loud, how she hid her pills under the mattress, how she hid the liquor bottles in the fishing box, how she put vodka in her morning orange juice. Hell, if we hadn’t been so nosy, thinking we were real detectives. He used us to shame her . . .” Bonny turned away as if the memory itself was trying to look her in the eyes.

“I’ve thought about that more times than I can count, but we can’t blame ourselves. That’s what I came to. Dad was going to shame her and say the same things to her even if he hadn’t found our notebook. He was intent on getting her help or having her gone: I’ve never been sure which. But it wasn’t our fault. Even if I felt it was for the remainder of my childhood.”

I lifted a handful of the letters. Each one folded and inside a sealed envelope with a single handwritten word on the front: Mom. “I don’t read them after I write them. It’s usually when something has gone wrong or right.” The urge to cry began as a weight in my chest and then rose to my throat. Tears puddled and I swiftly wiped them away. “I don’t even know how many are here now. I started the year she left and the last one I wrote was only a year ago, after I promised Tim that I’d quit looking for her. I tried to put it all aside. Let it go.”

“Oh, how could you do that? All that pain poured out onto paper. All that missing . . . Why did you bring them here?”

“I don’t know.” I scattered them across the table, a fan of envelopes representing years of aching sadness. “I just felt like this was where they belonged. That I should bring them here and find some way to get rid of them. Maybe even read them before I do. It’s time to stop looking and wondering. I promised Tim.”

“Don’t you want to keep them? Keep them like you would a journal?” Bonny lifted a letter and held it in her hand like it was the very one I needed to save.

I shook my head. “No. I don’t. I want it all to end. The wishing for a mom that never was. The absurd wishing to alter the past. What I’d give to make it different, to have her back. But I want that desperation to stop. So I brought them here. These”—I lifted a handful of them and let them flutter to the table—“are all I have left of her. Dad kept all the photos except one I have in a frame at home, and he passed all of Mom’s jewelry to his various girlfriends. This is it.”

“Why didn’t you ask for some of her things?”

“I don’t want anything,” I said. “If I wanted anything at all it would be to have my brother in my life more than he is, not some jewelry or pictures. I’m not calling Dad and asking him for some leftover pieces of a mom I barely knew.”

“I have an idea,” Bonny said. “We could do some kind of ritual, some kind of burial or . . . I don’t know. Do I sound crazy?”

“No,” I said. “I love that. I’m all about ritual.”

“Tim doesn’t want you to find her?”

“It’s not that.” I sank onto the couch and rubbed my face as if waking up. “There’ve been a few times I wasn’t quite as honest with him as I should have been. I spent money we didn’t have on a private investigator. I’ve left the kids with friends while I flew to cities where she might be. When I find something that hints of her, I become preoccupied and irrational. It’s been . . . bad.”

“Oh, Lainey.”

“Remember that time I came to visit you and left a couple days early to go home because I said one of the kids was sick?”

“Yes, the flu,” Bonny said.

“I lied.”

“What?”

“I went to Philadelphia, where there was a woman named Clara who had been found dead in the river. Do you believe that? Whenever the PI calls with some little hint, off I go like I’m an insane person. I’ve stared at dead, nameless bodies. Spied on women in shelters who won’t give their names. Googled until my computer gives out.”

“I had no idea.” Bonny stood next to me, but I couldn’t look at her.

I closed my eyes and let out a long breath, took in another and then opened them again to gaze at Bonny. “Only Tim has any idea and he needs it to stop.”

“I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing. But how does one give up?”

“You wouldn’t,” I said. “It’s untenable. You are more logical than this.”

“Really? Because I don’t see half of what I’ve done as logical.”

“Yes, it is. Look at you when you decided to leave. You didn’t just up and go. You planned and organized and put things in order.”

“And you can see how well that’s worked out.” She tried to laugh, but it didn’t sound right. “We do the best we can.”

“Yes, maybe we do.”

We ended the conversation when Daisy came running through the back door carrying a box turtle she’d found in the yard. She was always and forever wanting one more pet—our cat, Sasha, was never enough for her. I bent and focused on being a mom instead of talking about my own.

Once Daisy had run off to find George and Piper, I tossed the letters back into the box. I carried it all to the garage and then used my phone to video chat with Tim so he could see I was about to set up my studio.

“Hi, love,” I said, trying to look at him and not myself in the top right corner. I plodded around the garage and held up the phone, twisting it to show him. “So this is my makeshift space for now. I wish you were here to help me unpack.”

“Looks like home,” he said. I instantly wanted to be near him and for a moment I regretted my decision.

“It’s nothing like home. And I miss you terribly. Do you think you could come for a visit?” I asked.

“Probably not, sweetie. I’m dead in the middle of this new house renovation and even a few days will cost us. But hurry home. Get bored there. Miss me and come home early.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said and kissed the screen. We chatted about the kids and his tomato plants and all the things we talked about twice a day. Then I promised him that I’d call back when the kids came inside.

“Sweetie,” he said in that voice that meant he had something to tell me that I might not want to hear.

“Yes?”

“I have something to tell you, but you have to promise that you won’t change your plans or do anything crazy.”

“No promises.” I winked at him through the phone, but he didn’t smile. “Shit, what is it?”

“Lorenz called from New York.”

“The detective? God, I’d almost forgotten his name,” I lied. “What did he want?”

“He said he has a lead on a woman in Texas named Kara Ellison. He sent me all the information on e-mail, but I don’t want to send it to you . . . I don’t want you to ruin your trip. And I told him to please stop looking.”

“Why did you tell him that?”

“Because we agreed.”

“We agreed. Yes. But ‘Kara’ is awful close to ‘Clara’ . . .”

“Don’t.” His voice was tight and I pulled the phone to my ear so he wouldn’t see me cry.

“I won’t. Being here, I know it’s true. It’s the living with the unknowing. If I just . . . knew.” He was quiet until I asked. “Will you at least e-mail me the information?”

“Of course,” he said. “This woman . . . she’s in Houston.”

After I hung up, I sat on a wobbly stool and felt the ache of missing him. I’d loved him so long and so hard that I felt like an essential piece of me was missing when he was away from me.

I dragged the box to the middle of the garage. The air unit in the window emitted a growling noise and then clicked on, cold air pumping as I unpacked the box and set out my paints, brushes and encaustic medium. I lifted out the hot plate and the few blank canvases I’d packed. Inside a large glassine envelope were the six photos I’d sent myself, ones I wanted to work on. I placed them on the table in a neat pile.

“Hey, Lainey.” Piper’s voice startled me and there she stood in the doorway with her hands stuffed inside the front pockets of her shorts and her hair in a ponytail. She looked so very young. “Can I help you unpack?”

“Did your mom make you come out here?” I smiled and lifted a case of paints from the bottom of the box.

“No.” She shook her head. “I just thought I’d see if you . . .”

“I’d love some help,” I said.

She came toward me and then stopped. “Wait,” she said. “We need music.”

I set up the easel and she slipped away, only to return with a small round speaker. Soon Shelby Lynne’s mournful voice eased from the speakers.

“Perfect,” I said.

“You like her music?” Piper ran her fingers through a paintbrush I’d just set out and plopped onto a stool beside the workbench that ran along the far wall.

“I love her songs.” I placed a set of charcoal pencils on the wooden work surface and dusted it off with a rag. “I saw her in San Francisco last year.”

“You saw her live?” Piper’s eyes widened and she leaned forward, the paintbrush pointed out as if she were about to paint me. “You are so lucky.”

“I know,” I said. “She was great. Every time I hear her voice I go back to that night.”

“That’s what a song does sometimes,” she said. “Takes you back to that time you heard it first or best or whatever.” She exhaled and stood.

For a long while unsaid words rested between us as we unpacked, the music playing in the background. It didn’t take long before the right side of the garage was set up like a mini studio. The clean wooden work surface, meant for tools like rakes and hammers, was organized with art palettes, glue, a hot plate and other tricks of my trade.

“Have you always done this?” Piper broke the silence. “This kind of art, I mean?”

“Yes,” I said. “Always.”

“I wish I already knew what I was going to do. You’re so lucky that you decided what to do and did it and now you still do it and I have no idea and . . .”

“You don’t need to have any idea what you’re going to do,” I said. “I just loved art and I felt like it saved me. I didn’t set out to keep doing it. It just kind of happened. I tried other things along the way. I went to college, and I’ve had loads of other jobs.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“I’ve been a waitress, a vet’s assistant, a secretary. I’ve worked in a nursing home and as an ice cream scooper, all along trying my hand at these projects. Art sometimes feels like a calling more than a job.” I laughed. “By that, I mean when it calls, you don’t have much choice even if it’s not your ‘real job.’ Or at least that’s how it was for me.”

“Well, that makes me feel a little better. I mean, Mom? She just knew. I bet she knew when she was a baby that she wanted to be a doctor. And then everything she’s done since that moment has made her a doctor. Like a beacon from shore that she just sailed toward. But I’m lost.”

“You’re not lost,” I said. “It just feels that way.”

I had no real idea what I was saying to Piper. Maybe she was lost. Maybe we all were. But I felt an instinctual need to help her, to make her see that she was sailing her own boat to wherever it needed to go.

“We all take different paths,” I said.

Piper lifted her face to the air conditioner. “The only thing I like to do is read and you can’t make a living off of that.” Her ponytail flew backward and waved as if in a photo shoot. Then the conversation shifted to things like concerts I’d been to, places I’d visited, what Tim was like and how we’d met.

I set out my yoga mat and she asked me about it. I told her she could join me in my morning yoga anytime she wanted. Eventually Daisy’s voice called out for me.

“Guess they are done coloring in their new seashell book,” Piper said and took a few steps toward the doorway.

“Oh, I’ll get them.” I gently placed a canvas on the work counter.

“Lainey?” she asked as I brushed past her.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry about your mom.”

“Me, too, sweetie. Me, too.”

“I don’t know how you could come back here, but I’m glad you did.” She glanced at the doorway and then again looked at me. “I’ll grab the kids. I promised them I’d build a sand castle when they were ready.”

She was out the door calling Daisy’s name when I sat back on the stool and exhaled. Houston, Tim had said.

Maybe there was a time to stop wanting what you didn’t have, and do just as Bonny said, to find what matters most and gather those things. But what if Mom was still what mattered? What if I couldn’t stop making her matter? Tears formed in the curve of my chest and I swallowed them, setting off to join Piper and my kids in castle building. Yet on my way, I pulled up my flight app on the phone and searched for flights to Houston.