Hannah continued to scrub Galen’s plate, but the flake of salmon skin on the edge of the rim refused to dislodge. Stupid plate. She dumped it in the trash can, on top of the dinner Galen had barely touched.
Normal people threw out perfectly good plates all the time, right? Besides, one less plate in her cabinet meant nothing. She owned a dinner service for twelve yet lived a cater-for-one lifestyle. Hannah dried her hands with the yellow towel. Too cheerful, too soft, it made her think of daffodils and the rejuvenation of spring. Maybe she should dump the towel, too.
Reading people had always come easily, but tonight she’d offended her celebrity tenant with a simple reference to his mother, and had prepared a dinner her son was unable to eat. Apparently Galen had told her out in California that he was a vegan. What else had she forgotten? Had Will warned her off his mother, too?
The interaction with Will was a blessing—really, a blessing. One more reason to have even less to do with him. But this thing with Galen... She’d welcomed him home with a fridge full of fish and his once-favorite cheese.
When Galen was little, she knew he was going to cry before he did. And wasn’t that the definition of a good mother—to anticipate your child’s agony? How could she do that if she no longer understood his most basic needs? Gone were the days when she could find jeans on clearance for her son and drive home to a hug and “Awesome, Mom. You’re the best.” She couldn’t even feed him.
She stared through the uncovered window into the black wall of trees. The forest had inspired and terrified Galen since he was little. His best poems contained imagery of light through the trees; his worst nightmares played out in the forest. They both believed Saponi Mountain to be haunted, but the ghosts he encountered came straight from hell.
Hannah kicked the trash can back into its cubbyhole.
She should have answers; she should know how to reach her son. When life fell backward into a repeating pattern, the way forward should be obvious. Or maybe the second time was worse because you understood the price of failure.
Galen had chosen to stay with the therapist in California, which didn’t sit right. Surely he needed a mental health care professional in the same time zone, one he could talk with face-to-face. The nuances of depression were easily missed over the phone. She knew better than anyone. But they’d reached a compromise: Galen could keep the out-of-town therapist provided she drove him to and from A.A. meetings. When Galen was a teenager, car journeys were a time for confidences, especially given the way her job could intrude on their lives. Starting tomorrow, once a day for two twenty-minute car rides, he would have her undivided attention, and she would have his.
If she could just find the starting point, then maybe she could help Galen rebuild his life. She knew only the bare facts that made up the iceberg of her son’s mental collapse: his growing uncertainty about the future; his belief that he would never get a job—You should have talked me out of poetry, Mom; his girlfriend dumping him.
Until they’d met a month earlier, while Galen was in the hospital, she’d cast the girl as the villain. Hannah had watched a young woman walk into the trendy Californian coffee shop and had known, without doubt, that she was staring at Galen’s former lover. Soul mate was not a term Hannah liked—it was reserved for people who believed in true love—but she hoped the future would bring these two back together. They seemed to be a fit.
The girlfriend had explained, stopping to cry, that she still loved Galen, but that she, too, struggled with depression. She had tried to persuade him to seek help, to stop drinking. But when she’d finally told him she could no longer cope with the toxicity of the apartment, he’d acted blindsided. But then again, the girlfriend had said, he could have been drunk. Drunk Galen and sober Galen were one and the same. Hannah had been unable to comment, since she didn’t recognize the person they were discussing. He certainly wasn’t the little boy who had once created whole worlds out of Legos.
Hannah sighed, retrieved the plate from the trash and left it in the sink. Tomorrow she would try harder.
She tiptoed into the living room where Galen was curled up in the fetal position on the edge of the sofa, a cushion clasped to his chest. As a baby, Liam slept sprawled out as if to say, I can’t walk or talk, but I own this world. Galen, however, always slept in a self-protective huddle. Much as she did.
When did she stop thinking as a mother and start settling for throwaway conversations? Sure, first day of classes were great. Translation: I had a monster hangover. How’s life? Oh, you know. How’re your courses? Fine. What happened to that girl you liked? Which one? After twenty-two years of worry for her boys, she had allowed empty-nest syndrome to trump everything, to torpedo maternal instincts.
One tear escaped, followed by a second. She had told herself she wouldn’t cry, but she was moving through a world where there was no correlation between what she wanted and what happened. And she had never been this scared in her life.
When had Galen decided to give up on himself? Did self-loathing just slam into him one day like a piece of space junk falling from the sky, or had it always been there, festering in his DNA, and she’d been too busy to notice? If he were bleeding, she could fix it. If he were a client seeking answers, she could give them. But he was dying inside, and she was lost.
Rosie licked her hand, and Hannah sank to her knees for a hug.
“Stay with him, baby,” she whispered.
Then she stood and switched off all the lamps except one—to guide Galen back upstairs to his childhood bed. Rosie padded across the wood floor and flopped down by the sofa. Daisy and the other dogs followed. Nothing bad would happen tonight, not with her girls on watch. But what about the next night and the one after that?