I spend a lot of time that night drafting text messages to Alex and then not sending them.
—Hey
(Too serious.)
—Hi!
(Too eager.)
—Hey …
(Too suggestive.)
—Hi:)
(Completely desperate.)
—Hey what’s up
(Trying so hard it takes my breath away.)
—Yo
(Utterly, utterly ridiculous.)
—Hello Alex
(A robot would sound less formal.)
Alex and I last saw each other yesterday at lunchtime when we all left the beach house. He said, “Talk soon,” and I nodded. One of us should have contacted the other by now.
I need to stop thinking about him. I can’t stop thinking about him.
I am considering Photoshopping my face next to Alex’s, and comparing it to a photo I found deep in someone’s Instagram history of Alex and Vanessa, just to see if Alex and I are a comparably cute couple, but I quickly abandon that idea when I picture a scenario where Alex somehow stumbles across this Photoshopped image. The thought is so horrifying I want to wipe my laptop completely clear of all images I have ever saved and immediately get hundreds of hours of therapy.
I spend the rest of the night trying to distract myself by reading theories about celebrities who might be in secret relationships, writing down a list of all the evidence I might have missed that my parents fell out of love, and being mad at Zach, who I have also not heard from since our fight in the car.
Mum comes home from her non-date date and I ignore her and pretend to be asleep. Then, when she is in the shower (a couple of years ago, Mum became the kind of person who showers at night and Dad remained a shower-in-the-morning person, and really, now that I think about it, there might be no stronger indicator of impending divorce than this), I take being a horrible daughter to the next level. I sneak into her room and look at her phone, feeling mostly like a psychopath but also a little bit like a really cool spy.
There is a series of text messages between her and a man called Eric. They’re not sexy texts. I’m not completely sick, I would not read sexts between my mother and a stranger. They are barely even flirty. In fact, Eric seems very polite. He invited my mother to play golf and he also sent her a promo code to use to get 20 percent off when buying printer cartridges online. I don’t know which is worse—the thought that this was related to an actual conversation they had, or that he sent the code unprompted. Eric has the personality of a spambot.
My father will die alone, and my mother will marry a man who uses cheap printer ink as a seduction tool.
And now I also have to consider the fact that Eric texted my mother three times within an hour of dinner finishing. Either he is a stalker or I should definitely be freaking out that I haven’t heard from Alex in thirty-four hours.
Or both things could be true. Eric is a stage-five clinger, and Alex is ghosting me.
After her shower, Mum comes into my room in her bathrobe, combing her damp hair. I’m not fast enough putting my phone down, so she knows I’m not asleep.
“Let’s talk,” she says, lying down on the bed beside me. She is a big believer in never going to bed angry, which really gets in the way of my desire to hold petty grudges and stew on things at three a.m. instead of sleeping.
“What do you want to talk about?” I say.
“How was your time at Zach’s?”
“Fine.”
“What did you do?”
“Not much.”
“Natalie.”
“What?”
“Don’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Give me nothing answers.”
There was a period of time, when I was in my early teens, when Mum and Dad banned me from saying “Nothing much” and “Fine” in response to questions about my day. I had to think of something interesting to say. Sometimes I just made things up to appease them. Sometimes I would research random facts, because I knew if I said, “In Switzerland, it’s illegal to own just one guinea pig,” then Dad would be completely distracted by that information and they would both forget to ask any more questions about my day.
But I don’t have any random facts on hand tonight, and Mum was never as easy to distract as Dad anyway.
“Fine. Let me see. I went to the beach, I got sunburned, we watched some movies, and I kissed Alex.”
A part of me has been bursting to tell Mum this, because I want to shock her and show her how she doesn’t know as much about me as she thinks she does. I guess you’ve been so busy dating other men, you can’t keep up with my life anymore.
I also want to tell her because we haven’t been talking as much lately and I am scared we are going to drift apart, that maybe she’ll fall out of love with me in the same way she did with Dad, which is ridiculous because parents don’t fall out of love with their kids, but maybe they do and no one talks about it.
“You … what?” Mum says. She sounds as shocked as I was hoping she would.
“I kissed Alex, Zach’s brother.”
Mum sits up a little and turns to me. “When?”
“We were hanging out and it just happened.” I shrug, trying to look nonchalant.
“Do you like him?” Mum’s eyes are lit up with excitement and also slight panic. This must be what I looked like when Lucy told me she’d had sex.
“Well, I kissed him.”
“I thought you liked his friend Owen.”
“No.” I scrunch up my nose.
“But you said in the car—”
“That was ages ago.”
“It was a week ago!”
“Well, it feels like ages ago.”
“I guess I can’t keep up with your love life anymore,” Mum says.
“Well, I just told you the biggest thing that has ever happened to my love life, so consider yourself all caught up.”
“Honey, this is … this is great. I’m excited for you. We’re excited, right?” She’s looking at my face, trying to gauge my feelings. I’m not giving her much.
“It’s semi-exciting,” I say. I mean, it’s nice to have one person in my life excited by Alex and me, but she’s excited for the wrong reasons, and her excitement is like an alarm bell. Ding, ding, ding, sad desperate Natalie should be over the moon that anyone is paying attention to her.
“I should meet him.”
“Mum. Calm down. You definitely don’t need to meet him.”
“You could invite him over for dinner.”
“I’m absolutely not doing that.”
“Not now, obviously. Next week or the week after.”
Oh god, she’s going to suggest a golfing double date with Eric next. “We might not even be a thing next week,” I say.
“What kind of thing are you now?”
“The smallest thing possible, too small to even classify. We’re seeing where things go. Which is nowhere, since I haven’t heard from him since yesterday.”
“Why don’t you text him?”
Very easy for her to say, a woman who’s just had three texts from the man she left a couple of hours ago. Her eyes are bright, and I can see her next thought will be to help me decide what to write to him. It’s all there, flashing through her mind right now, the fun we’ll have being two single ladies figuring out the dating world together.
No, no, no, no, no, no. No, we are not doing this.
“I don’t want to talk about this with you.”
“Oh. Okay.” Her shoulders slump. Here we go with the guilt again.
“Mum, can’t you see I’m still upset with you? For lying to me for months.”
“I know.”
“And for breaking up with Dad.”
“You keep saying that, honey, but the truth is, we made the decision together.”
This can’t be true. Someone had to be the instigator, but they clearly don’t want me to know who it was.
“Well, it was a terrible decision,” I say.
“This is not how I wanted my marriage to go either. Trust me. I didn’t plan to be single in my late forties.”
“Well, why did it go this way? I don’t understand.”
I think of the list I wrote a few hours ago, of evidence I had missed. There wasn’t a lot of tangible proof. As a family, we’re not shouters or criers, not in the traditional sense. Our fighting style is all quiet viciousness: sharp-edged comments, sarcasm, eye-rolling, and pointed silences. They sometimes argued about money, but in a way that was so detailed and intricate I was too bored to listen in. Here’s my list of things I do know:
None of these things seems enough to end a twenty-year marriage, but maybe, when you add them all together, they are. The thing is, there was lots of good stuff too. I’m sure of it. They laughed a lot. They loved talking to each other. They genuinely seemed to enjoy each other’s company, and they always wanted to know what the other thought of things.
“It’s complicated,” Mum says.
“I am capable of understanding complex things, you know,” I say. I can’t seem to stop saying everything in the bitchiest tone possible.
“I know. I just … I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to share all the details with you.”
“All the details” makes it sound like there was a scandalous affair.
Mum can see where my mind is going. “No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Your father and I just no longer felt like we worked as a romantic couple.”
“Don’t all marriages go through that phase?”
“It wasn’t a phase.”
“But did you actually try to fix it?”
“Yes. For a long time.”
“But…”
But, but, but. But this doesn’t give me any answers. And it doesn’t explain to me how to know if a relationship is good or bad or wrong or right.
“I hate that you’re breaking up,” I say, and, finally, the bitchy tone is gone.
“I know.”
“Do you think you’ll get married again?” I am so scared of the answer to this question.
“To your father?” she says.
“No. To someone else.” I don’t want my mother to spend the rest of her life alone if she doesn’t want to be alone. I want her to be happy, but I don’t want to share her with other people either—she’s mine.
“I don’t have any plans to.”
“I’m scared of having awful stepparents.”
“I will never marry someone you don’t like, I promise.”
“Well, that’s a lot of pressure to put on me. I might be a terrible judge of character. Don’t give me that much power.”
“Fine. You have some power but not veto power.”
“No, I’ve changed my mind. I want veto power.”
“Sweetie, you’re jumping way ahead. A lot is going to change in your life in the next few years too. We don’t know where any of us will be in five years, or how we’ll be feeling about things.”
“Don’t say that.”
Growing and changing is only fun if my parents stay the same and I can show them how different and better I am without having to process their stuff too.
“Are you worried about next week?” she says.
Next week is when university places are announced, and the rest of my life will be decided. Of course I’m worried.
“A little.”
I’ve decided I actually quite like the safety of this limbo period. Nothing is certain or decided yet. Next week, my choices will become concrete and I might have made the wrong ones and I’ll have to live with that forever and I don’t know how anyone makes these kinds of decisions and feels good about them. The whole thing makes me feel sick.
“No matter what happens, I’m so proud of you, honey.”
There she goes, with the no-matter-what-happens stuff again. She has no idea that bringing up the fact that anything can happen is as unnerving as hell to someone like me.
I’m feeling bad now about how awful I have been to her tonight and for the phone snooping, and I’m about to apologize, when she turns to me.
“Natalie, there’s something else I need to tell you.”
My stomach hurts preemptively. “What’s that?”
Mum clears her throat a little. “We’re selling the house.”
“This house? Our house?”
“Yes. I can’t afford the mortgage on my own.”
This probably should have occurred to me before, but I have been too busy wallowing in my own self-pity and thinking about Alex to consider logistics. I hate this. Without a big piece of shared real estate, the chances of Mum and Dad getting back together someday just got much, much smaller. (I didn’t even know I was holding out hope for them getting back together until this moment.)
“Where will I live?”
“With me, at my new place.”
“Which is where?”
“I don’t know yet. There’s a lot to organize before I get to that point.”
I swallow, afraid I’m going to cry, and wait until I know my voice won’t wobble to speak. “What if I want to live with Dad?”
“You can do that,” Mum says, and she looks like she’s trying to stop her voice from wobbling too.
“So I have to choose one of you?” I knew it would come to this. If Mum had kept the house, then staying with her wouldn’t have felt as much like choosing, because I would be at the home I’ve always known, my real home. But if they are both renting new apartments, in new areas, then it is a direct choice between them.
“I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“But it is exactly like that.”
“You could do one week with one of us, and then a week with the other. Or a month each. Or a year. There are lots of ways for us to share you,” she says, squeezing my shoulder, and then smoothing my hair back from my face.
As long as I am shared. As long as my life is sliced up into equal pieces for them both to enjoy.