I loved mornings, something I inherited from my mother. I could count on one hand those rare times, growing up, when I came downstairs and she was not already up, often before it was light out, sitting on our screened-in front porch. In the winter, she’d wrap herself in a blanket, wear mittens and a hat over her pj’s. A mug of coffee on the wicker table next to her, a novel in her lap, though mostly, she’d be staring out across the street, the houses empty in the off-season. She’d be so still, so lost in thought, it worried me. Where did she go? Was she unhappy? “Your mom’s just charging her batteries,” my dad would say, and it’s true that if she didn’t get her time in the mornings, she’d seem out of sorts, something clipped in her movements as if she were hoarding her energy.
I was the same way now, setting the alarm for four thirty, though I wouldn’t run or go to the Y until later. I liked watching the swerve of daylight across the lawn, igniting the maple tree out back, the faded siding of the house behind mine. I liked sitting in bed, drinking coffee, paging through magazines I found at thrift stores, looking for words or images to use in collages.
When the phone rang just after five, I knew it would be my mother. We usually talked in the morning, though not as often in the summer, when she was at the restaurant late every night with my dad.
“So?” she said. “How’d it go?” I’d told her Erik and I were going out again. The fourth time in two weeks. That he had children.
“It scares me, Mom,” I said. “I haven’t felt like this since…”
“I know,” she said. “Since Nicky.” Nicky. Only my mother had gotten away with calling him that. It surprised me to hear her say it. She’d been so angry at him. For a long time, he’d been just Nick, that hard K of his name sounding like something she wanted to snap in half.
I nodded, unsure why I’d hesitated to mention him. Maybe the anniversary, a week away. Ten years. It felt impossible. Or maybe I hesitated because being with Erik was bringing up the past in ways I hadn’t anticipated. You don’t expect the good memories to hurt more than the terrible ones, but they do. For years I’d revisited all those last scenes with Nick: the few times in the hospital when everything about him was shuttered against me, and the brief, difficult visits after, which were worse. But in the past week I’d remembered other things: Kissing Nick for the first time in his parents’ kitchen when Kelly was out of the room, then trying to act normal once she returned. Why are you guys being so weird? Or driving down Coastal Highway in his ancient blue pickup to go surfing at the inlet, my hair blowing in my eyes and him telling me, “You should see how beautiful you look.”
I glanced at the magazine in my lap. Respiratory Medicine. Margaret, who lived in the other half of the duplex I rented, was a respiratory therapist at Waukesha Memorial. I was working on a collage about breath and air, which had started with, of all things, a map of the 1913 Great Lakes shipwrecks. The collage was really about drowning, though I’m not sure I knew this until later and then it stunned me that I hadn’t known it all along.
“Part of me thinks it’s stupid to keep going out with him,” I told my mother, setting down the magazine and sliding out of bed. I needed more coffee. “Eventually I’m going to have to tell him, and I can’t imagine—”
“You’re putting the cart way ahead of the horse,” my mother interrupted. “A step at a time, sweetie.”
“I know.” I set my mug on the counter and opened the blinds over the sink. The sky looked heavy and close, the neighborhood still but for a guy walking his dog. He was tall, like Erik, and I smiled, thinking of how, when we were driving home the night before, Erik and I had started kissing at a red light and didn’t realize the light had turned green until the driver behind us laid on the horn. “This is crazy,” I said, pulling away from him.
“I’m thinking it’s kind of nice.”
“Well, that too.”
And then, ahead of us, the traffic light turned yellow and he slammed on the brakes.
“You could have made that,” I said. “Easily!”
“But why?” he said, and pulled me into his arms.
“You know what’s weird?” I said to my mom as I refilled my mug. I didn’t wait for her to answer. “I didn’t think anything could ever hurt me again. After what happened, it just seemed…” I blew out a long breath. “But he could. He probably will.”
“You don’t know that.”
I took a sip of my coffee, then moved into the living room, opening the blinds in there too. Light fell in stripes across the carpet. “I’ve known him less than two weeks, Mom. This is nuts.”
She laughed quietly. “Actually, I think it’s called falling in love.”
“I barely know him.” I’d known Nick almost my whole life before I felt even close to what I felt for Erik after four dates—barely four, because the custard stand wasn’t actually a date, was it?
“Just enjoy this time,” my mom said. “Let Erik get to know all your wonderful qualities.” In the background I could hear the squawk of seagulls and knew she was sitting on one of the wooden benches facing the ocean. I liked picturing her there, eyes closed, face lifted to the sun, but it made me ache too. She no longer had her porch. Our house had been sold to pay the hospital bills. She and my dad lived in a one-bedroom condo outside of town now. Most mornings she rode her bike the mile and a half to the boardwalk. She never complained, but how could she not have mourned the loss? The ease of walking barefoot onto her own porch, the ocean a block away, the boom of the surf?
“I’ve been thinking about Kelly a lot,” I said. “Probably because of Erik’s connection to the theater, but it’s also that whenever I imagine telling someone…”
“Of course you’d think of her.”
“It’s not that I thought we’d stay friends, but if she couldn’t understand…”
“I know. She’s the most difficult for me too.”
But the truth was my mother hadn’t understood either. Not really. Even now, there was so much pain in her.
“She had a lot of guilt, Claire. A lot. Which I understand all too well. Don’t underestimate what that did to her.”
“I hate that you feel guilty.” I leaned my forehead against the window. “You saved my life.”
“I don’t know about that. But I know you tried many, many times to tell both me and Kelly what was going on and neither of us took you seriously. Or not seriously enough. That’s not easy to live with.”
“Is it weird that I miss her?”
I could hear the wistfulness in my mom’s voice. “She was one of a kind.”
“Remember that rhinestone-studded jean jacket she bought Lucy?”
My mother chuckled. “For a three-month-old!”
I smiled. “Nick was appalled.”
“You sound different,” my mother said.
“I feel different. And I know it’s crazy, but I keep thinking maybe Erik’s the reason I moved here. Maybe he’s my reward—” I stopped. “I didn’t mean that.” Reward? No. No way. My throat tightened. “God, Mom, what am I doing?”
“Claire, it’s okay.”
“Except it’s not. I want it to be so badly, but it’s not, and it’s never going to be.”
“If you really believed that, you wouldn’t have gone out with him again.”
She was right. And wasn’t this why I’d moved here to begin with? I wanted another chance. And I’d been given one. I had a good job, a home, a life I mostly loved. And yes, it was lonely. I didn’t have any real friends, by my own choosing, and I missed my family, I missed Delaware, but some mornings, running through my quiet neighborhood of 1930s bungalows, the broad Midwestern sky beginning to lighten, I felt, if not happy, then at least content. This is enough, I told myself. It’s more than enough.
And it was, until I met Erik.
From next door, I heard Margaret leaving the house, and then there she was in her maroon scrubs and clogs, blond hair in a bun, unlocking her car. She glanced up at my window before she got in and gave a little wave. We’d long ago agreed we were perfect neighbors. Now and then we’d sit on our shared porch and have a glass of wine, but we were both extremely private. She knew the basics about me: graphic designer, from Delaware, liked to work out. We often left the house at the same time in the morning, she heading to the hospital, me to go running. And I knew she was one of nine kids, from Minneapolis, and the man she was involved with was a pilot for American Airlines. Because he was around so infrequently, I assumed he was married, but I never asked. Once, after he left her house, I heard her wailing with such terrible grief it scared me.
After I got off the phone, I sat on the porch and laced up my running shoes. The low sun had burned through the clouds, the air thick with humidity. I stared down the street, named after a tree, as all the streets in this neighborhood were—Elm Avenue, Maple Lane, Spruce Street, which was mine, though there were no spruce trees at all. Someone told me once that housing developments were often named after what was destroyed in order to build them, so Willow Run was once a grove of weeping willows and Marsh Estates was once a beautiful marsh with long grasses that caught the falling light each afternoon. Do we always name our absences? I wondered as I eased into a jog. I thought of my collages, which I signed with her name and mine: Lucy Claire. Sometimes I thought the whole reason I created the collages at all was so I could write her name next to mine, attach them both to something beautiful. Or maybe I just wanted someone to ask “Why Lucy?” as Erik had the previous night, so that I could have that moment of sounding so nonchalant as I answered, “Oh, I’ve always loved that name!” It was what I used to say in my other life, the one where I had been her mother.