I thought of the nights I spent with her, so many nights over the last five years. She felt so real.
I glanced at Edward. When his eyes flicked to mine, leaving the road for just that split second, they were sad. “You are the problem, honey.”
“I know! That’s what I’m saying.”
“No. Not the accident. Not the media circus. Not even your mother’s detachment. You’re the one who can’t move on.”
“Can’t forgive?”
“That, too.”
The words hung in the air, along with the smell of man and car and drying pavement. We had crossed the state line and were in Connecticut. If the weather were an omen, it should have been raining like hell. If the weather werekind,it should have been raining like hell. Clearing skies? Clearing thoughts? Not a help, when we were moving closer to my mother, mile by mile.
“Maybe,” he finally said, “you don’t need to completely forgive. Maybe it’s like memories of Lily. Maybe it just becomes part of who you are.”
“Resenting someone forever?”
“Yes. A very small part.”
“But can you be happy living like that?”
He leaned forward to check an overhead sign as we passed beneath. We were still several exits away. Then he sighed. “Okay. Here are the choices.” One strong finger rose from the wheel. “You shut it all away, pretend none of it happened, lock the box, and never look back. That’s total denial.” Another finger rose. “Or you put the past on a pedestal—”
“Not a pedestal. That’s too rosy.”
“Dais, stage, front-and-center, whatever. You make it the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing at night. You let it dominate everything you do. That’s obsession.”
I waited. “What’s my next choice?” I knew there was one, because these two were extremes, and Edward was not.
He didn’t bother with the finger this time, but said with resignation, “You accept what you can’t change and move on.”
“Is that what you do?”
“It’s how I wound up in Devon.”
“But you still resent me.”
“No. I don’t. I told you. I don’t blame you for the accident. But I can’t vouch for your mother. If she needs a scapegoat for her disappointments, you may be it.” Grabbing my hand, he gave it a little shake. “Or not. We’ll know soon.”
***
I had grown up on a street of modest homes in Bloomfield, a suburb of Hartford, and there had been changes over the years, but they always seemed small. Signs of a new family, a new paint job, or an addition connecting house to garage were topics of discussion when I came home to visit. In my life, I hadn’t ever gone a month without a visit home.
Now, four years had passed, and—like us—my parents’ street was thesame, but not. The ranch house where a high school classmate had lived was still there, but the one beside it had been torn down and replaced with a large arts-and-crafts-style home. The gorgeous hedge of forsythia that had positively glowed for three weeks each spring had been replaced with arborvitae. The plain shingle home across the street from the hedge had been dressed up with fieldstone, dormers, and skylights. And the maple trees I loved, the ones that had been planted before I was born, when farmland was first carved up into streets?
Gone!
Lindens stood in their place—spindly saplings with cords holding them straight, and while I knew that lindens were fast-growing and would interfere less with overhead wires than the maples had done, I felt a sense of loss.
The sense of loss, of course, included Lily and my dad, both of whom were newly gone when I was here last. And the feeling only intensified when we turned into the driveway I knew so well.
I put a hand to my chest, which had gone hard. “I can’t do this,” I whispered. If my mother rejected me now, I would be destroyed.
Edward turned off the motor. “Too late. We’re here.” In a gesture so casual it might have been a stretch, he reached out to massage the back of my neck.
“You’re supposed to say Icando it,” I said when I could breathe again.
“That’s a given. You’re a strong woman, Mackenzie.”
