Heartbreak, not just over Max, but over everything. The moment I allowed myself to start feeling bad about what happened with Max, it was like all the grief that I’d kept down, all the mourningI’d refused to do back in San Francisco, rose up inside me and took everything away like a tidal wave. I dug Jasper’s letter out from his desk and read it over and over again, choking on my tears.
So now, even with how much I’ve been crying over him and trying to figure out what to do, I still get to my feet and shuffle to the door, mind racing and heart thudding at the thought that it might be Max here to apologize, to say that he’s sorry for what he said. That he wants to make this work.
That he’s done running away.
But it’s not Max standing at the door when I open it.
It’s my mom.
“Lacey!” she half-gasps, half-admonishes, stepping into the cabin immediately, her suitcase bumping along behind her. She drops it to the floor, the handle clattering against the hardwood, and reaches around me, pulling me in for a hug.
My mother and I don’t hug often. Jasper was more affectionate than her, and even he didn’t hug often. So the embrace is unexpected, but with the way I’ve been feeling the past week, I sink into it, tears leaking out hot and stinging over my cheeks.
“Mom,” I rasp, pulling back after a few minutes of holding each other. “What are you doing here?”
She’s already shaking her head when she pulls back, looking relieved and also pissed off. “Youdisappearedafter that conversation we had, Lacey! You can’t drop off the face of the planet and expect that I’m not going to come looking for you. Ignoring me I can handle, but Vanessa said she hadn’t heard from you, either. That’s when I got worried.”
I sniff and wipe the tears from my face in a blind swipe, but I’m probably just managing to smear snot over my cheek. My mom gives me a look like that assumption is right.
“Why would I be ignoring you?” I ask, and the words come out as a whimper.
“Come on,” she says, taking my elbow and leading me down the hall. “You need a shower. Oh! I like what you’ve done with the hallway.”
“… what I’ve…” My mother pulls me into the bathroom, looks around and nods at the changes, then leans down and turns on the tap. “Mom, have you been here before?”
She straightens up, looks at me like I’m silly, then clears her throat and says, “Of course I have. Who do you think came and brought Jasper home?”
My ears ring, and it takes me a moment to figure out what she’s saying. For a second, it feels like I’m standing in the bathroom with a stranger. She doesn’t seem to notice, checking the water’s temperature, then turning around and saying something to me that I can’t quite make out.
Her lips are moving, but I can’t hear a thing.
Heavily, I sit down on the toilet, nausea roiling up inside me again. Then, weakly, I ask, “Mom, what are you saying? You knew Jasper was sick?”
She bites her lip, then sighs and says, “Why don’t you take a shower first, and then we can talk about it?”
My brain feels numb. I’m not really sure what’s going on. But I follow my mom’s instructions, stepping into the shower and cleaning off. Shampoo, shampoo again. Conditioner.
When I step out of the shower, my hair is no longer greasy, and some of the queasy feeling has subsided. I find underwear, a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt sitting neatly folded on the sink for me, and pull them on. She must have found them in my dresser and brought them in for me.
My mom is in the kitchen, pouring hot water into two mugs. “Here,” she says, tapping the counter in front of the white mug, which is for me. I come and sit in front of it, pulling it under my chin and breathing in the smell of the tea.
It reminds me of being a kid. My mom might not have always been the most affectionate, but she would always make me a cup of tea when I was sad. Once, when I thought I failed a math test, she kept making me tea until the grade came through and it turned out I did fine.
“Jasper didn’t tell me that he was sick,” she says, matter-of-factly, the way my mom says everything. When I look up at her, she’s staring down into her own mug like it might have a script there for her to read from. “I figured it out. He’s my little brother. I know what he’s like.”
“So… when did you come to the cabin?” I ask, blinking at her, and this is when she looks at me, sighing so heavily that her shoulders drop a full inch.
“Jasper wasn’t going to come back to San Francisco. He didn’t want you to realize he was sick. He didn’t want to be treated differently; he thought that would be like dying early. But I knew you’d want all the time you could get with him. He said the only way he would agree to come home is if you didn’t know. That meant I couldn’t tell you, and I wasn’t allowed to say anything that might spell it out. He didn’t want me pressing on you to spend more time with him. He wanted a normal life.”
I’m crying again, wiping at my cheeks and shaking my head. For some reason, the knowledge that my mother knew actually makes me feel better. Jasper wasn’t all alone with what was happening to him. His big sister knew. She figured it out.
“Jasper was like a sick animal,” Mom says, her voice choking slightly as she bobs her tea bag in the mug. “He wanted to hide away. Didn’t want anyone to see him die.”
“Jesus,” I mutter before taking my first sip of the tea. Honey and mint. Soothing and invigorating at the same time. It never even occurred to me that there would be tea in the cabinet because my mother had been here.
A lot of things never occurred to me.
“I’m sorry,” I say next, and even though I’m not exactly sure what I’m apologizing for, Mom seems to get it, leaning over and placing a hand on my arm.
