Sylvia’s Friday night special. Sometimes I wonder how my dad feels about still living with his mother-in-law all these years later. I’ve never asked him. I’m sure if I did he’d say “You know I love her,” or “Sylvia is Sylvia!” There are few situations Dad doesn’t find the good in. He’s broken his leg, dealt with disease, lost both of his parents, and abandoned the hope of having a tool shed. He’s never lost his smile.
It wasn’t until two months after Dad’s accident that my mother and grandmother told me about the tickets. Right after it happened my mother fell into a depression. She’d sit at home… inside, never out, never on the beach—too much air, breath,movement—and stare at the television. No one knew anything had occurred, so no one knew what was wrong. No one except Sylvia.
“Something has happened,” my grandmother told me, although she didn’t say what, or to whom.
It was only when I found my mom in the shower, slumped over, skin rubbed raw, that I demanded an answer. Marcella had always been a little nervous, yes, but never catatonic, never absent, neverthis.
“What happened?” I asked her. “What is happening?”
They sat me down in my bedroom, Marcella and Sylvia. I remember because there was a Kelly Slater poster on the wall that still hangs there, peeled and yellowed at the edges—that I can’t look at without remembering that day. The one when my whole world changed.
“She’s too young,” my grandmother said. She’d been saying it since I’d found Marcella, since she’d come up the stairs, since she’d forced Sylvia to sit down on my bed.
“She needs to know what she has,” my mom said.
Sylvia shook her head. “It’s not the right decision.”
“You don’t know what the right decision is.” My mother turned on her. Marcella was sullen sometimes, but I rarely saw her angry, never heard her raise her voice. She wasn’t that kind of mother. You knew her anger in her silence.
“Please,” I said, both to get them to stop and to get them to just say it.
Sylvia looked at me. I saw her head imperceptibly nod.
She came toward me and took my hands in hers. Sylvia’s hands were always cold, but that day they didn’t feel like cool, familiar relief—they felt like shock.
“We’re different,” Marcella said, and Sylvia’s grip on my hand’s tightened. “We have something other people don’t.”
My mother pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. I could see her physically deflating.
“Go ahead, then,” Sylvia said, and I thought it was the most unattractive she had ever looked.
I remember thinking I didn’t recognize her. That someone else was in the room with us.
“Sweetheart,” my mom said, her tone changing. “Do you know how lucky you are?”
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I did know I was lucky. I knew in all the ways they tell you to be grateful. Two parents, enough food, good health. My hair was frizzy, but so what, right? Most of the time it was wet anyway. I was lucky for my proximity to the water, that I could admit. How did people growup in big, wide swathes of dry land? I knew that my parents, even then, were far more concerned with each other than with me. But I had an eerie sense that was not what she meant. I all at once was not sure I wanted to know what came next.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Sylvia smiled. And then she laughed. A big, wholehearted laugh. I loved her laugh. Every time she laughed I felt it was in delight—at life, and sometimes, in some precious moments, at me. But this laugh was different. It was maniacal. This laugh was not in excess of joy but in reaction to inevitability, to ridiculousness, to the unimaginable reality that this was her life, her family, this moment.
She set a hand on my cheek. It was still cold.
“You get a do-over,” Sylvia told me. Simple, brief, clean.
I felt the air slice with her words. Next to me, Marcella exhaled.
I asked the only thing I could think to. I was pretty sure, after all, that I understood the answer. “For what?”
“Something happened recently,” my mother said.
“Use the real words,” Sylvia said. Her voice was powerful, defiant. She spoke as if she were holding Marcella to the fire. She opened her mouth again, to say what came next, and Marcella leaped in.
“She’s my child,” she said simply.
My mother looked at me. I could see how red her eyes were—she looked like she hadn’t slept in days. There was intention in them when she spoke. When I look back on her words, the way they transformed, it appears almost cruel, the way she said what she did next.
“Your father died in a car accident,” Marcella said. She didn’t hover. She didn’t trip over the words. Out they came. “But I took it back, and now he’s here. And now here we are.”
