The moment I step back inside the house—ruining the welcome mat with my failure and the night’s transgressions—my mother is already facing me. A rictus frown is on her face, and sympathy muddles her wrinkle-heavy expression.
The zenith of my sorrow no longer waits in the wings but calls for a timely shower of tears—one that mirrors a similar trajectory to the downpour hell-bent on washing Maple Grove clean off the map. Cymbals crash in my ears, and despite being uncomfortably soaked, it feels like a brazen bull of heat is engulfing me.
“It’s over,” I whisper with a salt-burned tongue, relinquishing any attempt at keeping my emotions together. It’s the equivalent of crudely patching weather-beaten holes with wet newspaper to keep the elements out.
She doesn’t need me to elaborate. She knows—a mother’s instinct isalways right.
“Oh, Buttercup. I’m so sorry,” she coos, shedding her nighttime sweater to embrace me, not even caring to lambast me for bringing in half the tempest from outside.
I burrow into her as if I’m a child again—hardwired to seek solace in the only other person who can eradicate the noise like Knox—but her hug doesn’t feel nearly as comforting as the inherent certainty of well-built arms.
My vision whitewashes, and a delusional part of me is still trying to convince my mind that this is all some hallucinatory halfway.
I create twin fist holds in the back of her shirt, not bothering to apologize for the snot and saliva that discolor cotton. “He nevertrulyloved me, Mom. He—he said all these terrible things to me. I thought we were happy together.”
“I’m sorry things didn’t work out, Staten. I could see how much you two cared for each other.”
“I feel like I can’tbreathe. I can’t do this. I can’t live without him. I just want the pain to go away. Please make it go away.”
My mom strokes the length of my spine, holding me tighter than she ever has before.
When she speaks, her tone is saturated in guilt, roughening the usual softness of her voice. “I never wanted you to know what heartbreak felt like. Knox—he—oh, honey, he was in love with you. I could see it in his eyes. Whatever lies he fed to you, they don’t hold any merit.”
My mouth is drier than a communion wafer, and there’s a pit fight happening inside my stomach. I’m reeling in self-hatred and the increasingly suicidal urge to leave all my earthly possessions behind.
I didn’t expect to keep our fake relationship from my mother for so long—partly because I never thought it would evolve into anything real—but now, with no conscience to preserve, the only way I can grapple with my frustration is to jettison every once-airtight lie that has crossed my tongue.
I sever our embrace so I can look her in the eyes, more than prepared for the deserved ramifications of my duplicity. “In the beginning, when he came over for dinner…we weren’t actually dating. You mistook him for my boyfriend, and I didn’t have it in me to break your heart.”
“What?” my mother exclaims, shock sticking to the sallow features of her face.
“I was in love with Leif,” I admit quietly, as if speaking the past back into existence will undo all my progress with Knox.
“Leif Kennedy? Your friend from orientation group?”
I nod. “He never noticed me, and Istillwanted him. Knox—he was the first person to actually see me for who I was. I never asked him to. He was never even an option for me, but…but he saw the pain that Leif was involuntarily inflicting on me, and he became determined to prove to me that I deserved better.”
Taking a trip down memory lane isn’t at the top of my to-do list, and against my heart’s caterwauling, I wonder if all those clandestine looks I shared with Knox were anything but. My half-formed resentment jackknifes awake.
“Staten, I had no idea,” my mom cries. “I’m sorry I never realized what was going on.”
“You have nothing to apologize for. I shouldn’t have kept it a secret from you.”
Speaking of secrets, there’s another huge one that I have yet to unveil, and my near-death experience is a bit of a harder pill to swallow than some young adult love triangle Gordian knot. I brace myself for my mother’s predicted outburst, praying that my good-natured confession won’t result in a manhunt against my dearly departed.
The nerves are paramount; every emotion that’s been imprisoned in its corresponding sector is about to finally be released by a master key. The truth comes tumbling out at a velocity I can’t slow, annihilating the rule-following, guilt-free persona my mother has known half her life.
I guess death has cornered me in more ways than one tonight.
“Mom, do you remember when I was in the hospital?” I ask, my belly seizing, my feet submerged in the metaphorical debris of my mistakes.
A sleet of tears pebbles along her waterlines, caught and accentuated in the leftover lightning zigzagging through the path of least resistance. “Of course I do. It was one of the worst days of my life.”
Well, this might be your second worst.
If I was able to forgive Knox—and I was the one most affected by his…unusual parking skills—then my mom will surely be able to forgive him too, right? It was an accident.
She’s going to be devastated. I tell her everything—I always have, ever since I was a kid. Maybe it’s because I never had a rebellious phase, but an open line of communication between me and my mom has always been one of the most important staples of our relationship. We work well because of it. I’ve basically spit in the face of progressive talk therapy.
