Oh.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice soft now. I think of his eyes on that television. His rough voice as he told me about Cope.
I wish I hadn’t gotten up from the love seat.
For a few seconds, he doesn’t do anything but look at me, something loaded in his gaze, and then . . . then, I realize what he’s getting at.
Okay. Maybe it’s good I got up from the love seat.
“My mother isn’t football,” I say.
“I know that. Of course I know that.”
“But?”
He sighs again. “But you have a hard time talking about her outside of the basic facts. Outside of her leaving, and the men who she left for.”
“No, I don’t.”
But even I can hear it has the ring of untruth.
“The questions were about her leaving,” I say. “About Lynton, and the guys who came before.”
He doesn’t respond, and that’s because he doesn’t have to. If he lets me replay it all in my head, he knows I’ll remember. Some of the questions were about other things. Who Mom was when there wasn’t a guy in the picture. What kinds of things she liked, when it was only her making the choices. Whether I learned anything from her, when it came to raising my sister.
Every time I avoided giving much of an answer.
“What I said about Cope the other night—that I focused on all the negative things.”
“I don’t do that.”
He nods once, but it’s definitely not in agreement. When he leans over toward the coffee table and picks up the Olympia postcard, my stomach swoops anxiously, as though I’m watching someone pull them out of the curtain rod. I have to remind myself that they’re not a secret anymore, that Tegan and Salem and Adam have all been looking, for weeks, at these little four-by-six artifacts of my mother’s abandonment of us.
He looks down at it, and I can see his eyelids move across it as he reads it again. I can follow along, even from here, because it doesn’t really matter if the words are blurry on the page. They’ve always stayed pretty crystal clear in my head.
Dear Jessie,
The Pacific Northwest is a dream come true. People say it’s rainy here and it is, but I barely notice. Water is just part of the beautiful landscape that surrounds us. I think even Miles likesit!
I am thinking of you and Tegan. I know you are doing a great job with her. I have no doubt about that. I love you both!
Mom
“It doesn’t even say anything,” I tell Adam. “It’s sightseeing bullshit. Theweather. There’s nothing there.”
Nothing there except the line that’d made me so angry that I’d torn all the remaining clothes off her hangers while Tegan was at school.
I have no doubt about that.
I have every doubt, I’d thought, as I’d yanked shirts away from their cheap plastic hangers, as I’d kicked everything into a rumpled, tangled ball on the carpeted floor of her bedroom, my eyes burning and my throat tightening. A blind, bottomless rage.I am twenty-one years old and I am made of doubt.
“There might not be,” says Adam. “But the way you see your mom—”
“Do you see something there that I don’t?” I snap, impatient.
He lifts his eyes from the postcard, and everything is so confusing. I don’t know if he’s my Adam or Salem’s Hawk right now. Him knowing me for himself and him knowing me for this story—it’s so mixed up now. Impossible to untangle, which is exactly what he was afraid of.
“Jess. Please come back here and sit with me.”
