I linger by the chair for a few seconds, fighting with myself. My stubbornness, my standoffishness, my obsession with keeping parts of my life secret for so long. It was so much easier before Adam Hawkins knocked on my front door.
But it was so much harder, too. It was lonely and scary and small.
So when he sets his hand on the cushion beside him, I uncross my arms and go to him. When I sit, he lifts his hand from the cushion and sets it on my leg, exactly where I want it. So I can feel it: He’s still my Adam. Not Salem’s Hawk.
He passes me the postcard.
I take it with shaky fingers, swallow thickly, and look down at it.
“It would’ve been okay with me if you hadn’t talked today. You know that, right?”
I nod. I do know that. Adam always says I can say when. With everything, he’s always said I can say when.
“But you seem—since we met Ashley, you seem like you do want to. Or at least, you want to do what talking might lead to. You want to find her.”
I turn the postcard over and over. Picture, writing, picture, writing. I do want to find her, and it’s not only because it’s what Tegan wants anymore. It’s as if seeing that photo of Mom looking so different—not looking anything like me anymore—finally made it okay for me to want it, too.
It’s as if I can make it so I’m looking for someone I never knew at all.
“You’re looking at that postcard and you’re not seeing your mom anymore,” Adam says. “You’re seeing her only through Lynton, now. You’re trying to see if you can decode something about whatever con they ran. But if there were something about Lynton or the con, Salem or I would’ve found it, the same way I found MacSherry, or the way she found Kirtenour.”
I stop turning it over. Focus on the writing. He’s right. Deep down, I know he’s right. I let the words blur in front of my eyes again.
“She wrote those postcards to you, Jess. If there is anything in there that might help us in Olympia—and there might not be, we can’t really know for sure—I think you have to remember that. You have to remember what she meant to you. What you meant to her.”
I think it’s pretty obvious I didn’t mean anything to her, I almost say, but somehow, with Adam next to me, I can’t.
Instead, I can think about Mom behind me in the mirror, brushing my hair. I can think of the times when she was in between boyfriends, when I had the feeling that she and I were a real team, just the two of us. I can think of the time she let me pick out books at the library that other moms said were “too old” for girls my age. I can think of a Saturday afternoon she spent coloring with me,reallycoloring with me, putting up her own finished page on the fridge right beside mine. I can think of the time she told my first-grade teacher that if I wanted to go by Jess, she expected everyone to call me Jess and nothing else. I can think about the sound of her laugh and the curve of her smile. I can think of all the movies she loved, because I watched them when she was gone with Brent. I can think of how, when she came back, watching movies was one of the only things I’d let myself do with her when I visited, because at least while they were playing, she didn’t try to talk to me.
I can think of tons of things about Mom when I let myself, and the things I hate to think about the most are the things I didn’t hate about her at all.
Part of me wants to gather up all the postcards now. Shove them in the nearest curtain rod. Adam would let me, I think. He might even help, if I asked him to.
But another part of me knows I need to read them all again, keeping in mind the hair-brushing and reading and coloring and defending me to my teacher. I want to make a list of every movie we ever watched together and remember all the parts of them that made her laugh or smile.
In the end, though, I don’t have to do any of that.
In the end, all I have to do is look down at the first few lines of Mom’s postcard from Olympia again, my heart rattling the whole entire cage of my body.
A dream come true
I barely notice
Water the landscape
Even Miles likes it
“Holy shit,” I whisper, not even sure whether I’m talking to Adam or to myself. “Holy shit, I think I know where we should look in Olympia.”
And what’s worse?
What’s worse is that I’d bet anything she’s still there.
Chapter 25
Adam
Olympia is . . . heavy.
