“Tyler, please. You have to understand—”
“Tell me this isn’t real! Tell me you’re just a crazy fucking stalker! Tell me, Meredith, that you’re just a crazy fucking drunk. That you’re in some kind of alcohol-induced psychosis. That you’ve lost your goddamn mind!”
She exhaled.
“Your father,” she said, “was the love of my life.”
The picture crumpled under my fist. “Bullshit! My father didn’t love anything!”
Meredith walked toward a closet and pulled out a box. It teemed with photos and postcards and prizes, the kind you’d win at Coney Island. I tore through it, hunting for something to prove her wrong. All I found were more pictures. All I found were love letters.
“You wrote these, right? These aren’t real. These can’t be real.”
“They’re real, Tyler. They—”
“Fuck you! You’re a home-wrecker! He had a family! He—”
“Please let me talk. I can explain. I—”
“No! My dad couldn’t have loved you! He didn’t love anyone!He cheated on my mom my whole life! There was always a new woman, a new...”
Meredith picked a letter off the floor.
“That’s not true,” she said. “That may have been true before. It was certainly true after. But your father and I were soulmates. We were seeing each other on and off from the night we met until when I became pregnant with Juliet. He brought you here all the time. You took your first steps on that shore. Those handprints you found—they’re yours. You had a room right down this hall. I was going to leave Alan. Your father and I, we were going to make it work. Your mother knew. Alan knew. We—”
“No! My father was a drunk! He was a liar! He...”
The puzzle pieces began to click into place. The story my mother had told me—that my father didn’t know how to love and was always chasing somebody new—started to crumble. Wasn’t that an easier story to tell than the truth? That he could love someone, just not her? Just not us? All summer, my mother had known I was here, and she’d said nothing. She’d been so ashamed, she hadn’t said a single word.
“You’re a home-wrecker,” I said.
“This was your home,” she said. “This was going to be your home.”
My arms flew out wide. “You’re so fucking crazy that you believe that! If this was going to be my home, then why wasn’t it? If my dad loved you so much, then where is he!?”
She closed her eyes.
“I don’t know.”
“But you know everything,” I said, moving closer. Backing her into a corner. Behind her, press clippings.Top Pitching Prospect Shatters Arm in One-Car Accident. No Timetable for Likely No. 1MLB Draft Pick’s Return to Mound. Onetime Long Island Pitching Sensation Dies at Nineteen.“If you know everything, then where’s my father? If you’re so rich and powerful, why can’t you find him? Answer that, Meredith. If my father loved you so much, why the fuck isn’t he here!?”
“I... I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t!” I ripped the photo in two. Meredith flinched, and I was tearing things off the wall—chunks of my life, my summer with Katie, critical lines of dialogue that were supposed to belong only to her and me.Don’t go to Montauk. You’re still here. There’s only you.“You’re just a stalker! You’re just a sad, pathetic—”
“I pushed him away, Tyler! I did what you did to Katie this morning! He’d left your mother, I was going to leave Alan, we were going to get married, we were going to do everything right! And then we got into a little fight—it was nothing, one measly quarrel—and I ran back to Alan to make him jealous, and I got pregnant with Juliet, and I couldn’t face the mess I’d made! He begged for a year! Told me it didn’t matter—that he loved me all the same! But I couldn’t stand what I’d done to our fairy tale! That I’d ruined it a second time! And so I pushed him away! I convinced myself a normal life would save me from drowning! But it didn’t! I drowned all the same!”
“Is that why you were at the funeral? Were you hoping he’d be there? Because he disappeared when I was eight! Had you seen him? Did you know where he was?”
Meredith took one very tentative step toward me. “I met Michael,” she said, “completely by accident.”
I threw my hands on my head. “What! You knew Mikey too? How!?”
“We met at treatment,” she said. “I had not planned that. We were fast friends. You know how things go in those places. He started talking about his hometown—it took me a few days to piece it all together. That you were Tom’s Tyler. That he was the Mikey next door.”
I put my head in my hands, pacing across the room. “This can’t be real. This isn’t real.”
Meredith exhaled. I looked up. And then, all of a sudden, on the desk right beside her, I saw it. A loaded typewriter. A few thick stacks of paper piled next to it. I darted for the pages, and Meredith jumped out of my way.
