Heart Like Mine (29 page)

“It’s Ava,” I said. “I’m . . . I’m your granddaughter.” I waited a moment and when she didn’t respond, I continued. “I’m just calling to see . . . to see if you can help me.” That seemed like the easiest way to put it. Other questions screamed in my mind:
Why didn’t you ever come see us? Why didn’t you even care when Mama died? What kind of a mother
are
you?

“Help you how?” Her voice was still shaky, so I tried to keep mine steady.

“Well,” I began, “I have a photo album. One of Mama’s from when she was a little girl.”

“I don’t know how I can help you with that,” she said, interrupting me.

“The pictures stop when she turned fourteen,” I said quickly, afraid she might just hang up the phone. “I just want to know why. Do you have some you could send me? And maybe her yearbooks, too? From when she was a cheerleader in high school.”

“She was never a cheerleader,” she said. Her words were suddenly sharp. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t have any pictures to send you.”

What? Mama
lied
to me? Why would she
do
that?
My bottom lip trembled. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to be strong. Just long enough for her mother to tell me what I needed to know. I tensed the muscles in my face and tried again. “There’s something else,” I said. “A letter from a doctor. I think she was looking for the one who took care of her when she was fourteen.” I paused and took in a small breath. “Was she sick?”

“No.” She whispered the word.

“Then why would she be looking for her doctor? Why wouldn’t she just ask you?”

“She did ask me. I don’t remember his name.”

“Okay . . .” I tried again. “Are you sure you can’t just send me her yearbooks, anyway? I really want to know more about her.”

“She didn’t have any except her freshman year. She went away for a while that spring, to an all-girls school so she could focus on her studies.” She cleared her throat. “When she came home, she decided she wanted to go to the community college for her GED.”

An all-girls school?
I wondered if she was remembering that wrong. I took a deep breath. “Where was it? Can you at least tell me that?”

She sighed and waited several breaths before answering. “It was called New Pathways.” She coughed, a loud, startling sound.
“I have to go now. My husband is calling me.”
Her husband. Not “your grandfather.”

“Wait,” I said, my voice flooding with tears. I gripped the phone tighter. “Please. I don’t understand why this is so
hard
. Why you won’t just
talk
to me. I miss Mama so much. Don’t you miss her, too?” My chin trembled as I waited for her to respond. She was Mama’s
mother
—how could she not care about what happened to her?

“Of course I do,” she said softly. “Of course. But it’s in the past, and some things are better left forgotten. You’ll understand that when you’re older.”

“But—” I began, only to have her cut me off again.

“I’d change it all if I could,” she said. She sounded like she was about to cry. “But your mother made her choices and we made ours. It’s too late now.”

“It’s
not
too late!” I said, pleading. “You can help me.
Please
.”

“No,” she said, “I can’t.” And then she hung up the phone.

“Damn it!” I said, throwing my cell to the other end of my bed. I tried to process the short conversation.
She was never a cheerleader. She never wore a blue and yellow uniform or was captain of the squad.
She told me that story again and again, and every time, it was a lie. What else had she lied to me about?

I suddenly felt shakier than ever, more lost than I ever had before. I didn’t know what to believe about Mama. I wondered if her mother wasn’t remembering right. If she had lied to me just to get me off the phone or if what Dad said about her being confused was true.

My head swam with questions. The more I thought about what had just happened, the more angry I became. It wasn’t
fair
that Daddy left us. It wasn’t
fair
that I had to take care of Mama for so long; it wasn’t
fair
that she might have lied to me, that
everything I ever believed about her might have been wrong. It wasn’t
fair
that she died and I was left with Grace, who might have been nice enough, but she was not—nor would she ever be—my mother. Hot tears seared my eyes and I took a couple of shuddering breaths so no one would hear me. I was tired of crying, tired of feeling so sad. I just wanted everything to go back to the way it used to be.

A few minutes later, I had calmed down just enough to reach for my phone again, planning to call Bree back and tell her everything my grandmother had said, when there was a huge crash in Max’s room. This was immediately followed by the siren sound of his screaming his head off. Grateful to finally be distracted from my own dark thoughts, I leapt off the bed and ran down the hall, anxious to see what my brother had done.

After we got back from Sam’s house, I waited in the living room for Victor to come home. The kids were in their bedrooms—Max was playing with the Wii system Victor had brought from Kelli’s house and Ava was talking on the phone, to Bree, I assumed. I sat in the relative quiet, flipping the pages of the book I’d picked up on how children process their grief. It talked about how some would shut down completely, coping only by pretending that nothing had changed. They might go about their daily lives as they always had—going to school, spending time with their friends, trying to have fun. They wouldn’t want to talk about their parent’s death; they wouldn’t cry or get angry with the surviving parent. At least Max and Ava weren’t shutting me out. I felt buoyed by the moment Ava and I had shared in the bathroom earlier. Hopefully, she’d remember that I tried to comfort her. Maybe after some time, we’d find a way to be friends.

I really
wasn’t
trying to replace Kelli, but I was happy I could be there for Ava. I wondered if Kelli really would have chosen to end her life, knowing she would miss such important milestones with her daughter. If she would have believed her circumstances were so dark that the only solution to them was death.

I thought about the letter from the doctor I’d kept in my purse, after finding it at her house with Ava. I still hadn’t told Victor we’d
gone to get the recipe there—with his work hours and having the kids around us, the timing just hadn’t been right. I felt a little guilty, and afraid, now, too, I supposed, that he’d be even more angry that I’d waited to tell him. We’d never kept secrets from each other before—at least, not as far as I knew. There were things he didn’t know, but they were little things, like how much I spent to get my hair colored and cut each month, or about the entire bag of chocolate I finished off each week, the one I kept hidden in my desk at work. But he still hadn’t talked with me about the weird fact that Kelli’s freshman yearbook was absent any signatures. He hadn’t “looked into it” like he said he would. Not that it was a huge deal, but if it might help explain whether or not Kelli purposely ended her own life—if there was something so devastating in her past that might have led her to that leaping-off place—I didn’t see why he wouldn’t be anxious to find out for sure. Maybe I could do a little digging, but I wondered if Victor’s avoidance of it meant that he knew more about Kelli’s past than he wanted to admit. I wondered if he was keeping secrets from me, too.

My curiosity overwhelmed me and I got up, walked over to my purse, and pulled out the letter.
Dr. Brian Stiles.
It was a handwritten note on a blank sheet of paper. I found it a little strange that he hadn’t typed it on letterhead, but the script was slanted and slightly shaky; maybe he was retired. I could Google him, I decided, find out what kind of doctor he was. Maybe that would tell me why Kelli had contacted him.

A moment later, I was at the dining room table, drumming my fingers on the top of my thighs, waiting for my laptop to fire up.
Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this without telling Victor first.
But I knew if I did tell him, he’d brush me off. I couldn’t help but feel if I figured out what happened to Kelli as a teenager, it might give us some clue about how she died.

Straightening in my seat, I opened up the browser and typed in the doctor’s name and address. His website was at the top of the results list and showed his credentials as an ob-gyn.
Oh my god. Maybe
that’s
why her parents disowned her, why her yearbook is blank, and why the pictures in her albums stop when she was fourteen. Maybe she got pregnant.

I sat back against my chair and released a heavy sigh. If she had a baby, what had happened to it? Did she give it up for adoption? And if that were true, why wouldn’t she have told Victor about it? Had her parents made her so ashamed that she held on to that secret for all those years? I did a quick calculation in my head, figuring that if Kelli had the baby when she was fifteen, and Kelli was thirty-three when she died, the child would be eighteen now. I wondered if Kelli had contacted this doctor, trying to find her baby. Maybe she
did
find her child and he or she didn’t want anything to do with Kelli, and
that’s
what led her to take too many pills. If, in fact, that was what she’d done. Maybe she was devastated by an entirely different sense of loss.

My spinning thoughts were interrupted by a sudden, huge crash down the hall, followed by the sound of Max’s bloodcurdling screams. Forgetting about Kelli entirely, I raced to his bedroom, passing Ava on the way, and threw open his door to find him jumping up and down on the Wii remote. The white box that had been next to the small television on his desk was on the floor, too, cracked wide open, wires and circuit board exposed.

“Damn it!” Max screamed. Spittle flew from his lips with the words. His brown hair stood out in uneven tufts across his head, and he stared at me with wide, angry blue eyes, breathing hard. “Crap!”

“Stop it, Max!” I said loudly, rushing over to pull him off the remote. “What happened?”

He tried to yank away from my grasp, but I held tight. “It’s a stupid game. I
hate
it!” He began crying, his small shoulders quaking. Fat tears rolled down his flushed cheeks and he pulled away from me. This time I let him go, following him over to his bed, where he threw himself face-first into his pillow and pounded the mattress with his fists.

I sat on the edge of the bed and put my palm flat on his back. Not rubbing, not trying to comfort. Just letting him know I was there, the way I used to with Sam. “Why is the game stupid?” I asked quietly. Adrenaline shot through my veins and I tried to take a few unobtrusive deep breaths.

“Because it
is
,” was his mumbled reply.

Ava appeared in the doorway and leaned against the doorjamb with her arms crossed. She still wore her mother’s red sweater but had changed out of the black skirt she’d worn to Sam’s house and into her plaid flannel pajama bottoms. “He’s mad because he sucks,” she said simply. “He always gets mad when he doesn’t win.”

Max rolled over, glanced wildly around his bed, then grabbed his hardback copy of
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
from his nightstand and chucked it across the room, missing his sister only by a couple of feet. “I do not!” he screamed. “Why don’t you just shut
up
?”

I grabbed his arm again. “Max! That was totally unacceptable. Do you understand me? You could have really hurt your sister.” Then I turned my gaze to Ava. “And you. Don’t say your brother sucks.”

“Whatever,” Ava said, and rolled her eyes, which looked a little swollen. Had she been crying? She looked more angry than sad—as if she’d walked into her brother’s room already primed for a fight.
What the hell?
Just a few moments before, I’d been thinking how our relationship might be turning a corner, and now
this? I knew adolescents could be unpredictable—I remember throwing a few nightmare hissy fits when I was thirteen, too—but this seemed extreme.

“I don’t
care
if I hurt her!” Max shrieked, his face burning scarlet, the tears still falling.

“You’re such a little shit!” Ava yelled.

“Max! Ava!” I said, letting go of Max and standing up in the middle of the room. “Both of you knock it off
right now
! Do you hear me?” I was yelling, too, and breathing hard.

Ava looked at me, now the lift of her chin and defiance in her narrowed eyes making her seem much older than she was. I remember giving that same look to my father when he’d try to tell me what I should do.
Screw you
, it said.

“You’re not my mom,” she said. Her voice was low and full of spite. “I don’t have to do anything you say.”

“I’m the adult here, young lady, and you will do
exactly
what I say.” Even though I felt unsure, I lowered my tone to match hers, the same strategy I used to employ as an HR executive when mouthy employees tried to steamroll over me. I refused to allow this little girl to believe she intimidated me in any way.

At this point, I heard the front door open and shut. “Hey, guys,” Victor called out. “I’m home!” He appeared behind Ava a moment later, and she whipped around to bury her face against him. Her shoulders shook, and I couldn’t help but think she was faking her tears to look like a victim. Max pushed past me and threw his arms around his father’s waist, too. Victor gave me a confused, imploring look, his hands rubbing his children’s backs. “Hey now,” he said. “What’s all of this? What happened?”

“Max threw a tantrum and trashed the Wii,” I said tiredly, gesturing to the mess of cracked plastic and wiring on the floor. “Then he and Ava started fighting and he threw a book at her.”

“Grace
yelled
at us, Dad,” Ava said. Her tone had shifted from spiteful to sorrowful. “Max and I were trying to work it out.”

“That’s not what happened, Ava, and you know it,” I said. “Victor? Can we go talk about this in the other room?”