I ran out to the shop and got the crowbar. I stuck the metal bar where molding and wall met, then pushed. The molding moved with a loud squeal, the nails protesting as they were pulled out of the wood. I was careful not to splinter it. I pushed a couple more times and finally pulled the entire piece free.
I took it out to the shop, putting it somewhere safe, out of reach of my temper. I ran my finger along her name one more time. Something like hope kindled in the space behind my ribs. It was a strange feeling, like breathing again on my own after being on life support.
Luke was walking up the stairs as I came out of my room.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” I stopped. He looked uncomfortable, which meant he wanted to talk.
“Look,” Luke said finally, “do you think you could tell Mom I’m sorry? I guess I got a little out of hand.”
“Tell her yourself.” I was tired of being the only one trying to piece everything together.
He glowered at me. “She still won’t talk to me.” He ran his fingers through his hair, a sign of his frustration that made him look just like Dad.
“Do you blame her?” I asked. He
had
demolished the kitchen.
His head drooped, like it was simply too heavy for him to hold up anymore, and he clenched his fists. “I don’t know how to fix it.” His voice was rough and low, and I was pretty sure we weren’t still talking about the kitchen.
“I don’t think you can,” I said.
He raised his head and gave me a quizzical smile. “Wait.” He disappeared into his room. I heard him banging around, but I didn’t go in. Luke was very particular about his room—he didn’t let anyone in. He reemerged after a minute or so, holding a blue birdhouse. The paint was chipping off at the corners.
“Do you remember this?” he asked.
Vaguely. “You built that, didn’t you?” It was hazy, like seeing trees through thick fog. I could make out an outline, but not many details.
“In Mr. Shot’s woodshop. Remember?” He was grinning at me.
“I was failing woodshop,” I said, the edges becoming clearer, “and Dad was mad. He wanted to know what boy failed woodshop.” I remembered his anger, which was more shame than anything. He couldn’t imagine that I wouldn’t be good at something as simple as using tools. “You pretended to be me every day that week, until you’d finished the birdhouse. I got an A. But what was I doing that week you were me?” I asked. That part of the memory was in shadows.
“You were me, of course. You brought my C in math up to a B. And had to do one of my detentions.” His laugh burst out of him, like he had been trying to keep it in and failed miserably.
“So what happened?” I asked. His smile disappeared; he knew what I was referring to. When did we go from spending every waking moment together to hardly being able to be in the same room? Sometimes I almost had it. But it was like trying to hold on to a dream right after I’d woken up. I could feel the tone and mood, but I couldn’t remember the details. And then the feeling was gone, and I couldn’t even be sure I’d remembered that right.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, and the strain in his voice convinced me he was telling the truth.
I didn’t remember the math class. I remembered the birdhouse, but I didn’t remember pretending to be Luke. I could remember playing in our tree house, but I couldn’t remember when we’d been dismantled. The holes in my brain were infuriating, and there didn’t seem to be any logic to the gaps. I’d been to four sessions with Dr. Benson in the three weeks since we’d been here, but things weren’t any clearer. Not that I’d expected them to be. This was something I had to do on my own. “
What
can’t I remember?” That was probably the most important question.
His eyes were sad. “I don’t know, Ian. I really don’t.”
I was pretty sure he was lying. I just didn’t know why.
It was the third week of June already. Work kept me busy, while Becca’s emails kept me deflated. She’d been in Europe almost a month, her days brimming over with famous places and picturesque kisses. My summer was a waiting room. I was stuck between when and then, and I wondered if it was ever going to be my time. I prepared for college and races, and I dreamed of a day when I could live by my own words instead of someone else’s. But when was I supposed to stop preparing and start experiencing? How was I supposed to know when I’d reached that point?
The fact that my senior year loomed on the threshold made me a little afraid. And exhilarated. But mostly afraid.
Because that meant I had less than a year to polish my ACT score and shine up my GPA so that I wouldn’t be stuck at Middleton Community College. And money—I needed way more of that than I had now.
Mom refused to talk about what happened. I’d tried the next morning when I drove her to her car. But the silence had filled the Bronco like a balloon, our exhales expanding it until it pushed me against the steering wheel. She’d informed me, her perfectly plucked eyebrow raised, that she was allowed to have a bad day. I just wished she’d quit stringing those bad days together.
On Tuesday afternoon, I was in the back of the shop sorting through several boxes of clothes that had been dropped off that morning. All of the clothes were at least twenty years old, which, according to Mops, meant they were back in style, but I was pretty doubtful as I pulled out pants that seemed to be made out of plastic shopping bags.
The bell over the door jingled, and Mops spoke. The answering voice was high-pitched enough to break glass, a nasal voice with a hint of a whine. Sandy Smith. I dropped the clothes I was holding and stood up, feeling like I’d just flown by a police car at a hundred miles an hour. Busted. Four days. It took four days for Mops to find out what I’d been trying to keep quiet for seven months.
“Looking for anything in particular?” Mops asked. I eased out of the back room and hid behind a shelf of cracked kitchen gadgets.
“Not really,” Sandy said.
But I knew she was lying. She was looking for dirt, the kind that I’d been sweeping under the rug.
Mops went back to the counter, and Sandy shuffled over to look at some dishes. She was like a lioness slowly stalking her prey, waiting until just the right time to bound out of hiding. I measured time by the beats of my heart—after forty-seven thuds, Sandy Smith pounced.
“How’s Vivian?” she asked, her voice turning into a whine at the end of her question.
“Fine.” Mops looked up from her ledger, suspicious.
Sandy clucked her tongue. “I’ve been so worried about her,” she said. “Tommy told me what happened at Pete’s. She’s taking her dad’s death hard, isn’t she?”
Mops flinched. “It’s not easy losing someone.” I could tell she wasn’t sure where this conversation was going.
“But to be that drunk, and in front of Jenna.” Sandy shook her head. “You must be so worried, considering…” Her voice trailed off, leaving Mops to finish the sentence. As if any of us needed reminding that being drunk was an inherited trait in the Oliver family. Sandy wrinkled her nose like she smelled something rotten. “How bad is it?”
Understanding crossed Mops’s face, and she straightened up, shoulders rigid. “She’s perfectly fine, thank you.” Mops’s smile was forced and looked more like a snarl than an actual smile; her voice was sugarcoated glass. “But I’ll pass along your concern. And while we’re at it, please remind Tommy that AA meetings are at the Methodist church every Thursday night. From what I hear, he’s been drunk at Pete’s more than once.”
Sandy’s eyes flew wide and indignation colored her cheeks. Her mouth twitched, like it was desperate to fire back and couldn’t quite figure out how. Sandy spun around and headed for the door, her back so straight it looked like her spine was fused together.
“Now be sure to tell everyone down at the beauty shop I said hello,” Mops added. The only answer she got was the angry jingle of the bell and the silence of a closing door.
Mops sighed and flipped the ledger shut. “Come on out,” she said. I stepped from my hiding place.
“That one was always jealous of your mother,” said Mops. “She had the biggest crush on Jake, and she made your mom’s life miserable after she got pregnant.” Mops slid the ledger into the drawer under the cash register, then grabbed a couple of shopping bags and carried them over to the reading area. “Sandy acted like Vivian was the first girl around here who’d ever gotten pregnant in high school. She flounced around like a saint, all wide-eyed and innocent, but the way I heard it, she was doing half the football team.” Mops dumped the bags out on the rug and started sorting through the clothes, categorizing in a way only she could. “I was so mad when your mom announced she was pregnant, and I sure don’t condone what she did. But she got caught doing what most of the other girls were doing. And they trashed her anyway. At least she loved Jake. Not that it mattered to him. He’d already gotten what he wanted.”
I stood there like a deer in headlights. Mops and I had never had this conversation; I wasn’t so sure I wanted to now.
“I’m very proud of your mom,” Mops continued, “the way she held her head up despite the abuse. That sorry excuse of a boyfriend slunk out of town with his tail between his legs. Coward. But your mom didn’t run.”
I’d never looked at it that way before. I’d never seen Mom as brave—I always thought she’d been too scared to leave. I still wasn’t so sure that hadn’t been the case. But the way Mops put it, I could see where it would take a lot of guts for Mom to stay put and face her critics every day.
“Have you told her that?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I already knew the answer. Open communication was not a hobby those two shared.
She shook her head. “I tried. Probably not hard enough. Your mom thinks she has me all figured out, and I don’t reckon she’s about to change her mind anytime soon.”
Mom and Mops were a lot more alike than either would admit. Mules, both of them.
“So, your mom is drinking.” It wasn’t a question. “Why the hell haven’t you said anything?”
Because I was trying to protect everyone. Myself. Mom. Mops. I was trying to plug the leaks in the boat before it went down, only every time I thought I had one leak taken care of, two more appeared. But I was starting to believe that some things couldn’t be fixed. The past was never really past, and every choice, mistake or not, had consequences.
Mops sighed when I didn’t answer. “Did your mother ever tell you why I stopped drinking?”
“No.” I knew what had caused Mops and Pops to start. Mom’s little brother died of diabetes when he was just five. They hadn’t known he had it, and one day, he just slipped into a coma and never woke up. But I’d never asked why Mops stopped—or why Pops couldn’t.
I grabbed a box that hadn’t been unpacked yet and joined Mops. This seemed like the kind of conversation that needed busy hands. I sat next to Mops on the carpet, just like I had almost every day of my childhood. But I figured this story wasn’t going to be anything like the fairy tales she used to tell me.
“I was a bad drunk,” Mops said matter-of-factly. “I got angry. I yelled and threw things and hit Pops.”
That didn’t sound like the Mops I knew. My Mops was patient and kind, always cooking for other people or visiting them in the hospital. I didn’t know the woman she was talking about.
“Pops was a melancholy drunk. He would get sad and just sit and stare out into space. Or cry. Sometimes I hated him for that.”
He sounded like Mom. I hadn’t known that Pops either, not really, because they’d always tried to keep me away from him when he was drunk.
“I was angry at the world. I started drinking to numb the pain of losing Billy, but it didn’t work. It just made everything worse, and by the time I realized it, it was too late. I couldn’t stop. So I would get drunk and blame everyone else for my problems. I blamed God for taking Billy. He could have taken anyone. He could have taken me, even. But Billy didn’t deserve to die.”
I wondered why people always said that. No one really
deserved
to die—it just happened. Besides, death was only a punishment for those of us left behind.
Mops didn’t look at me as she continued, just kept picking through the clothes and putting them in piles. “One night, when your mother was sixteen or so, I got really drunk and decided I wanted to go out to the cemetery and see Billy. Pops was asleep on the couch, and your mother was out. She didn’t spend a lot of time at home. Not that I blamed her.” Mops stopped for a minute and stared at a pair of jeans that were so ripped up they seemed to be pleading to be put out of their misery. She didn’t seem to know what to do with them. I took them from her and tossed them in my trash pile. Mops was never willing to give up on things.
She sighed. “Anyway, I have no idea how it happened. One minute I was driving along fine, and the next minute my car was sitting in a house over on Azalea Street. There were bricks and dust all over my car. I’d hit my head pretty hard, and there was blood pouring down my face, but other than that, I was okay. I climbed out of the car, really shaky, and there, pinned in the headlights, was a crib.”
The lines on Mops’s forehead looked deeper than usual, her freckles darker on her pale face. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap, like she was trying to hold herself together. I listened to her voice, ripples through the air, as it strung letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into story. But the meaning flowed straight through me, swift and cold, leaving me numb. Because this story couldn’t have been about Mops. I was afraid to hear more; I was too afraid not to.
“The crib was mangled and crushed, bent around the hood of my car and pushed against the opposite wall. I sobered up fast. I thought I was going to throw up, and I remember begging God that I hadn’t killed that baby. I don’t know how I managed to get over to that crib. I was numb from the waist down, and shaking so badly it was a wonder I could walk at all.” Her hands were unsteady as she tried several times to fold a sweater. She finally gave up, squeezing it into a ball instead.
“I thought my heart would stop as I reached out to look under a tumbled pile of blankets. But there was a teddy bear in the crib. No baby.”