The whole drive back to the bungalow, I’m fighting tears, trying to make some kind of plan and coming up against all the same walls every time.
I can’t tell Hayden the truth.
I can’t lie to him.
My phone is full of messages from my friends, checking how the pitch went, asking for updates. I silence it and drive to the beach. Don’t even get out of my car, just sit there with the front bumper pressed up against a dune, sobbing.
I’m not even totally sure why I’m so emotional.
I’m sad about losing the job, sure.
I’m heartbroken for Margaret. For the decision she made, and the love behind it, and how all that love congealed into a hard shell around her, keeping everyone out.
And I’m devastated for Hayden. For me.
When I’m all cried out, I drive home. I leave my laptop bag in the car and go inside, immediately start packing my stuff, ignoring the crying jags that start and stop at random.
I can figure out flights later. I just know I’m not staying here.
Around two o’clock there’s a knock on the door. I go to open it, and the pain I feel at finding Hayden on my doorstep, another bottle of champagne in hand, is physical, a perforated edge down the middle of my heart. “I know we said you’d buy the champagne tonight,” he begins.
“I’m not taking the job,” I choke out before he can go any further.
His mouth drops open. “What?”
I swallow the jagged tangle in my throat. “I’m not taking it.”
“I don’t understand,” he says.
“You should,” I say. “You passed on it too.”
Slowly, his face slackens. “Wait, are you mad about that?”
“You’re the one who wanted me to ‘know I earned it,’ ” I say, paraphrasing him, like it matters at all. Like any of this matters. I’m not angry with him, but I’m angry, and it’s seeping into everything else, poisoning it. “And then you just withdraw yourself at the last minute. So which is it, do I deserve it, or did you think I didn’t have a chance?”
He gapes at me. “Fuck, Alice. Of course I thought you had a chance. I also thought you’d do a better job than I would, and—and I didn’t want this dumb shit to come between us.”
“You didn’t trust me not to resent you,” I clarify.
His mouth jams shut. “I didn’t want to put you in the position where you had to even consider it. And I didn’t want the job that badly.”
“And now I don’t want it either,” I say, tears burning in the back of my nose. Not now, not at the cost of the truth. Not at the cost of him. “Is that so hard to understand?”
“Yes,” he says, vehement. “This is your dream job.”
“Exactly! It was just a dream,” I force out. “The reality isn’t what I thought.”
“You’re lying to me, Alice.” His voice strains with hurt. “What’s going on?”
I shake my head, backing away from him as he moves closer, guarding that distance between us like it can do anything to protect my breaking heart. “I can’t,” I grind out.
“Alice, what is this?” he pleads. “Tell me. Tell me what’s going on. If I did something to hurt you, then tell me how to fix it, and I’ll do it, okay? Anything.”
I jerk back from him as he reaches for me, trembling from the effort of not breaking into sobs. “I can’t,” I say more harshly. “Ask Margaret.”
“I don’t want to ask Margaret,” he fires back. “Margaret’s not important. You are.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and then again, like I’m a skipping record, “I’m sorry. I can’t give you any more than that. I can’t—I can’t make this make sense for you.”
Not just because of the NDA, but because of Margaret. Because, no matter how furious I am with her, this is her story to tell. That’s what I promised her before I knew the truth, and it’s still what I believe.
“All you have to do is be honest,” he says helplessly. “Just talk to me.”
“Please don’t ask me again,” I whimper. “I don’t have anything to say.”
He stares at me, his disbelief curdling into a frustrated resignation. “So that’s it?”
I want to tell him to stay. To beg him to.
But I already know it won’t work. That he won’t be able to let this go. That even if he could, for a night or two, this secret would eat away at this thing between us. Margaret will go back into hiding, and then, someday, she’ll be gone, and if I did finally tell him myself then, how could he forgive me for lying to him for so long?
“Please go,” I whisper.
He stares at me for a long beat, his dark eyes glazing with tears. “Goodbye, Alice,” he finally chokes out, then turns and walks back down the path, away from me, while I try not to break.
Try not to call after him.
Try not to tell him now, in the worst possible moment, when all I can do is wound, that I love him like I’ve never loved anyone.
When he’s gone, I shut the door and slump onto the floor, letting a fresh torrent of tears overtake me. I’m not sure how long it goes on—minutes or hours—but when I catch my breath and my hiccups settle, I pull my phone out and text my mom.
Would it be okay if I came home for a while? I’m not doing well right now.
The dots appear to indicate she’s typing back. She says what she always says.
Sure.
Under the hideous neon-green quilt in my childhood bedroom, I half-heartedly search for other jobs. Aging celebrities who might want to tell their stories, dating trends that could become articles for The Scratch, and restaurants back in Los Angeles that might need servers. Because if I’m being honest, right now the last thing I want to do is my current job.
I told my friends the bare-bones details—that I’m not moving forward with Margaret, that I’m spending a few days with my mom—but since then, I’ve been more or less ignoring their texts.
I think about calling Hayden, but what else can I say? I could assure him that I want to be with him, beg him to let this one secret sit, but if he ever found out, could he forgive me for knowing something this huge and keeping it from him?
Could he even take being in a relationship with someone he knows, in essence, is lying to him, every single day, the same way that Margaret was?
I play mental games with myself: If he calls me right now, I’ll tell him everything.
I debate whether Margaret would ever forgive me, like it’s a game of he loves me, he loves me not, and if I just happen to pluck a flower petal at the right moment, all my problems could go away.
After three days of moping, Mom walks into my room, flips on the lights, and grunts, “If you’re going to be here, you might as well work.”
I don’t have a good argument for that.
I get dressed and meet her in the garden. I kneel beside her in the dirt, and without looking at me, she takes Dad’s hat off her head and holds it out to me, one hand still digging with a spade.
My heart pings at the gesture, at the familiarity of it, the quiet care. I put it on and get to work.
For the next two days, we plant.
Irish potatoes and squash, more cucumbers, and snap beans. We prepare the soil for the upcoming cool season planting, clearing out the empty beds, turning the dirt with fertilizer. We take the broccoli seeds she started inside last month and plant them, along with collards and onions.
I feed the chickens, and I collect their eggs. I pick the ripe fruit from the stand of trees, and I manage the compost toilet.
I take short, scalding hot showers, and I help cook every meal.
My limbs ache, but my mind, finally, goes quiet.
On my fifth night there, we sit down to eat in near silence, the same way we’ve eaten every meal since I got here.
Across from me, at the far end of the old wooden table, Mom picks up her fork, then sets it down again. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, kid?”
“Do you want me to?” I ask, surprised.
She sits back in her chair, mismatched from mine, all of them found in trash heaps on curbs or at thrift stores and lovingly restored by her and Dad. “What the hell kind of a question is that?” she demands.
“Sorry,” I say quickly, searching for a way to backtrack.
“Dear god, Alice,” she says. “I know I’m not winning Mother of the Year anytime soon, but do you really think I’m that awful? That I’d see my kid in pain and not care?”
“That’s not it at all,” I say.
“If something happened,” she replies, “you can tell me. If you lost your job, just say it.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” I murmur, looking down at my full plate. “But no, I didn’t lose my job.”
“Sorry to disappoint me?” she says, aghast. “You think I want you to get fired?”
This just keeps getting worse and worse. I want to rush to smack a Band-Aid on it, to take back or explain away that little comment.
But the truth is, now that my mind is clear enough to think, the memory of what Margaret said keeps surfacing: What good does it do anyone? He doesn’t like me…I can’t change who I am, and I’m not going to change him either.
I push back from my plate and, with a shuddering breath, force the words past the thickness in my throat. “You’ve never respected my job. You don’t respect me for doing it. You think it’s stupid and shallow and a waste of time, and I’m sorry—I’m sorry I’m not like Audrey. I’m sorry I’m not saving the world, and I’m not living a perfectly carbon-neutral life, and I spend money on—on unnecessary things like manicures and candles and romance novels. But this is who I am, and even if you don’t understand it, couldn’t you just pretend for a few days a year that you respect me? That you like me? Because I can’t figure out how to be anyone else, and it’s lonely, it’s so fucking lonely being the person who doesn’t belong in this family.”
She stares at me, agog, blank faced.
My chest heaves as I try to even out my breathing. My eyes, I realize, are glossed with tears, and I’m gripping my fork like a lifeline.
One second ticks by. Another. I wonder if she’ll just pick up her fork and go back to eating, pretend this never happened.
I wonder if she’ll scream. If she’ll let me have it the way I just did to her.
Finally, she cracks: “Oh, honey.”
Her chair scrapes back from the table and she comes around toward me, crouching to wrap me in her arms. The simple contact, the tight hug with no casual backslapping, no rush to pull away, makes me start to cry in earnest. “You belong,” she murmurs, kissing the top of my head. “Never doubt that.”
“I don’t,” I argue, my voice wrenching upward.
My mom grips my shoulders in her hands, kneeling beside me. “Alice,” she says calmly. “I respect you. I love you. I like you. But I don’t understand you.”
I blink away the tears, and her elfin features come back into focus. “Your dad…” She shakes her head and tries again. “When you were a tiny little girl, you were always glued to my side. All day, every day. Audrey was more independent, but you were my shadow.”
I sniff, wipe my eyes. “I was?”
She nods. “And as you grew up, grew into yourself…I don’t know how to explain this in a way that won’t make me seem like an asshole, so I’ll just say it. The first few years as a mom, it felt like you and your sister were pieces of my heart walking around outside my body. You were your own people, but you were also mine. It feels like a miracle, because it is. You had your father’s DNA and you had mine, and somehow that made a whole new person who was both of us and neither.
“And then you started growing up, and you found new things to like. Things I’d never even really considered. Pieces of yourself that were all you. And you didn’t need me anymore. It was amazing—it’s what’s supposed to happen. But it was terrifying too. To let you grow past me. Suddenly there were all these locked doors that used to be wide-open hallways.”
“Mom, I didn’t need you because I didn’t let myself. Because Audrey was sick, and I thought that’s what everyone wanted from me. For me to just…be okay. Happy. And I was. I figured it out.”
“I know,” she says. “And that breaks my heart. Because I wish I could’ve been there more. Not just when Audrey was sick, but since then too. Your dad would’ve…”
She chokes up again, but she forces herself onward. “Your dad understood you.” Her voice squeaks, and her shoulders lift in a slight shrug. “He understood the things you love. He understood your sense of humor. He had access to pieces of you I couldn’t get to, and I was okay with that, mostly. But when he died—god, Alice, I haven’t been able to figure out how to be what you need. He always knew the right thing to say to you. He always knew how to cheer you up, or how to talk you down.
“And I want to be a good parent to you, but I can’t be him.”
“I don’t need you to be him,” I promise tearily.
“You deserve to have him,” she says. “You don’t know how many times I’ve wished it had been me instead.”
“Mom.” My heart cracks, shatters. I wrap my arms around her again. “Don’t say that.”
Her voice shivers out of her, wispy and ragged: “I miss him so much.”
I shut my eyes, the tears still managing to pour through my lashes. “Me too,” I squeak. “I should have asked him more. I should have written it all down. I should’ve recorded every stupid joke and every piece of advice. I should have taken videos of him singing in the kitchen while you cooked. I should have tried to know all of him while I had the time. Before it was too late.”
My mom’s embrace loosens and she sits back on her heels, swiping her own tears away. “Baby girl,” she says. “It’s not too late. What do you want to know?”
We prop my phone up on the table with a stack of old books, set to video. I place my recorder next to it, both angled toward where Mom sits with a stack of old photo albums. I hit record on each, then go join her at the table.
“Where should we start?” she asks me.
“The beginning,” I say.
She opens album after album until she finds the book she’s looking for. “Our commune days,” she says, smiling affectionately at the first Polaroid of them, out in the sun, each in overalls, both skinnier and younger. He has his arm slung around her. He’s wearing a different though not dissimilar wide-brimmed hat.
“You said he was ridiculous?” I ask her, and her smile widens.
“The most ridiculous,” she says.
“Tell me everything,” I say.
“Only if you’ll do the same,” she says.
I hold out my hand. We shake on it.
Then we take turns sharing our stories.
The next morning, I sit down at the desk in Audrey’s room and start to write a letter.
After speaking with Mom, I know what I need to say. I can’t control how it will be received, but I have to try.
I’ve just finished when I hear the pounding at the front door, followed by Mom’s footsteps, and then a few overlapping voices.
The back of my neck tingles as I stand and make my way through the small house toward the laughter and conversation. In the entryway, I stop short at the sight of them, kicking off their shoes.
“Alice!” Priya squeals and bounds toward me, wrapping me in a hug.
“What are you doing here?” I say, flabbergasted, as Priya releases me.
“Your mom invited us,” Cillian says, hugging me next.
I look over his shoulder toward my mom. “Did you go through my phone?” I say, more confused than upset.
“Of course not,” Mom replies, seemingly a bit offended by the accusation.
“We exchanged numbers last time I was here,” Bianca says, sidling up to hug me next. I hold on for a long moment, so grateful for these people who show up for me even when I don’t ask them to.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I get out.
“Really?” Priya says. “Then why, pray tell, haven’t you been texting us back?”
“It’s a long story,” I say.
“Would anyone like some tea or coffee?” Mom asks.
“I, for one, would love some, Angie,” Cillian says, following my mom down the hallway, gawking at everything he passes and quickly throwing a look over his shoulder at me as he says, “It’s so nice to finally be invited here.”
“He’s never going to let it go, that he was the last one to visit here, is he?” I say.
“If you die first,” Bianca says, threading an arm through mine and turning me to follow him, “he’ll mention it in his eulogy.”
