When we got home from Thanksgiving dinner, I went straight to my room. I couldn’t believe I got my period and Mama wasn’t there to help me—it made me feel like I’d lost her all over again.
But Grace was there. She was actually really nice to me, which just made me feel more confused. When she talked with me in the bathroom that night, I felt protected and safe. Understood. Grace calmed me down, she made me laugh, and thinking about her now, I could feel Mama’s disapproval hanging in the air around me, thick enough to make it hard to breathe.
After I’d shut the door and flipped on the light in my bedroom, I walked directly over to the boxes of Mama’s things. If she couldn’t be here today, maybe at least I could feel close to her by touching the books she’d held in her hands, smelling the clothes that she sprayed with her perfume. With a deep intake of breath, I yanked the cardboard top open and looked inside. Books were stacked together tightly; I picked one of them up, flipping through the pages before setting it aside and picking up another. I didn’t know what I thought I’d find. It would have been easy if she kept a journal, spilling out all of her secrets onto the page, but I was pretty sure if she had, Dad wouldn’t have given it to me. I should have looked for one the day Bree and I were at her house. And soon, he’d hire movers to pack up the rest of the house. Everything would be gone—every trace of my mother erased. I opened the second box, pulled out a wad of Mama’s clothes, and pressed them to my face. I breathed the scent of her in and a few tears squeezed out of the corners of my eyes.
I reached back into the box to see what else my dad had packed. I pulled out another book, this one called Healing After Loss. I vaguely remembered her reading this as she lay in bed, underlining passages and making notes in the margins. I fanned through the pages slowly, looking at the sentences she’d marked up: You can let go of the pain, one of them read. You can choose to stop hurting, to release it like a tree releases a leaf from a branch. Reading this, I snorted, rolled my eyes, and picked up my cell phone to call Bree.
“Guess what?” I said. “I got my period.” We’d both been wondering which one of us it would happen to first and each promised to let the other know the minute it happened.
“Wow, really?” She waited a beat. “Is it . . . weird?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But not too bad.” She didn’t ask anything more about it, probably sensing I didn’t really want to get into the details. Bree was good like that. “What’re you up to?” I asked, and she sighed.
“Hiding in the bathroom. My dad’s in the kitchen with the Blond Hose Beast,” she said, referring to her father’s gum-cracking girlfriend. “She’s feeding him whipped cream off her fingers.” She made a gagging sound. “How about you?”
“Just looking through some of my mom’s things. You won’t believe the crap she was reading.” I told her about the stupid leaf sentence.
“What did she lose, do you think?” Bree asked. “Your dad?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I flipped through a few more pages, seeing her notes of Yes! This is me! in the margins next to certain passages. “None of this makes any sense.” I threw the book down on my bed, and my eyes caught the corner of a piece of paper sticking out of the pages in the back. “Hold on a second,” I said to Bree. I pulled the slip of paper carefully out from the book, a tiny swirl of excitement in my belly. Maybe it was a clue. Maybe it would tell me what I needed to know. It was small, the size of a bookmark, and only had a few words scratched on it in Mama’s handwriting. “She’s gone,” I read aloud to Bree, “but still, I feel her. I miss her so much.”
“What?” Bree said. “Are you talking about your mom?”
I explained the slip of paper in the book, then read the words aloud to her again. “What do you think it means?” I asked her.
“Heck if I know,” Bree said. “This whole thing just keeps getting more confusing.” I’d told Bree about the letter from the doctor, but now, reading this note, it seemed like she might have been looking for a woman, not a man. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be a doctor, I supposed. Mama wouldn’t miss a doctor, though. It really didn’t make any sense.
I ran my fingers over the words Mama had written. “I have to figure out who she was looking for.”
“Okay, but how?” Bree asked.
I took a deep breath. “I need to call my grandparents. They know what happened.”
“Yeah, but will they talk with you?” Bree sounded doubtful. “They’ve never even met you.”
“I know, but I have to at least try, right?” I was suddenly determined. “I’ll call you back.” We hung up, and before I lost my nerve, I scrolled through my list of contacts until I came to the one I’d labeled “Grandparents.” I’d dialed their number once before Mama had died, after she’d called them and ended up crying, thinking I could talk with them and get them to stop making Mama so sad. But I hadn’t pressed send, too afraid to hear their voices. Too worried that they’d make me cry, too. I programmed the number into my phone, though, just in case I worked up the courage to try again.
Moving my thumb over the send button, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, then pushed it a little harder than I probably had to. I wondered if they’d answer, and if they did, what exactly it was I wanted to say. I thought about the things my English teacher taught me to consider when doing research for something I had to write: Who? What? When? Where? Why? That last one, that was the real question. The only one I really needed to know.
The phone rang six times before someone picked up. “Hello?” A woman’s voice, frail and crackly. My grandmother.
“Hi . . .” I faltered, unsure how, exactly, to begin this conversation. “Happy Thanksgiving.” God, that was a stupid thing to say.
“Who is this?” She almost sounded scared, and I couldn’t understand why. Then I remembered that Dad told us she was a little confused, that sometimes this happened to people as they got older. I hoped she wasn’t too old to remember what I needed to know.
“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.
