We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(40)

I turn the water back on and focus on the dishes as I talk. “She’s got a new man. He lives in Mexico City. I didn’t want to go because of school stuff.”

“That’s awful,” says Tatum, wiping his brow with the back of his arm. “She just left you?”

“For a guy she’d known a week.”

Suddenly, I feel like I’ve said too much. I don’t want to give Tatum knowledge he can use against me. I take the sticky pavlova tray and scrub it under the hot water.

“I felt like my parents left me, when they died,” Tatum says, softly. “Because they weren’t sober, and they were driving—and you know, how could people do that when they have a kid, tucked up in bed, expecting his parents to come home safe? How can you even make that choice, to get behind a wheel when you know you shouldn’t? When you’re everything to somebody? Why wouldn’t your kid be worth the trouble it takes to call the taxi service? It’s money, but not a lot. A little bit of time spent waiting for the car to come. If you loved your kid, wouldn’t you bother to spend twenty dollars and wait ten minutes? But over the years, I came to think of it differently. Driving that car, it was just a dumb mistake. They got high too much. They weren’t thinking straight. They were flawed people. I stopped feeling like they left me on purpose.”

I look into Tatum’s huge brown eyes, so often glaring and defensive. His face is open. He has suffered a lot. The thought of that little boy, the selkie boy in Kingsley’s painting, the one who swims so joyfully and feels at home in the ocean, the thought of that little boy abandoned by his parents in their deaths—it brings tears up behind my eyes. I can’t actually say anything. A million stock phrases spin through my head, but none of them are adequate. So I just nod at him, taking in his loss and the long time it took for him to recover.

“What happened with your mom?” he asks. “Like, how did you find out she was leaving?”

“I begged her to stay. We were living with this guy, Saar. She wanted to leave him. And I said, instead of Mexico with the new boyfriend, maybe the two of us could get a place, a little apartment? I’d get a job and contribute to expenses. And I’d sleep on a foldout sofa. Even a studio apartment would work, just anywhere cheap. I tried to paint a happy picture, you know? To coax her into it. I said we’d decorate it with thrift-store finds and make it nice. We actually haven’t lived on our own together since—” I think back. “Not since I was seven. In Rome.”

“What did she say when you asked her to stay?”

“That I could come with her to Mexico, but she had to follow her heart.” I stop the water, close the dishwasher, and dry my hands. “She’s always following her heart.” This is the first time I’ve actually told anyone how hard I begged. “I said, ‘isn’t part of your heart with me? I’m the one who’s always been here. Please can’t we get an apartment? Let me finish high school. Let’s live together.’ But it turns out I’m not the type of person who inspires feelings of devotion.”

Tatum has stopped moving. He’s looking at me, paying attention to every word.

“She said I could get my GED from Mexico if I wanted,” I continue. “And that she was in love. If I loved her, I wouldn’t stand in her way.” I can’t look him in the eye. “She was gone the next morning when I woke up. She texted me that she knew I really wanted her to be happy, and she was looking at this wonderful chance at happiness and she absolutely had to take it.”

“She left without saying goodbye?”

“Well, she texted.”

Tatum makes a noise in the back of his throat.

“That’s how we left most of the time,” I say. “After Kingsley kicked her out and after this guy abandoned us in Rome when I was little, Isadora never got dumped again. She always left first, told them later. I just—I never thought she’d do it to me.”

For a second, I think he’s going to hug me.

I step back, impulsively. I don’t want him to hug me, because Tatum is obviously not a good person for me to have told all this personal stuff to. Just because we had some kind of a moment right now, talking about our missing parents and our abandonment issues, and

just because he plays guitar like an unselfconscious angel-boy and

has impossible muscles in his shoulders, and

just because he cleans up when no one else will,

and takes the dog to the vet, and

just because he asks questions that other people don’t,

that does not mean I want to be wrapped in his long arms and feel his whole strong body pressing so close to mine that I can smell the dish soap on his hands and the meringue on his breath.

Because Tatum is a very sullen taxi-van driver.

And he’s judgmental. And critical. And secretive. And untrustworthy.

And very irritating a lot of the time.

Also, he does not want me here on his territory. Or in his boys’ club.

So he’s not allowed to hug me, even though it would feel really, really good to be hugged by him right now.





38


He doesn’t try anyway. He puts soap in the dishwasher and starts it up.

To avoid the awkwardness, I go into the dining room, where I find yesterday’s breakfast dishes, and this morning’s, shoved to the side of the table to make room for a pile of what looks like Kingsley’s clean laundry. The clothes are jeans, stained with paint despite their trip through the washer, and a number of linen shirts, likewise paint-stained. They’re wrinkled and should have been hung to dry.