“So I’m not hitting on you, but—”
“But?” She smiled at him, and he blushed like a girl, his cheeks turning pink. He looked down shyly, dug his hands into his pockets.
“When does your shift end? Can I take you for an ice cream?”
Rocky road for him. Chocolate chip mint for her. A proposal with his mother’s gifted ring not even a month later. A backyard wedding with family and friends, wildflowers, and tears of happiness. Then she was pregnant with Jay—not planned but they greeted the news with joy. Then my father was deployed for the first time. That’s how the story went. Later, when he was home between tours, I was conceived.
It was no fairy tale, but it was their story.
She always told it after a bad night with him, when we were all shaken and he was sleeping it off. It was like a prayer, a reminder that there was good in him somewhere and that she had seen it once. That she’d loved him.
As a kid, I loved that story—imagining them, who they were before us, before he went overseas. And toward the end I hated it. It was a fantasy about a man who no longer existed. And no matter how badly she wanted him to come home, he was gone. And when I think of it now, anger lodges in my throat. I think if she just gave up on who he was, maybe she would have seen who he had become. Maybe she could have saved us all.
Instead, we all followed him, and didn’t leave even when he hurt her again and again.
What would Dear Birdie say?
She’d say to forgive the past, forgive my mother for loving someone who hurt her, for not taking us away. Because she could only do what she knew how to do.
It’s cold comfort.
There’s no moon, no stars. Just the trees and layers of dark. Up ahead I see it. A tilting wood post with three red reflectors. Here, I should turn right. I stop, idle a moment. I haven’t seen another car for an hour; the road I’m on is completely deserted. I roll down the window, hear only the wind, smell the scent of pine.
What is this place?
Did Bonnie, Mia, and Melissa come to this fork in the road and make the turn, never to be heard from again?
Maybe she wanted the pain, says Robin. She’s talking about Mom. Maybe she thought that’s what love was.
There’s a twig stuck in the tangle of her hair. She’s frowning. Maybe you do, too.
“No,” I say.
Didn’t you see it in him? she asks, holding a glistening black crow feather.
“No,” I lie.
Here is where I should go back and find Bailey Kirk, call the police. It’s clear that my actions are hubristic, foolhardy. But it’s as if there’s a gossamer strand from my heart to yours, a tug at my solar plexus leading me forward, no turning back.
Making the turn, the night gets darker still. I keep driving.
I was living with Jax in a Lower East Side two-bedroom, four-flight walk-up when my father reached out to me the first time. Cobbling together a living writing book reviews for The Village Voice, working as a temp at a poetry magazine, and waitressing at a busy restaurant on Avenue A, I was running ragged, tired all the time. But happy. I owned my life. My blog was taking off, more and more followers every day.
And even though I was trying to live on what I made, I did have family money—my mother had managed to save quite a bit, enough to pay for my education and Jay’s. She had a small inheritance, as well, from her mother’s life insurance payout. There wasn’t a ton, but there was a comfortable buffer that allowed me to cover the rent when earnings were lean, especially since Jay’s money came to me, too. Like the property, my father signed all the money over to me, Wren Greenwood. His way of making penance, I guess.
We had a landline in the apartment back then. Jax’s mother insisted that we needed it to call 911 in an emergency. Jax came from a big Brooklyn family—a loud, funny, loving cast of brothers, cousins, aunts, and uncles. Her mother would stop by unannounced with food, but really just to check up on her. Over the years, they basically adopted me into their clan and it was with her family that I spent all holidays. Jax informed me that her mom thought we were a couple, in spite of her efforts to convince them otherwise. When I moved out, they thought we broke up. Her mother called me.
“You’re part of our family,” she told me. “I want you to know that.”
I tried to explain how Jax and I were best friends, always would be.
“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s all good, honey. You understand? There’s always a place at our table.”
Jax was out the night the landline—which never rang—woke me from sleep.