Mom, she said, sitting down beside her. Mommy. I’m sorry.
But her mom didn’t stir, and Mia lay down beside her, rested her head on her chest. She knew that something was horribly wrong. But she pushed it so deep, squeezed her eyes shut and held on tight. She was sleeping. She’d wake up very soon.
That’s where her father found them when he came home from work, not long after. The sound of his wailing would stay with Mia for the rest of her life.
It’s not your fault.
This was the single phrase she heard most often after that day. From her father, from therapists, from aunts and uncles. But Mia knew how much her mother hated when she slammed the door. Truth be told, that’s why she slammed it harder than she had ever had before. And so no matter how many times people told her it wasn’t her fault, she knew that it was.
Mia’s mother had asthma; they’d recently had to change her medication. She’d ignored warning signs—shortness of breath, dizziness. She’d had a heart attack. No one’s fault, not really. But Mia knew that being upset could aggravate her mom’s asthma.
She wasn’t upset, her father, Henry, told her. She called me after you fought. She said, Princess Rainbows is at it again. We thought it was funny, cute. She wasn’t mad at you. She was never mad at you.
Mia didn’t believe him.
And while she loved her father, it was true that she loved him somewhat less than she loved her mother. It was also true that a very special kind of light that her mother brought into her life, and into her home, went dark. Though there was still light, it wasn’t anything like the light that came from her mother’s love. And her father, who had always been goofy and funny and full of laughter, with big appetites, and grand ideas, and big plans for day trips and vacations, seem to deflate, go pale and quiet.
The world should have ended. It did end for Mia and Henry in all sorts of ways.
It just didn’t for anyone else. They both went on in that unfamiliar gray light together with the person they loved less than they had loved her.
It wasn’t until years later, in rehab for the first time, that Mia Belle Thorpe worked to unpack this moment of her life. How everything that went wrong later for her, started there; how every moment after was colored by the loss of her mother. She was special after that. She wasn’t math Mia, or shy Mia, or grouchy Mia. She was Mia whose Mommy had died.
Mia Belle meant my pretty, or my dear one. It was special because it was the name her mother had given her. She wished she could tell her mother that she knew that now.
Now.
Now, the farther she went on the dark road, the more of herself she left behind. All the people she’d been—the pampered little girl, the child who’d lost her mother, the angry teenager, the addict, the recovering addict, the person struggling, always struggling to find the specialness she’d seen reflected in her mother’s eyes.
You were special to her. You are special to me, her father told her. That’s the only special anyone needs to be.
She’d left everything that tethered her to her life behind. She hadn’t called her father to say goodbye. He didn’t like Raife and he didn’t understand their relationship, so there was no point in fighting about her plans. After a while, she’d send him a letter, explaining.
She imagined that it would be a relief to have some distance, for both of them. Her father had a girlfriend now; she seemed nice, had reached out to Mia multiple times. But no. Just no. Maybe if Mia and her father had some space from each other, from the memory of their shared loss, they could each be happy for a while. She loved her father. But it didn’t make her happy to be with him. She strongly suspected that he felt the same way about her.
Let’s leave the toxic modern world behind for a while. Maybe not forever. But for now, I know a place where we can be free. That’s what Raife had said to her when he issued his invitation.
It sounded right to her.
On this dark road, with just a burner phone she’d picked up at a drug store, all the chatter had gone quiet. There were no social media notifications, no constant pinging announcing the ugly news headlines, or junk emails. No endless texts from friends with memes and plans for the evening. There were no podcasts. No Siri to ask about the weather—or whatever.
The car she’d picked up in the lot, as Raife had directed her, just had an AM/FM radio. As she drove, the stations she could receive changed. A country music station faded away into static. She cast about and found some classic rock station with a mouthy DJ that eventually devolved into white noise, too. For a while, all she could get was a Christian sermon filled with fire and brimstone. She listened for miles, just because she found that she was afraid of silence.