Fifteen
MY MOM WAS WAITING FOR ME ON THE FRONT PORCH WHEN I pulled into the driveway. She looked so beautiful, had let her hair go entirely silver and kept it short. She was wearing a camouflage Adidas tracksuit and the craziest sneakers, tropical snakeskin high-tops that I knew probably cost more than two hundred dollars. After all the kids moved out of the house, my mom ended up getting a really lucrative job with the Tennessee Department of Transportation, and she also got into collecting sneakers, which she could never really explain to me. “They look nice, don’t you think?” she’d say, holding up a pair of men’s Nike Terminators in a size too large for her to ever be able to wear them that she’d bought on eBay. She said people in town always commented on her sneakers, especially teenagers, and that made her feel good about herself.
She waved to me, and I waved back. I’d told her that I needed to visit for a few days, to talk to her about an article that someone was writing about me, and that they might need to talk to her as well. “Ooh, okay, exciting, I guess,” she’d said, though she wasn’t sure why I had to come back to Coalfield to do it. But she let me come. And here I was.
It wasn’t like I never came home. We visited my mom at least six times a year, and she came to see Junie in Kentucky when she had free time. Hobart had died of a heart attack when I was in my late twenties, and they had really loved each other, I think, or at the very least, she had loved him more than she’d loved my dad. She had recently been dating a new guy, Hank, a former college soccer coach, who was very kind to my mother and clearly loved her, but they didn’t live together. Every time I saw Hank, he had a bag of my books that he wanted me to sign for gifts to various family members and friends, which made me like him quite a bit.
“Come on in, sweetie,” she said. “I’ve got coffee or sweet tea. I’ve got, like, thirty different kinds of Little Debbies.”
“I’m good,” I said, and we walked into the living room and sat down.
“Tell me what’s going on,” she said. “It sounded important. You never come here by yourself anymore.”
I felt so shaky, like maybe the rest of my life would be tracking people down and telling them this secret. Or, no, that’s what the article would do for me. What I was doing now was a kind of gift for myself, to tell the people I loved, to prepare them, to give them time to forgive me. After the article, the rest of my life would be awkwardly running into people I once knew and then watching them silently consider how deeply disturbed I was.
“Sweetie?” she said. “Is everything okay?”
“You know the panic?” I asked. “The reporter is writing about it.”
“Oh dear,” my mom said, tugging on the sleeves of her camo tracksuit, “oh my.”
“Yeah, and, so, she’s been talking to me about it.”
“Talking to you?” my mom asked. “Just you?”
“Well, I guess maybe lots of people,” I amended, “but mostly me.”
“Okay. So, she’s writing about the panic. And that was, you know, more than twenty years ago, but okay.”
“And, she’s talking to me, because I was the one who did it,” I said. I needed to just say it. After Aaron, who thought his mom was dead, I realized I needed to be pretty forthright about this thing.
“Frankie?” she said, looking at me, her eyes watering.
“I made the poster,” I told her. “I wrote those words. I made it up.”
“Oh, sweetie,” she said, and she looked so sad for me, like she was in pain to see me in pain, and then she said, “I knew that already.”
“What now?” I said. She wasn’t in pain, I realized. She was embarrassed for me.
“Frankie? I know. I knew then. I’ve always known. Well, I mean, not always, not at the beginning, but I’ve known for a really long time.”
“But you didn’t know,” I said. “You had no idea. You thought it was the triplets.”
“At first, yeah, of course, but then I figured it out. You were so strange that summer; I mean, even before you tried to kill yourself in the car—”
“That’s not what happe—”
“Okay, well, I mean, you were so strange, more than usual, and I figured it out. Honey, how would I not have known? It was you.”
“Well, yeah, that’s what I’m telling you. It was me.”
“I know.”
“Oh god, Mom,” I said.