The voice of my lingering shame points out all the “truths.” “People do relapse.”
“I know. And if you do, we’ll deal with it.” She bends to get me to look her in the eye. “You’re not alone, Maya, okay? I’m here for you, and Nathan, and even Meadow, although she’s losing her mind at the moment.”
“I need to figure out how to set boundaries with her. She’s making me feel like a loser.”
“Maybe you should. I think it’ll get better once everything is settled with Dad and the restaurant and she can get on with her healing.” She blinks and swipes two fingers over her cheek. “All of us can.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s eat. Oh, and I bought you something.” She passes me a present. “Open it!”
It’s so very Rory that she wrapped an impromptu gift. I rip the paper off and find a package of Micron pens, a ribbon-tied stack of square thick paper, and a Zentangle book. “Hey, this is great! Thank you.”
“It’s very peaceful,” she says. “Meditation without having to concentrate so hard.”
The front door opens again, and Meadow slams into the kitchen. She holds her phone aloft. “They released his body.”
“What?” Rory says.
“The coroner,” Meadow clarifies. “They released Augustus’s body to the crematorium. They found no evidence of foul play and think he must have just had heart failure, maybe due to the cancer.” She stands there a minute, staring at us, her finger below her nose.
Rory falls into Meadow’s arms. “Finally.”
I stand, and Meadow holds out her other arm toward me. For a minute, I think I will hug them both, and then I realize it’s not at all what I want. I’m mad at Meadow, and mad at my dad, and there are so many emotions slamming around my body that I just shake my head. “I’ve got to go.”
Rory snags me as I go by, yanking me into the huddle by the back of my shirt. I fall into their bodies, so familiar, and am surrounded by their scents, which mean home and comfort and all the things I really need right now, but I feel strangled by everything else, shame and anger and loss.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp, pulling away. “I have to go.” I head to my car and pull up all the meetings listed online. There’s one that started ten minutes ago just a few blocks away, and I drive there directly, hardly breathing until I sit down in the featureless room. A speaker with a french twist and a cashmere sweater is telling her story.
I lean back and listen, my hand over my abdomen.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Norah
In the library, I go back to work on tracking down details of Meadow’s teen years. I feel like I’m missing something, right out of the corner of my eye.
It hits me as I look at the yearbook photos again: all this is entirely ordinary history. Why hide it? It makes a nice little Horatio Alger story—the girl from the sticks coming to town and making good. She has made good. I think of the way she looked this morning, a little wild. A little lost.
Wiggling my foot under the table, I go back through my notes. Mom. Dad. Stepdad. High school. Mom dead. Boyfriend. Baby Rory.
What about the boyfriend? I can’t find an obituary for him, or anything more in the yearbooks. But it’s a small town with a small newspaper. Maybe something will be there in the grad pages. I look through the notices but don’t see anything with his name. I keep scrolling through the headlines of the spring, then the summer, looking for . . . I have no idea what. A fire on a farm out in the boonies started a grass fire that hit the ridge and burned for two weeks. A flurry of burglaries. In the fall, the dullest of days—harvest festival, local mayoral election.
What am I looking for?
I go back through my notes one more time. Rory was born August 10, 1985. Meadow showed up at the Buccaneer just a few months later. I look at the numbers and realize Meadow was pregnant with Rory when she was a cheerleader, while her big romance was going on. But again, how did she have Rory, who has skin so white it’s transparent, with a guy who has skin the color of tree bark?
Whoever the father was, Meadow walked a hard road.
For a moment, I have to sit with the ache of recognition, the ways life let her down—war taking her father, her mother dead too young, her chances for happy teenage years ruined by a baby.
And then she found Augustus, who loved her and lifted her up and gave her a sense of herself and what she could do. He took in her daughter （and left his own behind, don’t forget, says a little voice in my head） and loved her for twenty years, until the marriage broke up over yet another affair.