Later, her father would say that Faith was never like this. “She’s just tired, most likely.” But Rachel knew better. She heard the damage she’d caused in Faith’s wail. It was an echo of the pain she felt when someone mentioned her mother’s name.
Ramona Thomas was a woman who dreamed of singing on Broadway but paid the bills by fixing the soles of rich white women’s shoes. She’d named her only daughter Rachel because it was her favorite from the Bible, a fact she’d written in a notebook filled with unfinished song lyrics and her bitter resentment, which coated her life like oil. All of it was bound to catch fire eventually.
Rachel was three when her mother left. Too young to have anything but the memory of her smell: vanilla and Pink Oil Moisturizer singed with a hot comb. The memory of her touch: firm but careful. The memory of a sweater: burnt orange, like sunsets, with little fuzz balls Rachel used to grab. Her voice was a melody that started to fade as soon as she left—like a song Rachel listened to less and less as she got older.
“I hated my mother for a long time.” Rachel didn’t look directly at Nathan while she spoke. She kept her eyes on the lake and let the water’s motion lull her into a calm. “But after Faith, I think I finally understood her a little more. You can’t straddle both sides of your life. Living in one means losing something from the other. That’s just the way it is.”
Despite her father’s assurances that Faith was fine, the tantrums were worse when she returned home for the summer. Rachel spent the first two nights rocking Faith to sleep, only for her to jolt awake, look at Rachel’s face, and start crying all over again.
“That’s when I had my first panic attack,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was. I’d sit outside her room and listen to her breathing while my heart was burning up inside my chest. I was nineteen years old. I remember thinking that we couldn’t live that way. That this couldn’t be what we were to each other. Nothing but damage.”
Her hands were trembling like she’d never left that narrow hallway. She pressed them hard against her legs. “I stopped going home. Phone calls would trigger another attack. Dad wrote letters, but I could never bear to read them. I got high a lot. It helped. But I couldn’t look at old pictures or be around kids.” She paused. “I wonder if that’s how my mother did it. Erased me from her life so that it was easier to stay away.” She glanced at Nathan but wasn’t brave enough to read his face. “Two years later, the dean of students told me that my father was in the hospital with pancreatic cancer. They’d put him into a medically induced coma.”
Nathan made a wounded sound, a strangled loss of breath. “I’m so sorry.”
“Please don’t be.” She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t deserve sympathy. I never will.” She took a deep breath. “I read all his letters. There was nothing about him being sick. It was all about Faith and—” The memory bled through and made her choke. She swallowed hard and kept talking, but her words stopped and started, tumbling together. She’d dropped her classes and returned home, but he was already gone. Faith was with a neighbor. She was five and there was no tantrum this time, but she didn’t eat for several days. Like she wanted to hurt in ways her mother couldn’t see.
The little money Peter had was put toward unpaid medical bills so large they looked like mortgages. The landlord gave her six weeks to get current on the rent. Rachel applied for retail jobs, but the hours never worked with Faith’s school schedule. After-school programs were full. Sitters were too expensive. Eventually an eviction notice went up.
“We stayed with a neighbor for a while, and then we went to a motel.” Her face warmed. “It was too expensive. To this day, I don’t know how I could have been so careless with my money.”
He slid a hand up her spine. “You were doing the best you could.”
“Well, you can guess what happened next. I ran out of money. I applied for public housing, but…” She paused and he finished the thought for her.
“Waiting list.”
“For everything. No one’s ever in a hurry to help someone when they’re poor. Maybe they figure since you don’t have anything, there’s no harm in making you wait.” Her voice cracked as she spoke, and she covered her mouth.
Nathan’s hand stilled. “Hey. If this is too much for you—”
“No.” She took a deep breath. “You asked, I want to tell you. We slept in the car because the shelters weren’t safe.” Bile rose in the back of her throat. “I would drop her off at school and take whatever work I could find. I made enough for gas and food. And then we would park on some quiet street for the night and hope no one saw us and called the police.” She could still picture Faith’s curly head bobbing beneath the blanket. Her daughter was still afraid of the dark back then. She’d prop a flashlight on her shoulder and read a worn copy of The Runaway Bunny that Peter bought for her. Rachel would stay up all night, staring at the expensive houses with their landscaped lawns and home security signs, thinking, I have to fix this. And at dawn, for a few hours between dusk and day, sometimes she’d sleep.