Bitter End (2 page)

“I’m going because of Mom,” I said, standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at his back, as usual.

“What’s your mother got to do with it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s part of why I want to go.” I took two steps into the room and then stopped and crossed my
arms over my chest. The room always felt lonely when Dad was in it. Lonely and chilly. “I want to know why she was leaving.
What was so great about Colorado?”

He stood abruptly, closing the paper with one hand and picking up his coffee mug with the other. “You want to go, that’s fine
with me. But we don’t have the money for it. With your sister’s college tuition and no second income…” he said, setting his
cup in the sink. But he never finished, and before I could ask another question, he was out the door.

Ever since my mom died, it seemed as if my dad always talked in open-ended sentences like that—especially when she was the
subject. “You know what your mom would’ve said…” or “Your mom would’ve thought your behavior right now…” or “If only your
mom were here…” He always looked so sad and meek when he said it.

It was the Big Mystery of my life. My mom. My dad. What happened between them and why we didn’t talk about it. Sometimes it
seemed as if I was the only one in the house who even cared.

The only time I’d ever heard Dad say anything real
about our mom was when I was eight. He drank a six-pack at a block party, and then he came home and sat at the kitchen table,
with a shoe box of old photos in front of him. That night he said our mom was “crazier than goosehouse shit,” whatever that
meant.

My baby sister, Celia, and I had giggled nervously when he said that, not sure if it was some sort of joke, imagining our
mom as a white and goopy puddle, stuck to someone’s windshield or a fence post, eyes rolling around insanely. Neither of us
remembered our mom. We were really little when she left.

But Shannin, our older sister, was there when Mom left, and she didn’t laugh.

Dad had gotten up, taken the shoe box, and tossed it into the garbage, muttering something about being an old fool. After
he left the mudroom, though, I crept in and pulled the shoe box out, took it up to my bedroom, and hid it under the bed. I
didn’t know why, but saving that box just felt like something I had to do.

Later that same night, when we were alone, Shannin took us into her bedroom and told us the Real Story. How she’d awakened
one night to the phone ringing. How she’d crept out of her room and into the hallway to look around the corner, crouched against
the wall with the skirt of her nightgown pulled over her legs. And then how the phone rang again and how Dad’s voice sounded
really upset when he answered it.

“She’s gone off the deep end this time, Jules,” Dad had said. “I don’t know. I don’t know where she’s gone.”

Shannin told us about how, just as Dad hung up the phone, the front door banged open and Mom barged through it, saying something
about going to Colorado—to the mountains. Dad had pulled on her elbows, saying she was drunk, and begged her to stay, to “see
someone,” and Mom argued that she was already “seeing someone,” just not how he meant it.

And then later, after Mom had left and Dad had disappeared into the kitchen and the smell of coffee started to fill the air,
Shannin had gone back to bed. And in the morning Shannin found out that while she slept, the police had come to the door and
told Dad that Mom had wrapped her car around a light pole and died. Just like that.

“Knocked her brains out onto the road,” Shannin whispered as Celia and I sat cross-legged on her bed, clutching each other’s
hands and shivering. “That’s what Dad told Aunt Jules at the funeral. Mom’s brains were knocked out onto Forty-first Street,
and they had to shut it down until they could get a hose and wash it off. And Aunt Jules patted Dad’s shoulder and said she
knew he loved Mom a lot and that he should never have had to hear something like that, and Dad cried and said, ‘I know, and
now I can’t forget it.’ ”

After Shannin told us the story, I went back to my room and locked the door. I pulled out the box of photos of Mom and Dad
and dumped them onto my bed, flipping through them carefully and secretively, as if I were doing something wrong just by looking
at them.

I stared at those pictures for hours. I’d look at Mom, so happy and thin and glowing, and would imagine her being drunk and
crazy like Shannin said. It didn’t seem to fit.

There were dozens of them. A photo of high school graduation. Two of a birthday party. One of their wedding day.

I had my favorites. Ones I’d look at over and over again.

A photo of them at a party. Dad sitting in a folding chair, Mom in his lap. Her hair was very short, and she was wearing a
vest over a button-down shirt. His hands were looped across her belly and clasped together. She had her hands resting on his
and a big smile on her face.

Another one, of the two of them sitting in a mossy space between two trees. Each of them was barefoot and cross-legged, facing
each other with their knees touching. Their faces were shadows. They looked like they were telling secrets.

And another one, Dad and Mom standing in Grandma Belle’s kitchen, wrapped in a kiss. Dad had Mom in a deep dip toward the
floor. Her arms were hanging limply at her sides. The back of the photo read:
First day back. Reunited!

One after another, the photos telling a story. Only it was a story with no ending because Mom left and Dad never told us why,
and the ending we knew just didn’t make sense when I looked at the photos.

The Mom in the photos looked so gentle. The Mom who left us must have been a whole different person.

When I was little, I’d ask Dad about it. Why was she going to Colorado? We didn’t know anyone out there. We’d
never even been there. But Dad would just mumble that Mom “wasn’t in her right mind and didn’t know where she was going.”
Once he said something about Mom being “too trusting for her own damn good.” But something in his eyes when he said it told
me he wasn’t telling the whole story. There was something more to Colorado for Mom. There was something important there. I
wanted to shout at him,
You heard about her brains on the road, Dad, and you said you couldn’t forget it, but you have! You
have
forgotten it!

Eventually Shannin told me to stop asking about it because it upset Dad too much to think about Mom. So I did. But I couldn’t
forget the story. It haunted me. Literally.

That year, I had nightmares. Always, they were the same. Dad screaming into a pillow, Mom standing at the top of a mountain
cackling, her face soft and sweet, her hair billowing out behind her. In the dream, she dangled me over the jagged mountain
edge.

“This mountain is mine,” she said, puffs of smoke billowing out of her mouth. “I don’t want you here. I don’t want you at
all, Alexandra.”

She laughed as I kicked and thrashed and begged to be let go.

“Oh, Alexandra,” she jeered. “Stop making such a fuss. Just think, they’ll have to shut down traffic while they find a hose
to wash your brains off the street. Isn’t that exciting?”

And always, just as she opened her hand and let me fall, I woke up.

It got so bad I refused to go to bed at night. Dad eventually took me to a therapist, who said some stuff I didn’t understand
about “closure” and “healing” and suggested that Dad give me something of my mother’s to help me feel closer to her.

Dad came into my room that night clutching a folded yellow envelope.

He cleared his throat. “Alex, honey, I know you’re having a hard time being without your, um…” His eyes filled up and he swallowed.
Then he pushed the envelope into my hands. “This was your mother’s. I bought it for her on our honeymoon…. It was in her purse
the day she, um…”

I held the envelope in both hands, looking up at him as he swallowed and swallowed, unable to finish any sentence, it seemed,
that had anything to do with my mother. He nodded at me, and I opened the envelope. Inside was a necklace—a thin leather strap
with a small hoop on the end of it, a web of flossy clear thread strung inside the circle. Tiny beads dotted the delicate
web; two white feathers, so small they might have come from a hummingbird’s tail, dangled from the bottom of it. I gently
prodded the beads with my finger.

“That’s called a dream catcher,” he said. “It’s supposed to keep nightmares away.”

He pulled the necklace out of the envelope, held it in midair to straighten it, and then carefully slipped it around my neck.
It smelled oddly familiar to me—perfumey and alive, almost like a memory—and instinctively my fingers drifted to it.

Right then, at eight years old, I knew. Just as I knew I’d never take the dream catcher necklace off, I knew that someday
I’d get to Colorado, where Mom had been going.

The therapist was wrong. The necklace didn’t give me closure. Instead, not knowing anything more than this about my mom made
me feel like a piece of me was missing, and I almost felt as though, just like Dad, I could break if I didn’t fill in that
piece. That there would always be a hole in my heart where Mom should have been, and if I didn’t fill it in, I could end up
empty and dull, like him. That I might forget hearing about her brains on the street, just as he had.

The next day as Zack and Bethany and I played on the woodpile behind Bethany’s house, I showed them the necklace and told
them the whole story. My mom wasn’t just gone, and my dad wasn’t just quiet. I told them about the photos and about Mom going
crazy and dying on her way to the mountains and about my plan to go where she was going. And just like that, the trip planning
officially began.

I needed to know that she was going toward something, not away from us. Not away from me. She loved me. I needed to know that
she loved me.

Whenever Aunt Jules or Bethany’s mom or someone else tried to tell me that my mom was an angel watching down on me from heaven,
I never could envision it.

To me, my mom was in the mountains, waiting for me to arrive.

“Really, if you’re not gonna be some stick-up-the-butt English teacher, who gives a crap about direct objects, anyway?” Zack
said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms. His toothpick—Zack’s new signature look was a toothpick—rolled from
one edge of his mouth to the other.

I picked up his pencil and held it out to him. “You should, that’s who; because if you don’t pass this class, you don’t graduate.”
It was only the second week of our senior year, and already Zack’s teachers were worried about his ability to stop goofing
off long enough to earn the credits he needed to graduate.

Zack shrugged. “And your point is?”

I gave him a look. “I thought the point was pretty self-explanatory.” He rolled his eyes at me. The toothpick, which had made
its way to the middle of his lips, was bumping up
and down as if he was flicking the other end of it with his tongue. I sighed and put down the pencil. “Fine. Whatever. Just
don’t come crying to me when your mom takes away the crapmobile again. And don’t expect me to give you a ride anywhere, either.”

Zack raised an eyebrow. “So that’s how it is now? Been covering your ass since forever. Saved you more times than I can count.
And you just leave me hanging out to dry. Hurts, my friend. Hurts.”

I grinned. “Yeah, pretty much. I’m doing you a favor. Someday you’ll thank me.”

“Now you sound like my mom. What’s next? You telling me this’ll hurt you more than it’ll hurt me?”

“Trust me, helping you can be pretty painful sometimes.” I cleared my throat and began writing in Zack’s notebook, which was
spread out on the desk between us. “Okay, seriously. We’ve gotta get to work. Here, look at this sentence. What’s the direct
object?”

Zack uncrossed his arms. He leaned forward over the paper and studied the sentence I’d written. “God, you’re a pain in the
ass,” he muttered around his toothpick. “Good thing you put out. That?”

I smacked his arm. “Close, but no. And you wish I put out, you perv. Okay, remember, to find the direct object, you…”

“Alex?” Mrs. Moody, the tutor lab sponsor, called from the doorway, interrupting us. She waved me over.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. “Why don’t you write five
random sentences, and when I get back we’ll find the direct objects together.”

“Can I use any words I want?” he said, arching his eyebrows at me deviously.

“Yes, such as ‘fail,’ ‘forever a senior,’ ‘degenerate,’ ‘grounded for life’? Go ahead.”

He made a face at me and picked up his pencil. I pushed my chair out and headed to the door, where Mrs. Moody was still standing,
half-in, half-out, talking to Amanda, one of the other tutors. Mrs. Moody was pointing over her shoulder with her thumb at
Zack, and Amanda was nodding. I waited, half-wondering if I’d done something wrong. Maybe she’d heard Zack and me bantering
and was firing me, which would totally suck because, without the tutoring lab seventh period, I’d probably get stuck in ceramics
or some other art class, in which I would, without a doubt, be a complete failure. Plus, I liked tutoring. Especially tutoring
Zack. Zack was a great stress-reliever, pervy jokes included.

Mrs. Moody finished talking with the other tutor and put her hand on my shoulder. “Alex,” she said with a wide smile. Mrs.
Moody always smiled, even if you were in trouble. Talking to her was like talking to a cloud. She was soft, graceful. She
smelled like honeysuckle and vanilla, and her clothes always drifted around her like ribbons on a breeze, giving the illusion
that she was moving faster than she actually was. When she spoke, she had this even, measured rhythm to her voice that made
me automatically think of bedtime stories. She was easily my favorite teacher. Hell,
she was easily
everyone’s
favorite teacher. “Come with me. I’ve got a new student for you.”

She turned and headed down the short hallway to her office, her shirt and skirt billowing out behind her, and I followed.

“He’s transferred over from Pine Gate,” she said over her shoulder. “Just needs to do some catching up so he can hit the ground
running in senior English. I thought you’d be the best choice for him, being our expert writer and all.” She flashed me a
smile as she paused at her office doorway, then stood to the side and ushered me through.