Epic Adventures of Lydia Bennet (9781476763248) (36 page)

I kept my focus on Kitty during my mini-monologue, petting up and down her back, up and down. Sometimes it's easier to say stuff when you pretend you're rehearsing. I rehearse a lot of conversations in front of Kitty, anyway. When I finally looked up, my mom was frowning.

“Lydia,” she said. “Your father and I want you to do what you think is best for you. If that's more college, that's wonderful. If it's not, I'm sure, in time, you'll figure something out. You're a smart young lady. As long as grandbabies are somewhere in my future between the three of you girls, you know I'll be happy.”

I smiled a half smile. “See, I know that. In my head, at least. I know you just want me to be happy, and that you and Dad will always support me. Which is why it was so strange when you basically pushed me out the door to New York. And Dad wasn't happy about it.”

And you've been sleeping a lot
, I wanted to say.

And Dad was sitting in the kitchen in the dark.

And you both kept disappearing, for “things at the club.”

I'd thought they'd been avoiding me. That this was all about me. But once again, when I pick up my head and actually see outside myself, things fall into place.

“What's been going on, Mom?” I watched her closely.

She sighed deeply, and a second later her hand stilled my incessant petting of Kitty.

“Your father wanted to tell you, but I made him promise not to . . .” she began.

I shifted nervously. Nothing about that sounded good. “Tell me what? Mom, you're scaring me.”

“Do you remember my tennis elbow? Well, when we went to have it looked at, the doctor noticed something . . . else.”

“Something else. Something . . . bad?” I asked.

“Something else that
might be
bad. So they did some more tests, and some more tests, and . . . the week you left for New York, they needed to do some exploratory surgery.” Her hand went to her side, holding it lightly.

“Mom!” I blurted out, stunned. “You had surgery? Why didn't you tell us?”

“You girls have all had so much going on, I didn't want my silly, old, aging body to get in the way of that,” she said, retracting her hand from mine and busying herself straightening out the bedding underneath us.

“Mom . . .” I started.

“I know, I know.” She raised her hands in defeat. “Your father disagreed with me. But we didn't know if it was anything, and I just wanted everything to be fine for a little while longer.”

I softened. Guess my penchant for pretending everything is okay even when it might be crumbling down around me comes from somewhere.

“I don't like it,” I said. “But I know what you mean.”

Mom smiled, albeit a little sadly, understanding what I meant.

“Are you okay?” I asked when she didn't pick up the conversation again.

“I'm fine, sweetheart,” she said. I looked at her, willing my stare to convey that I wanted the truth. No more appeasement or hidden truths. “I promise. The doctors assured me that everything's normal.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

But I couldn't stop my mind from drifting to the what-ifs. What if things hadn't been okay? What if they had found something that actually was bad? Would they have told us? Or would they just have
kept pretending everything was fine until there was no more hiding that nothing was fine at all? And how could I be upset when she was just doing the same thing I had done? Kept doing?

At least Mom did something about it,
I thought. She only kept the truth about not being fine from me and my sisters; she still got help. I, on the other hand, had lied to myself about everything, letting things eat me up from the inside like an unchecked disease until the symptoms became too obvious for the world to ignore.

A choice like that could've been dangerous for my mom, but I'm starting to realize how dangerous it could have been for me, too.

“We're not kids anymore,” I said.

“No, you're not.”

“Promise you'll tell me if anything big happens again.”

She looked me in the eye, as serious as I've seen her. “I promise. Anything big happens, you'll be the first to know,” she replied. “Besides your father, of course. But I need you to do the same.”

Fair. “I will. No more secrets.”

“No more secrets.”

“Well, some secrets, because duh, you're my mom, I can't tell you
everything
,” I quickly corrected myself. “But not big life-changing ones.”

“That sounds good to me,” she agreed.

“I love you, Mom.” I reached across Kitty and pulled her into a hug. “I'm glad you're okay.”

“I love you, too,” she said. She pulled back and held my face in her hands. “No matter what. I hope you know that.”

I nodded. I did—I do—know that. Mom may spend all of every dinner gossiping about the neighbors and wondering whether Jane and Bing or Lizzie and Darcy will be the first to tie the knot and will they have the wedding here or out where they live now—but it's dinner she's made for us, every night. The things she's always done to show me and my sisters that she loves us mean more than just saying it. And hopefully . . . hopefully every member of the Bennet
family can get better at this whole communication thing. I feel like we're trying. Miracles don't happen overnight, you know.

“Now, you tell Lizzie I say hello when you see her.” Mom stood up, straightening the wrinkles she had left in my comforter as soon as she did. “Mary, too. And make sure they're eating right. I hear kale is big in the cities nowadays, maybe some of that. And lots of water, the heat's been just awful lately.”

She went on for a few more minutes about things I had to do to check up on my sister and my cousin—way too many things than I could possibly remember, but I promised to try my best—and finally left me and Kitty on our own.

*  *  *

I headed up to San Francisco first thing the next morning. I was still on NYC time, which meant I actually woke up before nine on a Sunday, and there just didn't seem to be much point to putting it off.

Most of the drive consisted of listening to the radio—something I had found I missed profoundly in New York without a car. But I also spent part of the time strategizing.

I didn't want to do any more dancing around with Mary, pretending everything was fine and we were just super okay. Because she would. “Fine” is her default mode. “Fine” is her not being angry I screwed everything up for her. “Fine” is her just leaving.

I needed to up the stakes. I needed to get Mary mad at me in order to get her to admit that she was already mad at me. Look, it makes sense if you know Mary. Which I do. And I know one of the best ways to irritate her is to invade her privacy.

So, four hours after leaving my house, I parked my car, marched up to the door of Lizzie's building, crossed my fingers that I hadn't somehow mucked up the address, and barged right into the apartment.

Right into . . . something.

Mary squeaked incoherently as soon as the door swung open,
rushing to disentangle herself from another body on the couch with her.

A body that was attached to asymmetrically cut bleached-blond hair with purple at the ends.

“Lydia!” Mary yelped, fumbling with the unbuttoned buttons on the front of her shirt. “What are you doing here?”

I blinked. And then I jumped back on track.

“Why aren't you mad at me?” I demanded. I saw Violet smoothing out her hair and looking intently at absolutely nothing on the side of the couch where Mary wasn't sitting, but I kept my focus on my cousin.

“What are you . . . What?” Mary started, confused. “What's going on? Why are— Wait, what the hell are you doing?”

Good. There was that break from the constant Mary Bennet deadpan. I'd need that to get anywhere with this conversation.

“I think I'm gonna bounce,” Violet broke the silence, looking back and forth between the two of us. She turned back to Mary. “See you tomorrow?”

Mary nodded.

Violet leaned in toward my cousin but seemed to think better of it and instead stood up and walked all the way around the coffee table in the other direction. She made her way past me, offering up an uncomfortable smile as a wordless greeting and good-bye as she went. I heard the door shut behind her and I shifted closer toward Mary, who was standing now.

“Okay, so, what? What's going on?” Mary asked, shaking her head.

“You're supposed to be mad at me. Why aren't you?”

“Wait. You came all the way out here and burst into your sister's apartment to . . . try to make me mad?”

“What? No!” I responded. “Well, kind of. But just to make you talk. Where is Lizzie, anyway?”

“She's . . . out?” Mary said. Uh-huh. Later on I would take a quick glance in her fridge, but if it wasn't stocked with artisanal
cheeses, then I'm guessing Lizzie doesn't
really
live here, and the pillow with her head dent is resting on Darcy's bed.

Mom's gonna flip.

“Okay,” I said. “But where was I? Oh, yeah, me barging in to be mad at you for not being mad at me is not why you're supposed to be mad at me.”

“I literally have no idea what you're saying.”

I drew a breath and started in on the real issue at hand. “I screwed up. I promised you I would move up here with you, and instead, I messed up all your plans—our plans—and you didn't get mad at me. Why?”

Mary sighed and sat back down on the couch again. “Lydia . . . we've been over this. You've had a lot going on this year—”

“No! That's not good enough! I can't just have people make excuses for me all the time! Or make them for myself! I. Messed. Up. You have every right to be mad. Be mad at me!”

“Okay? I'm mad at you?” she tried. “I don't know what you want me to say.”

“Anger is the second stage of grief, we learned that in class. Second, so you can't just skip over anger and move through the rest. That's not right. Something's not right. That's what happens when people screw you over. You get mad at them. There's something wrong if you can't get mad. Right? I screwed you over. It was my fault. So you're supposed to . . .”

I heard it as I was saying it. But at the same time, I think I knew it all along.

Yes, I wanted Mary to admit that she was upset with me and for things to get back to normal between us instead of all this uncomfortable distant crap.

But there was someone I was more upset with—me.

“Why can't I be mad at him, Mary?”

Her brows furrowed in continued confusion before I saw the realization sink in.

George.

“Everyone wanted me to be mad at him. I want to be. I think I should be. But I can't. I don't understand it.”

All the muscles in my body that had tensed minutes ago in preparation for this argument went slack, and I slumped down onto the couch next to my cousin, who was probably suffering from emotional whiplash at this point.

“You don't have to feel any certain way,” Mary said. “Everyone deals with grief differently—I'm sure you learned that, too. If you aren't mad, you aren't mad. That's okay.”

I wonder what Ms. W would tell me in this moment. I wish I'd thought of these things before now, then maybe I could have talked to her about them. Not that I really let myself think of anything beyond schoolwork and Cody and how
fine
I supposedly was all summer.

“I feel like I'm supposed to be. I feel like . . . there's something I'm supposed to be feeling, something I'm missing, that I'm not.”

Mary chewed on her lip. I could tell she was struggling to find something comforting to say. Something useful.

“When I found out you weren't coming up here with me, I wasn't . . . disappointed,” she started. “I mean, I was, but mostly, I just felt like an idiot.”

“Why?”

“Partly for believing our plans would actually work out. You were ditching me again, and part of me thought I was stupid to think you'd want to come out here and be my roommate and whatever—”

I opened my mouth to interrupt her but she cut me off.

“I know, that's dumb. I know. It's why I didn't tell you,” she continued. “And another part of me felt stupid for not pushing you when you started flaking on schoolwork and counseling. I knew something was going on, but I don't think I wanted to know. And that's really shitty of me. And I think I was just too busy being mad at myself to think about being mad at you.”

I thought about that for a minute.

I spent a lot of time being mad at myself for everything that happened with George. I . . . think I still am, in some ways. Sometimes I wonder if I should have seen it coming. I'd heard people say he was no good. I knew it was shitty of me to get with Lizzie's ex behind her back. I knew that some of the things he said and did felt . . . off.

Everyone says it's not my fault. Lizzie, Mary, Ms. W . . . okay, maybe not people like Harriet, but that doesn't matter. The people who count always say it's not my fault. And I know that's true. Logically, I know that's true.

But sometimes it takes emotions a while to catch up with logic, if they ever do.

I'd wanted to think I was done feeling this way, but it still creeps in.

Because sometimes I think about the good times. How when we were together, none of the warnings mattered. It was just us. And I loved the bubble we lived in together. Our own world.

I feel guilty about that.

It doesn't add up. The two George Wickhams. Because there were two of him. Two sides. And the side I spent most of my time with . . . it just doesn't add up, everything that happened.

Anger, guilt, confusion. I felt a lot of different things about our relationship, and the fallout I was left to deal with on my own. And I felt just about all of it toward myself.