The Best I Could (37 page)

Ivy clutched her chest. “You frightened me,
Eli.”

“Not my intention. Sorry.”

She studied me, her brows furrowing, before
she picked the mascara wand up and leaned forward again. “I may run
into town,” she told me.

I watched her do her makeup. There was
something about the way she wiped at the lines to even them out,
the way she rummaged through brushes, and smoothed on colors like
her face was a canvas. It was comfortable watching her. It made me
a boy again—young and hopeful. It wasn’t my mom that scared me. It
was what she was capable of that had made me more fearful the older
I became.

“I think we need to talk,” I said
finally.

Mom paused. “Eli, I don’t think now—”

“Why did you do it?” I asked. “Why did you
drug me? And Jonathan and Heather?”

Pops was right. I was beginning to let stuff
go, and this was my biggest hurdle. This rocky relationship I had
with Mom. Being with Tansy, considering a future relationship with
her, meant facing things that could hold me back. People talk, but
they don’t always say what they want to say. They act out instead,
using emotion to hide what they really feel. I’d become so
embroiled in the horror of what my mother did, I hadn’t been able
to look past that world, past that experience to see the bigger
world beyond it.

Until the orchard. Until Tansy. Until
now.

My mother stiffened, her manicured hands
coming to rest on the vanity’s surface. The skin there wasn’t as
tight as it used to be no matter how much lotion and anti-aging
products she rubbed into her flesh.

“Don’t tell me the stuff I’ve heard before,”
I added. “The whole I did it for you crap. Just tell me why you did
it. Tell me what was going through your head when you did it.”

She looked at me, chin up. “I can’t answer
that question.”

Anger, cold and cruel, unfurled inside of me.
“Why?”

Her lips quivered. “Because I don’t know why.
I just did it.”

“There had to be a reason,” I insisted. “You
don’t just drug your kids and not know why, Mom.”

“Ivy,” she corrected, her gaze going to her
reflection.

I stared at her, my heart pounding. “Mom,
Mom, Mom, Mom … what do you hate about that word so much? Why do
you have such a problem with us calling you that? It’s what you
are. It’s what you fucking are.”

Mom’s fingers started to tap the table, her
jaw tensing.

“What’s the purpose of Ivy?” I asked. “Mom,
Mom, Mom—”

“Stop!” she shouted. “Just stop! I did it
because I didn’t want to be a mother!”

Her words were knives, and my heart was the
bull’s eye.

“What?” I whispered.

Her chest heaved, her nails digging into the
vanity. “You … I don’t know. I was in love with your fathers. I
thought keeping them interested meant having something that kept us
connected. But then the relationships got so suffocating, and I
didn’t feel the same.”

We were gifts she’d had to give to the men in
her life, but then couldn’t return when they weren’t what she
expected.

“You never loved them,” I bit out.

“Is that what you want to hear?” she asked.
“No, I didn’t really love them. I felt like I did. You, Heather,
and Jonathan were chains, holding me down.”

“So you wanted to kill us?”

She panicked, her eyes widening. Shooting to
her feet, she knocked over the chair she’d been sitting on.
“No!”

“That’s what it sounds
like,
Ivy
.”

“N-no,” she stuttered, “I loved you. All of
you. I just wasn’t ready … I didn’t want to hurt you.” Confusion
swept over her face. “I don’t know why I did it. I don’t—”

“You could have just sent us away,”
Jonathan’s voice said from the hallway.

I turned, finding my brother standing behind
me. He wasn’t angry like me—that wasn’t Jonathan’s emotion. Hurt
and pain filled his eyes, reason keeping him grounded. Like he knew
she would never give us an answer that mattered, and he was okay
with that. It was enough she knew how we felt. I needed to take
lessons from my brother.

Footsteps thudded on the stairs, and our
grandfather materialized at the end of the hall. He froze, staring
at us, horror on his face.

A whimper escaped our mother. “Jon?” She
reached for him, but he didn’t approach her.

“What’s better, Ivy?” he asked. “Being
surrounded by family or strangers.”

“Boys,” Pops began. He paused when we threw
him identical quelling looks, his shoulders slumping. “Okay,” he
said. “Get it out.”

A sob escaped our mother. “You told him!” she
accused me.

I didn’t say anything because I had.

A mascara-tinged tear slid down her cheek,
ruining her makeup. “Jonathan, please don’t hate me,” she
begged.

He stepped toward her. “I don’t hate you. I
love you. You’re my mother, no matter what you want us to call
you.’

“But you’re not looking at me the same,” she
pointed out.

“You mean, I don’t see you as a victim
anymore?” he asked, shrugging. “No, I don’t. We were the victims,
Ivy. Heather and Eli, especially. At least my dad cared, you know?
I had that much. They had Pops, but they couldn’t escape you. They
couldn’t leave every time you got frustrated. They had to brace
themselves for your tears and deal with it. I hate to say it, but
by staying, they showed you more love than you deserved at the
time.”

My lips parted, the old need to defend Mom
startling me. She didn’t need defending. My mouth snapped shut.

Mom fell to her knees, her fingers digging
into the carpet. “You hate me,” she wailed.

“No, I don’t,” Jonathan repeated. “I’ll
always love you. I may not agree with you, but I love you.”

She looked up at me, her eyes lit with anger.
“You told him! I hate you, Eli! I hate you for that!”

The part of my heart that had tried with my
mom, the part that could have forgiven her, was pulverized. Her
words were the push I needed. I didn’t need to forgive her to move
forward. I just needed to hear her say the words.

“Ivy!” my grandfather cried.

I held my hand up. “No.” I laughed, my eyes
on my mother. “Which one of us is on our knees, Ivy? It isn’t me.
This world isn’t pretty, you know? No matter how beautiful you are,
how much makeup you apply, or how classy you look, you shit and
piss the same way the rest of us do. We didn’t give up on you. We
didn’t even ask to be here, but we’ve always picked you up. I don’t
hate you. Even if you hate me. Funny, how I can’t find enough anger
in me to hate.”

I backed into the hallway.

“Jonathan,” she screeched, “stay with
me!”

My brother didn’t stay.

“It’s not you she hates, Eli,” my grandfather
told me when we passed.

I froze. “I know.” Placing my hand on his
shoulder, I squeezed. “It’s the part of me that reminds me of her
that she hates.”

Pops blinked, his eyes bright. “You see that
now?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Mom wailed behind us. Pops remained. We
didn’t.

Jonathan’s feet thudded behind mine on the
stairs. “Hey, Eli,” he said when we reached the bottom.

I faced him.

“I love you, brother,” he told me.

I smiled. “I love you, too, Jon.”

The words came easier than I thought they
would, which made me wonder what it would be like to say them to
someone else. It made me wonder how much of the feeling, not just
the words, I was capable of.

I was
not
my mother.

Tansy

Atlanta turned into a fun day with Deena and
Nana, our problems brushed aside. Not forgotten, but no longer so
large, so all-consuming.

Lots of laughter followed us. It was a hot
day running into shops to escape the heat, going into businesses I
needed to go into, and then ending with the zoo, me following
Nana’s van in Dad’s Buick.

We walked the zoo for hours, teasing each
other and eating cotton candy like we didn’t have this whole other
life to return to. Like Nana wasn’t taking a day off of work, like
Deena wasn’t afraid of the future, and like I didn’t have a job and
a place to live to look for.

When we left, I climbed into the Buick and
followed Nana out of Atlanta, the setting sun throwing shadows and
patches of pink into a golden sky.

Buildings and traffic waved good-bye in the
rearview mirror, and I saw myself in the chaos. It’s crazy how much
of me I’d lost in the three years after Mom’s death. Everything I’d
ever wanted stopped being aspirations I looked forward to and
became enemies, dreams that strangled me, the future hating me
because I’d let go of it.

It was easy to let go of things. It was
harder fighting to get them back.

The rearview mirror was a pair of binoculars
staring into a part of me I was leaving behind.

A ghost sat in the passenger seat, my
father’s scent lingering in the fabric.

“I don’t know what you were thinking,” I told
Dad’s spirit. “I don’t guess I understand what it was about Mom
that made the rest of us less. Is it wrong that your love for her
made me start to hate her?” I glanced at the empty passenger seat.
“When she died, I missed her a lot. Even dead, she clung to us. She
was in the leftover food she left in the fridge the night before
the accident, she was in the grocery list she left out on the
counter, in the missed call she made to your phone before she left
for work, and in the open tube of toothpaste she left out on the
bathroom counter.”

I winced. “At first, I kind of loved that she
was everywhere. Until you ruined it. You let her memory become a
demon that possessed you rather than the angel we all needed her to
be to move forward.”

Reaching out, I touched the empty passenger
seat. “Demons eat your soul, Dad. They change you and everyone
around you. They changed us, and now … we need to exorcise those
demons. It’s time to say good-bye to them.”

Dad’s car made a weird rattling noise, the
same noise it had been making for over a year, but it ran and it
was my noise now. Even though Nana shocked me the night before, she
also opened my eyes.

Excitement zinged through me, twisting my
stomach before spreading through my body. For the first time in
three years, I looked forward to my life.

Eli’s face swam before my eyes, making me
smile. I had a thing for Eli Lockston. The thought of loving him
scared me, but not enough to make me run.

My tires—oh, how good it felt to say
that—crunched over broken pavement and gravel, yelling, “Time to
live, time to live. Breathe, Tansy!”

Later that night, I called Jet.

He picked up on the third ring. “Hello?”

“It’s Tansy.”

Giggling filled the line, a female voice
hissing, and I knew by the sound that my brother was lost. It made
me sad.

Saying something to the girl, he moved away,
static filling the line as he covered the receiver.

After a minute, he asked,
“How are you doing, sis?” with an emphasis on the
sis
, like he needed to
convince the girl he was with that I wasn’t a part of his little
black book.

“Funny, I was going to ask you the same
thing.”

I could almost hear him shrug across the
line. “It’s okay. Been working a lot and hanging out with
friends.”

Sitting down on the couch in the living room,
I watched as Snow ambled toward me, her snout landing on my knees.
I didn’t know why the dog kept following me, but I hoped it was
because she saw something in me that I didn’t. I wondered if Nana
would let me adopt her once I found a place to live.

“I’m going to move out of Nana’s, Jet. I’m
going back to school. To college.”

“What?” The distant way he’d spoken when he
answered suddenly sounded less indifferent. Interested. Irritated.
“When? You can’t leave Deena.”

“Yes, I can. She’s doing good, and she’s
stronger than she looks. She’s taking boxing lessons at a local
boxing club, and I think she’s going to be really good at it. She’s
only been to a few classes so far, but I’ve caught her practicing
when she didn’t know I was looking. And I’ve been gardening. Which
is a stupid thing to say because you know I like gardening, but
it’s become a bigger thing this summer. It’s reminded me why I
liked science so much, the environment, and so—”

“Tansy, stop. You’re babbling. What’s going
on over there? What the hell got Deena into boxing? Are you sure
that’s a good sport for an angry kid?”

I smiled even though I knew he couldn’t see
me. “It’s kind of therapeutic actually, and speaking of
therapeutic, I’m going to be seeing a therapist soon. Nana called
Eli’s grandfather this morning, and he gave her some names. Friends
of his. I start next Monday.”

“Eli?” he asked, baffled. “Therapy?”

“My boyfriend,” I answered. “I think.”

“What the fuck? What’s going on over
there?”

“We’re living,” I told him. “Maybe you should
have stayed, Jet. It’s been a rough ride, and it’ll probably get
rougher, but we’re living. I think you need to live, too.”

“I
am
living.”

The giggling girl was back, murmuring sweet
nothings into Jet’s ear and the receiver.

“No,” I disagreed sadly. “You’re hiding.”

“Tansy—”

“I just wanted to call and check on you. To
tell you not to worry about us, okay? That we love you, and that
when you get a chance, maybe we can plan a visit? Here. I’m going
to check into getting a phone with the money I have left from Dad’s
life insurance, so that I have a number I can put on applications.
I’ll text you the number when I have it. I got Dad’s car from
Atlanta today, and picked up the forms I need to file for school
grants. I’m going to start with community college because I got
behind when I dropped out of school. A two-year college is a good
start I think, and it depends after that where I go.”