The Lost Husband (26 page)

“And since I’ve been here? This is the secret you’ve been not telling me?”

She nodded. “I was letting you get settled in at first,” she said. “And then I didn’t know how to bring it up. It’s all so ugly and so sad. After your mother showed up here, I was amazed at how it felt to see her again. I was just overcome with …” She shook her head, like she couldn’t even come up with a word.

“Hatred,” I said.

Jean nodded. Her eyes looked tired. “That’s probably it. And it made it harder to bring it up, not easier.”

Jean glanced at the clock. She was late for carpool.

“Go,” I said. “It’s okay.”

We both stood up, and then she was hugging me with that familiar hug. “I’m so sorry I lost you,” she said into my ear. And then she was out the door.

Chapter 21
 

The screen door slapped closed, and I looked back down at the open album on the table. I had work to do in the cheese kitchen, but as soon as I was alone, I knew it would have to wait. I turned and followed Jean out.

“Wait!” I shouted across the farmyard.

Jean turned around.

“There’s something I need to do,” I said.

“What?” she said, but I think she knew.

“I need to go see my mother.”

Jean took a few steps toward me. She was assessing me, I could tell. Deciding exactly how crazy our conversation had made me. “Okay,” she said next. “I get that.”

“Can you put the kids to bed?”

“Of course.”

“And can Sunshine do the evening milking?”

“Yes,” Jean said. “She can.” She studied me for a second. “Are you sure you want to go?”

My whole body felt like television static. I nodded.

She peered at me. “What are you hoping to gain from seeing her?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I have to go.”

“Just be careful about your expectations.”

Something about her tone made me hesitate. Maybe a confrontation wasn’t the best idea after all. Maybe it would just make things worse. “Is it pointless to even go?” I asked.

“No,” Jean said. “Not as long as you know what you want.”

“I want a different mother.”

“Not going to happen.”

“I want her to see how wrong she was and collapse on the floor in regret.”

Jean shook her head at me.

“I want her to apologize.”

“Sweetheart,” Jean said, “your mother is never going to apologize for anything.”

A good reminder. “That’s true,” I said.

“So,” Jean said, “go see her if you need to. But remember who she is. Going to your mother for understanding is like going to the hardware store for bread.”

I went. There were an infinite number of things about my life that I’d never be able to change. But at the very least I had to stand up for myself—and after a lifetime of compensating for and apologizing about my mother, that felt like a change in itself. I had to say that I’d been wronged. Out loud. If for no ears other than my own.

Everything Jean had just told me swirled in my head, and it all seemed related. It was like I’d loaded every important thing in my life into the spin cycle. I thought about how often I’d worried that
the loss of Danny would haunt my own kids in some inescapable way. But I was the one who was haunted. My kids had lost their dad, but they’d gained Jean, Russ, Sunshine—and even O’Connor as a fishing buddy and martial arts expert. Most important, they had never lost me.

It made me feel terribly sorry for myself, but it made me feel vastly better about my kids. The empathy I’d been using to imagine how life had impacted them had come from my own experience—but my own experience had been so much worse than theirs. I had assumed that losing Danny would leave them with the same kind of permanent homesickness that I carried with me wherever I went. But I suddenly realized that it wouldn’t. And then I realized something else: I hadn’t felt homesick in a long time.

When I got to my mother’s condo, I beat on the door with my fists until I heard the locks start to click. Thirty years of disappointment and anger churned in my body like an inner tsunami, and I fully intended to unleash it all on my mother as soon as she opened the door.

But it wasn’t my mother who opened the door. Instead, it was a man I’d never seen before.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

He smelled like cologne, and he wore a T-shirt under his blazer, Don Johnson style.

“I need to see Marsha,” I said, pushing right past him.

“She’s getting dressed,” he said, following me across the living room, unsure if he should stop me. “We have a date.”

I left him behind, bursting through my mother’s bedroom door and slamming it behind me.

She caught my eyes in the mirror and waited with her eye shadow brush to her lid.

“What?” she said, already irritated.

I just glared.

“She told you,” my mother said then, turning around.

I nodded as meanly as I could.

My mother shook her head. “And you hate me now, and I’m a terrible person, and blah blah blah.” She didn’t wait for a response, but went back to work on the eye shadow.

“It’s not funny,” I said. “It’s not trivial.”

“And? What? You’re here to tell me I’m the root of all your troubles?”

I gave a fierce nod. “Something like that.”

“Please.”
She unscrewed the cap of her mascara.

“Why did you take me from them?” I said. “I was happy! I was loved!”

“You were my child,” she said, self-righteous as ever. “You belonged to me.”

“No,” I said. “I stopped belonging to you when you left me behind.”

My mother sighed and set down her makeup. “Libby, what can I tell you? I was practically a child myself.”

“I’m not mad at you for leaving, Marsha,” I said, resolving not to call her “Mom” again. “I’m mad at you for coming back.”

“For coming back to my own daughter?”

“Why did you do that?” I asked. “What were you thinking?”

My mother turned around then to face me. “I wanted you,” she said, as if that explained everything.

I ran my hand into my hair. A whole lifetime of that woman dragging me along behind her without looking back flashed
through my memory. “But you didn’t!” I said. “You didn’t want me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, as if it were actually ridiculous.

“You took me away in a squad car.”

“That’s not my fault! Jean and Frank were the ones who wanted a standoff at the OK Corral.”

“You just wanted someone to love you,” I said then, realizing as I spoke the words how true they were. “Someone who didn’t have a choice.”

I’d hit too close to the mark. “That’s fine,” she said. “You can believe that if you want to.”

“I don’t
want
to believe it,” I said. “There’s no other option!”

“Jean is perfect, and I am a monster,” my mother said. “That’s fine. But didn’t I get you out of that shitty little town? We went places. We saw things!”

“
You
went places,” I said. “
You
saw things.” I was stuck at home—usually with a twelve-year-old babysitter. Or alone.

“Fine,” she said. “I’m a terrible person. Can we move on?”

I shook my head. It was time to do something different. “I’m not sure that we can.”

She evaded me with ease, the way she always did—as if she were just delivering the lines of her life. “Libby, Libby, Libby,” she said, popping on her shoes. “We can’t change the past. Was it the best decision I’ve ever made? Probably not. But obsessing over it and stomping around yelling about it certainly won’t give us the answer. I don’t know why you want to spend your whole life looking backward.
I
am looking forward at what’s ahead.” Before I knew it, she was at the door with her hand on the knob. “And what’s ahead tonight is a date. With a man who drives a Ferrari.”

Then she opened the door and slipped out, moving into another room and a different setting, expecting that once we were with company, politeness would compel me to drop it.

I caught up with her in the living room as she said, “Tony, this is my daughter, Libby.”

“We just met,” he said, a little wary.

I hadn’t come for revenge. But suddenly the opportunity was there. Because the truest thing about my mother was that she needed the approval of strangers. Male strangers, in particular. She needed to impress them. She needed to dazzle and charm and seduce them. She needed to see herself reflected in their eyes exactly the way she wanted to be. It was why she never stayed with anyone. Once they got to know her well enough to see her faults, they couldn’t give her the only thing she wanted: admiration. And nobody knew her faults better than I did. Which is why I was such a drag.

“We didn’t meet, exactly,” I said to my mother. “I barged past him on my way to confront you for abandoning me as a baby.”

My mother’s face stiffened into a smile. “Very funny,” she said.

“And then for changing your mind,” I went on, “and coming back to rip me from my adoptive family. In a squad car.”

I was ready to go on and on. I was ready to expose all of her weaknesses and imperfections in front of this new man. It was the perfect chance to humiliate her and get her in the one place it would really hurt. I pulled in a breath.
Go home
, I was about to say to him.
This woman is hopeless
.

In that instant, however, my mother’s composure broke. She leaned in to point at me. “Don’t you dare make fun of me!” Her voice came out in a rush like I’d never heard before. “I never wanted to be a mother. But it happened. And after I left, I could have stayed away forever. But I forced myself to come back for
you. I did the right thing, damn it—and you can’t make me regret that.”

The room was dead quiet. It felt like the first true thing she’d ever said to me.

I took a real look at my mother for the first time in years. Suddenly I noticed that her hair had gotten thinner. Her mascara was a little smudged under one eye. She was smaller than I remembered, too. The word that came to mind was
frail
.

I found myself thinking about how parents always seem like giants to their kids. They seem to control the whole world. But of course that’s just perspective. It’s not that parents are big, it’s that kids are small. It’s not that parents are powerful, it’s that kids are powerless. My kids made the mistake all the time of thinking I should know things that I didn’t, or that I should be able to solve things that I couldn’t. There was no way for them to understand that I was just me—just a former child myself. And for the first time it hit me that my mother, in this way at least, was exactly the same.

I thought about how she had spent a whole lifetime looking for something she couldn’t find. And I knew right then something about her life that she didn’t: She was never going to find it. Not just because she was looking in the wrong places. Because whatever it was she wanted so badly just wasn’t out there.

And with that, I felt something new for my mother: compassion.

“Well,” my mother said then, lifting her chin to step back into her persona. “If you’re finished with your little outburst, we’ve got dinner reservations.”

I nodded. My voice was quiet now, all the urgency drained away. “I am finished with my little outburst.”

I’d never turn her into a different person. I’d never make her
see what she’d done wrong, or make her regret it, or even make her apologize. I would never have the mother I wanted, but she would never have what she wanted, either. And that wasn’t just sad for me. It was sad for both of us. As thoroughly as my mother had ruined my life, she’d done a far more thorough job of ruining her own.

My mother stood up taller. “Good,” she mustered at last.

“I’m going home now,” I said, and suddenly I knew the only words in the world that had a chance to make things better instead of worse. I spoke them with care, fully aware that the person who really needed to hear them was me.

I turned back at the door and met her eyes. “And by the way,” I said, “I forgive you.”

Ten blurry minutes later, I was parked in front of the house I’d lived in with Danny and the kids. It was a 1940s
Leave It to Beaver
two-story with honeysuckle growing on the fence and a barn-red front door. Although, looking more closely now, the new owners appeared to have repainted the door black. Which looked terrible.

It was dark outside by now. The lights were on inside the house, and I could see the new family sitting down to dinner. The mom finished up in the kitchen as the father worked to keep three little boys in their chairs.

Back when we were living with my mother, it had soothed me to watch them. I’d still felt like a part of that place, like I belonged there—like I had every right to be there. That night, though, whatever magic watching these strangers inhabit my old house had held was gone. I used to be endlessly fascinated by them—not because of anything about who they were but because of where
they were. That was
my driveway
they’d parked on. They slept in
my bedroom
. They ate in
my dining room
.

I hadn’t been back since we’d moved away. Now it felt creepy and stalkerish. I felt like a police car would pull up at any moment and the officer would tell me to move along.