SIX MONTHS LATER
Your blood pressure looks great,” Maddy said to Pops, taking the cuff off his arm. “I think you’re gonna outlive all of us.”
The old man harrumphed and I smiled, helping him off the table. He was ninety-eight and sharp as a tack and one of our favorite townies.
I was living at the Grant House. I’d been here since the day I left Justin.
When Maddy called Daniel and Alexis, they said yes immediately. We got out of our contract at Royaume, citing an emergency situation, and we left for Wakan.
Alexis had hired us to work at Royaume’s satellite clinic here. She was a general practitioner and the town doctor—and, as we came to discover, Briana’s best friend and Neil’s ex-girlfriend. That was an interesting revelation. And so was the update we got via Briana a couple of days after we arrived. Apparently the last thing Mom did before disappearing was to burn Neil’s house down.
Briana said it was karma. She also said Neil didn’t seem to be too upset about it, so at least there was that.
Alexis came in holding a coffee. “Are you two going to be home for dinner?” she asked. “Daniel wants to know how many veggie burgers to grill later.”
“I’m going to the VFW with Doug,” Maddy said.
“So you won’t be home tonight.” I gave her a wry smile.
“No, I won’t be home,” she said. “I’m going to let that tall drink of water slam me like a door.”
Alexis sat in front of her charting computer. “I could have gone my
entire life without that visual.”
I was laughing when Doug popped his head in the room. “Hey, babe, ready for lunch?”
Maddy skipped over to him and stood on her toes to kiss him. She was a full foot and a half shorter than him. He wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her back a little too enthusiastically, and Alexis and I shared an amused look.
Maddy broke away and grinned up at her boyfriend. “Let me run to the bathroom real quick.”
Doug watched her go as I collected my purse. “So, when are you two moving in together?”
“I keep asking her,” Doug said. “She tells me to shut up.” Alexis snorted.
“That woman scares the absolute shit out of me,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t get enough of her.”
“I think the feeling is mutual,” I said. “She’s only scary when she cares.” Alexis was laughing.
A minute later Maddy came back down the hall and Doug took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders before they walked out.
I’d never seen Maddy like this for a guy. And I realized now that was partially my fault.
It wasn’t easy to have a relationship when you moved every few months.
And I knew now that she’d done that for me more than for the adventure.
We’d had a lot of long talks since we’d come here.
She told me how much she’d worried about me over the years. How she had to stay with me because she knew if she let me go out on my own, I’d never come back.
She was right. I would have become Amber.
Only unlike Amber, self-preservation built me to be independent. So I never would have called for help or money. I just wouldn’t have called at all.
I would have distanced myself from her until I was so small there was nothing left of me and her. She knew this. And she loved me enough to keep it from happening.
I used to never be able to say I love you. It was something I was working on in therapy. To say it meant to give someone power over me and
the ability to hurt me.
But I could say, with my whole heart, that I loved Maddy. She was one of the great loves of my life. And the thought that I would have given that up because of what Amber made me was a cautionary tale that I would never let myself forget.
I hoped Maddy moved in with Doug when she was ready—that she knew I was ready to have a normal life now and it was okay to let me go a little because I wouldn’t disappear when she did. I would never get that small again. I might fall back on old coping mechanisms from time to time. I would always have to work on it. The urge to isolate would always pop up when I got scared or stressed or hurt by someone. But I had the skills now and I knew what to do when I felt myself shrinking.
I’d done three months of CBT and I had a talk therapist I really liked who specialized in trauma. She had me do a once-a-week drive down to Rochester to meet her for EMDR treatments for my complex PTSD— another thing I hadn’t known I’d been dealing with but made sense to me once I was diagnosed. I’d talked to Doug, who also dealt with it, and he’d said EMDR really helped him. So I’d tried it and it did help, tremendously. A few weeks into therapy I asked Daniel to put my luggage in the attic. I didn’t want it under the bed ever again.
I felt stable for the first time in my life. Steady. Like I could stay somewhere, be someone who people got to know and depend on. I was capable of that now. It didn’t scare me.
Well, it did. A little. But I was still ready for it. And that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t come to Wakan. Maddy had been right about that, like she was right about most things.
It was weird, but I’d gotten to know this place through my mother in little flashes my whole life. There had always been tiny pieces of Wakan in Amber. And it made sense. Daniel and Amber had been raised by the same people. I learned why Mom was so crafty. Grandpa had been a woodworker like Daniel, and Grandma was a seamstress. The whole family gardened, something Mom passed on to me. The little sayings she had, Daniel would say too. All of the good parts of Mom that I’d lost when I let her go weren’t totally gone. A lot of the best of her was here. Wakan was an untarnished version of her. And I was glad Daniel bought Grant House. Mom would have ruined it. She wouldn’t have cared what happened to it, the same way
she didn’t care what happened to me.
There were a few times over the last six months that my phone rang from a number I didn’t know. For the first time in my life, I let it go to voicemail.
I was at peace with my decision to have no contact with my mom. I felt free in a way. I no longer worried where she was, or if she was okay. She wasn’t my burden anymore and I hadn’t even realized how heavy she’d been for me to carry because I’d done it for so long. I finally set her down. And that started with me forgiving her.
I chose to believe that she didn’t want to be the villain in my life—even if she was. I didn’t lose my beautiful empathy, as Maddy called it once. I still believed what I always had, that people are complex and nothing is black and white. I believed that now more than ever.
I knew from talking to my cousins and my aunts and my brother that Amber had shown warning signs of who she would become since she was a teenager. Manic and depressive episodes, acting out, drinking at thirteen, probably to self-medicate whatever she was dealing with. Maybe they hadn’t known how to help her. No internet back then, and therapy was stigmatized. Maybe in this little town with no mental health services, they legitimately couldn’t help her. Her mental state made her vulnerable. More prone to risky behavior and trauma inflicted because of it.
Cracks.
A baby at fifteen that she had to give up.
Cracks.
Tumultuous relationships with her parents and siblings—cracks. One leading to the next and she never learned to fill them. She just tried to outrun them, and Maddy was right. You can’t outrun yourself.
Being here, I understood her now, probably better than I ever had. And at the end, I just felt sorry for her.
Alexis was still at the computer when I grabbed my jacket. “You’re cutting out early, right?” Alexis said, looking at her watch.
“Yeah,” I said, putting on my coat. “I have an appointment. I’ll see you at home later.”
“Drive safe.”
I zipped up my jacket and walked out to my car in the blustery March air. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going today. Not even Maddy.
I was going to see Justin—and he didn’t know that either.
I had a voicemail from him. He’d left it the day before we broke up.
“Hey, where are you? Why’d you leave? Call me.”
I played it a lot just to hear his voice.
I wondered for a long time if he still wanted to know where I was. I wondered if he still wanted me to call. Because I wanted to.
I’d wanted to pick up the phone so many times. I missed him so much. But I didn’t feel ready and I didn’t want to give him false hope that I ever would be, or keep him from moving on. I had been small, dealing with everything that had happened and all the emotional fallout and trying to focus on my mental health and getting to know my family.
But I wasn’t small anymore.
I told myself that if I could do the work, make strides in therapy, stay here for six months, be still in one place for the first time in my adult life, that I’d be ready enough to reach out to him and see if there was anything left of us—and I did it. Today was the six-month anniversary of my coming to Wakan. I’d been watching the date approach for weeks and it was finally here.
I timed the drive to his house so I’d get there while the kids were in school, after his stand-up meeting and with a few hours until anyone came home—assuming he’d want me to stay that long. I was going to meet him where he was for once. And I was terrified.
Nobody in this world still possessed the ability to break me like Justin did. Justin looking me in the eye and telling me he didn’t love me anymore or didn’t think I was someone he wanted around his family would destroy me. It would be worse than Mom. It was taking everything in me to be that brave and that vulnerable just to show up.
I didn’t know where he was with his life. Maybe he’d moved on.
I never saw anything in Sarah’s Snap stories that made me think he had a girlfriend—at least nobody serious enough to bring around the kids. But he might be dating. That was a very real possibility. Someone else’s fingers tangled in his thick hair. Him laughing with his head on their pillow.
Forehead kisses.
This was somehow the worst image of all, him pressing his lips to someone else’s head.
But even if that was the news I’d get when I got there, it was still worth
trying, because I wanted to go home.
Grant House was where I lived, but it wasn’t home. Justin was home.
The kids were home.
Justin was right. Home wasn’t a place, it was a person. For me it was a whole family.
I wanted to hold Chelsea. I wanted to help Sarah and Alex grow up. I wanted to wake up next to Justin and plant things in his yard, stay in one place and let things take root. Make traditions. Have birthdays and Christmases with these people, even though they weren’t mine. I was strong enough for that now, if he’d let me. For the first time in my life, I was capable of love—and the loss that came with it. I could handle it now. I’d healed enough for it.
So I got in my car and I started the journey back to him.
Toilet King billboards peppered the whole drive to his house like highway markers, letting me know I was headed in the right direction. I was less than half an hour away when out of nowhere, like I’d somehow gotten a signal on my phone that I hadn’t gotten in the past six months, Sarah called.
I stared at the caller ID for a solid ten seconds before I hit the answer button. “Sarah?”
“Can you come get me?”
I wrinkled my forehead. “Come get you? From where?” “School.”
“Are you sick? Where’s Justin?”
“I don’t want him. The nurse says you’re still on the emergency contact list, you can come pick me up, they’ll let me go with you. Just come.”
“You’re going to need to give me a little more information than this,” I said.
“I got my period, okay?”
Ahhhhhh…
“I’m not telling my brother to help me get pads. And I’m not calling Leigh. She’ll throw me a period party. I’d rather die.”
I laughed a little. Yes, Leigh would definitely do that.
I was close. I could be there in twenty minutes. But then the nervousness sank in.
For some reason seeing Sarah felt as hard as seeing Justin.
Harder.
I didn’t just break up with Justin when I left. I broke up with all of them.
Alex would forgive me. He went with the flow and he’d probably be fine with whatever Justin decided. Chelsea was too small to know or hold a grudge. But Sarah… she would tell me exactly what she thought of me for leaving, and she wouldn’t sugarcoat it. She probably wouldn’t sugarcoat what Justin had been up to over the last six months either. Especially if it involved someone else. Just because she called me for help didn’t mean Sarah wanted me back in their lives. She didn’t forgive easily. She was hard on people and she didn’t forget. It would be a tough conversation and I didn’t have the bandwidth for it.
It took everything I had just to come and see him.
Also he wouldn’t be alone now like I’d planned, we wouldn’t have the privacy I’d hoped for if Sarah was there.
For a split second I thought of telling her I couldn’t do it, to call her brother to pick her up and I’d try this talk with him another day. Turning around and going back to Wakan.
But I also remembered what it was like to get my first period without a mother to help me.
I’d been alone, I didn’t know what to do. My cramps had me doubled over and I’d bled on my clothes. I didn’t want Sarah to have any of the small traumas I’d been forced to endure because of an absentee mom. So I made my decision.
“I can be there in twenty minutes.”
I came and I felt like an imposter when I signed her out of school. An adult she trusted enough to call in an emergency, but one who hadn’t been here in half a year and had to answer for it.
“Does Justin know where you are?” I asked her as we came out to the parking lot.
“No.”
“Okay, well we need to tell him. Text him right now.”
“He’s not gonna get a phone call or something telling him I’m gone. I’ll just tell him when I get home, it’s already embarrassing enough.”
I opened the door on the driver’s side and stood there to talk to her over the roof. “Sarah, I don’t feel good about taking you from school unless your guardian knows I’m doing it.”
She opened the passenger side and threw her backpack into the back seat. Then she leveled her eyes on me with the most annoyed teenager glare I’d ever seen. “He’s not gonna care. It’s you.”
She got in and slammed the door.
I sighed. She was probably right, he wouldn’t care. If he cared, he would have taken my name off the emergency contact list. Still.
I got in and started the car. There was no point in arguing with her. She wouldn’t budge and I wouldn’t be the one to text him. Six months of no contact and my first message to him was “hi, your sister got her period”? No.
I’d just explain it to him when I got there. And then I’d search every inch of his face looking for any sign that he didn’t hate me.
I got Sarah her supplies. Then I took her to Culver’s for burgers. I walked her through how to use everything while we ate in the parking lot in the front seat.
“Take this.” I handed her two Motrin. “Take one to two every six hours starting the minute you get your period. You have to stay ahead of the pain, okay? It’s harder to make the cramps stop once they start.”
She took the pills with her Sprite.
“Hot baths help. You can also use a heating pad. And tell Justin he needs to wash anything with blood on cold, okay?”
“Justin doesn’t do my laundry anymore. I do it,” she said. I looked at her, surprised. “Really? Since when?”
She shrugged. “A while. He taught me and Alex how to do it. We do a lot of stuff now.”
The corners of my lips twitched up. “Like what?” “I cook.”
“You cook?”
“Yeah. With Justin.” “What else?” I asked.
She bit the tip off a fry. “We have a chore chart. Oh, and Alex drives.
He’s got the van.” She wrinkled her nose.
I laughed a little. “And you? How have you been?”
She shrugged. “Pretty good. I won my dance competition. I painted my room. Taught Brad to roll over and shake.”
“He never changed the name, huh?”
“Nope.”
No, he wouldn’t. And Human Brad probably still sent him every Toilet King thing he could get his hands on.
She went on about all the changes since I left. New traditions on holidays and funny stories about the other kids and plans they’d made for spring break.
I smiled softly.
I was so proud of them. They were okay—not that I thought they wouldn’t be. But I think they really were okay.
They’d figured it out. Come together as a family, found normalcy and joy in the aftermath of everything they went through and everything, and everyone, that they’d lost. And Sarah had a maturity about her now that she didn’t have before. And not the kind that comes from growing up too fast in the midst of trauma. The kind that comes from healthy parenting and coming of age. It made me happy.
It made me feel like I’d done the right thing leaving when I did. Because I would have done nothing but undo any progress they made when I would have inevitably left.
“Me and Justin made Mom’s cookies,” she said. “They came out good.
He said you would have really liked them.”
The sudden mention of him mentioning me made my heart flip.
I’d missed so much. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, his birthday, the kids’ birthdays. They had to hate me. How could they not?
“We miss you, you know,” she said.
The words caught me by surprise and I looked over at her. “You do?”
She talked to the burger in her lap. “Everybody was like, really sad when you left.”
I swallowed. “They were?”
“Yeah. Like, I know you’re not, but it kind of felt like you were my big sister or something. You were our family.” She looked at me.
I studied her. “I felt like that too. I didn’t want to have to leave,” I said. “Then why did you?” she asked.
I turned away from her.
“Sometimes you leave because it’s better to deal with your problems on your own.”
“Did you?”
I came back to her. “Yeah. I did. And I’m really sorry if my leaving hurt you. The last thing I wanted was for you to feel abandoned. I know what that’s like.”
“I didn’t feel abandoned,” she said, looking me in the eye. “’Cause I knew if I ever called you, you’d come.”
She said it so matter-of-factly. And it was funny, because the second she said it, I realized she was right. I would have.
Anytime over the last six months, I would have been there if she’d reached out.
I wasn’t like Amber.
Even small, I was better than she was. And then she did call and I did come.
I’d passed a test I didn’t even know I’d been taking.
“When we get home, you should come inside,” she said. “I bet he’d want to see you.”
I had to muscle the lump down in my throat. “Okay,” I whispered. “I’ll do that.”
I just hoped she was right.
