I was ashamed, but talking with Ben helped me realize that I had no control over what Lee Marlow wrote. That it wasn’t my fault.
I couldn’t shoulder every burden, and especially not his.
“Mom?” She stopped on the porch, and turned back to me with a raised black eyebrow. I took a deep breath. “I have something I have to tell you. Before—before you find out from someone else.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“No!” I quickly replied, repelled. “No—no absolutelynot.”
She breathed out a sigh. “Thankgod. I don’t think I could bury my husband and welcome a grandchild all at once. My range of emotions is not that flexible.”
“Mine neither,” I said with a laugh. I motioned to one of the rocking chairs on the front porch, and she sat in one, and I in the other. “I... remember that man I dated? Lee Marlow?”
“The asshole who kicked you out onto the street?”
I hesitated. “There’s more to it than that.”
And then I took a deep breath—and I told her. About Lee Marlow, and the stories I told him about our family. I told her about his book deal, and how I found out, and the last conversation we had before I found myself outside in the rain. It had been my choice to walk out. My choice to leave.
But really, what was the other option?Staying?
“I think what’s worse,” I said finally, “is that Marlow wrote Dad wrong. He wasn’t weird or cryptic or terrifying. I think that’s the worst part about this entire nightmare—Dad’s immortalized by that asshole, and he did itwrong.”
Mom crossed one leg over the other, and took out a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket. “Fuck him,” she quipped.
“Mom!”
“No, truly,” Mom repeated, lighting her cigarette. “Fuck that son of a bitch for twisting every good memory you told him into some derangedTwilight Zone.We aren’t a gothic horror novel. We’re a love story.”
I... never thought of myself, my story, my life, as anything more than a boring book shelved in a boring library in a boring town. But the more I thought about my family, about the summers I and my siblings ran around in the sprinklers, and played hide-and-seek in the cemetery, and the Halloweens Mom dressed as Elvira and Dad hid in a coffin and popped out to scare every poor kid who came trick-or-treating, and the years Alice and I played dress-up with the vintage clothes we found in the attic, and the summers collecting animal bones, and lighting candles formidnight waltzes through the parlors, and sitting so quietly in the kitchen with Dad to listen to the wind sing—
There was nothing but love in those memories.
We might’ve been a family in black, but our lives were filled with light and hope and joy. And that was something that Lee Marlow never understood, never wrote in his cold, technical prose.
It was a kind of magic, a kind of love story, I didn’t think he’d ever understand.
From the oak tree in our yard, a crow cawed in the branches, and a few of his friends echoed. My chest tightened.
Ben.
“And someday,” Mom added surely, as certain as sunrises and spring thunderstorms and wind through creaky old funeral homes, “I know you’ll write our story the way it was meant to be told.”
“I—I don’t think I could—”
“Of course you can,” she replied. “It might not be in one book. It might be in five or ten. It might be little bits of all of us scattered throughout your stories. But I know you’ll write us, however messy we are, and it’ll be good.”
“You have a lot more faith in me than I have in myself.”
Mom tapped me gently on the nose and smiled. “That’s how I know I’m a good mother. Now, these old bones need some rest,” she sighed, and stood. She kissed me on the forehead. In the porch light, she looked older than she ever had. Weighed down by sadness—but held together, still, by hope. “I’ll see you at the Waffle House in the morning. Sweet dreams, dearest.”
Then she went into the house, and closed the door behind her.
I sat there for a while longer as the wind began to howl through the trees as the storm grew closer. A flash of lightning streaked across the sky.
In my memories, I could see Dad sitting on the steps of thehouse, smoking a stinking cigar as he watched the storm roll in, a beer in one hand and a smile on his face, Mom leaning her head against his shoulder, a glass of merlot in her hand, her eyes closed as she listened to the rumble of thunder.
“There’s nothing like the sound of the sky rattling your bones, you know?” he once told me when I asked why he loved thunderstorms so much. “Makes you feel alive. Reminds you that there’s more to you than just skin and blood, but bones underneath. Stronger stuff. Just listen to that sky sing, buttercup.”