Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

She caught Maureen’s eye and shot her a broken smile. “I guess this isn’t something you could have told me over the phone, huh? No. I get it, I do.”

She stood and Maureen came out of her own chair and Jeremy took two quick steps toward her. She realized they thought she might faint.

“I’m okay.” She found herself looking at the ceiling, noting that it was copper, of all things. “I’m just really...” She searched for the right word. “Sad?” She answered her own question with a nod. “That’s it. Sad. Tired too. You know? Been a long hunt. I’m going to go.”

“No,” Jeremy said. “No.”

“Please,” Maureen said. “Don’t go. We made up the guest room. Be our guest tonight. Take a nap. Stay. Rachel, please.”

She slept. She never would have thought it possible with all the shame. Shame in knowing how much they pitied her. That they’d avoided this conversation for as long as they had because they hadn’t wanted to reduce her to what she was now: an orphan. She could hear a distant tractor as she closed her eyes and the sound chugged through dreams she couldn’t remember. When she opened her eyes ninety minutes later she felt, if anything, even more exhausted. She went to the window and parted the heavy curtains and looked out on the Jameses’ backyard and the backyard that abutted it, that one strewn with children’s toys, a short slide of hard plastic, a pink-and-black buggy. Beyond the yard sat a small Cape with a pale slate roof, and beyond that farmland. The tractor she’d heard sat idle in a field.

She’d thought she’d known what it was to feel alone but she hadn’t. She’d had an illusion to keep her company, a belief in a false god. A mythical father. When she saw him again, she’d been telling herself in one way or another since she was three years old, she’d feel whole, if nothing else. But now she had seen him again, and he was no more connected to her than the tractor.

She came down the stairs and they were waiting for her in the small parlor at the bottom. Rachel stopped in the doorway and noted the pity in their eyes again. She felt like an emotional beggar, going from door to door her whole life, asking perfect strangers to feed her. Fill her. Fill her again.

I’m a bottomless vessel. Fill me up .

She met Jeremy’s gaze and it occurred to her that maybe it wasn’t pity she saw there but his own shame.

“I get that we weren’t blood,” she said.

“Rachel,” Maureen said, “come in.”

“But that made it okay for you to leave me?”

“I didn’t want to leave you.” He held out his hands. “Not you. Not my Rachel.”

She entered the room. She stood behind the chair they’d placed across from the sofa where they both sat.

He lowered his hands. “But once she’d decided I was the enemy — and she decided that the first day I showed any doubt about going along with her fantasy of who impregnated her — there was no quarter.”

She took the seat.

“You know your mother better than anyone, Rachel. So I’m sure you were well acquainted with her rage. Once it found a target to focus on or a cause in which to channel itself? There was no stopping it. Certainly no speaking truth to it. And once I got a blood test, I transformed from an enemy to a cancer in the body of that house. And she went after me with single-minded” — he searched for the word — “madness. She was either going to bring me fully to heel or she was going to expel me.”

“Expunge you.”

He blinked. “What did you say?”

“She screamed it at you that last night — I will expunge you .”

Jeremy and Maureen exchanged startled looks.

“You remember that?”

Rachel nodded. She poured herself a glass of water from the pitcher on the coffee table between them. “And that’s what she did. If she’d expelled you, Jeremy, that would have worked out okay for both of us, I think. But when she expunged you, you were erased. The dead have names and grave markers. The expunged never existed.”

She sipped her water and looked around the parlor at its books and pictures and the record player and LPs just where she’d predicted they would be. She noted the hand-knitted throws and the place where the love seat buckled on the ridgeline and the various scrapes in the hardwood floor and the scuff marks in the wainscoting and the slightly cluttered nature of it all. She thought how nice it must have been to grow up here, to have been the children of Jeremy and Maureen. She lowered her head and closed her eyes and in the darkness she saw her mother and the playground with the low clouds and the wet swings where Jeremy had taken her as a small child. She saw the house on Westbrook Road with its piles of sodden leaves the morning after he’d left. Then she saw an alt-life in which he hadn’t left and Jeremy James was her father in all but blood and he raised her and counseled her and coached her middle-school soccer team. And in that alt-life, her mother wasn’t a woman consumed by a thirst to bend all the people in her life to fit her own fucked-up narrative of that life but was instead the person she was in her writing and her teaching — objective, rational, self-deprecating, capable of a love that was simple and direct and mature.

But that’s not what she and Jeremy got. They got a conflicted, aggressive, toxic mess of outsize intelligence, outsize anxiety, and outsize rage. And all of it bound up in an outwardly competent, cool, and calm Nordic exterior.

“I will expunge you.”

You expunged him, Mother. And in the process you expunged me and yourself out of the family we could have been, we so easily and joyfully could have been . If you’d just gotten out of your own fucking way, you horrible demon bitch.

She raised her head and pushed the hair out of her eyes. Maureen was there with a box of tissues as Rachel had somehow known she would be. What was that kind of attentiveness called? Oh, right. Mothering. So that’s what it looked like.

Jeremy had moved to the floor in front of her, sat looking up with his hands clasped around his knees and his face lit with kindness and regret.

“Maureen,” he said, “could I speak to Rachel alone for a minute?”

“Of course, of course.” Maureen returned the box of tissues to a credenza, then changed her mind, brought it back and placed it on the coffee table. She refilled Rachel’s glass of water. She fussed with the corner of a throw rug. Then she gave them both a smile that was supposed to be comforting but curdled into something terrified. She left the room.

“When you were two,” Jeremy said, “your mother and I fought pretty much every minute we were in each other’s presence. Do you know what it’s like to fight with someone every day? Someone who claims to dislike conflict but who in fact lives for it?”

Rachel cocked her head at him. “You’re really asking me this?”

He smiled. And then the smile went away. “It scours the soul, damages the heart. You can feel yourself dying. Living with your mother — from the time she’d decided I was the enemy onward, anyway — was to live in a state of perpetual war. I was walking up the driveway after work once, and I threw up. Just puked into the snow covering our lawn. And there was nothing specifically wrong at that particularly moment, but I knew that the second I walked into the house, she’d come at me about something. Could be anything — my tone of voice, the tie I chose that day, something I’d said three weeks earlier, something someone else had said about me, a feeling she had, an intuition she’d received as if by divine providence that something was not right about me, a dream that suggested the same...” He shook his head and let out a small gasp, as if surprised how fresh the memories could be even now, almost thirty years later.