Sarah Dessen: This Lullaby

I pushed open the front door, then felt it hit against something: another can. They were everywhere, scattered across the foyer as I crossed it, going into the kitchen.

“Mom?” I said, and listened to my voice bounce off the countertops and cabinets, back at me. No response. On the table, I could see the food stacked for our big family dinner: steaks, corn on the cob, most of it still in the plastic bags from the supermarket. Next to them, a stack of mail, with one envelope, addressed to my mother in clean block writing, ripped open.

I moved across the room, stepping over another Ensure, to the doorway of her study. The curtain was hanging down, the old busy-don’t-bother-me sign, but this time I pushed it aside and walked right through.

She was sitting in her chair, in front of the typewriter. Sticking out of it was a copy of the picture I’d thrown at Dexter. It was positioned the same way a sheet of paper would have been right before she rolled it in.

My mother, strangely, seemed very calm. Whatever fury had caused the explosion and scattering of Ensure cans had obviously passed, leaving her sitting there with a stoic expression as she considered Patty’s face, so pouty and posed, staring back at her.

“Mom?” I said again, and then I reached out my hand and put it over hers, carefully. “Are you okay?”

She swallowed, and nodded. I could tell she’d been crying. Her mascara was smeared, black smudgy arcs underneath both her eyes. This, I thought, was the most disturbing thing of all. Even in the worst of circumstances, my mother always looked put together.

“They took it in my own room,” she said. “This picture. On my bed.”

“I know,” I said. She turned her head, looking at me quizzically, and I backtracked, knowing it was best to keep the fact that yet another copy existed to myself. “I mean, that’s the quilt, right? Behind her.”

She turned her gaze back to the snapshot, and for a second we both just looked at it, the only sound that of the refrigerator ice machine cheerfully spitting out a new batch of cubes in the next room. “I missed him,” she said finally.

I put my hand over hers and sat down, pulling my chair closer. “I know,” I said softly. “You came back from Florida feeling really good, and then you find out he’s such a rat bastard that he-”

“No,” she said distractedly, interrupting me. “I missed him. All those Ensures, and not a one made contact. I have terrible aim.” And then she sighed. “Even just one would have made it better. Somehow.”

It took a second for this to sink in. “You threw all those cans?” I asked her.

“I was very upset,” she explained. Then she sniffled, wiping her nose with a Kleenex she was gripping in her other hand. “Oh, Remy. My heart is just breaking.”

Whatever humor I might have been able to see in her pelting Don with empty Ensures-and it was funny, no question-left me as she said this.

She sniffled again, and clenched her fingers around mine, holding on tight. “What now?” she said, waving her Kleenex in a helpless way, the white blurring past my vision. “Where am I supposed to go from here?”

My ulcer, long dormant, rumbled in my stomach, as if answering this call. Here I was, so close to my getaway, and now my mother was adrift again, needing me most. I felt another flash of hate for Don, so selfish, leaving me with a mess to deal with while he slipped away scot-free. I wished I had been here when it all came down, because I did have a good arm. I wouldn’t have missed. Not a chance.

“Well,” I said to her, “first, you should probably call that lawyer. Mr. Jacobs. Or Johnson. Did he take anything with him?”

“Just one bag,” she said, wiping at her eyes again.

I could already feel it happening, the neat click as I shifted into crisis management mode. It wasn’t like it had been that long since Martin left. The path might have grown over a bit, but it was still there. “Okay,” I continued, “so we’ll need to tell him he has to set up a specific time to come back and get everything. He can’t just come whenever he feels like it, and one of us should be here. And we should probably get in touch with the bank, just to be safe, and put a freeze on your joint account. Not that he doesn’t have money of his own, but people do weird stuff in the first few days, right?”

She didn’t answer me, instead just staring out the window at the backyard, where the trees were swaying, just slightly.

“Look, I’ll find that lawyer’s number,” I said, standing up. “He’s probably not in, with it being a Saturday and all, but at least we could leave a message, so he’d get back to you first thing-”

“Remy.”

I stopped, midbreath, and realized she’d turned her head to look at me. “Yes?”

“Oh, honey,” she said quietly. “It’s okay.”

“Mom,” I said. “I know you’re upset, but it’s important that we-”

She reached over for my hand, pulling me back into my chair. “I think,” she said, and then stopped. A breath, and then she said, “I think it’s time I handle this myself.”

“Oh,” I said. Weird, but my first thought was that I was somewhat offended. “I just thought-”

She smiled at me, very weakly, and then patted my hand. “I know,” she said. “But you’ve dealt with enough, don’t you think?”

I just sat there. This was it, what I’d always wanted. The official out, the moment I was finally set free. But it didn’t feel the way I’d thought it would. Instead of a wash of victory, I felt strangely alone, as if everything fell away suddenly, leaving me with only the sound of my own heart beating. It scared me.

It was almost as if she sensed this, saw it on my face. “Remy,” she said softly, “it’s all going to be all right. It’s time you worry about yourself, for a change. I can take it from here.”

“Why now?” I asked her.

“It feels right,” she replied simply. “Don’t you feel it? It just feels… okay.”

Did I feel it? Everything seemed so tangled, all at once. But then in my mind, I saw something. The country, spread out so wide, with my mother and me separated not only by our difference of opinions, but also by miles and miles of space, too far to cross with just a look or a touch. My mother was down, but not out. And she might have denied me some of my childhood, or the childhood I’d thought I deserved, but it wasn’t too late for her to give something in return. An even trade, years for years. Those passed for those to come.

But for now, I scooted closer, until we were touching. Knee to knee, arm to arm, forehead to forehead. I leaned into her for once, instead of away, appreciating the pull I felt there, something almost magnetic that held us to each other. I knew it would always be there, no matter how much of the world I put between us. That strong sense of what we shared, good and bad, that led us to here, where my own story began.

In the hour before Chris and Jennifer Anne were due to show up for dinner, I gathered all the Ensure cans from the front yard and various spots in the house, depositing them with a satisfying clank in the recycling bin. My mother was taking a shower, having insisted we go ahead with our family dinner, despite what had happened. While I was doing my best to adjust to my new hands-off role in this separation, some habits died hard. Or so I told myself as I took down the big naked woman off the kitchen wall, sliding it behind the refrigerator.

After our talk, my mother had filled me in on the gruesome details. Apparently the Patty thing had been going on for a while, since even before my mother and Don met. Patty had been married, and the affair had been a series of breakups and makeups, ultimatums and backsliding, finally ending with Don saying if she wasn’t serious enough to leave her husband, he was moving on. Don’s marrying my mother, however, was a catalyst for her subsequent separation, and while they’d tried to stay apart they couldn’t, in Don’s words, “fight the feeling.” My mother winced as she repeated this phrase: I was sure I winced hearing it. It was Patty who’d sent the picture, fed up with waiting. Don, according to my mother, hadn’t even denied it, instead sighing and walking into the bedroom to pack a bag. This, I felt, said a lot. What kind of car salesman doesn’t at least try to talk his way out of things?