Crazy Love You (11 page)

I still couldn't meet her eyes. She was too sweet, too earnest. I didn't deserve her. Instead, I looked out the window at the platform. A woman was rushing for the train. A homeless guy slept on the bench, covered with sheets of newspaper. A little girl stared at me with a curious tilt of her head while her mother chatted on her cell phone.

“Thank you for doing this,” I said, finally turning back to her. I don't know how much time had passed since she'd spoken. But she was okay with me being awkward and reticent. I never had to talk with Megan. She seemed to understand me without words.

“I want to help you take care of her,” she said.

“I'm not doing a very good job,” I admitted. “I don't go see her as often as I should.”

“I think you're doing what you can. Let me help you do a better job,” she said.

And I agreed because it was a relief to have Megan in my life. And there had been no one to share this with, not since my father died. Even when he realized that my mother would never get better, that he couldn't fix the thing that had broken inside of her, he didn't turn away from her. But he wasn't a man who could handle the idea that some things stay broken and you have to carry the pieces around and forget that you ever thought they might be mended. After he was gone, I carried them alone, even though I wasn't any better at it than he had been.

And so we took the train up north, and got a cab from the station, and I took Megan to the place where I grew up: The Hollows. As we pulled through town, and out onto the rural road that led to my childhood home, I waited for her to be horrified, for her to ask me to take her back to the train station.

I was prepared to never see her again after she knew what I came from. How could someone who came from such a good, clean life want someone who came from so much ugliness and misery?

But all she said was, “It's so beautiful up here. So peaceful.”

She was looking at the sky and the trees, and the quaint little town center that had been gentrified and grown wealthy in recent years. People had moved from the city, bringing with them a taste for fine restaurants and money to shop at trendy boutiques. And it was actually kind of a nice place to live now. That is, if you liked living in the middle of fucking nowhere, where the woods were haunted and people went missing, died mysteriously, or killed their own babies with, what seemed to me, unusual frequency.

But anyway, as far as “pretty” goes—okay. I guess there was a kind of prettiness to The Hollows. That's what Megan seemed to see when we pulled up that long drive to my old house. It was mine now; my father put it in my name before he died.

“We could do something with this someday,” she said. The cab was pulling away and I felt that constriction of my airways that I always felt when I returned home. “If we get tired of the city.”

“Meg,” I said. I put my hands on her shoulders and looked her dead in the eye. “Hear this. We are never living here. This place is a hell mouth.”

She leaned in to give me a chaste little kiss, a patient smile. “Come on. It's not that bad.”

Could she hear them, I wondered, the Whispers?
I
could hear them all around me. But no, she was glamoured by the towering pines and the swaying sycamores, by the larks and the squirrels and the big fluttering monarch butterflies. She would hear them, though, if we stayed for any length of time. She was sensitive and open. Eventually, she would sense the darkness here. But I wasn't going to allow that to happen.

“If you don't like the house, we could tear it down,” she said. Yes, she was the child of privilege. If you don't like something, break it apart, build something all new. Poor people accept their lives, work with what they have, understand implicitly that some things cannot be changed. But the rich think they can bend the world, the very universe, to their will. I wonder who's right.

“We could build any kind of house we wanted here.” She looked dreamy. Had she not heard me? Did she think I was joking? “It could be a retreat, a place to write.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. I didn't want a full-blown confrontation. “Someday.”

Like never.

It was strange watching her walk through those rooms, over the worn shag carpet, past the white refrigerator, up the shallow stairs. She moved into the room I'd inhabited as a kid. No doubt she expected it to be preserved as was her bedroom at Binky and Julia's. Her old room had not been converted into a guest room, or a work space, or a place for the treadmill. It was a living shrine to an adored only child. It looked like a teenage Megan could happily return at any moment and bounce onto her pink cloud bed and lounge among her debate-team trophies, and framed artwork, and dolls and stuffed animals and pictures of her friends. You could almost hear her chatting on the phone, getting ready for prom, crying when she broke up with her first boyfriend.

My dad had kept the twin bed in my old room, the plaid comforter. But all my old stuff—books and toys and games, sketches, models—was boxed up in the basement. He had put a desk in my room, used it as a place to pay bills and whatever else. He wasn't a sentimental guy. He didn't like the comics I wrote. I am not sure he ever bought one. There weren't any of them on the bare shelves, no pictures of me, of our family even before everything.

“Was this your room?” Megan asked. She sat on the bed.

“Yeah,” I said. I was embarrassed by my old bedroom suddenly. Felt the urge to make excuses for my dad. But in the end, like usual, I didn't say anything.

“Hmm,” she said. She kept her cheerful demeanor, but I could see she was disappointed by the room's sparseness. She wanted to know who I was as a kid. “It's a good size.”

Out in the garage, we got in the rumbling old Scout, took it into town, and filled it up with gas. I recognized the attendant immediately as my high school's former star jock, homecoming king, all-around-most-likely-to-succeed fuckhead who had made my life a living hell: Mikey Beech.

He didn't recognize me, or if he did, he hid it well. He looked like shit, I was happy to note. He'd packed on a good fifty pounds and was carrying it all in his face and his gut. And—P.S.—he was pumping gas for a living at thirty-something. Most likely to succeed at being a loser, looked like. He still had arms like sledgehammers, though.

Meg went into the little shop to get herself a bottle of water and to scan the paltry aisles for some kind of dairy-free, gluten-free, organic snack. And I stayed in the driver's seat, letting the homecoming king pump my gas and squeegee my windows.

“Check your oil?”

“Why not?” I said.

I saw the recognition flash across his face just as Megan climbed back into the car with a bottle of water and a package of nuts. She held up her purchases and I felt the heat of Mikey's gaze.

“Local,” she informed me with a note of triumph.

“Awesome,” I said. She hefted the door closed and it shut with a heavy thud.

“This old Scout held up okay,” Mikey said. He leaned his big hands on the door.

“Sure did,” I said.

I didn't look at him, swallowing back the tightness in my throat that always preceded a conflict of any kind.
What a pussy!
I could hear them all laughing. The sting of it endured more than any physical injury I'd ever suffered.
Sticks and stones can break your bones but words can break your heart.
My mother had said that to me once. I know, very helpful. It stayed with me.

But Mikey Beech didn't say anything more, just gave me the bill and I paid cash and gave him a flashy tip. His eyes bored into my neck.

“Keep the change,” I said without looking at him.

“Have a good one.” He gave the hood a friendly pat.

But he said something as I pulled away. It was low and under his breath, like a growl. I didn't hear it, didn't want to hear it. In the rearview mirror I saw the nasty, taunting bully I knew him to be. His face was twisted in an ugly grimace.

“People are so nice here,” said Megan.

“Yeah,” I said. “Real nice. For a bunch of rednecks.”

She snorted, gave me a little nudge. “Don't be such a New Yorker.”

•  •  •

I found it funny and a little sad that my mother had clearly tried to pull herself together for Megan. She had put on a dress I sent her three years ago. It hung off her thin frame, looking like a muumuu even though I think it was a size six or something. She had also tried to apply a little bit of blush and lipstick. She looked like a doll in a horror movie, broken and frightening, even though she was smiling when we entered the dayroom.

I'd offered to take her out to lunch, more because I didn't want to shock Megan with the full misery of my mother's situation. But my mother refused to leave the hospital and Megan said it was fine. She didn't want there to be any secrets between us, things about our lives that we hid from each other. We both knew we were going to be together forever. I hadn't actually popped the question yet, but I had my plan in place.

We ate sandwiches in the hospital cafeteria. And, in spite of my mother's frighteningly bad application of makeup, she and Meg seemed to hit it off. They were gentle with each other, kind and soft-spoken. But they were both that way anyway, so I guess it shouldn't have come as any surprise.

“Ian tells me you're a writer,” my mom said. She was just nibbling at the chicken salad sandwich that sat in front of her. Megan and I were both almost done with our meals, but Mom had barely eaten. She hardly consumed enough to keep herself alive. I wondered if this was one of the ways she punished herself, or maybe it was just that the food was total shit here.

“Well,” said Megan, “I'm working on a novel, that's true. But right now I'm a nanny to a four-year-old boy named Toby.”

“Oh, that's such a nice age,” said my mother. She touched but didn't pick up her sandwich and I noticed how dry and red the skin on her hands was, how her nails were bitten to the quick. “I remember when Ian was four. Everything is so magical—Christmas, Easter. They still believe in all the wonderful things.”

“That's so true,” Megan said. “Toby asked me the other day about fairies. And I thought if I told him that they were real, that they played in the park and lived in the trees, he'd believe me. I envy that, that willingness to believe in magic.”

“We lose it,” my mother said. She looked out the window with something wistful on her face. “We have to let that go.”

“I know,” said Meg. “Luckily there's plenty of real magic—like love, music, poetry. There are stars that are light-years away, stars that died a millennium ago and yet they're still sparkling in our night sky. There's springtime and the birth of children. Those things are magical, too.”

My mother smiled at that; it was bright and sudden and took me by surprise. I hadn't made my mom smile like that in years. Her smiles at me were always heavy with sorrow and regret.

“You're right,” she said. And I could see that Megan had given her something, a positive thought to cling to in dark hours. It might have been more than anyone had given her in a long time, even me. My mother and I were so wrapped up in each other, in our terrible past, that we hardly gave each other anything except bad memories, and a sad, tattered kind of love.

They chatted on about ordinary things, like Megan's college days, and my mom's dreams of becoming a journalist. I kind of zoned out a bit, checked my e-mail on my iPhone, looked at my Facebook page. I heard my mom say, “Don't put that novel off too long. You'll never have more time than you have right now.”

“My mom always tells me that,” Megan said.

It was so strange, seeing these two women I loved, so different, from such totally different phases of my life. One all dark, one light. And yet they fit together, yin and yang. I guess I was happy. I also wanted to leave, take Megan away from here, from my mother. I didn't want anything from my past to leak into my future. I kept seeing a rusted barrel with toxic waste eating through the metal, breaking it down from the inside, starting to drip out in a noxious lime-green ooze.

In the truck on the way back to the house, Megan cried.

“She seems so fragile,” she said. I pulled over because it wasn't just a few little tears and sniffles. She was sobbing. “But she must be so strong inside. I can't imagine living with it—the pain, the guilt.”

“It wasn't her,” I said. I know; I said that already. But I thought it should be repeated—because people don't seem to get it when I say it. My mother seemed like another person altogether during that time. Herself, but not at all herself—as if someone else was living in her body and looking out through her eyes. “It was the person she is when she's not well. I think she disassociates, or something. That's the only way I can explain it. And she has never put herself back together, not really. She couldn't live on her own, I don't think.”

Megan dug some tissues out of her purse, wiped at her nose and eyes.

“If we fixed up the house, we could spend some time here,” she said. She looked at me over her tissue. “You could see her more often. Maybe it would help you both.”

There it was, the pull of The Hollows, luring me back. On the sweet lilt of Megan's voice, it almost seemed appealing. I could see the house we'd build, imagine taking my mother out to lunch more than once every few months. That's how it got you; it wove itself into your now, seduced the people who didn't know better. My mother had warned me about this.
Don't let it bring you back here.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

“That's what you say when you mean no,” she said.

I smiled a little inside. Megan already knew me better than anyone had—even Priss. Priss only knew a former version of me. She didn't know the me that I was with Megan. Megan balled up her tissue, started picking it apart. She was pretty even when she cried, a pink flush on her cheeks and the tip of her nose, under her deep brown eyes.