I shrugged, like I was sorry to break it to her. “I’ll never change my mind,” I said. “I know too much.”
“Maybe you don’t know enough.”
Why wouldn’t she just let me go upstairs? I let the irritation in my voice leak out. “Just look around at the world—at the lonely and the cheated on. The violent. The abandoned. I know exactly what people do to each other. I’ve seen enough ruined lives to last forever.”
“None of that is what I’m talking about,” she said. “None of that is love.”
“There’s conquest, and there’s status, and there’s porn. Love is something girls invented so they could feel better about it.”
I’d shocked her. Good. “If that’s what you truly believe,” she said, “then I feel so sad for you.”
“I feel sad for all the women out there dragging their boyfriends to Bed Bath & Beyond and making them shop for throw pillows. They want the fantasy more than they want the truth.”
“What’s the truth?” she challenged.
“The truth is that love doesn’t exist.”
I meant for that moment to be my win—I meant it to convey to her that whatever it was she remembered of me, or expected of me, or wanted from me, it wasn’t happening. We weren’t going to watchIt’s a Wonderful Lifeand be besties. We weren’t going to talk about boys or braid each other’s hair or treat this whole long year like a slumber party. That one fierce statement was meant to settle how things were going to be.
The girl she remembered was gone.
My mother should have nodded, looked down, and given up. But she didn’t. If anything, the words seemed to spark more resistance in her.
She stood up a little straighter and looked me over like she was really seeing me for the first time all day. Then she said, “Sounds like you just threw down a challenge to the universe, lady.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” she said, looking a little triumphant, “that you clearly, obviously, any second now, are just about to fall in love.”
Eight
WAY TOO MUCHconversation. I spent the next two days fiercely avoiding my mother.
No easy feat in a house the size of a shoe box.
I skipped dinner. I went for runs. I made “visual inspections” of the town of Lillian. I did the grocery shopping and picked up a lavender neck pillow for Diana at the pharmacist.
When I did interact with her, helping her on the stairs, say, I kept my interactions short, polite, and action oriented. I would not have another conversation like that with her. I hadn’t come here for therapy, or to have my mind changed—about anything. I’d only come here because I had no choice.
Basically, I was just holding it together until I could start my first shift at work.
I had already timed the drive from Rockport to Lillian, twice, and scouted the station so I’d know how to get there. I’d been to HR downtown to fill out reams of paperwork, get fingerprinted, and pick up my mask, gear, and uniform—both dress and everyday—and makeeverything official. I picked up my brass nameplate and my ID badge with my firefighter/paramedic designation.
Then, the morning of my first day, I set three alarms for four thirty so I’d have no chance of being late.
I followed Captain Harris’s instructions to the letter: no makeup, no jewelry, no cleavage. I even made an attempt at “no boobs” by clamping mine down with a bra that was part spandex, part corset. I put my hair in a low, decidedly unbouncy bun at the back of my neck. Actually, it wasn’t even a bun; it was more like a wad. I just wrapped the ponytail holder as many times around it as it would stretch. Message: I care about my appearance exactly as little as a guy.
I even hesitated on the ChapStick because when I took off the cap, the wax looked slightly pink.
When I left the house at sunrise, Diana was also up, sitting meditation-style out on a bench in the garden, eyes closed, face turned to the breeze riding in from the ocean. She wore a silk kimono, and she had a different eye patch on. This one was red with cherry blossoms. In two days, I’d never once seen her without one.
I opened the back door, but she didn’t hear me.
“I’m heading out,” I called.
She turned and opened that one eye. “At this ungodly hour?”
“You’reup,” I said.
