Anyway, that argument happened before her mother knew she was sick. After her diagnosis, she turned up the volume on her wish/hope/demand that Lorna reconcile her regrets for the sake of peace. “Think of it this way,” she said as she refilled aglass of wine that Lorna was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to be drinking with all the medicine she was taking. “If you could let go of the things you can’t change, maybe you wouldn’t be so angry anymore. You’d be able to move on from the hand that life dealt you. You need to do it before it’s too late, Lolo.”
Lorna had been incredulous. “It’s already too late, Mom.” She’d had enough of Kristen. What she could not understand was why her mother hadn’t.
Her mother doggedly continued her nonsensical argument until the day she died. Lorna had ignored it then, and she kept on ignoring it after her mother was gone. And after Kristen moved to Florida. She would have forgotten it all had it not been for the matter of her grandmother’s house. With the house soon up for sale, she needed whatever money was in her mother’s trust.
She remembered a Sunday afternoon in the garage apartment they’d lived in behind Peggy Shane’s house. Her mother was lying on a single bed, her face etched with pain. Most of her hair was gone, and what remained had turned stark white from the chemo and the stress. She was so thin, she looked like a living skeleton.
A breeze coming through the open windows kept the apartment comfortable, but her mother was covered with a thick blanket. Lorna had been infuriated with Kristen that afternoon. She was supposed to have been there with Mom, but as usual, she wasn’t.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to remember a time she hadn’t been angry with Kristen.
“Oh, Lorna, I worry about you so,” her mother had croaked after Lorna unleashed her opinion of Kristen skipping out on her one responsibility.
“Don’t worry about me, Mom. I’m fine,” Lorna snapped. Butshe’d regretted her tone instantly. It wasn’t her mother’s fault that Kristen had bailed on caretaking responsibilities, disappearing into thin air without telling anyone. Kristen didn’t have a job, but Lorna did. Kristen didn’t have to pay rent, but Lorna did.
Her anger wasn’t really directed at her mother, but where else would she vent her frustration? Even when she caught herself, when she knew she was being unfair to her ailing mother, it came bubbling out because she didn’t have the strength to contain it. Fury seemed to ooze from every pore.
“Well, you don’t look fine to me,” her mother said hoarsely. “You hold so much regret and guilt, Lolo. It’s not good for you.”
Regret? Guilt? What she was holding on to was fury. At her mother for dying, at Kristen for leaving her to deal with her mother’s death on her own. At the world in general for always dumping on her.
“I wish you would consider joining Al-Anon. It’s made such a huge difference for me. If you’d just address your issues—”
“Stop,” Lorna said.
“I’m trying to help you.”
Lorna’s pulse was pounding, her head on the verge of exploding. “Stop, Mom.”
“You don’t need to live with guilt. You can free yourself of it.”
“Stop!” Lorna cried. “I don’t need to free myself from anything. You’re the one dying—not me.” The moment those words flew out of her mouth, she tried to claw them back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Her mother, who once would have used that remark as a jumping-off point for a massive argument, smiled weakly. “Well, you’re not wrong about that, Lolo. So maybe give me the benefit of my deathbed insight, will you?”
Lorna had not given her mother the benefit of that insight.She’d grown impossibly angrier and said things she truly, deeply regretted. So much so that now she was choking with regret. Her mother had been right about that, at least.
She could hardly bear thinking of her mother’s last few weeks on this earth. Every memory felt like a gut punch. She missed her terribly.
She even missed Kristen, although she was hard-pressed to say why.
Lorna looked at the stack of unsent letters to Kristen and the unopened ones from her stepmother. She looked around at her apartment. This was the space where Nana helped her and Kristen make Christmas ornaments. They would sit around the coffee table with their yarn and glitter and felt and construction paper, listening to Nana tell stories about when she was a girl while they made snowflakes and Santas and stars. This was the space where they created dance routines or, on the hottest days of summer, read their books under an enormous ceiling fan. This was where Lorna had lived her happiest life. Nana made meals for them—full meals, never microwaved. She helped them wash their hair, and at bedtime she would hug them tight and tell them she loved them to the moon and back.
Mr. Contreras had chopped up all those memories. Now she was isolated in this space, her inability to trust anyone a thick coat of armor keeping her away from people and from life.
Keeping her lonely.
She stared down at the file. She couldn’t open it. She knew what was contained in those pages by heart; she’d practically written the thing herself that night she’d let out all her frustration and disappointment with her family on her dying mother.
She mentally flipped through her catalog of intact memories, and even those that were fractured confirmed what she alwaysknew. Everything—the good and the bad—had always started and ended with Kristen.
The truth, which Lorna was very good at ignoring, was that she was terribly tired of being herself. She was exhausted from being so angry and distrustful. She wanted friends. She wanted to go for drinks and get invited to parties and know how to have casual conversations. She wanted camaraderie with her coworkers and to laugh and go on vacations. She wanted men like Seth not only to smile at her but tolikeher. She did not want to be called King Kong. She wanted to be called Lolo.
Micah had urged her to open herself to the process. She was afraid of his process, because she had the feeling he meant to open the door to her bomb shelter. She was afraid of what she might say or do, things she could never take back. How much more of her could she risk? It felt like there was hardly anything left of her as it was.
Without looking at the papers inside, she took the file back to her dresser, opened the bottom drawer, and put it away.
She didn’t know where to go from here. She was usually so practical, so set in her decisions about how to move forward. But tonight she felt like she was tumbling through space, thrown for a loop.
