“Excuse me?” she said.
“You think it wasn’t obvious? You were tired of us! Tired of doing all our nuclear family bullshit when you knew there were other lives you could have out there!”
Thelma gasped. It was the only sound that expressed her horror.
“What was the breaking point for you, huh?” He was the one who came closer, backing Thelma farther into the living room and scaring away his daughter’s cat. As Fiddles rushed up the stairs, Thelma held her own against a man who was old, but still much bigger than her. She prayed that Megan would not suddenly come home. Doubtlessly, she would insert herself into this mess, and that was the last thing Thelma wanted her granddaughter to witness.
This is between him and me.Six months of doubt in her mind had been sixty years of resentment in his heart.
“What broke you?” he asked again, close enough for her to smell the beer on his breath. “Was it your girlfriend living an independent woman’s life? Was it Dad? Or…” The dark shadow crossing Robbie’s face didn’t come from the lack of light in the living room. It was his soul, on fire, billowing black smoke from his orifices and threatening to cut off all oxygen between them.
He’ll be the first to fall, but he’s taking me with him.
“Or was it me that broke you?”
Thelma’s eyes fluttered shut as she bore her son’s reality.
Hadn’t she wondered? Since the first moment this man looked at her with such deep, knowing disdain? His wounds had been deep, and the scar tissue cracked over the years. Even if Thelma didn’t know what he had been through after her disappearance, a mother knew when her son saw her as the source of all his guilt.
“Never,” she whispered, her hand shaking as it uncurled from a fist and reached toward him. “Never, pickle.”
He shrugged her off when she touched him, going for his cheek but diverting to his forearm when it was apparent he would rather die on the spot than have this moment acknowledged for a second longer.
“Then why!” That booming anger was louder now that they were closer together, but Thelma was not intimidated. She latched onto Robbie’s arm and attempted to look him right in the eye. “Why else would you leave that night? It was because of me! I was too much! A burden!”
“Robbie!” She was a growth on his limb that was willing to take an elbow to the face if it meant they put an end to this toxic thread that had been woven through the decades of a past Thelma hadn’t witnessed. “How dare you! A little boy isn’t a burden on his mother!”
Those grayish-blue eyes of his father were wide and whirling. The rest of his appearance was somehow older and more fragile than before, but those eyes? They were the same eyes Thelma had beheld the day she disappeared, and the same eyes she gazed into the day she became a mother for the first time.
It was the power of a mother’s love, wasn’t it? No matter the face, she recognized her child for who he was.Mine.
“I don’t know what you’ve been through these past sixty years, Robbie. I’msorryI hadn’t been there! I’msorrythat your father’s best wasn’t good enough.” Thelma rubbed the bottom of her hand against her eye. She wasn’t even crying yet, but she knew it was coming. All the tears, all the pain they were supposed to have shared over the decades were never realized. Not from Robbie’s point of view, and he was the grown man who had mourned his mother without a shred of closure.I’m here, honey! I’m the closure!
But just because Thelma’s presence was a miracle didn’t mean the man was prepared to receive it.
“I’m sorry, honey.” She cupped his cheeks, despite Robbie’s best efforts to look away from her. As her thumbs pressed against leathery skin and dry lips, she was reminded of the time her son came home from Little League caked in mud after a sudden rainstorm struck his game. While Bill pulled Robbie’s disgusting uniform off in the kitchen, Thelma received him in the downstairs bathroom, where she spent twenty minutes rinsing off his face, arms, and legs of the mud that soon splattered against the floor. Yet every inch of mud she removed revealed the soft skin of her little boy just trying his best.I got mud all over my dress and spent another fifteen minutes mopping the floor as he hopped in the bath.
She would do it all again if it meant giving this boy another day with his mother.
“I’m sorry.”
Robbie shook her off him but did not storm away. Instead, he planted his shoes on the carpet and sank his face into his own hands. Thelma sat next to him, simultaneously living in the present and the past.There is only one present.The present she perceived around her.
She saw the same walls in Van Nuys as she had on Hemlock Street. Old family pictures, all in black and white or sepia-toned. Cross-stitch samplers and handmade quilts patched together from scraps. Shelves full of first-edition and well-loved paperback books. Robbie had become much like his forebears—venerating the past. But what he couldn’t do that his Nordic and Dutch immigrant ancestors had been forced to complete was themoving onpart.
This was the present. It may have been 1958. It may have been 2018. For all Thelma knew, they had drifted farther into the past, to times before electricity and antibiotics.
She leaned her elbows against her thighs, contemplating the wall while she spoke. “It’s strange for me too, you know. I’m yourmother. I’m grateful to God that my boy was still alive. That he took me in when I needed it most.” She craned her head toward him. “In one night, my life irreparably changed. I got in the car to go to the market to buy milk, because the milkman hadn’t been by in two, three days. I don’t even remember that detail now. I was listening to ‘Twilight Time’ by the Platters on the radio in the car. Then suddenly there was a fog… and Mariachi music.”
Robbie was silent.
“I only had one more day than you to come to terms with what happened. But what happened in one day for me was sixty years of confusion and guilt for you. The things you must have thought about me… your father… I can’t fathom it, because I haven’t lived through it. But know that we both loved you, Robbie. You and your sister were our whole world in that house.”
A faint grunt nearly knocked her over on the couch.
“If anything…” Here it came. The truth that Thelma had locked away, because to acknowledge that level of guilt meant she might slip into the same cycle of self-flagellation that Robbie had carried for the past half a century. “It’s my fault. I could have gone to the market that afternoon. I was supposed to. It was the responsible thing to do.”
Robbie lowered his hand from his face. “Well, why didn’t you?”
