Page 122 of The False Flat

“I’m sorry,” she started right away, as if she’d been rehearsing the words and needed to get them out before they left her mind. Tears fell into her expensive, cranberry-colored sweater. I’d never seen that happen before; I was transfixed. “I thought I was doing the right thing.” She shook her head, squared her shoulders, and blinked away the tears.

“I need to tell you this without blubbering. When Grant told me that you were getting married, and I didn’t know . . .” She put her hand over her mouth. “I knew I had to do something. I knew it that day I watched you pull out of your driveway without shoes, when I was trying to hold everything together. But I didn’t know what to do or how to do it.”

Was she here to talk me out of marrying Grant?

She reached for my hand, but shock had numbed me, and I couldn’t grip hers back. She pulled her hand into her lap and held her own.

“When Grant came to the Cities, he told me I needed to stop holding it all in, that I needed to talk about whatever was inside me.”

Grant went to talk to my icy mother, the mother who’d told me to leave him.

“But that’s how I’ve managed, by holding it all in.” She was speaking in her usual analytical tone, softened slightly, and it didn’t fit with the words she was saying. “And I couldn’t understand how he knew. I’d spent my whole life making sure everyone thought I was fine. And then I wondered if you knew, and then I wondered who else knew.”

She paused.

“What happens when I let it all go?” Her voice went shaky, but she wasn’t crying.

I’d asked that same question over and over again the past months. I couldn’t believe she was asking it now.

You can’t know, I wanted to tell her.

“But that’s all there is left, isn’t there?” she went on. “That’s what I’ve decided, at least. I might lose you if I tell you, but I’ll definitely lose you if I don’t. That’s how I lost Tif, but I never tried to get her back.”

Her voice cracked, like her throat had been stripped. I knew that feeling too.

“Do you want some water?” I spoke for the first time.

She nodded, and I went to Grant’s kitchen, filled a glass, wished he were here, then returned to his living room and handed my mother the water. She downed half of it, and her hand shook as she placed it on the table beside the couch.

I wanted to reach out to this very real version of my mother, but I was scared she’d fall back into herself, and I wanted more time with the softened person who lived behind the hard shell.

“There’s no excuse; there is only explanation. It might not make a difference.”

Tell me.

I still couldn’t speak, but I wanted her to go on.

Tell me.

She inhaled, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, her face was firm. “Tif and I had a brother, Samuel. Sam.”

Sam? No, that was wrong. My mother had one sister, Tif, the only family she had until she didn’t.

She nodded, like the disbelief on my face was something she had to answer.

Tell me.

“When I was fifteen, I snuck out to a party my parents had explicitly forbidden. But I was infatuated with this guy Ryan, one of Sam’s friends. He was cocky and disgusting, and he wanted me at that party, so I went. At some point, I wanted to go home as badly as I’d wanted to get there, but Ryan and I had both been drinking, so I called Sam, who was seventeen. He could drive, and I begged him to come get me. He’d told me to stay away from Ryan, so he was furious and wouldn’t come.” She paused long enough to reach for her water glass, and a quarter of it splashed onto her jeans, but neither of us acknowledged it.

Maybe I was wrong when I’d said my mother was on Grant’s couch. My mother didn’t have a past, didn’t have a brother named Sam, would never talk like this.

“What did you do?” I asked, suspended in this moment.

She curled her fingers around the glass.

“I took Ryan’s keys.” She was looking past me as if at a screen that was playing out her memories. “And I drove his car. I couldn’t stop crying because I felt so guilty. I’d done all the things I never should’ve done. And then, the tears kept me from seeing the other car on the road.” My mother started crying then, crying with her past, fifteen-year-old self. Crying for the first time—ever.

A cold sweat broke out on my body because suddenly I knew where this was going. One thing she had told me when I was a kid was that my grandparents had been killed in a car accident when my mother was fifteen, by a drunk driver.