“Me, too,” I admit.
“I can’t get through a tennis match at all,” Naomi amends now. “I like gymnastics. Every other sport is unbearable.”
I choke out a laugh. Then I sober up again. “Mel would never forgive me if she knew the truth about what I did.”
“Oh—because there was other stuff she never forgave you for when she was alive?”
“I never did anything this bad.”
Naomi rolls her eyes. “She loved you like her own child, and you know that.”
“But Iwasn’ther child.”
“And she still loved you,” she argues. “Maybe you’re right and Mel wouldn’t have forgiven you, but so what? Who was she, God? She wasn’t a saint. You don’t need her blessing on every single area of your life. She was just a woman.”
“She was Mel,” I say.
Naomi sighs, like I’m not getting her point. “Yes, that was her name,” she says. “And she was just a woman, but she loved you.”
Naomi stands then, as if her work is done, as if there’s nothing more she can say that will penetrate my thick head, and maybe she’s right.
I still want Mel’s forgiveness.
I still want her approval and her love and the way she made me feel at home. I don’t know if anybody else will ever make me feel like that again.
Still, I cross the living room floor and hug Naomi tight, the way Mel and I used to hug. She stiffens and awkwardly pats my back.
“Thank you,” I say.
After Naomi leaves, I come back to the living room, ball up on the couch, and cry. I cry for the people I love and for the people I lost. I cry for the mother who wouldn’t wake up and for the one who never will again. I cry because of that night, and because of all the horrible things I still think and believe about myself as a result of it.
I don’t know if I will ever be okay with me, the way Willow learned to be okay with herself. The way Mel was okay with herself.
But I decide right here and now that I have to try.
I have to try, because hating myself didn’t save Ro’s life or Mel’s. It didn’t give me Luke, and it didn’t change the past.
I choose a random CD from the box Naomi brought over and stick it into the old stereo system in our living room.
Ella’s beautiful voice fills the room. For a moment, I am seven and nine and thirteen, dancing in the Cohen living room with Mel. We are twirling and shimmying and laughing, okay and hopeful and alive. Then I am eighteen, alone in my living room. Not yet okay and not exactly hopeful, but completely alive.
It’s not everything, but it’s a start.
27
MARCH
Snow crunches beneathmy boots as I walk across campus. It’s a cloudy day, a film of gray covering the sky. I’ve just gotten out of my anatomy class when I feel my phone vibrate with a text. It’s from Willow, telling me that she is going home for spring break.
What about you?she asks.Or are you doing a crazy Mexico trip with all your new friends?
I smile as I text back.No Mexico trip. I’m probably coming home.
She writes back almost immediately.Yay!!!!
While I have my phone out, I decide to take a selfie and send it to Ernie. I know it will piss him off. He hates getting pictures on his watch. But I figure if he gets to troll people constantly, I should get to troll him occasionally.
I’ve also texted or called him every couple of weeks since I’ve been at State. When I told him in December that I was leaving in January to go to school, he’d done his whole “yep, told you you’d get sick of me” bit, but I could tell he was hurt. I promised to keep in touch and make him get good use out of that watch.
