About a minute passes before the door swings open, and I don’t know why I’m so surprised to see Luke.
He barely looks at me as he nods for me to come inside.
One step in, and I’m hit with a deluge of memories. Ro and I sliding down the railing from the top of the stairs. Helping Mel bake or cook. Lying on the ground and playing dead while Sydney sniffed me up and down and tried to lick me awake.
Luke watches as I unbuckle my sandals and slip them off in the foyer. I feel stupid the whole time, like we’re playing at something. I’m pretending to be polite, a stranger who takes her shoes off at the door and has never climbed into his mother’s bed fully clothed.
The silence is heavy and thick, so I try to think of something to say.
“Where’s Sydney?”
“We gave her away.”
I was just making small talk, but his response is like a punch in the gut. Sydney’s gone?
Luke is looking off to the side, impatient and bored. Like he just told me the sky was blue, not that they gave away the dog whose fur I cried and laughed into routinely during the last nine years.
“Oh,” I say belatedly, and try to get myself under control. This visit is going to be a nightmare if I’m already crying and I haven’t even seen Mel yet.
Once I’m finally out of my shoes, I follow Luke past the living room to the small guest room off the dining room. The last five or so years, it was where I’d sleep when I spent the night at their house. Mel had this rule that as soon as I was old enough for training bras, there were no more sleepovers in Rowan’s room. Even if we were both in separate sleeping bags.
Luke knocks twice on the guest room door. “Mom?”
A voice I’d recognize anywhere calls back, “Come in!”
He pushes the door open, and then I’m standing in what is obviously Mel’s new bedroom. A hospital bed is the centerpiece, but the same IKEA table I spent far too little time doing homework on is pushed against one wall.
It takes me a second to spot Mel, another second to realize she’s in a wheelchair. A lump so big lodges itself in my throat, making speaking an impossibility.
Mel, too, seems speechless.
She blinks at me a few times, and in the silence that passes, I notice how small and frail she looks. The old Mel used to try out diets every once in a while (starting them, but never finishing), claiming sabotage over the fact that she worked in a bakery and had two sons who ate like bears, but now she’s the kind of skinny that no diet could cause. Her skin is pale, and I can’t stop looking at her wrists. There’s so little flesh there.
“Jessi,” she breathes finally.
I shuffle closer, wanting to touch her but so afraid.
“Baby, hi,” she says, and that’s the thing that finally undoes me. I burst into tears and kneel in front of her, hugging her legs.
She laughs and runs her hand over my hair. “Oh God, that’s so not the response I’m looking for. Making people cry with just one look.”
I’m sniffing and shaking and gasping for breath all at the same time. Why is she hugging me? Why is she comforting me right now?
“What are you doing here?” she says, as if she didn’t know I was coming.
“Told you, Mom. She’s your surprise.” It’s the first moment I remember that Luke is still in the room. It’s also when I realize that shedidn’tknow I was coming. I turn around and look up at Luke, confused, but he’s just leaning against the wall, watching us.
I’m her surprise?
But he said ...
He told me ...
Lukeis the reason I’m here?
“I’m so mad at you,” Mel says now, cupping my face in her hands. My heart drops, and I lower my gaze.
Here it goes.
