Page 39 of Letters From A Stalker

“I don’t know.” I whisper.

“Were you allowed to need her?”

Now my throat feels like it’s tightening and the reaction is immediate enough to piss me off. “Of course I was.”

Kai doesn’t challenge it, but he doesn’t nod either.

“She loved me.”

“I haven’t suggested otherwise.”

“She did.”

“I believe you.”

Something about how easily he says it strips away the argument I was preparing.

“She wasn’t a bad mother.”

“Julia.” His voice is quieter now. “You don’t have to convince me that your mother was a bad person in order to talk about the ways she may have hurt you.”

The room goes very still. My father is easy to be angry with. The evidence is easy to compartmentalize. Infidelity. Manipulation. Blame. Abandonment. Suicide. I can put the memories in boxes and close the lids.

My mother doesn’t fit into boxes. She cried in my bed. She asked me where Dad had been. She wanted to know whether I’d seen the woman again. She told me not to tell him she’d asked. She told me I should have kept quiet. She needed me to understand. She needed me to choose. She needed.

What about what I needed?

The thought catches and refuses to let go. Kai is saying something, but I don’t hear the first few words.

“Julia?”

I blink. His face comes back into focus.

“Sorry. What?”

His attention has changed. The curiosity is gone, replaced by something more careful.

“What were you thinking about?”

“My mom.” I try to say more, but the memory rises without permission.

I'm twelve. Maybe a little younger. I wake up in the middle of the night because I'm thirsty and need water. The house is quiet, but when I walk into the kitchen I see a thin line of light under the pantry door. I open it, and my mother is sitting on the old potato bucket we kept in there, the light from the single bulb making her face look pale and strange. She reaches for the doorknob like she wants to shut me out, but then she changes her mind and starts talking in this low, frantic mumble that doesn't sound like her at all.

She's holding my father's phone in one hand and a pair of his underwear in the other. She keeps saying she can't find anything in the phone, that he erased the messages but she knows they're in there, she knows he's texting them. And then she holds the underwear out toward me, pointing at the stain she says is cum, her voice rising and falling as she tries to make me see it the way she does. She's not herself. She's talking too fast and not really looking at me, just needing someone to hear her. I stand there in the doorway of the pantry, too young to fully understand what she's showing me but old enough to feel the wrongness of it settle into my stomach and stay there.

She used to do things like that. Pull me into the middle of whatever storm was happening between them. Ask if I'd noticed whether his tennis clothes smelled like sweat or like laundry detergent when he came home. Whether the orange clay from the courts was on his shoes or if they were clean. Whether a woman had called. Whether he'd said a name. Sometimes I'd tell her something small and then they'd fight because of it, and I'd lie in bed listening to the raised voices, wondering if I should have just stayed quiet.

“I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Kai’s voice reaches me immediately. “You were a child.”

“I know.”

But the room is getting quieter. Not the good quiet. The wrong quiet, the kind where sounds start happening somewhere else.

“Julia, look at me.”

I try. His face blurs for a second before becoming clear again.