Page 123 of The False Flat

“The alcohol kept me from reacting,” she went on, her voice robotic now. “I slammed into that car. I was fine. Not a scratch. Nothing. But I killed the person in the other vehicle, the old, teal BMW Sam had been given on his sixteenth birthday.” A long pause. “I killed Sam,” she whispered. “He’d decided to come get me after all. I killed my brother.”

No. I held my face in my hands as the words crashed into me, as if I’d been there to feel the impact. The sight was vivid behind my eyes. A flash of teal caught in headlights. The crunch of metal on metal. The thud of a chest hitting a steering wheel. The silence of life extinguished. And then the screams that surely followed and likely lived in my mother’s head.

“I told you your grandparents had died in a car accident,” she somehow went on. “They didn’t die in it. But I killed them, too, when I killed Sam. Technically speaking, my mother killed herself four months later. And I didn’t know how to navigate a relationship with my father after he stopped speaking to me, and now he’s passed. If I hadn’t . . .”

The glass cracked in my mother’s hands, and we both stared down at her lap, where blood dripped from her palm. I grabbed a wad of tissues and encouraged her to get up to tend to her injury, but she shook her head.

She held the tissues against the cut. “If I don’t finish now, I might lose my nerve.” Her eyes clung to my face, devoid of expectation. “If I hadn’t done all the things I shouldn’t have done, we would’ve stayed a family. You don’t get over that, Penelope. Brandon was taken from me, from us, because I had taken my brother. Tif tried, God love her, she tried to tell me it wasn’t my fault, but I didn’t want forgiveness. I didn’t deserve it.” She glanced at me, looked away, looked back like she was forcing herself to keep eye contact.

“And I ruined a good man. Your father. He loved us, but he couldn’t cope, especially after I convinced him it was my fault. He, too, tried to tell me it wasn’t, but he was broken, and I was convincing. I stayed. I cared for him as he drank himself into oblivion and cheated because I deserved it. It was my punishment. When he was with someone else or drinking, he wasn’t with me, and he could forget. I could never forget. And after he died . . . he died.”

Her head bent forward until I couldn’t see her face. Her body shook, and I wasn’t sure I could keep looking at her. I didn’t know how to digest this new information. It weighed me down, kept me in place, but something was moving inside, a slide puzzle righting itself, the picture that had been distorted for so long finally clearing.

“Nearly everyone I love is gone, and it’s all my fault,” she whispered.

Before I reacted, she slid to her knees, narrowly avoiding a shard of the glass she’d crushed in her hands.

“You’re the only one left, Penelope. Pretending it’s all fine isn’t working anymore. I’m pretending harder than ever, and I’m losing you anyway. How do I stop losing you?” Her last words were louder than the rest, so full of anguish that a piece of me ripped in two. I’d come near hating my mother, resenting her and wishing she were someone else. She was someone else. I just never knew it; maybe she never knew it.

Her head remained bowed. Her question hung in the air.

How do I stop losing you?

This was something else I’d been asking. About Brandon, about Grant, about myself.

How do I stop losing you?

I didn’t know the answer to that question. But without a word, I reached down and lifted her up. I led her to Grant’s kitchen, where I ran her hands under cold water and helped her bandage them.

Then I opened the refrigerator and pulled out the cold cherry pie that I was supposed to be eating with the man I would marry in two weeks.

In the silence of Grant’s clean kitchen, my mother and I ate pie.

CHAPTER 50

LIFE REALIZATION #24: ALWAYS PUT PANTS ON BEFORE YOU CRY

“This is it,” Grant said. “Tomorrow we get married. You’re really going to go through with this?”

“You’re really going to go through with this?”

We were back at Chuck’s cabin in a room with a large, carved canopy bed and a bathroom attached, settling in before Grant and I became husband and wife. Deanna, William, Chuck, and Celia were here, but everyone else was scheduled to show up tomorrow evening. Aurora was staying in the nearest hotel. I wanted to forgive her, but I needed time.

I’d asked Hannah to tell me what to do because wanting my mother in my life, after everything, seemed wrong. She told me the following:

There’s nothing wrong with me wanting my mother in my life.

Sometimes people are too damaged to react logically; the past obscures the present, so what you think you’re doing isn’t what you’re doing at all.

A child never stops loving their parents, not fully, and you can love through hate.

Love is stronger than hate.

Love is stronger than anything, can overcome anything.

It’s my life, my decision.

I need boundaries.