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The room was now a meditation studio—complete with a Buddha and a small Zen garden, a large mat. But they had kept the purple walls. That was what they’d kept? The color was startling, taking me back in time, and, like that, it all came back to me. I was five and ten and fifteen at once, sitting in the window seat in the corner. Rain never far away.
I remembered her walking in, the day she graduated from high school. She was still in her gown, and I was sitting there imagining what I would do with the room when she left. Rain had graduated at the top of her class and received a full ride to Princeton. She would get to study in one of the most impressive math programs in the country and she would still be near enough to Montauk that it would be easy for her to come home regularly, which I knew was important to her.
Maybe that was why I didn’t believe her when she said that she wasn’t leaving, that she was staying in the house—staying where she was—and taking some classes at the college in Southampton instead. I wouldn’t leave you, she had said that day.
At the time, I was furious. How could she give up an opportunity like that? And how could she pretend it had anything to do with me? I screamed that she was pretending to say something kind, that she was pretending to be worried about me, when we both knew it was our father she was worried about. He was the reason why she was stupidly giving up a free Princeton education. I was certain she thought that without her there—to act as his buffer, to act as his protector—I would try to break him. I would try to break him of all his rules, of all his trauma. And she didn’t know if he could handle it. Would he get better if he were stripped of his crutches? Or would he just be defeated?
She was so angry that she stormed out. I thought she hadn’t liked getting called out for the truth—that she didn’t want to defend herself again for bending herself in every possible posit
ion to protect our father. But what if I had been wrong? What if the truth was that she had been staying for me? Maybe she had thought that, if she left me with him, he would crush me instead?
I walked over to the window seat, and sat down on a strange bamboo pillow. I looked out the window, at the front yard, the guesthouse in the distance.
I had always felt so subsumed by our house, by the rules that governed it, rules I never understood. That didn’t change, being here again.
I’d spent the last eight nights in my car on the side of my childhood driveway, waiting for the lights to go off, so I knew my sister was asleep. One night, I’d watched through the window as my sister and her daughter had a late dinner. My sister’s boyfriend hobbled around in the background. They weren’t eating anything fancy. A pot of pasta, bagged lettuce. But she was happy, my sister. Her daughter ate as Rain leaned in and listened to her speak of her day. My sister had built a family—she had built a life she enjoyed—and I had judged her before she even started.
You had to ask yourself: Where did that judgment get you?
There was a sonogram hanging over the rearview mirror in my car. A healthy little baby. Strong heartbeat. The start of limbs. I didn’t know if it was of a boy or a girl. But it was on the way. There was a baby on the way that belonged in part to someone who didn’t think he knew me anymore. Where would that picture be hanging in the alternate reality where I hadn’t become a stranger to him? Where I had confessed before it was too late? Where he had confessed too?
For the last eight nights, I’d waited until the lights had gone off, until I knew my sister was asleep, so she wouldn’t look at me with a mix of pity and aggravation that I was still sleeping on her couch. So I wouldn’t have to look into her face and see her dismissal. So I wouldn’t have to think about her and her daughter and my husband and my father and everyone who’d once loved me and whom I had somehow lost.
Tonight, I didn’t have to wait for her lights to go out. I curled up on the floor in my childhood bedroom, on someone else’s soft mat. And I realized I’d been wrong about something else. Maybe the most important thing. I’d been wrong about the ways we move past the versions of ourselves that no longer fit. I’d thought it involved running, as far and as fast as your feet could carry you, from your former selves. I didn’t understand that was the surest way to wind up exactly where you started.
44
In the morning, I looked out the window, feeling foggy and damp, like I’d had a bottle of wine the night before. My shoulders were sore from sleeping cramped up, my head spinning from the heat.
I opened the window, letting in the chill, the soft breeze, and I saw her staring at me from her tiny loft window.
Sammy.
She looked confused, for just a second, about why I was in the main house. Except her happiness at seeing me there must have trumped her questioning.
Because she opened her window wider.
“Hi,” I mouthed.
“Hi,” she mouthed back.
Then she peeked behind herself as though she was going to get caught.
When she turned around again, I pointed toward the stairs, leading to the beach and the ocean.
She gave me the thumbs-up and closed the window, already on her way there.
“So you and Mom had a fight?” she said.
We sat on the rickety stairs, the beach right beneath us, the ocean winds strong and thick.
“We’ll work it out,” I said.
She fought to keep her hair pinned behind her ears. “I don’t know how, if you guys are avoiding each other.”
“You noticed that?”
“Well, I do live here.”
