Page 55 of I Can't Even

“With blue hair?” I asked.

“No, this was just something fun to do.” The joy of a new hairstyle didn’t exude from Em’s demeanor. Did she hate it? Love it? Regret it?

“Soph is going to freak.” I noticed that her skin was pale, and she was thinner too.

“Why? It’s not her hair.”

“Good point.”

Em took the boots out of my arms and headed toward the stairs. She was dressed casually in jeans and slip on sneakers with a thermal shirt. Maybe that’s what a person wore to the salon when they dyed their hair blue. I had no idea. I just wasn’t buying what she was peddling. She could pretend she was fine all she wanted, but the shdows beneath her eyes were getting darker every day, which the blue hair did not help. This was not a person who was dealing with her stuff.

“Em, grief can be really difficult to navigate,” I said. “I hope you know you can talk to me about anything anytime. You do know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know.” Em shrugged, jostling her armful of boot. “But I don’t need to. I’m fine.”

“Fine is usually code for not fine,” I pressed.

“Well, this time it isn’t. Fine is fine,” she said. “And now I’m going to bed. Good night.”

“Good night,” I called after her.

“And do not go back and finish your striptease in the kitchen,” Em called over her shoulder.

“I wasn’t going to,” I lied.

She snorted and I knew she didn’t believe me because she was smart like that. With a last regretful glance toward Liam’s house, I checked the locks and secured the first floor before climbing the stairs to my bedroom.

The light across the way had gone dark and I didn’t bother putting on mine while I changed, sensing that he would not be looking for me again tonight. Maybe Em was right. I might be sacrificing my self-respect for a lost cause. Was Liam worth it? Yes, definitely yes. If I could have a second chance at what we’d once had, I would give up the above and throw in my pride and dignity, too.

It occurred to me as I slipped between the sheets that maybe Soph was also right, and that chasing Liam was my own thigh-high-boots-and-blue-hair way of dealing with my grief and shock.

Perhaps pursuing him was more about having a distraction than a mission. Maybe I didn’t want Liam as much as I wanted to not think about the fact that I wasn’t who I thought I was. That all the years of criticism and scrutiny weren’t about me so much as they were about Babs’s rage at my father’s betrayal. I wished she had told me. I wished we’d gotten therapy or something, but mostly, I wished she’d given me a chance to love her and mourn her the way Em and Soph were. I never had and never would. The hurt ambushed me and before I knew it, I was rolling onto my pillow and sobbing until the pain ebbed and I could breathe again.

Ambush grief. One minute you were fine and the next you were a mess. It had hit me several times over the past few days, but usually, I redirected my thoughts to Liam and pushed it away. This time I didn’t. I let myself grieve for the woman I had thought was my mother and for the relationship we could have had that was now lost to me for good.

I let the sadness, the bitterness, the wish that it could have been different, fill me up inside. It spilled over my rim and splashed down my sides. It seemed unending, and I thought about distracting myself from the anguish with thoughts of Liam, but I didn’t. Instead, I concentrated on Babs. I thought about how she’d said she wished she could have loved me. Then I thought about Mrs. G and how she’d said Babs was so proud of me. The pain in my chest eased. It would have to be enough.

I realized it was time for some self-truth. I didn’t want to believe that I was using Liam to manage my grief, but I couldn’t deny that my interest in him had become much more focused after Babs’s death and after learning the truth of my own origins.

Oh, sure, I’d thought he was a hottie before she died and we clearly had unfinished business, but in the days leading up to her death and after, it became a mission to get him to notice me, to give us another chance.

Why was I suddenly so desperate to revisit a relationship I had left years before without a backward glance? It wasn’t coincidental. I was running away from my grief or trying to, anyway. With my new awareness, I knew I needed to step back, to reevaluate, and reassess.

If I was chasing Liam for the wrong reasons, things weren’t going to work out for us. I refused to be responsible for ruining his current relationship if I was uncertain that us being together was the outcome that I truly wanted. It wasn’t fair to any of us, and I knew what I had to do.

Em had split before I got up the next day. Since she still wasn’t working, I had no idea where she could be, and I was more worried about her than ever. Given how close they had been, losing Babs had to be an emotionally crushing weight that she couldn’t lift alone. I wished I knew how to get her to talk to me.

Soph wasn’t home either, as she was volunteering at the twins’ school, so I left her a message about Em’s blue hair but didn’t hear back from her all morning. I drank my coffee in the kitchen, feeling more than a little mortified to think of how far I would have gone if Em hadn’t crashed my little striptease the night before.

In an effort to step back and do some thinking, I didn’t go surfing or to the coffee shop. The shade over my bedroom window remained down and I worked all day, not breaking to loiter in the front yard to sunbathe, or anything else for that matter.

Instead, I chugged endless cups of coffee until I was so wired, I was certain I could smell sounds. It was late afternoon with my heart hammering and my fingers shaking, I finally backed away from my laptop and pulled on some jogging gear. I gulped a big bottle of water and then stretched. I would run my demons out of my head or at the very least speed walk them into silence.

Shoving earbuds into my ears, I cranked Guns N’ Roses’s Appetite for Destruction from the phone in my arm holster and began to jog. In my sports bra and yoga pants, I started down the street and through Gull’s Harbor to the narrow strip of pavement that had been created specifically for people who wanted to run or walk along the tops of the cliffs with an ocean view.

The ripping crunch and grind of the guitar along with the singer’s raw vocals blanketed my senses to any other sounds. I kept my head forward and ran, clocking the miles as if they were no big deal. I knew I needed to save enough strength to turn around and go back so at a small park on the rise of a grassy hill, I paused.

Sweat was pouring off me. My lungs heaved as I sucked in gulps of the damp salt air. I lifted my face to the strong, cool breeze blowing in from the ocean and let it chill my skin. I shut off the music and closed my eyes. I did some yoga breathing and tried to feel my feet sink into the earth as I became one with my surroundings. A seagull flew by, cawing at me as if trying to pull me out of my Zen moment, but I refused to budge.

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