Page 39 of I'm Not Yours
I had to come to peace with my dad before I could come to peace with Jace and me.
I loaded a suitcase and my dad into the trunk. Yes, my dad, in his urn, was loaded up in my trunk. I didn’t miss the symbolism there.
The first place I drove to was my dad’s trailer, about an hour away from Schollton. It was clearly abandoned and leaning to one side, the grass grown up around it, the stairs rotted. I opened the unlocked door and peeked inside. The smell almost knocked me over. The scent of cigarette smoke, unwashed people, and stale liquor came at me like a putrid wave. It was battered and broken inside. I held my breath as one appalling memory after another tunneled through me.
I had lived here.
I was from here.
This had been mine and my mother’s life.
I pictured my father’s looming presence. I saw where I’d slept, the window he had broken now taped over. I saw my mother cowering, beaten. I could smell my own fear, my pervasive loneliness.
It made me sick. I had to lean over in the tall grass when I raced outside.
I stumbled into the apple orchard, sucking in air, surprised it was still there. I hiked up and down every single row, one mind-blowing, soul-kicking memory chasing after another. My nerves rattled remembering how many hours I’d spent there, eating the apples, carving them, throwing them in fits of fury, hiding in the branches when I had to escape the harangues of my dad or I wanted to cry for my dead mother. I felt pity for the lost little girl I used to be.
I dumped some of my dad’s ashes on the steps of that trailer, swaying with nausea.
When I was done, I headed to the place where that terrible thing happened. I found the rock. I picked flowers. I left flowers on top of the rock, my tears rolling down onto the petals as I sat there.
In the distance I saw our trailer, a metal coffin for a girl’s spirit.
I would not ever return again; I knew that.
I drove to Bigfork, Montana. I took two days to do it, stopping in Coeur d’Alene on the way. It gave me a lot of time to think. Most of the time I thought about how much I loved Jace. I pretended we could be together, daydreaming about it for hours. When the daydreams ended, I’d be back in abject hopelessness.
I stopped by my mother’s grave and left a huge bouquet of pink tulips, her favorite. I sat there in that cemetery and cried, then I started talking to her, remembering all the good times,and those cherished memories finally started to squish out the despairing ones.
We had been happy in Bigfork. So happy.
I drove to our old house and climbed out of the car.
“Allie! Is that you?”
I turned. It was Mrs. Ashley, the woman who had begged my dad to let me stay with them.
“Mrs. Ashley!” I ran to her with open arms. She met me halfway.
“I would recognize your mother anywhere. Sweetheart, you are her mirror image, with all that gorgeous hair and the golden eyes.”
I had dinner with her and Mr. Ashley. It was such a pleasure, a relief, agift, to be able to talk to someone about my mother. She brought out three huge boxes right away. Inside were all of my mother’s things that I’d so wanted to keep— her perfume bottles, her tablecloth with the yellow tulips, the tiny mirror with the ornate gold frame, her picture of an apple orchard bathed in sunlight, my pictures with the pink ballerinas. I pulled out two Jane Austen books and clutched them to me.
“Thank you, Mrs. Ashley,” I said.
“Oh, dear. You are so welcome. I loved your mother. She was a good, strong woman. She would be so proud of you. She loved you very much. I wanted to mail these to you sooner but I didn’t have your address. Your mother changed her last name when she arrived, didn’t she?”
I nodded. “She had been trying to hide.” I left none of my dad’s ashes in Montana.
From Bigfork I went to Yellowstone. I had pretended I was someone I wasn’t when I was with Jace. I pretended that my dad’s voice, telling me I was ugly, too thin, bony like a skeleton—a weird, dumb kid with a huge mouth, who was addicted to apples—was not ricocheting around in my head.
I’d been in college for three years and Yellowstone’s incomparable beauty called to me for the summer. I had checked out a book on Yellowstone as a high schooler, and because I loved being outside, loved the serenity that nature brought to me, Yellowstone seemed like the ultimate heaven of natural wonders.
Jace told me he loved me about three weeks after we’d met by a waterfall that flowed into a stream. I cried. No one had saidI love youto me since my mother died. Every time he told me he loved me, I became teary, and he wiped away my tears. We talked aboutalmosteverything. We talked about his childhood, which had been rocky, too. His mother had had four husbands. His father had taken off when Jace was a baby. His mother lived in Florida. He did not see her much. He wanted a family of his own, completely unlike the one he had grown up in.
I almost shared the truth about mine, but I couldn’t. I was trying to pretend I wasn’t trailer trash, and it had been engrained in me not to talk about being poor.
I was vague, said my mother was dead, my dad wasn’t that nice.
