Page 37 of Dreams of Falling
“Snack, please,” he said, opening and closing his small hands, each like a baby bird’s mouth waiting for a worm.
She gave him a kiss on the cheek and a snack bag full of Cheerios before pulling out a chair at the end for me. It looked just like her mother’s kitchen, painted a soft cream with bright yellow accents, including a large clock over the sink in the shape of a daisy and a sunshine-colored blender on the counter. A pretty hand-painted border of daisies surrounded the large picture window and back doorway.
“Your mother painted those,” Mabry said, indicating the borders. “You can pretty much see her work all over town. Refuses to take payment, but that’s not why she’s in high demand. She’s really good. She always hides pictures inside her murals, and sometimes you can live with one for years before seeing it.”
She pointed at a section of the daisy border to the right of the door frame. “She’s painted a tiny ladybug family on most of the leaves: agrandma ladybug with white curly hair and a cane, a teacher ladybug holding a spelling book and wearing glasses and—my favorite—a little-girl ladybug wearing tap shoes. It always makes me think of you. Remember that talent show...?”
I held up my hand. “Please. Don’t go there. I’ll have nightmares for months.” I walked over to the border and peered closely at the leaves, seeing the anthropomorphic insects in various human occupations. They were beautiful, and clever, and painted by my own mother. “I had no idea...” I stopped, not wanting to be reminded again of how absent I’d made myself not only from my old life, but from my family that had continued on without me. It was the ultimate conceit, to believe that everything would stand still in my absence.
I returned to my seat at the table, where Mabry had set a glass of tea with a quarter of a lemon floating on top. She glanced up at the clock, and turned back to me as she sat down. “I have to leave for my shift in an hour, so that gives us a little time to catch up.”
I looked at Ellis, who was happily shoveling Cheerios into his mouth with the flat of one hand while pushing a car back and forth on the table with the other, and then glanced around again at the cheery kitchen that reminded me of her mother, and I found myself nodding. “I don’t think I can stay a whole hour, but long enough to catch up.”
“Of course, that’s assuming Jonathan gets home in time to watch Ellis so that I won’t be late again. It’s his day off, so he’s playing golf with some of his friends from work. He’s a bit addicted.”
I took a sip of my tea, and studied my friend who, other than wearing her hair a little longer than she had in high school, looked exactly the same. “So, tell me about your dream.”
She took a deep breath and then began strumming her fingers on the table. “Well, I was invited to a pool party by a friend—I couldn’t tell you who since I didn’t recognize her, just that she was a friend. There was a huge crowd, but nobody was in the pool. So, I jumped in and found that it was full of torpedoes, and it was my job to defuse them all so everybody else could swim.”
I thought for a moment. “There’s a lot going on there. I think I might need some time to figure that one out. Can I call you tomorrow?”
She nodded. “Sure. In my bedside table I’ve actually got a whole notebook of dreams I’ve had. I’ll let you take a look.”
“Sure,” I said, although I wasn’t really listening anymore. I was looking at the small part in her hair on the side of her head that shouldn’t have been there.
She saw what I was looking at and turned her head so I could see it full on. “See? It’s hardly noticeable.”
I met her gaze and said the words that had needed to be said for nine long stupid years. “I’m sorry.”
She sat back in her chair, shaking her head. “You saved my life, Larkin. You don’t need to be sorry.”
I rolled my eyes. “You wouldn’t have landed in the water if I hadn’t thrown the cooler at you and knocked you out of the boat.”
Her face went very still. “But when everybody else was still trying to figure out what to do, you jumped in and brought me back to the surface.”
I wanted to stand up and walk out of the kitchen and that house right then. Because this was the whole reason I’d been gone for so long. Why I’d left. And I thought I’d been done with it. But I wasn’t. “Because of me, you had a concussion and spent the night in the hospital, and I was the one who never spoke to you again.”
Her gaze drifted to her son, who was trying to Hoover up his Cheerios on the table without using his hands. “You had good reason to do what you did. I would have done the same thing if I’d been in your position.”
My old anger, the self-directed anger that had made me leave when I was eighteen and never look back, poured through me. I pushed back my chair. “No, you wouldn’t have. You wouldn’t have had a reason to be in my position. You knew who you were. I was just the stupid chubby kid who thought I was Miss America, Albert Einstein, Liberace, and Britney Spears all rolled into one. And you and Bennett just went along for the ride, without telling me that I was making a fool of myself. That’s why I’ve been angry with you and Bennett all these years. Because you knew and never told me.”
She waited until I’d raised my eyes and met her gaze before shespoke. “You’re wrong, you know. We never thought you were making a fool of yourself. Your free spirit was one of the reasons why Bennett and I loved you. The way you barged through life without caring what other people thought. It was amazing and heroic. I want Ellis to be like that. To try things whether or not he’s good at them, or has the right talent. Because how do you ever know what your true calling is unless you’ve tried everything out?” She lifted her hands, palms out. “Despite your reasons for leaving, you packed up your stuff and moved by yourself to another state where you didn’t know a soul. That, Larkin, is courageous and brave.”
I snorted. “Acting like a fool is fine when you’re a little kid. Then it just gets sad. Especially when your two best friends know the truth and keep you in the dark. And don’t try to tell me that you didn’t, because I won’t believe you.”
“Fine, don’t. But it’s the truth.” She stood, her eyes studying me. “There was nothing between me and Jackson. You know that, right? Never. I would never have hurt you like that. I’ve always loved you like a sister. And what happened on the boat—I had no idea about any of it. I promise. You never gave me a chance to tell you that, so I’m telling you now. That’s all in the past. You need to stop beating yourself up about it.”
I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t all in the past, that I still lived with it every day of my life. And that there was something she didn’t know, that I couldn’t tell her because it would make me seem even more pathetic than I was. I could never tell her about that part of me that craved attention and admiration that still flourished on the dark side of my heart, scratching to be let out, any more than I could admit that Jackson Porter could still make me forget everything I thought I’d learned.
“I’ve left it all behind me, Mabry. I’ve moved on to a new life. A new life that includes a tiny studio apartment in Brooklyn that I can barely afford, and a daily commute across a river that looks nothing like the Sampit, but it’s mine. I don’t lie to myself anymore. No more pretense that I was destined for greatness. I’m just... me.”
I ruffled Ellis’s hair. “Good to meet you,” I said, shaking a grubbyhand. Looking at his mother, I said, “Good to see you, Mabry. Maybe I’ll see you again before I leave.”
She lifted Ellis from his booster seat and followed me to the door. “You’d better. You need to tell me about my dream, don’t forget. And you still owe me.”
I stared back at her. “So much for everything being in the past and forgotten.”
“Forgotten isn’t the same as not remembered. I choose not to remember some things. But there are other things I’ll never forget.”
