Page 55 of We Fell Apart
“It’s his art, not hers, though.”
“Yeah, but it’s herface.”
Tatum looks over from where he’s scraping plates. “Can I ask what happened with your mom? You said she moved to Mexico, earlier.”
I turn off the water and think how to answer. I am sort of surprised he’s asking about my life away from Hidden Beach. Meer, for all his curiosity about what’s in my sketchbook and what video game stories I can tell him, for all his enthusiasm for drawing on me and swimming with me, visiting chickens, making jam, and generally sharing his life with me, hasn’t asked me about my mother. He does know she left, from my social media, but he mostly existsright here and now—not in the past and not in the future. And Brock is caught up in his own recovery. He’s eager to try to explain his own complicated journey and he’s unendingly curious about trivia—What’s my opinion on Lady Gaga? What songs did I sing in school chorus? Why is everyone obsessed with passion fruit when it’s yucky?—but he doesn’t have the bandwidth to delve into other people’s painful histories.
“I suppose my mom is a bit like my father,” I say, finally. “As in, she doesn’t feel obligated to me.”
“Go on.”
“You know how some parents, when their kid is cranky, or messing around when it’s time to go somewhere—you know how some parents say okay, then, I’m leaving without you! Bye! And they leave the playground, or wherever? They maybe even go a ways down the street until their kid comes crying and running behind them, begging not to be abandoned, promising to be good. My mom was that mom. She was always pretending to leave without me. It was how she’d get me to behave. But there are other parents who would never do that to a kid. They would scold the kid, maybe, or coax the kid, or pick the kid up, or even get mad, but they wouldn’t threaten to leave a little person they’re responsible for. You know? She just—she always left open the possibility that she’d go away without me.”
Tatum’s face looks so concerned, it makes my throat close up.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I’m practically an adult. I’m not supposed to need my mommy anymore. I mean, that threat sucked when I was little, but she didn’t actually leave me, then. She always fed me and bought my clothes and a lot of times she was kind and sweet, but she was just more interested in love and adventure than in this child who was tagging along on her life. It was feminist, in a way.And now she’s totally within her rights to go live wherever she wants.”
“Is that what she did?”
I turn the water back on and focus on the dishes as I talk. “She’s got a new man. He lives in Mexico City. I didn’t want to go because of school stuff.”
“That’s awful,” says Tatum, wiping his brow with the back of his arm. “She just left you?”
“For a guy she’d known a week.”
Suddenly, I feel like I’ve said too much. I don’t want to give Tatum knowledge he can use against me. I take the sticky pavlova tray and scrub it under the hot water.
“I felt like my parents left me, when they died,” Tatum says, softly. “Because they weren’t sober, and they were driving—and you know, how could people do that when they have a kid, tucked up in bed, expecting his parents to come home safe? How can you even make that choice, to get behind a wheel when you know you shouldn’t? When you’reeverythingto somebody? Why wouldn’t your kid be worth the trouble it takes to call the taxi service? It’s money, but not a lot. A little bit of time spent waiting for the car to come. If you loved your kid, wouldn’t you bother to spend twenty dollars and wait ten minutes? But over the years, I came to think of it differently. Driving that car, it was just a dumb mistake. They got high too much. They weren’t thinking straight. They were flawed people. I stopped feeling like they left me on purpose.”
I look into Tatum’s huge brown eyes, so often glaring and defensive. His face is open. He has suffered a lot. The thought of that little boy, the selkie boy in Kingsley’s painting, the one who swims so joyfully and feels at home in the ocean, the thought of thatlittle boy abandoned by his parents in their deaths—it brings tears up behind my eyes. I can’t actually say anything. A million stock phrases spin through my head, but none of them are adequate. So I just nod at him, taking in his loss and the long time it took for him to recover.
“What happened with your mom?” he asks. “Like, how did you find out she was leaving?”
“I begged her to stay. We were living with this guy, Saar. She wanted to leave him. And I said, instead of Mexico with the new boyfriend, maybe the two of us could get a place, a little apartment? I’d get a job and contribute to expenses. And I’d sleep on a foldout sofa. Even a studio apartment would work, just anywhere cheap. I tried to paint a happy picture, you know? To coax her into it. I said we’d decorate it with thrift-store finds and make it nice. We actually haven’t lived on our own together since—” I think back. “Not since I was seven. In Rome.”
“What did she say when you asked her to stay?”
“That I could come with her to Mexico, but she had to follow her heart.” I stop the water, close the dishwasher, and dry my hands. “She’s always following her heart.” This is the first time I’ve actually told anyone how hard I begged. “I said, ‘isn’t part of your heart with me? I’m the one who’s always been here. Please can’t we get an apartment? Let me finish high school. Let’s live together.’ But it turns out I’m not the type of person who inspires feelings of devotion.”
Tatum has stopped moving. He’s looking at me, paying attention to every word.
“She said I could get my GED from Mexico if I wanted,” I continue. “And that she was in love. If I lovedher,I wouldn’t standin her way.” I can’t look him in the eye. “She was gone the next morning when I woke up. She texted me that she knew I really wanted her to be happy, and she was looking at this wonderful chance at happiness and she absolutely had to take it.”
“She left without saying goodbye?”
“Well, she texted.”
Tatum makes a noise in the back of his throat.
“That’s how we left most of the time,” I say. “After Kingsley kicked her out and after this guy abandoned us in Rome when I was little, Isadora never got dumped again. She always left first, told them later. I just—I never thought she’d do it to me.”
For a second, I think he’s going to hug me.
I step back, impulsively. I don’t want him to hug me, because Tatum is obviously not a good person for me to have told all this personal stuff to. Just because we had some kind of a moment right now, talking about our missing parents and our abandonment issues, and
just because he plays guitar like an unselfconscious angel-boy and
has impossible muscles in his shoulders, and
