Page 123 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
I swipe away Delphine’s call only a second after it pops up, giving Ma my full attention. “You can’t live with me,” I say seriously. It’s the first direct and honest thing I’ve said to her all night. “I don’t have rooms, Ma. It’s all open. And my girlfriend is living with me.”
Ma sniffs. “It’s not as if you’re married—she can move back into her own place—unless—” Her eyes widen with meaning, and I sigh.
“We’re not getting married. But I don’t want her to move out. Especially not when I think you don’t really want to move in.”
“You don’t know what I want,” she says tightly.
“Maybe.” My headache has finally squeezed off the air supply to my self-restraint; it’s dead. RIP restraint. “But I don’t think you know what you want either.”
“Becky.”
“You haven’t known what you’ve wanted for such a long time that your first reaction to getting divorced is wondering how other people will feel about it.”
My mother purses her lips. “I don’t like being spoken to in this way.”
“And I don’t like being between you and Daddy! I don’t like feeling like I’m your only friend, when we both know that’s not true! I don’t like having to talk around whom I date to make you more comfortable!” I’m caustic, spiky. I’m a human mace swung by a knight. “You’re unhappy, and I think you hate knowing that other people are happy without you.”
“That’s not fair!” Ma says, crying harder. “And this is no way to speak to your mother! Your father has poisoned you against me, he took you away and now he’s made you hate me—”
“I don’t hate you,” I interrupt. My eyes are hot and wet with fresh tears of my own. “That’s your problem—you think all your unhappiness is because you aren’t loved well enough by everyone else. But it’s no one else’s job to make you happy, Ma, and it never has been. I’m sorry that you and Daddy couldn’t make it work. I’m sorry that we couldn’t stay in the same city and have the things we all needed. But we can’t keep using the past as an excuse for misery in the present.”
Ma doesn’t respond for a long time. She’s staring past her screen, and she’s still crying, but it’s softer now, only the tears and not the sobs.
I close my eyes. Shame has followed my outburst, but there’s relief too. I’ve wanted to say these things for so long, and now they’re said. Now they’re out there.
“Are you miserable, Rebecca?” my mother whispers. It’s my full name that has me opening my eyes. She says it like a mother should say it—like she grew me from scratch, like she labored over every bone and organ and liter of blood that went into making me.
It’s surprising how quickly the answer comes. With the headache and my terrible day and my pervading loneliness and having to fix everything and this phone call, and yet—
“I don’t . . . I don’t think I am, actually. I think I’m happy. Or something very like it.”
“Why?”
She asks it like she really wants to know. Like she’s hoping I have an answer for this, some small candle she can borrow to light her way.
I think of Delphine that evening with the sparkler, laughing with her bare feet in the soft grass. I think of her in my bed, sleepy and pliant as I curl possessively around her. I think of her kneeling in front of me, her honey eyes clear and trusting.
I think of her. Just her.
Delphine Dansey, sunshine girl and socialite.
My former enemy, my brat. My kitten.
“Because of her,” I say, and it comes out so easily that the words that follow next feel inevitable. “I love her.”
I love her.
All this time I thought she was Tea Set Barbie, staring worshipfully up at me, the Red Dress Barbie. But no, I had it all wrong, it was always the other way around.
It was me worshiping her, it was me enamored with her utter sweetness and symmetry of being, it was me besotted and beguiled and content simply to be witness to her existence.
I was Tea Set Barbie the entire time.
God, I’ve been such a fool. For so long I’ve thought of love as a lie, as a sequence of compatibility and chemicals, or I’ve thought of it like I think of kudzu—a sneaking, snaking weed, reaching and grasping and choking all the life around it. I haven’t wanted love because all I’ve known of it has been from my parents, and honestly, they’ve been very bad at it with each other. And sometimes bad at it with me. But how long am I going to use that as an excuse?
“I’m glad to hear it,” Ma says, and her voice is careful but earnest. “I can’t wait to meet her.”
“That would make me quite happy,” I say, and I mean it. “And I want you to be happy too, Ma. If you want to move up here with Ima, we’ll find a way to make it happen, and if you want to start dating again, you know I’ll support you. But it has to start with what you want. It can’t depend on anyone else.”
