Page 67 of The Art of Scandal

A mother can decode their child’s pain by the way they cry. Faith’s was a breathless whine when she was hungry, and a hiccuping staccato when she wanted attention. The high-pitched scream that burst from her tiny body when Rachel came home for the holidays was pure pain. It wasWhere were you?andWhy did you leave me?andPlease don’t go, in one long, scream. All Rachel could do was hold her arms down in the center of the bed so she wouldn’t hurt herself.

Later, her father would say that Faith was never like this. “She’s just tired, most likely.” But Rachel knew better. She heard the damage she’d caused in Faith’s wail. It was an echo of the pain she felt when someone mentioned her mother’s name.

Ramona Thomas was a woman who dreamed of singing on Broadway but paid the bills by fixing the soles of rich white women’s shoes. She’d named her only daughter Rachel because it was her favorite from the Bible, a fact she’d written in a notebook filled with unfinished song lyrics and her bitter resentment, which coated her life like oil. All of it was bound to catch fire eventually.

Rachel was three when her mother left. Too young to have anything but the memory of her smell: vanilla and Pink Oil Moisturizer singed with a hot comb. The memory of her touch: firm but careful. The memory of a sweater: burnt orange, like sunsets, with little fuzz balls Rachel used to grab. Her voice was a melody that started to fade as soon as she left—like a song Rachel listened to less and less as she got older.

“I hated my mother for a long time.” Rachel didn’t look directly at Nathan while she spoke. She kept her eyes on the lake and let the water’s motion lull her into a calm. “But after Faith, I think I finally understood her a little more. You can’t straddle both sides of your life. Living in one means losing something from the other. That’s just the way it is.”

Despite her father’s assurances that Faith was fine, the tantrums were worse when she returned home for the summer. Rachel spent the first two nights rocking Faith to sleep, only for her to jolt awake, look at Rachel’s face, and start crying all over again.

“That’s when I had my first panic attack,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was. I’d sit outside her room and listen to her breathing while my heart was burning up inside my chest. I was nineteen years old. I remember thinking that we couldn’t live that way. That this couldn’t be what we were to each other. Nothing but damage.”

Her hands were trembling like she’d never left that narrow hallway. She pressed them hard against her legs. “I stopped going home. Phone calls would trigger another attack. Dad wrote letters, but I could never bear to read them. I got high a lot. It helped. But I couldn’t look at old pictures or be around kids.” She paused. “I wonder if that’s how my mother did it. Erased me from her life so that it was easier to stay away.” She glanced at Nathan but wasn’t brave enough to read his face. “Two years later, the dean of students told me that my father was in the hospital with pancreatic cancer. They’d put him into a medically induced coma.”

Nathan made a wounded sound, a strangled loss of breath. “I’m so sorry.”

“Please don’t be.” She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t deserve sympathy. I never will.” She took a deep breath. “I read all his letters. There was nothing about him being sick. It was all about Faith and—” The memory bled through and made her choke. She swallowed hard and kept talking, but her words stopped and started, tumbling together. She’d dropped her classes and returned home, but he was already gone. Faith was with a neighbor. She was five and there was no tantrum this time, but she didn’t eat for several days. Like she wanted to hurt in ways her mother couldn’t see.

The little money Peter had was put toward unpaid medical bills so large they looked like mortgages. The landlord gave her six weeks to get current on the rent. Rachel applied for retail jobs, but the hours never worked with Faith’s school schedule. After-school programs were full. Sitters were too expensive. Eventually an eviction notice went up.

“We stayed with a neighbor for a while, and then we went to a motel.” Her face warmed. “It was too expensive. To this day, I don’t know how I could have been so careless with my money.”

He slid a hand up her spine. “You were doing the best you could.”

“Well, you can guess what happened next. I ran out of money. I applied for public housing, but…” She paused and he finished the thought for her.

“Waiting list.”

“For everything. No one’s ever in a hurry to help someone when they’re poor. Maybe they figure since you don’t have anything, there’s no harm in making you wait.” Her voice cracked as she spoke, and she covered her mouth.

Nathan’s hand stilled. “Hey. If this is too much for you—”

“No.” She took a deep breath. “You asked, I want to tell you. We slept in the car because the shelters weren’t safe.” Bile rose in the back of her throat. “I would drop her off at school and take whatever work I could find. I made enough for gas and food. And then we would park on some quiet street for the night and hope no one saw us and called the police.” She could still picture Faith’s curly head bobbing beneath the blanket. Her daughter was still afraid of the dark back then. She’d prop a flashlight on her shoulder and read a worn copy ofThe Runaway Bunnythat Peter bought for her. Rachel would stay up all night, staring at the expensive houses with their landscaped lawns and home security signs, thinking,I have to fix this. And at dawn, for a few hours between dusk and day, sometimes she’d sleep.

“I knew that if someone caught us, they’d take her away from me,” she said. It was the only thing that kept the panic attacks away. And that’s when she knew having Faith had fundamentally changed her. That it had rewritten her DNA. All that time, she’d been afraid that love would break her, but instead it made her stronger than she’d ever been.

Even during the worst of it—when people walked by peering into her car window, looking for a purse or forgotten keys, that moment when they made eye contact and she never knew if they would see her as a deterrent or an opportunity—Rachel didn’t fall apart. She’d covered the windows with newspaper and started carrying a knife. And then one day she’d found Alesha’s address in one of her father’s old books. A scrap of paper that nearly fell to the floor before she noticed.

“She found me a job waiting tables,” Rachel said. “Faith was enrolled in school. A few years later I met Matt and…”

And she got her own big house. A manicured lawn. She got the security of Matt’s bank account. She got to wake up every day next to a man she loved. Someone who had vowed in front of hundreds of people not to disappear like her mother or be stolen away like her father. She got the Abbotts, a family more flawed than she was. And she could finally tell Faith that everything would be fine and know it was true.

Rachel had signed that prenup to prove to everyone, including herself, that she married Matt for love, not money. But in reality, she was exactly like her mother, bending herself into awkward shapes to become the perfect wife, when she never really wanted any of it. She had fought for a life she didn’t want because losing it scared her more than losing herself.

And here she was, still fighting. Still afraid. Loving Nathan was a ledge, and she had no idea what was on the other side. What would happen if she jumped? Would she just keep falling?

“Does Faith have any idea how much you’ve sacrificed for her?” Nathan asked.

Rachel bristled at the idea that she’d earned her daughter’s sympathy. “She knows I didn’t finish school. But it wasn’t a sacrifice. It was doing the right thing.”

“Is that how she sees it? You never graduating, moving in with strangers, being a full-time wife and mother while your art collects dust in storage?”

She thought about the few times she’d mentioned her art to Faith, and how quickly her daughter would change the subject. Rachel had always assumed her former career aspirations were a reminder to Faith of being abandoned for something her mother thought was more important. “I put her through a lot. She has a right to be cautious when it comes to me.”

“No, she doesn’t,” he said. “I couldn’t boil water when I was eighteen. You were learning to be a mom before you even knew how to be a person.”

“Being a mother was more important.”

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