I Left Home and Let Them Clean Up the Mess

Chapter 3 What They Wanted

Celia called again two days later. Then her sister, my aunt Margaret, called the next week. Then a cousin I barely remembered from a wedding when I was twelve. Then my father, briefly, as if he were calling a business associate and not the daughter he hadn't spoken to in years.

"It's your mother," he said. "She's not well. Come see her."

I hung up on him.

Then the messages started. Some pleading, some angry, some from people I had never met—old friends of my parents, neighbors, someone who claimed to be a doctor at the hospital where my mother had supposedly been admitted.

Mom: I'm sorry. Please come home.

Mom: Marina, I don't know how much time I have left.

Mom: Your sister needs you.

That one made me laugh out loud in my empty apartment. Wren needed me. Wren, who had never needed anyone.

I ignored them all. I went to work. I edited my books. I took my cat to the vet for his annual checkup. I told myself that this was just another version of the same pattern, that my family had always known how to push my buttons, and that the button marked "come home" was the one they pushed when they wanted something.

And then Wren called me herself.

Her voice was different. Softer. For a moment I didn't recognize her.

"Marina," she said. "Please don't hang up."

"I'm not going to hang up," I said. "I'm just not going to do what you want me to do."

A pause. I heard her breathe. "I'm not calling to ask you to come home," she said. "Not exactly."

"What are you calling for?"

"I need to tell you something." Another pause. "The engagement fell apart because Mr. Halloway's family found out something about our family. Something about Dad. The woman he was seeing—she's not just pregnant. She's been talking. To journalists. To people who care about that sort of thing."

I sat down. "What does that have to do with me?"

"Nothing. That's the point. It has nothing to do with you. But Mom is—she's not handling it well. She thinks if you come home, if we present a united front..." She trailed off.

"Wren."

"I know," she said. "I know. You shouldn't have to. I'm not asking you to."

I waited.

But she was asking. She was just asking in a different way.

"Mom's been in bed for two weeks," she said. "She thinks you hate her."

"I don't hate her," I said, and was surprised to find it was true. The opposite of love, it turned out, was not hate. It was indifference. It was four years of silence. It was a life built three hours from the house I grew up in, with no room in it for the people who had once been the whole world.

"Then come home," Wren said. "Just once. Just for a weekend. Let her see you. Let her know you're okay."

"I'm not okay," I said. "I'm fine. That's different."

She laughed, a small sad sound. "Yeah," she said. "I know the difference."

I didn't agree. I didn't say no. I said I'd think about it, and then I hung up and sat on my couch for an hour, staring at nothing.

The next day, my mother called me herself.

It was the first time I'd heard her voice in four years. It was thinner than I remembered. Older. Tired.

"Marina," she said. "Please don't hang up."

"I'm not going to hang up," I said.

"It's about Wren." A pause. "And it's about you. And I know I don't deserve to ask, but I'm asking anyway."

"Ask me what?"

"Come home," she said. "Just for a weekend. Just to help me fix this. The family is falling apart, and I need—" She stopped. I heard her swallow. "I need you."

I closed my eyes.

"Mom," I said. "Do you remember what you said to me the last time I was home?"

Silence.

"You said there was no place for me in your house," I said. "You told me if I couldn't come as family, I shouldn't come at all. Do you remember that?"

"I remember."

"And now you're asking me to come back because the family is falling apart, and you need me. Not because you miss me. Not because you want me. Because you need me."

"That's not true."

"Then what is true?"

She was quiet for a long time. And then, in a voice I had never heard from her before, she said, "I don't know. I don't know what's true anymore. I just know that everything is falling apart and I don't know how to fix it and I thought—I thought maybe if you came home, I could remember how to be the person who had a daughter."

The person who had a daughter. Not the person who had a daughter who fit. The person who had a daughter.

I didn't say yes. I didn't say no. I said, "I'll think about it."

And then I hung up and sat there for a long time, in my apartment, in my city, in my quiet life, and thought about what it would cost me to go back.