Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [32]
“It’s been almost eighteen years,” I stated, more to myself than to Jack. “I don’t think I have much to say to her. I didn’t even know if she was alive. I sort of figured that she wasn’t, since she’d never popped back up.”
The truth was that when my mother hightailed it out of the family, when she left us a flimsy note that literally read good-bye, and when Andy, my brother, and I ran to her closets to find them barren, I never really looked for her. I prayed for her return, yes, but I was nine, and after I hand-scrawled signs that I’d planned to stick up on telephone poles around the neighborhood, and after my father gently suggested that she wasn’t “missing” in the way that the signs implied, I simply gave up. After six months, I even stopped praying that she’d come back. She’d run away, and far be it from me to try to rein her back in, like a kite tangled in a tree. Instead of asking God to return her to us, I littered my prepubescent mind with various reasons that she’d left us: I hadn’t been grateful enough for my ninth birthday party; I’d gotten a B in geography; she was always asking me to clean up my room, and I rarely, if ever, tidied to her satisfaction. And soon enough, I bathed myself with sadness and guilt, and knew that she wasn’t coming back because I’d pushed her away, and why would she want to return to such a spoiled, rotten kid who wasn’t thankful enough for her parties and couldn’t be bothered to put back her My Little Ponies? My father promised me that this wasn’t so; he called me into our molasses-colored den after dinner one night and kindly and firmly told me that this wasn’t so, but mostly he, too, squirreled into his pain, and his silences offered little reassurance.
But eventually, as my preteen years gave way to more deductive teenage ones, I grew hostile, bitter, resentful at her departure, and I vowed to erase her from my space entirely. Which, most days, when I wasn’t letting her betrayal define me, I managed to do quite well.
So no, I didn’t realize that she lived within miles of me and that conceivably, she’d never really gone that far to begin with.
“Well, maybe you should call her. I don’t know. It’s up to you,” Jack said to me tonight, as the taxi pulls to an abrupt stop at a yellow light.
Of course it’s up to me! I almost snapped, then realize that it wasn’t him that I’m mad at. It was just my initial inclination, to mount an overwhelming defense of my actions because I’d spent so many years doing so with Henry, who never understood, who, in his own words, couldn’t understand, how I could let my mother slip away after decades of not knowing her.
“You’re crazy not to track her down,” he’d say, over pasta or when I’d finally soothed Katie to bed or when I was stretching after a power walk, ambushing me with the subject when I was least prepared.
“How would I be crazy not to?” I’d always retort back, once I’d caught my breath at the surprise attack. “Here is a woman who has wanted no part of my life, who decided that I’d be better off without a mother than with her as my mother, and gave me no say in the matter, and now, she wants back in? I think I’d be crazy to give her that chance.”
“She’s your mother!” Henry would say, his voice boiling with judgment. “Isn’t that worth something?”
I’d seethe silently and exit the room, fleeing both my husband who didn’t know what was best for me and the skeletons that he’d insist on digging back up.
So tonight, with Jack, it’s hard not to rage at his innocuous reply, even though I know that he doesn’t fault me for my choice. Hell, I’m not even sure how much my choice registers with him. He was so tied to his mother that, I think in the cab, he just doesn’t get it, would never get the fury and the devastation that comes from abandonment. But he didn’t get it in an entirely different way from Henry. Henry got it—he got how she scarred me—and yet he still chose to tirelessly push me to make