Confidential(12)

Young and I were a memory, an open grave. It was just a matter of time before the dirt fell over us.





CHAPTER 9





LUCINDA


Mom said Adam hadn’t changed, but could love really be that blind?

He looked ravaged. He’d always been thin and rangy, but now he was skeletal. He must not have been eating for months before his cancer was discovered. I couldn’t believe he just saw a doctor in the past few weeks. This had clearly been going on much longer. And the house was a wreck, too, like they’d become hoarders.

All the rooms were tiny, but after Mom got clean, they’d been well kept. Cozy. I used to love that house, sitting outside on the deck, journaling, the Russian River below. Now there were dusty piles on every surface, and it managed to smell actively rotting and musty at once. Again, this had all been going on much longer than a few weeks.

It already smelled like death, was the thing. Food left to decay and spoil, the scent of apathy and neglect.

It didn’t seem like Adam was the only one who’d given up, no matter what Mom had told me on the phone. I wondered what had been happening between them over the past years, in my absence.

Adam was lying on the plaid sofa in the living room, under an afghan. Mom was slamming pots and pans in the kitchen. She’d looked pissed ever since I arrived, which was disorienting, as I’d expected to find her weepy and grateful. Adam appeared to be dozing, but he had to be pretending; I couldn’t imagine who could sleep in all that racket, or maybe he was just that close to dead.

Finally, Mom walked into the living room with a tray holding some canned soup she’d heated up. My eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to seeing her with gray hair and no makeup and sweats; it was as if someone were impersonating her. As if I’d wandered onto the wrong soundstage, and none of this was real.

She shoved a bunch of papers, magazines, and who knows what from the coffee table onto the floor and put the tray down with a clatter. The soup spilled. Adam’s eyes flew open.

“Your daughter’s here,” my mother sneered. He’d come into my life as a teenager; she’d never left out the step before daughter before.

I’d also never seen her behave like this. But then, I didn’t know what it was like to have your husband choose dying over living with you. Now that I’d seen the condition of their lives, though, it seemed like a far more rational decision.

“Hi, Lucinda,” Adam said with a weak smile.

“I’m going out,” Mom announced. “I’ll leave you two to talk.”

After the slam of the front door, Adam and I looked at each other.

“She knows,” he said.

“Knows what?”

“The past.” He glanced down at the soup as if he didn’t know how it got there, and I realized my mother hadn’t told me where the cancer had spread, but his brain seemed like a definite possibility.

“Whose past?”

“Ours.” He gestured between us. “I told her. Deathbed confession.” He tried to smile again.

I stared at him for one long, shocked moment.

Then I had the uncharacteristic desire to smash him in the face. The gall. The selfishness. He was on his way out, but I had to go on living, and she had to live knowing . . .

I stood up and started striding around the room, not sure what I could possibly say. He couldn’t undo this. Neither of us could. He’d blown it all up. His life. His relationship with my mother. My relationship with her.

The anger was like a fire through my limbs. An unfamiliar fire. I didn’t get mad; I got self-abusing. But that was under normal circumstances, and this was so far from normal.

“You’re going to die,” I said. “You’re going to hell. But did you need to take us with you?”

“You’re always so melodramatic.”

Maybe cancer really was rotting his brain. Good. “I’ve never been melodramatic. I’ve always held in way too much.” Then it dawned on me. “You did this so she’d let you go, didn’t you?”

“She hasn’t tried to convince me to do chemo since. And once I’m gone, she won’t waste a lot of time grieving. She can go find someone who deserves her.”

“That’s not how it works. You don’t love the people who deserve you. You love who you love.”

“But you don’t have to act on it,” he said. “That was my mistake.”

Crazy as it sounded, all I’d wanted was to protect my mother from the pain. The pain of knowing who I really was. Now I couldn’t spare her.

I couldn’t believe he’d chosen this as his final act. The man who both my mother and I fell in love with was riddled with cancer and, supposedly, conscience. He thought this was about mercy. I could see it in his face.

He was getting ready to leave, and Mom and I had to dwell in the wreckage. Well, I already had been for years. But she didn’t have to. He and I had agreed to that years ago. He broke the pact, without giving me so much as a warning while I drove here, ostensibly to convince him of how much he had to live for.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“Maybe?”

“Now you can go ahead and hate me, too.”

He’d done this so I’d let him go, too. Then Mom and I could both hate him. “I’m going home.”