Now Is Not the Time to Panic(52)

It wasn’t like I never came home. We visited my mom at least six times a year, and she came to see Junie in Kentucky when she had free time. Hobart had died of a heart attack when I was in my late twenties, and they had really loved each other, I think, or at the very least, she had loved him more than she’d loved my dad. She had recently been dating a new guy, Hank, a former college soccer coach, who was very kind to my mother and clearly loved her, but they didn’t live together. Every time I saw Hank, he had a bag of my books that he wanted me to sign for gifts to various family members and friends, which made me like him quite a bit.

“Come on in, sweetie,” she said. “I’ve got coffee or sweet tea. I’ve got, like, thirty different kinds of Little Debbies.”

“I’m good,” I said, and we walked into the living room and sat down.

“Tell me what’s going on,” she said. “It sounded important. You never come here by yourself anymore.”

I felt so shaky, like maybe the rest of my life would be tracking people down and telling them this secret. Or, no, that’s what the article would do for me. What I was doing now was a kind of gift for myself, to tell the people I loved, to prepare them, to give them time to forgive me. After the article, the rest of my life would be awkwardly running into people I once knew and then watching them silently consider how deeply disturbed I was.

“Sweetie?” she said. “Is everything okay?”

“You know the panic?” I asked. “The reporter is writing about it.”

“Oh dear,” my mom said, tugging on the sleeves of her camo tracksuit, “oh my.”

“Yeah, and, so, she’s been talking to me about it.”

“Talking to you?” my mom asked. “Just you?”

“Well, I guess maybe lots of people,” I amended, “but mostly me.”

“Okay. So, she’s writing about the panic. And that was, you know, more than twenty years ago, but okay.”

“And, she’s talking to me, because I was the one who did it,” I said. I needed to just say it. After Aaron, who thought his mom was dead, I realized I needed to be pretty forthright about this thing.

“Frankie?” she said, looking at me, her eyes watering.

“I made the poster,” I told her. “I wrote those words. I made it up.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, and she looked so sad for me, like she was in pain to see me in pain, and then she said, “I knew that already.”

“What now?” I said. She wasn’t in pain, I realized. She was embarrassed for me.

“Frankie? I know. I knew then. I’ve always known. Well, I mean, not always, not at the beginning, but I’ve known for a really long time.”

“But you didn’t know,” I said. “You had no idea. You thought it was the triplets.”

“At first, yeah, of course, but then I figured it out. You were so strange that summer; I mean, even before you tried to kill yourself in the car—”

“That’s not what happe—”

“Okay, well, I mean, you were so strange, more than usual, and I figured it out. Honey, how would I not have known? It was you.”

“Well, yeah, that’s what I’m telling you. It was me.”

“I know.”

“Oh god, Mom,” I said.

“It was you and that boy that you had a crush on. It was . . . oh my god, the name just flew out of my head. His mom played the violin. I went to school with her. Jesus, I don’t remember her name, either.”

“His name was Zeke,” I said. “It was me and Zeke.”

“Yes, I know.”

I wished she’d stop saying that she knew. She had short-circuited my brain a little bit. I was prepared to reveal this secret, ask for her forgiveness for not telling her, and then try to protect her from the fallout. And instead, she was sitting there on her sofa, waiting for me to catch up.

“We had a Xerox machine in our garage, sweetie,” she said, softly, like I was six years old.

“But it was broken,” I told her. “The triplets broke it.”

“I know, which is why I didn’t quite realize it at first. But once it got really bad, I would check the boxes of copy paper and it was always less than before.”

“I didn’t know if you remembered that we had that copier,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me before? Why didn’t you tell me that summer, after people died? Why didn’t you make me stop?”

“Well, it did take me a while to figure it out, because you had confused me by liking a boy for the first time in your entire damn life, and then, crazy things had already happened, that boy fell off the water tower. And why in the world would I want to make you feel bad about that? You never mentioned it, and so I didn’t, either.”

“The whole time you’ve known,” I said.

“And, sweetie, maybe I would have said something if you’d messed up your life. If you’d never been able to recover from that summer, I would have told you that it wasn’t your fault, any of it, and that it was beautiful, I think, what you and Zeke made. But you got married, and you had Junie, and you’re a published author, and you’re a success. So I didn’t need to say anything. And you didn’t say anything, so I hoped that you’d forgotten about it, or put it behind you.”