Serious Moonlight(102)

It took her a long time to answer. “I used to think it was because I didn’t want you to remember Lily in a bad light. Because she made some bad decisions—or didn’t make any decisions at all, I suppose. Which was frustrating. But she was also sweet and wonderful and funny, and people never remember the good things. They remember the bad stuff.”

“I already remembered some of the bad stuff.”

“Not about her, about me,” Mona said. “What if I had told somebody about Lily’s pregnancy? What if I’d called Hugo and urged him to talk to Lily? What if I’d pushed her harder to see a doctor?”

“That’s absurd,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

“I know that now. But I was worried you wouldn’t. And that you’d shut me out for either making a mistake or keeping that mistake from you all these years. Maybe it sounds stupid, but I think I’ve been afraid you might do what Lily did and just walk away one day.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Darling, I sure hope not. But between your mom and your grandma’s deaths, and everything else that’s happened, I sometimes look at you and see the same coping mechanism I saw in Lily—a girl who protects herself by keeping people at a distance.”

As I glanced at the sleep clinic technicians through a glass window, I thought about Daniel and our fight. He said he didn’t tell me that he knew Darke was his father because he was afraid I’d run away from him. Was this who I was? Someone who ran away when the going got tough? Who pushed people away?

“I love my mom, but I don’t want to be her,” I said.

“Then don’t,” she said firmly. “Just be yourself.”

It wasn’t until the next day that I was able to get my sleep center results. With Grandpa and Aunt Mona, I sat in a tufted leather chair on the other side of the doctor’s desk while he flung out phrases like “sleep latencies” and “sleep onset REMs.” But when I heard “troublesome” and “narcolepsy with cataplexy, type one,” I sat up straighter and listened to what the doctor was trying to tell me.

She said that there’s some genetic disposition for the disorder, but that symptoms sometimes didn’t appear until teen years, and they typically increase over time, which is probably why my sleep issues had been getting worse lately.

She said that it was a long-term neurological disorder, and I was never going to be cured or perfectly normal.

But.

I could manage it with changes in my routine and with medication. And that I’d need to make an effort and be willing to experiment with treatments, because it may take a couple of years to find the right balance of medication—to keep me awake when I needed to be awake and to sleep when I needed to sleep. And maybe that’s where Grandpa went wrong after he got diagnosed: he didn’t like how the medication made him feel, so he gave up. I needed to be more tenacious than that if I wanted this to work.

And I did. In some ways this felt like turning over a new leaf. No more running away. Time to commit to things that mattered and stop fearing the worst.

Armed with prescriptions and a series of future appointments to check on my progress, I emerged from the doctor’s office feeling like Rocky Balboa, arms raised in triumph at the top of the famous stone steps in Philadelphia, ready to win at life. As if I’d accomplished something monumental. God as my witness, I’d never go boneless again!

Well, it was a start at least. And that wasn’t nothing. I could finally set my eye on the horizon, where feeling better wasn’t guaranteed but at least possible. It was a weight lifted off my shoulders—a spring-cleaning of the sticky cobwebs inside my head. And as we stood in line for a celebratory lunch of chicken sandwiches and strawberry-lemon bars, my newly cleared mind had space for thinking about other things.

Like Daniel. And that night at the opera.

And our fight.

I thought and thought, and I didn’t understand how I could be so angry at him one second, and the next, miss him so much that my heart felt like it was shattering. But it wasn’t until I got home from the doctor’s office that I came to some realizations.

He was right when he said he’d tried to tell me earlier about Raymond Darke—at least, in a small way. Before the opera, when we’d argued about going. He wanted to call the whole thing off. He never flat-out said, I knew Raymond Darke was my father this entire time—which would have prevented all of this. At the very least, my heart wouldn’t feel as if it had been punched repeatedly.

But I’d been so distressed about Daniel lying to me that I’d failed to realize how upsetting it must have been for him to face Raymond Darke. That was the point of the whole thing, right? It wasn’t that Daniel was hell-bent on outing Darke’s true identity to the world; he was trying to communicate with his father. And could I blame him? A couple years after my mom died, when I was twelve, I spent weeks trying to figure out who my father was, based on nothing but a nickname and a school that Aunt Mona had remembered. I looked online. I called people. I made lists. I never found out who it was, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. And I’d done it all behind my grandparents’ backs. I’d lied. I’d kept secrets. It wasn’t because I didn’t love them, but because it was my quest. They could never understand what it felt like.

Daniel shouldn’t have lied to me. But I could understand how it snowballed into something he didn’t intend. And I understood why he was afraid to tell me, because right now I was afraid too. Afraid that we’d both failed each other. Afraid of what I’d lose if I gave up on us and walked away instead of accepting his apology.