The Break(66)

My mom stirs. Only her reading lamp is on. They always leave it on for her at night in case she wakes and doesn’t know where she is. I reach out a hand and pat her leg gently as she wakes up. “Mom,” I say softly, cradling Lila with the other hand. Her eyes flutter open. “Rowan,” she says, which floods me with relief, but she looks so scared it doesn’t last long.

“I’m right here,” I say.

Lila’s sleeping deeply on my chest, and there’s a hazy warmth to the room even though it’s freezing outside tonight. The dim light reminds me of when my mom and I would curl up in her bed each night. “Mom,” I say carefully.

She tries to pull herself up onto her elbows but it’s too awkward—she can’t quite get her body right. So she rolls onto her side and props up her head with a pillow. “Sweetheart,” she says. “I need to talk to you. I’ve been asking them to send you to me all day. They kept telling me how busy you are.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” I ask softly. The low lighting inside her room makes me want to whisper. “I would have come.”

“I know, dear,” she says. “I couldn’t find my phone. I think I’ve misplaced it.”

I’m sure it’s in her desk where it always is, but I don’t say that because I don’t want her to feel bad.

“I was thinking, sweetie, about everything that’s happened to you. And I want to tell you something, and whatever you decide to do with that information is okay with me. All right?”

I nod, unsure of where she’s going, surprised she’s this lucid.

“I think the truth may be more important to you than protecting myself. And Ken, well, he’s dead and gone now anyway. Heart attack, you remember?”



“Ken Conroy?” I ask, confused. He was one of my dad’s friends, and the only person named Ken whom we both know.

She nods. I didn’t know he was dead; she never told me, and I don’t make it my business to keep track of my dad’s friends. I tried to bury them the same time we buried my dad. I remember the exquisite agony of running into one or two of them in town at the deli buying sandwiches and Coca-Cola, or at the Hollywood Video renting movies for whatever family they had left. Most of them disintegrated, folding in on themselves, getting into scrapes with the law and leaving wives and children.

“It’s just that,” my mom starts, then pauses. “I know you’re working with that woman Sylvie. And that she says you’ll figure out why you had that break and snapped on your sitter, and you’ll put all those pieces together yourself, with Sylvie, safely. But I want you to know that I’ve done some reading on PTSD, here, alone, on my phone. There’s just so much alone time here.”

Guilt floods every cell. Couldn’t I have her live with us? Couldn’t I get her out of this place?

Where is June?

I shudder. I want to talk to my mom about what’s happening at our apartment right now—I can practically see the uniformed cops swarming it with dogs and flashlights and forensic equipment. Will there be sirens? Will our neighbors pour into the hallways? Will they find something?

My mind runs in a loop, but I focus on my mom because it’s so clear she needs to say this.

“And what I’ve read as I’ve researched is that any mind is capable of shutting down and repressing the memory of a traumatic event. And I know how traumatic Lila’s birth was. It’s just, Rowan, your mind has already had practice at shutting down and forgetting.”

I pat Lila’s butt, my eyebrows up. “What do you mean?” I ask. I think of the knife and what I remember about my dad’s bedroom that night.



“I was carrying on with your father’s friend Ken,” my mom says, like a foot smashing a hornet’s nest.

“What?” I ask. If I wasn’t sitting, my legs would have given out. “Carrying on? You mean having an affair?”

“Yes,” my mother says, matter-of-factly, like we’re talking about something else. And there’s no guilt in her eyes, only fire, like she has to tell me something and this is only the tip of the iceberg, and also like this is no longer about her but about something much bigger.

“Really?” I ask, incredulous. I’m never much surprised by people’s affairs. But this is different; this is my mother.

“Yes,” she says again. “And Ken killed your father.”

My heart stops. It skips so many beats I swear I’ll die right there. I can’t speak. I can only stare at her beautiful face squinting at me, taking me in.

“Mom,” I finally say, my hand still against Lila’s back. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Because you already knew,” she says, and she leans into me and takes my hand. “You were there. You saw it.”

I’m not sure where I go in that moment. The room feels fuzzy, the edges of the bed blurring, shadows dancing over the walls. A car honks somewhere nearby and it feels like a slap.

“You were just a bitty thing, Rowan,” she says. “You were only five. At first I thought we were both pretending not to know. But then I realized you’d been so traumatized that you’d blocked it out. And I was too scared to put you in therapy, too scared of what you’d remember and reveal to a therapist or to the authorities. I loved Ken and my heart was broken, and I worried that not only would Ken go to jail but somehow I’d be implicated in what happened and I’d be taken away from you. Your father was dead and nothing was bringing him back, and I’d seen it with my own eyes—it was self-defense. I didn’t need a jury to find Ken innocent, not when I knew there’d be so many ways a trial could go wrong.”