The Night Before(61)

“I probably started dating again too soon,” I say. This is now damage control. If he opened me up and saw what was inside my head, he would shove me out the door and turn the bolts.

“After the bad breakup?” he asks.

I nod yes, but then also no. “It’s more than that. I learned some things over the summer. About myself and my childhood. Things that I’m still sorting out.”

He drops a piece of crust into the box and picks up a fresh slice. “Well, since this is technically our second date, let’s hear it. All of it,” he says. “Tell me what you learned this summer that you can’t sort out.”

I lean against the counter, bare feet planted firmly on the linoleum floor.

“It’s about my father. And my mother, really.”

“You said your father cheated and then left all of you for another woman. You haven’t seen him for sixteen years, right?”

“We were supposed to go for weekends. Up to Boston, twice a month. Rosie went until she was seventeen, but I refused. I could see it made my mother happy when I did, and Dick never pushed it. At least, that’s what I was told. Your father said you can go if you want, but you don’t have to. I think it would have been different if Rosie had refused.”

“Why? Did he love her more?”

I look at him now with profound curiosity. It’s such a horrible question, and yet also dead-on. I like how smart Jonathan is, and how honest. Yes, I think. He is honest.

He offered to show me, to find himself on the Internet, to pull up emails. But I’ve done enough damage tonight. I’ll have time tomorrow—I’ll have all day because Rosie will wake me up, sneaking in my room to make sure I’m all right, the door squeaking, the floor creaking. She can’t help herself.

“Yes,” I answer just as boldly. “He loved her more. I’ve just recently been able to admit it. I had to be shown. I had to have the evidence laid out before me.”

I tell him then about the picture I found in a box my mother sent me when she moved to California. It has all of my old junk from my room—plastic trophies and medals, art projects, letters I wrote home from summer camp. And pictures.

“I made it my screen saver,” I tell him.

He stops eating and leans against the counter next to me. “Wait—you took the one photo from that box where you can actually see the sadness on your face—your little childhood face, sad because you knew your father loved your sister more—and you put it in a place where you had to look at it every day?”

I laugh a little because he’s right. It is absurd. Except that it also makes perfect sense.

“I didn’t want to forget. I wanted to see that face, looking at my father behind the camera, and know beyond any doubt that it lives inside me.”

“That’s horrible,” he says. “It’s so sad. I’m sorry, Laura. Really—I can’t imagine thinking that my parents didn’t love me. Even when my sister and I complain about the terrible things they did as parents…”

“Was your mother late to pick you up from soccer practice?”

“All the time! How did you know?”

We both smile now.

“But even when we complain about those things, there’s never a question about whether they loved us.”

I think to myself how normal that must be. How most adults in our world—the world of the privileged—take this for granted. And I realize how hard it is for me to imagine it.

“I’m happy for you,” I say. “And I’m happy for Rosie.”

I go on then, with these things I learned from Dr. Brody. How I choose men who would never love me so I could repeat the past. Craving that feeling that was so familiar. Craving the chance to finally be enough, enough to fix him and make him love me. How I did that with Mitch Adler.

It struck me one day in the West Hotel, lying in bed with Dr. Brody, Kevin, after making love. Feeling safe and protected. We spoke of these things, and I suddenly realized that all of these pieces fell into place. That Mitch was dead because they did.

I don’t tell Jonathan about Dr. Brody or how I came to understand all of these things about myself.

And I don’t tell him about Joe and the secret we now share.

I only say that I figured it out and that I now feel responsible for Mitch. He wouldn’t have been in that car with me if I had done what any normal girl would have done. If I had told him to go straight to hell when we were kissing behind a tree.

Jonathan is quiet suddenly, and it has me unnerved. Something about Mitch Adler gets under his skin. Maybe because he can’t believe he’s here with me—the woman who might have killed someone. Or because it reminds him of the man who drowned when he was in high school. Or, maybe, because of something else. Something I can’t even imagine. And I have a very colorful imagination.

“Are you wondering if I’m one of them?” Jonathan says after a little while. “One of your wrong men?”

Now it’s my turn to be honest. “I wouldn’t know if you were. That’s the problem now. It’s like knowing you’re color-blind and then someone asks you the color of the leaves on the trees.”

“So you gather evidence—is it spring or fall? Are they maples or oaks? Why is he driving that shitty little car?”

I answer with a nod and a smile as I stare at my naked toes.