Things You Save in a Fire(37)

He’d been dying when she left.

It tinted the story a slightly different hue, I’ll give it that.

“But you had to leave on my birthday?” I said, my throat feeling thick. “My sixteenth birthday.”

She nodded. “He had a surgery scheduled that Monday morning. He was healthy enough to try a lung transplant at the time, though it didn’t ever take the way they’d hoped. I waited until the very last minute, but then, by the afternoon of your birthday, I had to go to make it in time. He was scared and alone.”

“I was scared and alone.” It came out like a whisper.

But she heard it.

She nodded. “I thought if I stayed until your birthday, it would be like splitting the difference. I could be with you in the morning, and see you, but then get to him in time to take him to the hospital.”

My chest felt heavy, like it was sagging.

“That’s become a defining fact about our lives,” she said then, “that I left on your sixteenth birthday—and it was horrible timing, I admit. But I was trying to stay as long as I possibly could. I wanted to take you with me, if you remember.”

I did remember. She’d asked me to come, too. But I couldn’t leave my dad—and I was so indescribably angry at her for tearing our family apart that I didn’t even want to talk to her, much less move across the country.

But that didn’t mean I wanted her to go.

I wanted her to come to her senses and stay with us.

“Why didn’t you just tell me about Wallace being sick?” I asked.

“I hadn’t even told your father yet. I didn’t know how much he could handle. He cried so hard when I told him, I was afraid he might hurt himself. I thought maybe I could explain better after things settled down. I was making the best decisions I could. I honestly didn’t realize when I drove away that day that you’d never speak to me again.”

I gave her a look like, Come on. “I’m living in your house. Not sure it’s accurate to say I never spoke to you again.”

She gave a nod, like, Fair enough. “But I lost you.”

She wasn’t wrong. She had lost me.

Now was probably the time to confess to her about the other big event of my sixteenth birthday. I recognized, as I watched her lift a shaky hand to readjust her eye patch—blue-and-yellow check today—that it wasn’t entirely fair of me to let her go on thinking that she alone was responsible for all the misery in her wake. Now was probably the time to give her a real answer to that breezy question about whatever happened to Heath Thompson.

But I couldn’t. I had never talked about it in my life, to anyone. And up until this moment, I’d believed I never would.

Instead, I changed the subject. “So,” I said, more to fill the silence than anything else. “How does forgiveness work?”

She nodded, like we’d come back to the point. She gave a businesslike sigh and sat up straighter. “There are a lot of different methods for chipping away at forgiveness. Just saying the words ‘I forgive you,’ even to yourself, can be a powerful start.” She did not pause to see if I’d say them but kept right on. “Forgiveness is about a mind-set of letting go.” She thought for a second, then said, “It’s about acknowledging to yourself that someone hurt you, and accepting that.”

Done, I thought.

“Then it’s about accepting that the person who hurt you is flawed, like all people are, and letting that guide you to a better, more nuanced understanding of what happened.

Flawed, I thought. Okay. Check.

“And then there’s a third part,” she went on, “probably the hardest, that involves trying to look at the aftermath of what happened and find ways that you benefited, not just ways you were harmed.”

I gave her a look. “That last one’s a doozie.”

“Agreed.” She nodded. “The biggest—and the best.”

“Are you telling me I need to try to find upsides that came from your leaving?”

“It sounds greedy of me, doesn’t it?”

“A little.”

“But that’s just the way it works. I’d tell you the same thing if we were talking about anyone else.”

“You know a lot about this.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to study.” Next, she tilted her head. “Can you think of any upsides? Can you think of any good things in your life that wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t left?”

I let out a long breath. I frowned. I thought about it for a long time as I stared at the floor.

Then, at last, I said, “I got very, very good at basketball.”





Fourteen


MY STRATEGY FOR avoiding the rookie was much like my strategy for avoiding Diana. And about as effective. As determined as I was to get away from the rookie, the captain was just as determined to throw us together. We had to sit side by side at meals in the wobbliest two chairs. We had to clean the bathroom together, and do the chores nobody else wanted. We had the worst two parking spots, the farthest away.

For a while, we always got lumped together as newbies.

I worked hard to change that. Practically speaking, this meant pulling pranks on the rookie—establishing that I was a prank-er, not a prank-ee.

So: Hiding his clothes while he was in the shower? Me. Pouring ice water on him while he was fast asleep? Me. Filling his shoes with water and putting them in the freezer? Me. Whatever the guys needed done, I did it. I volunteered. I thought it would separate us. I thought it would distinguish me with the crew. I thought, at the very least, it would annoy the rookie and discourage him from being so nice all the damn time.