Confessions on the 7:45(78)

Where are you, Dad?

Don’t worry. Everything’s okay. You’ll see. A couple of days and things will be back to normal.

But he’d never heard his dad sound like that. There were unfamiliar noises in the background of the call—a ringing phone, voices he didn’t recognize.

Everything’s okay. Just hang tight.

His mom had said that, too. But Oliver was old enough to know that when grown-ups kept saying that, then it wasn’t true. Things were not okay.

And, then, after Mom left their bedroom, went back to the room next door where Jasper and Lily slept when they were all visiting together, after they’d been quiet for a long time, he heard his mom crying. Not just getting teary, the way she sometimes did. Not yelling-crying the way she sometimes did when they were really being “little assholes,” as their dad liked to say. Just crying. Stuttering breaths, little sighs. Crying the ways girls did, long and sad. She cried for a while, probably didn’t think anyone could hear her, and then she was quiet.

He got out of bed and walked through the jack-and-jill bath (why did they call it that?), pushed the door open. He walked over to the bed. He was going to ask to climb in with her. But the bed was empty. Mom was gone.

Maybe she went downstairs the way Grandma did sometimes. Sometimes Grandma went down and made warm milk. A couple times he’d followed her. And they sat and talked, about whatever—school or comic books, things his mom and Aunt Marisol did when they were younger. The tree house that used to be out back of what was now Grandpa’s house, what trip Grandma and Paulo were taking. Why Grandma and his real grandpa weren’t married anymore. Sometimes people fall out of love, and they’re just better off apart. Sometimes that happens. And it’s hard at first but then, after a while, everyone adjusts. It sounded like another lie that grown-ups told. Zander said that it sucked, even with two birthdays, two Christmases. But Oliver’s mom wasn’t a kid when Grandma and Grandpa got divorced. And his real grandpa was way less nice than Paulo.

He figured that his mom and his dad were splitting up. And somehow it had something to do with Geneva, who didn’t come back to work.

He walked back through the bathroom and got his iPad.

He heard sounds from downstairs, so he left his snoring brother and sneaked down, creeping on the stairs. He figured maybe he should show his mother the pictures he took when Geneva left. He had so many pictures—pictures of Geneva, pictures of the neighbor’s dog, a picture of Stephen’s naked butt, his own butt. He had pictures of his mom in the kitchen. His dad in his study, staring at his computer, which is where he usually was. He had a picture of his dad’s butt crack as he bent over to try to fix the wall. Cut that out, you little stinker, he’d yelled. Delete that picture. But Oliver had laughed so hard that Dad started laughing, too. His mom always held up her hand. I’m a wreck! Stop, Oliver! Ugh, that’s the worst angle for me. He had a whole catalog of backward slow-motion footage of Stephen jumping off the bed, the couch, the front stoop—one where he fell and started to cry. That one always cracked him up, how fast Stephen’s face changed—happy one second, then wailing at the camera in pain and misery.

Oliver crept down the stairs, past the gallery of photographs on the wall—pictures of his mom and aunt as kids, Oliver, his brother, his cousins, Grandma and Paulo on trips, the time they all went to Disney. He liked looking at them; he didn’t remember a lot of the moments. But the photographs were like a memory, he could almost remember being there because he saw the picture so many times, heard the stories told again and again. There was one picture of his mom holding a puppy—their old dog Chewie. She was ten, Grandma said—which seemed impossible. How could his mom ever have been a kid like him?

At the bottom step, he saw the light on in the kitchen. Oliver thought he’d find his mom, bent over her phone, or staring off into space the way she sometimes did, the expression on her face unreadable. But instead it was his grandmother. She was at the stove, wearing the same pink robe she did most nights, the smell of warm milk meeting him at the door frame. She would put honey in it, some other spices—weird things like pepper and something else he couldn’t pronounce. She called it golden milk; it was maybe his favorite thing ever. He took his seat at the table. Grandma never got mad at him for getting up.

“Mom’s not in her bed,” he said, moving toward the table, pulling up a chair. More pictures everywhere, on the walls, on surfaces. At his house, all their pictures were on the television screens, the computers, iPads, phones. There were hardly any paper photographs in frames. One from Mom and Dad’s wedding, where Mom looked like a princess and Dad was a lot thinner.

Grandma turned to face him; she always smiled when she looked at him and Stephen, Lily and Jasper. Her eyes got all crinkly. But tonight, she looked a little worried.

“I heard her leave,” she said with a nod. “It woke me.”

“Where did she go?”

“Sometimes when she was younger, she’d go running at night. When she was stressed, or upset about something, she’d just get out of bed and go jogging.”

“You let her?” Oliver wondered what it would be like to just leave a place without permission, alone. It didn’t even seem possible, even for his mom, who was always home, or with them, or with Dad. Dad could go out alone; he could be gone for days and it didn’t matter that much. Like now. But Mom? That was different. Take care of your mom, Dad had said on the phone earlier. How was Oliver supposed to do that? He hadn’t asked; it was one of those things you were already supposed to know. Like the “bro code.”