I'd Give Anything(45)

Zinny. That ferocious, courageous, liquid, shimmering girl who wrote and drew and strung snowflakes on fishing line and jumped off cliffs and invented words and loved her brother and stood by her friends.

Zinny was her mother.

Was? Is?

Did you stop being your old selves? Did they fall away? Were you always only the self you were in the present?

Or were you, every second of your life, all the selves you’d ever been? Avery hoped it was this. She wanted to meet Zinny, to meet her and to sit with her and listen to her tell the rest of the story. She wanted it so much.

Avery loved her mother. But she took care of their house and gardened and walked the dogs and worried about Avery. And she had married Avery’s father. Had there been a moment with him, too, with kites overhead and the sun straight above, a moment when love arrived whole and perfect and true? Avery could not imagine it.

She found her mother in the sunroom, sitting on the floor, her back to Avery, a sketch pad (a sketch pad!) open on the coffee table in front of her, her hair in a ponytail, her head bent. Avery saw her mother drawing, and she could not remember having seen her draw like that before, and for one flashing, dizzy second, she believed Zinny had come back, flown out of the past and alighted in Avery’s present.

Then, her mother looked over her shoulder and smiled at Avery, and she wasn’t Zinny.

But maybe she was.

“Hey, love,” said her mother.

Avery took the journal from behind her back and held it out to her mother, and her mother stretched out her hands to take it and stopped, her two hands just hovering in the air. Then, she pressed her hands to her mouth.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.”

“It was in the suitcase,” said Avery.

“I don’t understand.”

“From Grandmother.”

Avery’s mother stood, her face full of confusion, and she walked to the sofa and sat. As Avery went to sit next to her, she glanced down at the sketch pad. Walt looking just like Walt. Noble and cute at the same time. One ear up, one ear down.

“Oh my God, Mom, that’s so good,” said Avery.

Her mother reached out and took the journal and opened it, turning pages with her pretty, long-fingered hands.

“I can’t believe she saved this,” she said. She looked at Avery, and Avery saw something in her mother’s face that broke her heart a little: surprise. Her mother hadn’t realized her own mother had cared enough to save an old journal all these years. This didn’t seem to Avery such an unusual thing for a parent to do (her own mother saved everything Avery had ever written or made), but the fact seemed to leave her mother positively awestruck. Her expression dissipated slowly, and she said, “You read it?”

Avery nodded.

“Wow,” said her mother. “Oh my.”

Her mother pressed a hand to her own cheek and then to her chest.

“So what happened?” demanded Avery, eagerly. “What happened on the missing page? What was the bad thing that happened after Gray’s dad died in the fire?”

Avery’s mother seemed to snap out of a daze. “What?”

“The torn-out pages, the ones you burned. What was on them?”

And then, before her eyes, Avery’s mother deflated, her shoulders sagging. “Oh, honey.”

“Come on, Mom, hurry up! I need to know. Just tell me.”

“I can’t.”

Stunned, Avery said, “What? Why not?”

Her mother set the journal in her lap and shut her eyes and rubbed the delicate skin under her eyes with her fingertips. When she opened her eyes again, they were sad.

“I just—can’t,” said her mother. “I’m sorry.”

Avery felt a surge of anger. “But you have to, Mom! I need to know. I can’t explain why exactly, but I need to.”

Her mother shook her head, an almost slow-motion swiveling that made Avery want to take her shoulders and shake her, snap her out of it.

“I would if I could, honey, but I can’t. And trust me, it wouldn’t do you any good to know.”

Suddenly, Avery felt angry. And as much as she wanted to know—was dying to know—the rest of the story, she understood that her anger was much bigger than that.

“You don’t get to decide that,” she said. “Why are you always trying to protect me from stuff? I’m not a baby, and I’m not stupid.”

“I—I’m not always trying to protect you,” said her mother.

“Are you kidding me? That’s all you do. Everything with dad? How you won’t even answer my questions about what he did? Or how you act like it wasn’t that bad?”

Her mother opened her mouth as if to speak but then shut it again.

“You threw him out of your room. Do you think I don’t know what that means? And guess what? He’s gone. If it wasn’t that bad, why are you getting a divorce, Mom?”

Her mother looked stunned.

“Avery! We haven’t even talked about divorce.”

“Stop lying. Obviously, you’re going to get a divorce!”

Her mother took a deep breath. “Oh. Well. Okay, yes. We will. We just haven’t said that word to each other yet, but we will get a divorce.”

“Finally.” Avery spit out the word; she felt ablaze with anger. “Finally, you tell me the truth.”