Tell Me Three Things(10)

We made do. Both of us did. And for a while there, we were so busy holding things together, I almost forgot how things used to be. How all three of us used to be conjoined. When I was little, I’d climb into bed between my parents so we could make our daily Jessie sandwich. We were a happy unit; three seemed a good, balanced number. Each of us had our defined roles. My dad worked and made us laugh. My mom worked too, but part-time, and so she was point person, the family soother and the glue. My only job was to be their kid, to be their good egg, to bask in their constant stream of attention.

It’s been 747 days and still I have not yet learned how to talk about any of this. I mean, I can talk about how I bought the toilet paper, how we were broken, how I was broken. But I still haven’t found the words to talk about my mom. The real her. To remember who she was in a way that doesn’t make me keel over.

I don’t know how to do that yet.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve forgotten how to talk altogether.

“It’s amazing, Dad, really,” I said, because the new house is amazing. If I was going to be held captive by a wicked stepmother, surely there are worse places I could have ended up than living in the pages of Architectural Digest. I wasn’t going to complain about its utter lack of homeyness—and not even homeyness specific to me, but homeyness in general—or the fact that I felt like I had moved into a museum filled with strangers. That would sound petty. Anyhow, we both knew that that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Mom wasn’t here. That she would never be anywhere again. When I thought about that for too long, which I didn’t, when I could help it, I realized it didn’t matter much where I slept.

Certain facts tend to render everything else irrelevant.

We once were three strong, and now we were something altogether different. A new, unidentifiable formation. A cockeyed parallelogram.

“Call me Rachel,” Dad’s new wife had said the first time I met her, which made me laugh. What else was I going to call her? Mother? Ms. Scott? (Her maiden name. Actually, not her maiden name. Her previous married name.) Or even more ridiculous, her new name, my mother’s name: Mrs. Holmes? In my head, she remains Dad’s new wife; it’s a futile exercise to try to get me used to the idea. Dad’s new wife. Dad’s new wife. Dad’s new wife. Talk about three words that don’t fit together.

“Call me Jessie,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. The fact that she existed at all had come as a surprise. I hadn’t even realized my dad had started dating. He had been traveling a bunch—pharmaceutical conventions, he claimed—and I hadn’t thought to question him, even though he had never before taken a work trip. I figured he was using work the same way I was using school: as a way to forget. I was excited to be home alone for those weekends. (Did I take advantage and throw big parties, where kids sipped beer from red Solo cups and left piles of vomit on our lawn? Nope. Scarlett slept over. We made microwave popcorn and binge rewatched old seasons of our favorite shows.)

Then one day my dad came home and said this whole thing about having fallen in love and I noticed he had a new ring on his finger. Cold and shiny. Silver: a bitter medal. Apparently, somehow, instead of going to Orlando to learn more about Cialis, he had eloped to Hawaii with a woman he met on the Internet in one of his bereavement support groups. At first, I thought he was joking, but his hands were shaking, and he was half smiling the way he does when he’s nervous. And then came the long, terrible speech about how he knew this was going to be difficult, a new city, switching schools and all—this was the part he said fast, so fast that I made him repeat it to make sure I had heard him right. This was the part when I first heard the words “Los Angeles.”

A step up, he said. An opportunity. A way to get us out of “our rut.” Those were other words he dared to use: “our rut.”

I hadn’t realized we were in a rut. “Rut” seemed way too small a word for grief.

He was tan, his cheeks pink from three days on a beach. I was still pale from the Chicago winter. My fingers probably smelled of butter. I didn’t cry. After the shock wore off, I cared a whole lot less than I thought I would. Sometimes, when Scarlett says I’m strong, I think she really means I’m numb.

—

Rachel is one of those teeny-tiny women who somehow use their voice to take up a lot space. She doesn’t speak so much as announce things. Call me Rachel! Tell Gloria if you want to add anything to the grocery list! Don’t be shy! She’s a whiz in the kitchen! I can’t even boil an egg! Pilates kicked my ass today!

I find her exhausting to be around.

Today’s announcement: “Family dinner!” Until now, I’ve mostly avoided sitting down with everyone at the dining table. Rachel’s been busy working late on a new film—an action-hero slash sci-fi feature called Terrorists in Space—that she promises is “going to kill it at the box office!” On nights my dad’s not out to business dinners with Rachel—“Schmoozing is key!” she likes to pronounce—he’s been glued to his computer looking for a new job. Theo goes out a lot too, mostly to Ashby’s house, where they steal her mother’s Zone Delivery meals.

I tend to eat in my bedroom. Usually peanut butter and jelly that I’ve bought myself, or ramen with an egg. I don’t feel comfortable adding to Gloria’s shopping list. Gloria is the “house manager,” whatever that is. “Like family!” Rachel pronounced when she introduced us for the first time, though in my experience family members don’t wear uniforms. There also seems to be a cleaning crew and a gardener and various other Latino people who are paid to do things, like change lightbulbs or fix toilets. “Guys, get down here! We’re all having dinner together, whether you like it or not!”