Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(25)

“I’m fine. Just tired.”

“Your energy is all wrong,” Mom says. “First you’re jittery and nervous, and then you run off to the bathroom and you’re there for fifteen minutes, and when you come out, you seem sad. Is it a guy?”

“Yes. I’m in love with a cool hunk named Chadford, but he doesn’t love me.”

“Wanna tell me what’s going on?”

It’s like when you don’t think you’re hungry. But then you pass a pizza place and get a whiff and you realize you’re not only hungry, you’re hungrier than you’ve ever been in your life. Yes. I do want to tell you what’s going on. No one would understand better than you. But I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” Mom’s voice is gentle but urgent.

“Trouble? Like—”

“I don’t know, DeeDee. I read tarot cards and palms, not minds.”

“No.”

“Then?”

Maybe she’ll be okay. Maybe enough time has passed that she’ll be fine and it won’t hurt too much. Maybe.

I draw a deep breath and hold it before speaking. My blood is thrumming, a headache emerging at the base of my skull. “I…might have tracked down Dad.” The words no sooner leave my mouth than I realize what an atrocious time it is to spring this on her, especially with her currently spotty medication consumption.

It takes a moment for the news to register, but I see the hurt spreading on Mom’s face like a drop of blood blooming on white cloth.

“DeeDee?” Her voice implores me to be making some awful joke. Scolds me for it. Begs me to say, Just kidding!

“I saved my money and hired an investigator.”

“Why?”

I can’t tell if “why” is a question or a rebuke. “She came up with an address for a Dylan Wilkes in Boca Raton, Florida. He’s changed his name to Derek Armstrong.” I wait a couple of beats before adding, stupidly, as though Mom might’ve forgotten who Dylan Wilkes was, “She maybe found Dad.”

Mom’s face turns ashen, and she sags into herself. She hasn’t been good for a few weeks, but tonight she rallied. That’s done. She says nothing for so long it scares me. I can hear the ticking of our cuckoo clock, which doesn’t keep time, nor does the cuckoo work. It just ticks.

“Mom?”

“Why?” She shakes her head slowly, as if watching a building burn on TV. “Why on earth?”

“I don’t know.” This is true.

Mom’s eyes well. She quickly wipes them and puts her fist to her trembling lips. “DeeDee.” Her voice cracks and dissolves.

“I’m sorry.”

“I almost drowned when he left. On top of everything else, I was suddenly a single mom. It almost killed me. I thought I wouldn’t make it. It rips my heart up even talking about it.” She says this in a near-whisper.

“I had to find out.”

“And you did. So now what?”

“I don’t know.” I’m damming back tears and my throat aches like I’ve swallowed an ice cube that was slightly too big for my esophagus.

“Contact him? Dig everything back up?” A tear leaves a shiny streak down Mom’s cheek.

“I said I don’t know.” I’m crying now too. “I want to know why.”

“You want to know why? I can answer that. Because things got tough here, and it was easier to run out on both of us than deal with the hard reality. Because he only thought about himself.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“What if there’s more to it than that?”

“What could there be?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think.”

“I do. I think I needed to never think about him again. That’s what. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t, but still. You have any idea what it’s like to love and hate someone so much?”

“You aren’t the only one he hurt.”

“Here we’re struggling to pay the bills, and you’re paying someone who-knows-how-much to open old wounds. You have to let this drop. You can’t keep digging.”

I sit still and don’t say anything.

Mom presses. “Promise me you will stop.”

I wipe my eyes with the backs of my hands, break eye contact, look away, and nod slightly.

She rises from the couch. “I can’t. I need to go to bed.”

“Mom.”

She raises her hand for me to stop talking.

“Mom.”

She keeps her hand raised. “DeeDee. Please.” She’s not sharp or angry anymore, but exudes the sort of weariness she did during her worst days, when she seemed to hope her heart would simply stop beating.

She blows out the candle that was the only light we were using and walks to her room tenuously, like she’s balancing on her head the sloshing bowl full of whatever’s been allowing her to keep it together for the last almost-decade. From her room, the sound of hushed sobbing, the kind coming from a wellspring that can’t be capped, try as she might.

I sit in the dark stillness of our puny living room, the red ember of the candlewick gradually dimming and then dying, white smoke curling off it. Encircling me are the baubles and trinkets we’ve used to line our little nest. I’ve never thought of them as talismans against sadness, but maybe that’s exactly what they are.