Chapter Fifteen
Lennon
I’m sitting at a little bistro table in London, lost in my thoughts, when Haylee appears in front of me. “Lennon? Hey, Len?”
I shake my head to clear it, wondering how many times she called my name. “Sorry. Daydreaming. How’d it go?”
She tries to hide a smile by ducking her head as she joins me. We had arranged to meet at this restaurant a half hour ago, but Haylee had to postpone slightly when Louis assigned her an interview with an entertainment website back home. When she looks up again, she’s still smiling.
“That good, huh?”
“It’s just weird,” she says, the smile turning to a grin. “I’m doing a phone interview. In London.”
“You’re a hit. I knew you would be.”
She shakes her head. “So weird.”
“What does Louis say?”
She rolls her eyes. “He says we need to pounce on our momentum.”
“He’s not wrong.”
“Yeah, but what else can we do, besides what we’re doing? I mean, we’re on tour.”
“In Europe,” I point out. “And a lot of this interest is coming from back home.” Again, the attempts to hide the smile. It’s pretty cute. She’s been like this ever since the live Paris concert aired and Intrigue starting getting a lot more attention.
From the first time I heard her sing, I knew that all it would take for her to make it big was a little exposure. And it looks like that concert, airing in a record-breaking number of households in North America, has had that exact effect. Suddenly Intrigue is getting a lot more interview requests and radio play back home. It’s pretty fun to watch. Especially if she’s going to keep smiling like that.
“So what’s next on the agenda?” I ask, pouring some water from the carafe on the table and passing it to her. “You guys have time off before the next show?”
“For now. I should probably get the hell out of London before Louis books us for something else.”
“Don’t tempt me. I’d love to get out of here.”
She sits up straight. “Yeah? Where would we go?”
I think about that. “I’m still bummed we didn’t get to Italy on this trip.”
“Ooh, Italy.” She sighs. “But that’s probably too far away for just a night. You know what we should have done?”
“What?”
“I was reading that book you got me, the one about the water lilies?” On our last day in Paris, Haylee and I spent an afternoon alone at the Orangery, a small museum that housed six of Monet’s famous water lily paintings. Each huge canvass took up an entire wall in the gallery. And since she also loved the Monet at d’Orsay so much, I bought her a souvenir book on the artist.
“Yeah? Are there any paintings you want to see here in London?”
She shakes her head. “Not that I saw. But it did talk about Monet’s house. Did you know you can visit it? And see the actual pond where he painted the water lilies? It’s in Giverny, which I guess is pretty close to Paris. We totally should have gone. I wish I’d read it sooner—Lennon? Hey, are you okay?”
I try to make myself breathe normally, try to unclench my jaw. She has no way of knowing about Giverny. How could she possibly when my own brothers don’t know?
“Lennon?”
“I’m fine,” I say quickly. “You’re right, we should have gone down there. I should have thought of it.”
From the look she’s giving me, I’m not doing a very good job of proving that I’m fine. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I—”
“Don’t give me that crap, Lennon.” Her face is getting red, her breathing rapid. She’s upset, I realize. Shit. I scared her.
“I’m fine, Haylee.”
“You’re not! You’re having nightmares all the time! I don’t think you’re sleeping much at all. Are you?”
I sigh, rubbing my face. “I’m not sleeping well, no.”
“Isn’t that… something to worry about?”
My eyes snap up to her face, my stomach falling when she looks slightly guilty. “Who told you that?”
“Daisy,” she whispers. “She just said that I should look out for it.” Her voice strengthens. “But that’s not all it is, Lennon. You’re spending half your day staring off into space. You’re obviously upset about something, and I want you to talk to me.”
Well, shit. I thought I’d done such a good job of hiding it.
“I don’t know,” I admit, resting my head in my hands. “I’ve been having dreams, and for some reason I can’t make them disappear during the day. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry!” She reaches across the table and takes my hands away from my face. “I just want you to talk to me about it.”
I stare into her eyes, wondering what she would think if I told her. I’m dreaming about my mom. I always dream about my mom. And I don’t know why that’s so scary. I don’t know why it makes me feel like I’m failing someone.
“Would you go with me now?” The words are out of my mouth before I even consciously decide to ask. We could take the Eurostar back to France and be there in a few hours. Plenty of time, if we left now.
“Go with you where?”
“To Giverny.”
Her face clouds. “You want to go to Giverny now? Instead of talking to me about this?”
“No,” I say quickly. “I want to go to Giverny because…” I breathe out, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “I want to go to Giverny because my mother is living there and I think it’s time I went to see her.”
***
Four hours later, we’re back in Paris. It feels strange to be here, familiar and totally foreign at the same time, even though it’s only been a week since we left.
“You doing okay?” she asks, taking my hand.
“Yeah. Definitely. We need to get to platform five, I think.”
As soon as I told her what I wanted to do, Haylee agreed. She didn’t even ask me any questions. “We’ll have to switch trains in Paris, but it shouldn’t be too hard,” she said, studying a travel app in the taxi on the way back to the hotel.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked. “I know you were joking about Louis scheduling stuff, but he probably does have work for you.”
“Then I’ll do it when we get back,” she said. “If this is something you need to do, we’re doing it. Besides”—she leaned across the seat to kiss me—“I’m looking forward to our first trip away together.”
I laughed at that, feeling strangely free, considering the circumstances. “You do know we’ve been sleeping in hotel beds together since we met.”
She stuck out her tongue at me before turning back to the window.
And now here we are, back in France, boarding the train to Giverny. “Countryside is pretty,” Haylee says as the suburbs of Paris finally fade into the distance. She’s leaning on my shoulder, and I wonder if the armrest is hurting her in this position. But it’s the way she always sits when we’re close, I realize. She leans into me, like she’s taking strength from my presence. Or maybe she’s giving it to me. Either way, it makes me feel strong, when she leans like that. Makes me feel like I can handle shit after all.
“What do you want to do first?” she asks. “The Monet House or—”
I cut her off before she can say anything else. Like maybe, your mom’s house. “Monet. Definitely.”
She watches me for a long moment, concern evident on her face. “You sure you’re okay with this, Lennon? Maybe you should have talked to your brothers first. Shouldn’t they be here instead of me?”
I shake my head. “You’re the only one I want with me if I decide to go through with this.” I kiss the top of her head, trying to calm myself with her now-familiar vanilla scent. “I just want to enjoy a nice afternoon with you first. That’s what I need right now. Okay?”
“Okay.” She nestles into my chest a little before yawning. “How long is the ride?”
“Another half an hour. Why don’t you take a nap?” She nods against my shoulder, closing her eyes, and I relax back into my chair.
I haven’t slept in days.
I know I should tell Levi, tell my dad. They know, better than anyone, what usually happens when I stop sleeping. But then I would have to tell them about the dreams. And I don’t think I can do that yet.
I’m not entirely stupid, though. I did call Dr. Jacobs back in Tennessee a few days ago. I’ve been in contact with her since we left town, but I let the communication lapse since Haylee and I got together. Her advice was simple—tell your Dad. When I told her about the dreams, she got very quiet. “You definitely need to talk to your father, Lennon,” she said, her voice as serious as I’ve ever heard it. “You need to sit down and have a conversation about your mother.”
“Why?”
“Because there are obviously things there that you don’t want to remember.”
I promised to think about it, but I have no intention of telling him. Not yet. I couldn’t explain why, but the thought of talking about those dreams filled me with a dread that made me lose my breath. I couldn’t tell my dad. Not until I knew what I was dreaming about.
But maybe it was time to talk to someone else. Someone like my mother.
“We’re getting close, Haylee,” I whisper into her ear. “Come on, babe, time to wake up.”
She grumbles a little as she stretches, and I wonder if worrying about me has her losing sleep as well. Definitely not what she should be concentrating on right now, not with the band getting so much positive attention after the show. Just like she shouldn’t be running away from the tour to go tramping through the French countryside with me. This is a big break for her, and I’m not helping. You’re failing, I correct myself. You’re failing her.
“You okay?” she asks when I don’t join her in the aisle. I give myself a mental shake. We’ve come too far to go back now.
“Let’s do it.”
We don’t have any luggage, just my backpack with our toothbrushes and a change of clothes for each of us. We called ahead and booked a room at a small inn in Vernon, the town outside of Giverny where the train stops. The room is miniscule, with a rose-patterned bedspread and an antique writing desk. “This is totally you, Lennon,” Haylee says, smirking. “The flowers really go with that whole emo rock guy thing you have going.”
“Me? It’s totally you. Look at how well your leather jacket matches the wallpaper.”
“What’s this?” She picks up a color pamphlet from the desk. “It’s about Giverny.” I come to stand behind her to read the information over her shoulder. “Look at how pretty it is,” she says, pointing down at the fields of flowers.
“It’s a lot colder now. Might not be many flowers.”
“That’s fine. There’s still some color on the trees. It will be nice.” She reads silently for a moment. “It says there’s a shuttle bus right by the train station to get to Giverny. So that’s pretty easy. And we can go to his house with the garden, and then there’s the museum and…”
Her voice fades in my mind as I look down at the pictures in the pamphlet. How close are we, right now? Will we pass her house on the bus? Will I know it when I see it?
A wave of fear rushes through me, and I know this was a bad idea. It could change everything. What in the hell was I thinking?
“Okay, I fully blame you for how dorky I’m becoming,” Haylee says, her voice cutting through my panic. “But I am totally excited about this.”
I want to be excited. I want to go walk around the cute little town with my girlfriend and not worry about anything. I want to not be afraid.
Haylee looks up at me, smiling, and I make myself a promise. I’m going to enjoy this, I think to myself fiercely. I’m going to have this day with Haylee. I’m going to have these memories. I’m going to have this one good day.
And I try really hard not to recognize the feeling that’s growing in my chest—the one that says this might be the last good day for a long, long time.
***
I try. I really do. I hold Haylee’s hand and laugh when it’s appropriate and kiss her on the bridge over the lily pond. But that horrible feeling just keeps growing in my chest, and I know there’s no way she can’t see it on my face.
“Let’s rest here for a minute,” she says, pointing to a bench in the garden. Most of the flowers have died by now, but the plants are still green. I try to concentrate on that. On how cute Haylee looks with red cheeks, her masses of black hair flowing out from under a knit beanie cap. I try to concentrate on the feel of her fingers in mine as she takes my hand.
“How are you holding up?”
“I’m sorry,” I say immediately. “I’m ruining this.”
“You’re not ruining anything. This is a tough day for you. Sightseeing first probably wasn’t the best idea.”
“I think we should go back,” I whisper, not meeting her eyes.
“To the inn? Okay, that’s totally fine with me.”
“Not the inn. To London. I think we should forget this whole thing.”
She doesn’t speak for a moment, just brushes her fingers across my hands. “I think you might regret that, Lennon. You’ve been having a rough time for a few weeks now, haven’t you?”
I nod.
“And that has to do with your mother.” It’s not a question. “So maybe this will help. Talking to her. I mean, it was important enough to you to come all this way.”
Because I have no argument against any of that, I tell the truth. “I’m scared.”
“Of course you are. You haven’t seen her in what—fifteen years?”
“Seventeen.”
“I think that would scare just about anybody. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t the right thing to do.”
I swallow a few times, trying to get my heart rate under control. “Do you think we could go see her now?” I ask, even though it’s the last thing in the world I want to do. “If we get it over with, then maybe we could enjoy the morning before we have to head back tomorrow.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” she says, smiling at me. It makes me feel a little better, the ease of that smile. “Let’s get it over with.”
So we stand and leave the garden, walking down the winding streets of Giverny. It’s a beautiful fall day, the sky blue overhead, the air cold enough to bite but bearable. A few of the trees are still holding onto their colorful leaves high above the little stone buildings of the town, contrasting with the solid green of the pines on the hills in the distance. It really is a beautiful place. I imagine being here with Haylee in some alternate universe where I can just enjoy myself, ignorant of how close my mom is.
“Maybe we could come back here too,” I blurt out, my voice sounding panicky. “When we come back to go to Montmartre.”
“Maybe we could,” she says, but her eyes tell me she knows the truth. I won’t ever be enjoying a day in Giverny again. “Do you have the address?”
I hand her the scrap of paper from my pocket. I don’t tell her that I’ve been carrying it with me the entire time we’ve been in Europe. But maybe she can tell—the thing is creased and soft with wear, evidence of how many times I’ve unfolded it just to stare at the words.
It was a private investigator that found her. It was one of the first things I did when we signed our record deal and I had a little cash. I wasn’t sure why I did it. It wasn’t like I wanted to see her. There weren’t many positive feelings toward our mom in my family. She had left us. She hadn’t wanted us anymore. But it was the kind of thing that got into my head and wouldn’t leave. The idea of knowing. Where she was. What she was doing. What life she had chosen over us.
Finding out she had been in Europe was a shock. She had no family there, no friends that I was aware of. But it wasn’t like I would have really known. My dad didn’t talk about her, not ever. The investigator had photos as well, but I didn’t take those. I didn’t want to see her face.
Yet here I was.
“We’re pretty close,” Haylee says, her voice gentle. “Just down this road here.”
I nod, not trusting myself to speak, and follow her down the sidewalk. The houses on this road are small and tidy. Brick cottages behind brick walls, postcard-sized gardens in the front. They all look fairly similar.
I know which one is hers before we see the address. Maybe it’s the wind chime hanging from the front gate. Or the birdhouse in front of the wall. There’s a little sign on the gate, words about home being the window to your heart. I swallow, and Haylee tightens her hold on my hand. I’m grateful she doesn’t ask me if I’m okay, that she doesn’t give me any out. Because I know there’s no way I would have swung that gate open if she wasn’t standing there next to me, silently holding my hand.
More wind chimes hang in the small garden, along with several sculptures of wire and glass. The feel is funky, a little eclectic. I have a flash of her walking through the grass at our house in California, barefoot, her sundress swinging around her legs, and I have to stop walking to catch my breath.
“I’m right here,” Haylee says softly, and somehow I make my legs move again. Then I’m knocking on the door, and I can’t breathe, and I’m praying that she isn’t home, that the investigator was wrong, that a French woman will open this door and I can run away and pretend none of this ever happened.
But that’s not how life works. When the door opens, it’s not a stranger standing in the foyer looking out at me with wide, knowing eyes. It’s not a stranger bringing her shaking hand to cover her gaping mouth. It’s my mother.
“Lennon,” she whispers. “It’s you.”
***
I don’t know what I imagined when I tried to picture her house, but it wasn’t this. The cottage is tiny, the living area smaller than the one on our tour bus. She’s filled the space with comfortable, slightly worn furniture. The walls are painted vivid shades of blue and green, splashed with bright color from paintings and tapestries. She has vases of flowers everywhere and more wind chimes inside.
“Can I get you anything?” she asks, once we’re sitting on a creaky little sofa. “Tea or coffee? Water?”
“Tea would be good,” I hear myself say, my voice strange in my ears. I don’t really want tea, though a shot of Jack Daniels sounds pretty good. All I really want is her out of the room for a minute. So I can pull myself together.
“Of course. Just give me one moment.”
She hurries into the kitchen, and as she passes I see that her hands are still shaking.
“You okay?” Haylee asks. It’s funny, I’ve been hearing those words for months, so often that they’ve started to drive me crazy. But hearing them now, from Haylee, while we sit in my mother’s living room, I want to answer honestly for the first time in years.
“No,” I mutter, staring at my hands. “I think this was a bad idea.”
“It will be fine,” she says, slipping her hand through the crook of my arm. “It really will. We can leave if you need to.”
I nod, looking around the room, hardly taking in anything I’m seeing. No pictures stand on the mantle or any of the surfaces. Plenty of art and not one photograph of a real person.
“Here we are.” I look up and see my mother standing in the doorway to the kitchen, holding a tray. A tray that’s shaking in her hands.
“Let me grab that,” Haylee says, jumping up to rescue the tray before it can fall. She sets it on the coffee table in front of us. My mother looks adrift now that she doesn’t have a task. She fidgets for a minute then sits on the edge of a purple armchair directly across from us.
“I haven’t met your friend,” she finally says, nodding at Haylee.
“Oh.” My voice is dull, and I clear my throat. “This is Haylee Hunt.”
My mom smiles. The first smile I’ve seen on her face in seventeen years. I feel like I’m going to throw up. “You’re the singer,” she says.
“You know who I am?” Haylee asks, incredulous.
“Of course!” She jumps from her chair and walks to a leather trunk in the corner by the fireplace and lifts a large cloth book from inside. It’s the same kind of book that Paige had us use to make scrapbooks this summer. I have a sudden, horrible urge to laugh and bite down on my tongue as my mother brings the book over to us. “Here you are,” she says, turning toward the back of the book. She places it on Haylee’s lap, and I look down to see a clipping from a magazine. It’s a press picture of me and my brothers, a smaller picture of Intrigue in a box in the corner. Ransom announces tour dates for Europe; brothers to be joined by Intrigue.
I look up at my mother. “You have press clippings about us?”
“I do!” Her voice is a shade too high pitched; she’s definitely nervous and trying to cover it. She flips to the front of the book. “I’ve been collecting since you opened for Grey Skies.”
Haylee looks up at me, worried, and it occurs to me that I’m digging my fingers into my thighs. I make a conscious effort to relax them and reach over to take the book from her.
“Have you enjoyed the tour?” she asks Haylee, returning to her seat across from us.
“It’s been really great,” Haylee says, her eyes flicking back and forth between me and my mother. “We’ve had really great turnouts at all of the stops and…”
I tune her out, focusing on the book in my lap. I flip idly through the pages. Promo photos, magazine spreads, album reviews, sales figures. What did she say? She’s been collecting since the Grey Skies tour. Collecting. Like she’s some kind of fan or something.
“Were you at the concert?” I ask, interrupting them.
“The concert?” she asks, her voice squeaky. “You mean—”
“We played two shows in Paris.” I have no idea how I’m keeping my voice so controlled. I feel like I should be screaming. “It’s a forty-minute train ride.”
“I didn’t go to the shows, Lennon. No.”
“Why?” I hit the book in my lap with my knuckles. “You’ve been collecting info on our tours for years. Why wouldn’t you want to get the first-hand experience?”
Haylee reaches for me, but I brush her off, staring at my mother across the forgotten tea service. She looks different from the way I remember. Was it just my little kid’s brain that painted her as so beautiful in my memories? Her face is lined, much more so than my father’s, four years her senior. She’s thinner than I remember, all boney angles. And her hair is shorter and lank now, a dull brownish shade. It used to be so long, shining and smooth. Blond, almost white, just like Daltrey’s. Daltrey. Who was five when she left. I feel something like a sob—or maybe a yell—rise in my throat, and I have to dig my heel into my other foot to keep it together.
She holds her chin up a little, her voice stronger now. “I didn’t think it would be appropriate,” she says. “Or fair to you.”
“Fair.”
“Lennon—”
I shake my head, the desire to laugh overtaking me again. She didn’t think it would be fair. “Don’t mind me.” I wave between the two of them. “You were talking about the tour. I interrupted.”
“Lennon,” Haylee whispers. My mother is staring at me with wide eyes.
“What? You don’t want to talk about the tour?” I know my tone is nasty, know that Haylee doesn’t deserve to sit here and listen to me like this. But I can’t help it. “What should we talk about instead?” I gesture down at the scrapbook. “Looks like you know all about how we’ve been, huh? So what about you? How have you been, Mom? Been keeping busy?”
She swallows, straightening her shoulders, like she’s walking into battle. “I have been, yes. Giverny is a very nice little town and close enough to Paris for an afternoon trip once in a while.”
“And what do you do here, in this nice little town?”
If my tone is affecting her, she doesn’t show it. “I’m an artist.” She gestures at the wall next to the fireplace. “I’ve been selling my paintings for several years now. My garden sculptures bring in more money, but it’s the painting that I really enjoy.” Those wire and glass sculptures outside. She made those. And the painting on the wall—maybe all of them? I squint at the one near the fireplace. A swirling sea of blue and green, a bright, oversized sun above casting light onto the waves. I try to imagine the woman I knew painting that, painting anything, and I can’t. Her life now has no connection to the life we had then. No connection to who she used to be. No connection to us.
Except for this book. When I don’t reply, Haylee takes a deep breath. “Lennon and I saw a lot of beautiful art in Paris,” she says, clearly trying to keep things civil.
My mother’s face brightens. “Did you go to the Louvre? What was your favorite?”
“Uh, no, not the Louvre. We spent a lot of time at Musee d’Orsay.”
I can see Paige’s face so clearly in my head, looking at me in the van outside the museum. Telling me that she chose it specifically for me. That it reminded her of me. Because Paige knew me. Your heart is, Paige told me when I asked her about beauty and light.
After my accident this summer, I refused to talk to anyone. Once Levi and my father dropped the bombshell of what had been happening with me, my brothers freaked out. There was so much yelling that night. Cash had broken things. Punches had been thrown. When the doctors finally kicked them out of the room, I refused to let any of them back in for days. Not my father, not the boys, not Levi. I couldn’t face them, not after what I had done. In the end, it was Daisy who finally forced her way in to see me. She sat next to my bed for three hours and talked to me about everything that had happened. Talked to me about her suicide attempt two years earlier and what her recovery had been like. Told me how it felt in her head and her heart back then, how hopeless and broken and worthless she had felt. And then she held my hand and told me that it could get better, just like it had for her.
I can’t look at my mother anymore. I can’t think about how Daisy and Paige know me better than she does. How they were with me on the worst day of my life. Or how Haylee was the one with me for the happiest moments. And my mother wasn’t around for any of them.
I stare down at the book in my lap, idly flipping through the pages. Toward the back there’s a magazine clipping, an article from a gossip magazine. It’s Daisy and Daltrey walking into a restaurant back in Nashville, before the tour. He has his hand on her back, opening the door for her. It was still summer then, and she’s wearing a tank top, the material stretching across her slightly swollen stomach. A baby makes three? questioned the headline. On that page my mom had used a paperclip to attach another picture. An old Polaroid of four little boys sitting on a couch. The older two looked a lot more similar back then than they do now, the color of their hair the only really distinguishing feature. The third is barely a toddler, looking up at his older brothers and laughing. A baby is laid across the oldest one’s lap, and none of them seem to know what to do with him.
He used to cry all the time, I think, bringing the tip of one finger to Daltrey’s tiny face. That is the first thing I remember about him. That he would cry. And Reed and Cash used to sing songs at the top of their lungs to cover the sound, to make me laugh.
I go to the very front of the scrapbook and turn the pages with shaking fingers, looking at every single one, moving faster and faster until I get back to the end. The shot of us with Daltrey the day he came home from the hospital is the only real photograph.
“Lennon?” Haylee asks, and I look up, realizing they’ve both stopped talking to watch me. I toss the book onto the table in front of me, knocking over one of the empty tea cups.
“One photo,” I say, unable to stop my voice from shaking. “One photo of us.”
Her face crumples. “I didn’t have the chance to take more.”
One photo from the day Daltrey came home and then not another reminder of us until we became famous. And all those years in between—moving, starting over, birthdays, crushes, learning to play music, all those shitty gigs we played as teenagers, all those heartbreaks—nothing.
Suddenly I want to turn the table over, want to rip the paintings from the wall, to destroy this sunny, happy little room filled with her art and her colors. I understand, for the first time, why Cash likes breaking things so much when he’s upset. I want to break everything.
“This was a mistake,” I say, standing. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“I’m glad you came,” my mother says, crossing to me, her face desperate. “I’m so glad you came. Please, let’s talk—”
“What’s there to talk about?” I cry, feeling savage satisfaction when she flinches. “You don’t know me, and I don’t want to know you.”
“Of course I know you, Lennon—”
“Shut up!” I scream, turning to grab the book and throwing it to the ground at her feet. “A lot happened between that picture and the start of the first damn tour.”
“I understand that.”
“I don’t think you do! I don’t think you could have any idea what it was like for us after you left.”
She flinches. “I can’t ask you to forgive me, Lennon. I don’t deserve to be forgiven. But I am sorry. I’m so very sorry.”
I hate myself for the tears in my eyes, hate myself for wishing she would touch me, that she might put her arms around me. “Then why didn’t you come back?” My voice cracks, and I sound fifteen years younger. Like a little kid, left behind, wishing his mom would come home. “You had years to change your mind, to be sorry. Why couldn’t you come back?”
It isn’t until she wipes her eyes that I realize tears are streaming down her face. “Because you all deserved so much better than me. I couldn’t come back.”
“That’s bullshit. It’s an excuse.”
“No, Lennon, it’s the truth.” She reaches for my arm, and the yearning I feel for her touch is so strong it horrifies me. I jerk away from her. “I couldn’t come back.”
“Why?”
She looks me straight in the eyes and responds with a question of her own. “What do you remember about me leaving?”
We were in the car. She took me back to that place that scared me so much. And when I cried she left me in the car.
I reel back, feeling like she slapped me. “Nothing,” I say, my voice shaking.
The pity in her eyes makes me feel sick. “We should talk about that.”
I’m shaking my head before she’s finished talking. “No. I’m done here.”
“Lennon, wait—”
“No. This was a mistake.” I turn to Haylee. “Let’s go.”
She looks scared as she nods, crossing to my side, but my mother blocks our path to the door. “If you’re not going to talk to me, then you need to talk to Will—you need to talk to your dad.”
“So he can tell me what I already know? That you abandoned your children? Thanks, I think we’ve covered that over the years.”
She doesn’t grimace, merely watches me with those eyes filled with guilt and pity. “You know it’s more than that.” She blinks, the guilt in her eyes overtaking the pity. “I did abandon you. I was no mother to any of you, and you deserved so much more. But I think you need to hear the whole story, Lennon.”
“Why, so I’ll—what? Feel sorry for you?”
She shakes her head. “No. So you can get better.”
“Get better?” I yell so loudly that Haylee jumps. “Get better? Do you have any idea what I’ve been through the last few years? Do you have idea what it feels like in my head?”
“Yes,” she whispers. “I think I do.”
I can’t stand to look at her for another second, can’t stand the pity and the sadness. Can’t stand her pretending like she might actually know something about me. She left me. She doesn’t know anything. I push past her, not waiting for Haylee, not listening to my mother’s calls for me to stop, and cross the lawn in three strides.
Haylee catches up with me two houses down. “Lennon.” Her voice is terrified, and I find I can’t look at her either.
“I want to go back,” I say. “To London. I want to get out of here.”
“Okay. Let’s get the shuttle, and we’ll—”
I don’t know what she says next, I can’t focus on anything. Memories are shooting through my head, confusing me, making me wonder what’s real. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be sick. Or start screaming.
“Come on,” Haylee says, taking my hand. “Just follow me.”
I hold her hand like a lifeline, following her away from the house, away from the town, follow her to the train station and all the way back to London where my family is waiting.
It’s the middle of the night when our cab pulls up to the hotel. It occurs to me that neither of us has eaten since lunch, and a pang of guilt pierces through the cacophony in my head. What a surprise, I think. Giant screwup, like always. Can’t take care of myself, can’t take care of my girlfriend.
You’re failing her too, a voice in my head whispers through the noise as we climb out of the car. And then Haylee is pulling me forward once again. “Let’s get to bed,” she says, sounding tired.
“I think I should be alone.”
She stops on the sidewalk and turns to me, an incredulous look on her face. “Absolutely not.”
“I just think I—”
“There is no way I’m leaving you alone after that. You let me come with you or I’m going to get Levi.” She sighs, running her hands through her hair. She’s exhausted. “Look, we don’t have to talk about any of it tonight, okay? But I’m not leaving you alone.”
I’m too tired to argue, so I nod and follow her upstairs. She helps me pull off my shoes and sweater, and then we collapse into bed. Haylee pulls the covers over us and wraps her arms around me, burying her face in my chest. “Lennon, we’ll figure all of this out, okay?”
I nod even though I know it’s ridiculous. There’s no figuring this out.
“It’s going to be okay, I promise.” I don’t bother to nod this time, and she squeezes me tighter. “I love you.”
Her words barely register. Some part of me is dimly aware of what she’s saying, of the fact that we’ve never said that to each other before. But there’s too much noise in my head to focus on it, to think about what it means.
I only know one thing. I should not have gone to that house. I should not have looked into my mother’s face after all these years. Because now I remember everything.