Chapter Twenty-two
“Richard, come and feed the birds with me.”
A breeze ruffles Mom’s hair and she walks out the back door of her residential facility into the giant backyard. The sun streams down. It’s nearly fall in Southern California. The backyard is filled with shade, and this place is located closer to the ocean than Mom’s place, so it is cooler too.
She walks toward a tree and sprinkles bird seed on the ground. I follow behind.
“Do you remember the hummingbird feeders you used to put out every spring in the backyard?”
I remember Dad doing that.
“I loved those.” Mom smiles. She sits beside me on a wooden bench in the shade. We watch the birds swoop and dive and then peck at the bird feed she’s sprinkled by the tree.
“How is it going with Tara?”
I whip my gaze toward Mom and in this moment there is lucidity. A wicked-sharp gleam in her eyes, like the picture from Dad’s desk drawer, as though Mom is completely present. I want to weep because we’re getting nearer to the end of her lucidity. The other day she held her toothbrush in her hand and had no idea what she was supposed to do with it.
“We…we broke up.”
“Ah,” Mom says. “But it was different than Susie, yes? I mean she didn’t have…”Mom glances away from me. “She didn’t have that same type of problem, did she?”
“No.”
Irony strikes me dead in the face, because in this scenario, it is me who had the problem, not Tara. The need to subvert my emotions by fucking every woman I possibly could. By fulfilling my vocation.
“I…she did something I can’t forgive.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Mom tilts her head and that sharp-eyed gaze that I desperately miss, focuses on me.
“Can I take your picture, Mom?”
I slip my phone from my pocket and point it in her direction.
“Jake, this is silly,” she says, but pats her hair, tilts her head, and smiles.
I know as I press the button this will be the final picture of my mother with her sharp-eyed gaze knowing everything about where she is and who she is with. I feel this to my core. In fact, if I can let my heart believe it, this will be our final conversation.
“I love you, Mom.”
Wanting her to take that with her on the journey I know she will leave for soon, the journey, that while her body will remain here with us, her mind will be unreachable by me and Rachel and Lily.
“Hey, want to see the picture of you with Lily, Rachel, and Daisy?”
Mom smiles and nods and I turn my phone to her. Again with the damn. fucking knot in my throat and the tears threatening to careen down my cheeks. I pinch my nose.
“Darn allergies,” I say and smile. “Lily looks so much like you Mom.”
I try hard to keep my voice from cracking. “She loves you so much. We all do.”
“I love all of you too.”
She looks at me and squeezes my arm. For a second, I see it. I see that she knows that she’s missing giant chunks of time from her memory, but can’t bear to speak about it, not in this moment, not in what could be her final moments with me.
“Jake, you deserve to be happy. We all deserve to be happy in life. There was a time that I was unhappy with your father—”
“Mom you don’t—”
“No, please, let me. It’s…it’s important to me.”
She looks into my eyes and I know she must say these words to me.
“I didn’t think I could ever forgive him, or trust him, or even if I’m completely honest, if I would ever love him again. Especially after what happened between us. But Jake…I let him back into our home and into my heart because he said I could trust him, and I could love him, and that he would do anything he could to prove that to me”
Mom smiles and leans forward.
“I took that leap of faith and I’ve spent the rest of my life grateful that I could be that brave, and some would say foolish. But life is full of risks and sometimes those risks are worth the fear.”
I turn away from Mom and look across the yard toward the sun setting. A deep breath fills my lungs.
“Mom I do love her. I’m afraid. I just…”
I turn back and the sharp gleam in Mom’s eyes is gone, replaced with a blank look of child-like happiness.
I don’t cry. I fight that urge. Instead, I reach my hand out to my mom, or the woman that looks just like her but has no memory of her life or me. I grasp her hand and smile at her, even while I want to cry.
“Thank you, Mom.”
She smiles and turns toward the birds, and I don’t even know if she remembers my name.
***
I walk into Rachel’s house because the door is unlocked.
“Hey, I’m here.”
Lily tears down the stairs with Daisy hot on her heels. All big puppy paws, she tumbles after Lily, the two of them an adorable pair. Rachel walks out of the kitchen and looks at me.
“Lily and Daisy have puppy school.”
“I know.”
I bend down and scratch Daisy’s head. She’s so happy her entire backside wiggles. “Fletcher’s already in the backyard.”
“See you when we’re finished Uncle Jake.” Lily bolts through the house to the yard.
“Why are you here?” Big Sis says to me, her arms crossed.
“We have to talk.”
She sighs and even though she’s tough, she knows I’m right.
She turns toward the kitchen and I follow her. From this spot we can watch Lily, Daisy, and Fletcher in the backyard.
“So talk,” she says.
She opens a cabinet and pulls out a glass, uncorks the wine bottle on the counter, and pours herself a drink.
“It started about a year after Susie died. It was consensual, word of mouth, and never commercial, in any way.”
“No money. Not ever.”
I shake my head. “Not ever.”
“Perks. Gifts. Meals. Travel?”
“No, not generally. But if there were take-out meals I paid. Hotel rooms all paid for by me. I did receive one gift from a woman I saw for nearly five years.”
Rachel swirls her wine and takes a sip. “But that was the anomaly, not the rule.”
I nod.
“Fine. So you’re a sex addict like Susie. I wish I’d known sooner. Maybe I would’ve judged her less harshly.”
“This wasn’t about the sex.”
“It wasn’t about the sex for Susie either.”
I scrub my hand through my hair and look at Rachel. “This was because of what happened to Susie. I never wanted any woman to feel like she did. Like there was nowhere to turn. And I….I needed the physical intimacy and even the emotional connection, but in a way that I could control. A way that didn’t put me at risk. A way that allowed me to feel safe. That what happened between me and Susie, that I would never fall in love again, and it worked—”
“Until Tara.”
I nod. “Until Tara.”
“Did you know about the article?”
“Not until it was posted.”
“Shut. Up.” Rachel places her wine glass on the counter and leans toward me. “That bitch didn’t even tell you before it posted?”
And like that, in an instant, she is my big sister again. Still angry at me, probably disappointed, and definitely worried, but right now she is angry because in her mind, regardless of all of the above, I’m still her baby brother, and nobody gets to wrong her little brother, except maybe her.
I shake my head.
“And you forgave her?”
“I love her.”
“Oh, Jake. We don’t choose very well do we?”
She lifts her glass and takes a long sip of her wine.
“Fuck,” she says. “So why now? Why are you two broken up now if you’d forgiven her about the article?”
“There was more. At first she said she figured it out after we started seeing each other and she copped to putting it together when she saw my phone.”
“Fuck.” Rachel’s eyes grow wide. “The flip phone! And here I was worried you were dealing drugs when actually you were simply peddling flesh to the entire Westside.”
“She found it and at first she said that she just saw the name, but actually she downloaded all the numbers and contacted all the women.”
“Wowza!”
Big Sis goes to a cabinet and lifts out a couple of Pyrex dishes. She opens the refrigerator and pulls out a container of cheese and mashed potatoes.
“How’d you figure all that out?” She turns back to the counter. “Hmm, that’s an extra dish.” She lifts a Pyrex and puts it aside.
“An extra dish?”
“Yeah, that one’s not mine.”
“Right.”
It’s the one Kendall brought back to Rachel.
“How did you find out about the phone numbers?”
“There’s a woman that she reached out to, that figured out my real identity, because I bumped into her as Jake.”
Rachel sprays one of the Pyrex dishes with oil. She sets down the spray can and looks at me.
“This is all fucked up. Why did she tell you that? Why did Tara tell you the truth, finally?”
“I guess someone threatened to out me if she didn’t come clean.”.
“Now what?”
I glance through the window toward Lily. Daisy races across the yard between Fletcher and Lily. Lily throws her head back and laughs.
“I don’t know.”
I pull my phone from my pocket. “I saw Mom yesterday,” I say, and flip the phone around to Rachel so she can see the picture I took.
“Oh, Jakey. It’s her.” A tone filled with longing. Rachel presses her fingers to the corners of her eyes. “I…I don’t think we’ll see her much anymore. I mean the Mom who remembers our name.”
“No, I don’t either. It’s almost like she clawed her way to me.”
I look into Rachel’s eyes. “She told me why she took Dad back. How it was maybe the most foolish things she ever did and definitely one of the bravest. How thankful she was that she’d been that brave.” I press my lips together. “Love requires bravery.”
Rachel looks at me. “Be brave.”