“Nina,” Mom says, bringing me back. “If there was a way to undo everything I’ve done wrong, don’t you think I would?”
“Would you? I don’t know. You’re being all pithy and tossing out quotes and it’s ticking me off. The truth is that you forgot us. You let Ray drown in his own guilt, and you didn’t do anything to help him. I think you actually wanted him to suffer.”
“I did not!” Anger finally boils over in her as well. “You have a child of your own. You tell me that if Cassie did something stupid—accident or not—that you would want her to suffer for it. Would you?”
“Of course not,” I scream back at her, like she didn’t just prove her point.
“I prayed for Ray every night,” she says, pointing her finger at me. “Just as hard as I prayed for Lola. I couldn’t do anything but stand by and watch what happened to both of them.”
I see a chance to bring her down, and I take it.
“You prayed for Ray. You prayed for Lola,” I say, bobbing my head, revving up. “Did you ever pray for me?”
She sucks in a breath of air, and I think she’s going to spit something out at me, but she just stands there, looking at me. Beaten.
“No,” she says, and the honesty of it hits me in the stomach. “I don’t know that I did. I didn’t think you needed it. I thought you were strong enough to handle things on your own. You always seem so strong.”
“I wasn’t.”
Anger is quickly losing ground to devastation. I’m one small word away from losing my backbone and crumpling into a heap.
“I don’t think you understand what you’ve done,” I say. “I needed you to love me too.”
“Of course I loved you. I do love you,” Mom says, still sounding angry. “You have no idea how much I love the three of you. Yes, I made a huge mess of things. But not for lack of trying.”
“You call what you did trying?” It’s a mean thing to say and I know it. I feel bad right away. I don’t know that I’m doing any better with Cassie. Honestly, I think I’m doing worse. Everything I’m saying to my mother, I know that Cassie could say to me. In her own way, she already has.
“Now you stop right there,” Mom says, talking to me like I’m still a teenager. Maybe this is a conversation we should have had when I was. “Don’t you dare doubt my love for you. I know I have hurt you, and you have every right to tell me about it, but don’t for one second think that anything I did was out of any other motivation than to love you and care for you. Even the drinking—and yes, I know that sounds crazy. I drank to take the edge off, so I wouldn’t snap at you kids because I’d had a stressful day. Sure, it was a bad road to start down, and I went down it a lot farther than most people. I got lost, and when I tried to find my way back, I went the wrong direction.”
“What does any of that mean? What am I supposed to do about that now?”
“I’m hoping there is a way to salvage our relationship, Nina. Some way to turn this back to what it could have been.”
“I don’t want to salvage our relationship,” I say, and her face falls. “It wasn’t worth saving.”
I don’t mean it like she thinks I do, but she starts talking before I can explain myself.
“Nina, look,” she says and puts her hand on mine. “I know what I put you and Ray and your father through. Saying I’m sorry can’t smooth this over, I know that.”
“I don’t think you understand,” I say. “You tossed us into this other life and expected that we’d know how to make our way.”
“But wasn’t it better?” she asks, her face a ball of confusion and expectation. “Without me drinking?”
I pause in my anger, and my field of vision clears slightly. “It was different. I don’t know that better is the right word.”
“I see.”
“It was fragile,” I say, having found the phrase to fit it. “It was brought on by things that had nothing to do with us and dependent on things that we couldn’t control. That’s tough for a kid.”
Life before Lola’s accident had been a glass bottle that we could see and touch. We could gauge our world by the measure of liquid inside. Not that we wanted Mom to keep drinking—no one wanted that—but life after Lola’s accident was like fog drifting around our feet, vaporous but still able to trip us up. We didn’t know how to navigate that life.
“There are things you don’t understand either,” she says. “It was a chance for me to be what a mother was supposed to be. That was more intoxicating than any drink had ever been.”
“You were my mother too,” I say, the anger welling again. “I was just as broken as Lola and Ray. Just because I was better at hiding it didn’t mean I was whole.”
In the eyes of a child, a mother is infallible. Truth is what she says it is. She’s Wonder Mom, superhero.
“Will it be good enough if I say it?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.”
“I am,” she says and puts her hand back on mine. “I am sorry.”
“I know,” I say and let her
