The Everafter (12 page)

age 6

Hot…hot…hot. The sun beats down on us. I love the Magic Kingdom, but I’m tired of the heat and just plain exhausted. The sun glares off of everything. And my face feels gritty with sweat. My hair is soaked. Mom and Dad have even decided that we all need popcorn to replace some of the salt we’ve lost from sweating.

I like that idea.

I take a piece of popcorn and drop it, watching it fall. It seems to float slowly in the heavy air. When it finally hits the ground, I kick it with my foot. This place is so glittering
and clean, I’m happy to see the lonely popcorn piece on the ground.

“But I want to go back on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride,” Kristen moans.

I kick the piece of popcorn along as we walk. This is one of my favorite things to do. Walk…kick…walk…kick…

“We will,” Mom reassures her. “But your father wants to take you on the Jungle Cruise first.”

“You said we could go through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride again,” I whine. I feel betrayed. I give my popcorn piece an extra-hard kick. It skitters off and I lose sight of it.

This. Is. It.

The end of the world. It’s too hot. I don’t want to see anything else except the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, where it’s dark and cool. I’m tired. My eyes hurt. My feet hurt. My head aches.

And now I’ve lost a piece of popcorn.

A piece that was very important to me.

I can’t help it. I begin to cry.

My family hasn’t even noticed that they’ve left me behind. They keep right on walking. Fine…if they don’t care about me, then I don’t care about them, either. I’ll run away and live in the Swiss Family Treehouse that we saw earlier today. All by myself. Forever.

Only…that’s not sounding quite so great now that I
can’t even see my family anymore.

I panic.

I start crying even harder.

Suddenly, Mom and Dad are standing in front of me. “Madison, stay with us!” my mother starts to chastise me, but then she notices how hard I’m crying, so she wipes my face with a Kleenex instead. “C’mon, sweetie,” she says. She reaches for my hand and pulls. I yank my hand away from hers.

“What is it, honey?” Daddy asks.

“My popcorn,” I wail.

“It’s right there in your hand,” Daddy tries to reassure me, gesturing to the bucket I’m still holding.

“No,” I explain through my sobs. “I was kicking a piece and I lost it.”

A strange silence descends between them, even as all the noise of the Magic Kingdom surrounds us.

Then Mom says something really strange to Dad. I hear something that sounds like “object attachment.” Even though I don’t understand those words, I know Mom’s tone of voice. It’s the one she uses when what she
really
means is “Maddy’s difficult. I can’t wait until she’s older”—even if those aren’t the words she’s saying.

“C’mon, sweetheart,” Daddy says. “I’ll give you a piggyback ride.”

I climb on Daddy’s back, and we move on toward Cinderella’s Castle.

M
OM’S COMMENT
about “object attachment” suddenly makes perfect sense. I’ve always had some kind of connection to the things I’ve owned. Losing them left me feeling bereft because they were linked to everyone and everything in my life that was important. And unlike the people I loved, I could control them—at least I could when I wasn’t losing them.

Objects are safe, too. I mean, they don’t change much. A pen stays a pen and a set of keys always unlocks something. You can go back to the object, hold it, remember who you were when you loved it. That’s something you can count on.

But let’s face it, I’m not talking about “you” right now.

I’m talking about me.

The same me who—even in death—is incredibly attached to these things because they take me back to who I was. Somehow, though, it doesn’t seem quite as fulfilling as it once did to have a relationship with a piece of popcorn that I’m kicking along on the pavement…

Kicking…I suddenly realize I haven’t tried that yet with the pinecone. I’ve imagined myself doing every other possible thing that can be done with it. But I never envisioned myself kicking it as I walked along. Could that be…?

I swim myself through the currents of space until I find the pinecone, and…

age 17

“What am I going to do, Maddy?” Sandra asks.

I kick the pinecone along as we walk down the trails of the park. I know I need to get out of my head, where the image of Gabe’s and my fight last week is on automatic replay 24–7. We still haven’t talked to each other, and I can’t stop wondering if this is the end of our relationship. Our gazes have met across the hallway several times, and I keep wanting to go up and tell him how sorry I am that I threw that ring at him.

But I just can’t. I guess it’s the humiliation. And the
fear…that he won’t accept my apology. And—let’s face it, I’m still angry at him, too, about Dana.

I keep expecting to see him walking down the hall with her or something.

Only—thank God—he doesn’t.

He just looks at me like he wants to talk to me, too, but can’t.

It’s hard to stop thinking about all that and pay attention to Sandra. But I have to do it somehow. She needs me right now.

Some friend I am…only half concentrating on what she’s saying.

And the thing is…the decision she makes about this whole mess is going to have an impact on me. What if I lose my best friend, too? I can’t bear that. It almost makes me want to give her what I
know
is the wrong advice. Because if she does what’s right, I
will
lose her.

Sure, if she moves to Oregon with her dad, she’ll still email me and call. Even come to visit sometimes. But it won’t be the same. Gradually the emotional distance between us will match the distance between Michigan and Oregon. The pain of that realization slices through my obsession with Gabriel and helps me concentrate on how important this really is.

“I don’t want you to leave, Sandra.
I
want you to stay here with your mom, but your mom’s…well, not quite right. You know that. How could you stand to live with her
without your dad there to help you manage her?”

There ought to be a law that says parents can’t get divorced during their kids’ senior year of high school. They ought to have to stick it out until the kids are gone so they don’t disrupt the most important year of our lives.

“But if I stayed,” Sandra argues, “it’d only be for the rest of this year, right? I mean, in ten months I’ll be going away to college.”

“Sandra…” It’s hard to figure out how to tell her this. She’s always been so touchy when it comes to talking about her mother. There’s a lot about her mom that she just won’t admit to herself…like that her mother’s a really sick woman—and I’m not talking physically. “I’m not sure that you’ll
go
to college if you stay here with your mom.”

“I’m going to college. There’s no way I’m not!” she protests.

“Oh, I know you’ll take college classes. But, well, I don’t think you’ll go
away
to college. I think your mom will manage to convince you to stay at home and go to community college. Or maybe she’ll convince you to go part-time so you can commute to a university. But…” I kick the pinecone a little too hard, and it skitters off the path into the grass. I track it down but have to kick it a couple times to get it back onto the path. “Can you see your mom living alone?” I just know Mrs. Simpson will convince Sandra
that leaving her alone will kill her.

“But how can I go off with Dad right now and leave her by herself? It’s like she’d die. Maybe even kill herself.”

Too late—obviously. Mrs. Simpson has already convinced Sandra she’s responsible for the life and death of her mother.

Still, Sandra’s comment shows progress—sort of. Sandra’s never admitted before that her mom is
this
kind of unstable.

But a response to the comment is also tricky. I’m not sure exactly how to approach this subject, so I sound totally stupid as I talk in slow motion. “At least…if you go…now…you’ll have, well, your dad…he’ll help you get up the…courage…to do it. You’ll have him…reassuring you that…well, that you need…a life, too. And if you…leave with him…won’t your grandma…I mean…can’t your mom…live with her parents? If you weren’t here…maybe she’d…maybe she’d move back South…with them.”

“She says she won’t. She’s going to stay right here, and she wants me to stay with her.”

Great. Just great. It’s like Mrs. Simpson has already anticipated all my moves and put her game pieces in place to defend against them. She’s not a woman I ever want to play chess with.

Yet that seems to be exactly what I’m doing.

In frustration, I kick the pinecone too hard again, but
I’m so focused on Sandra that I don’t pay much attention to where it’s going. “See? That’s what I mean. She’ll do that to you again next year when it’s time for you to go to college. Convince you that she’ll be all alone if you leave.” I want to tell her that her mother is seriously crazy, but my credibility in the judging-people’s-sanity category has plunged to an all-time low. Even Sandra thinks it was nuts that I accused Dana of killing my cat and trying to kill me. Better that I not mention anything related to, well, mental health.

We’re both silent for a moment as I look for the pinecone off the path. I don’t find it. Sighing, I sit down on the grass. Sandra’s still standing, and as I gaze up at her, I notice that in the past few months she’s gained weight. I’m surprised. How could I not have noticed until this moment that she’s put on about fifteen pounds? Have I been that absorbed in my own life? She’s lost that birdlike fragility I’ve always thought of her as having, and I mourn its loss—not because she’s less pretty than she used to be, but because the difference in her shows me how much everything has been changing lately.

“She thinks you’ll try to get me to stay, you know.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, patting the ground next to me, encouraging her to sit.

She does. “Whenever we have this conversation at home, she tells me to ask you what to do. She thinks you’ll try to get me to stay here with you.”

I can just imagine
those
scenes. No doubt Sandra’s mom is crying and pleading. She’ll use any dirty tactic she can to keep Sandra tied to her. I’m glad I’ve managed to think about Sandra’s best interests instead of my own for once. I know I’m selfish sometimes, but selfish enough to try to keep Sandra under the spell of her mother?

No. Not that selfish. I’d rather lose my best friend and have her get the chance to lead a somewhat healthy life than keep her near me if it means living with her mother.

“Don’t get me wrong, Sandra. I wish you could stay. I wish your dad wouldn’t leave. Couldn’t he get a job around here?”

She shakes her head sadly. “He says he has to get away from her, too. And he wants me to go with him. He thinks, like you do, that it’ll be bad for me to stay here with Mom. But I don’t see how he can just walk away from her like that. She needs us. She’s defenseless without us.”

“Or she wants you to think she is. She doesn’t have to be.” I don’t add that her mother is anything
but
defenseless. She’s one of the strongest women I know. She uses the appearance of weakness to get people to do what she wants them to. “Much as I want you to stay here—and I definitely do, Sandra—I want even more for you to be happy. And you’d never be happy here alone in that house with your mom. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do,” she admits. “It’s just so hard to do what
I should. I’m terrified that—” She pauses for a moment, unsure. Then she plunges ahead. “She’s been threatening to kill herself. I think she might really…this time…I mean now…How do I tell you all this? There’s stuff I probably should have let you know before.”

There’s
more?!
I suddenly feel betrayed. I guess I shouldn’t have assumed I knew everything about Sandra, even if she is my best friend, but still I don’t like hearing that she’s been keeping secrets from me. Especially about her mom.

When Sandra doesn’t pick up the thread of her thoughts, I prompt her by using my knee to nudge hers.

“Well, it seems like my whole life she’s been threatening to kill herself. The first time I remember it, I was in, like, first grade, I think. She started waving around a butcher knife while she was having some fight with Dad. Told him she’d kill herself.”

It’s not hard to figure out who won that fight, but I keep my mouth shut about it.

“When I went to camp during fourth grade, remember how I had to suddenly go home?”

“Yeah. Your mom got sick.”

“Well, sort of. She called and told me she had this bottle of pills that made her feel better while I was gone, but she thought she’d need to take a lot of them to make all the pain go away. I only kind of got what she was hinting at, but I got
it enough to know I was scared and had to go home.”

There’s a moment of silence between us. “How often?” I finally ask.

“How often what?”

“How often does she threaten to kill herself?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes she’ll go a couple years without ever threatening to kill herself. Then suddenly she’ll be threatening her life every day for a couple weeks. Do you know how many different ways there are to kill yourself? I do. I think my mom’s said she was going to use every one. The whole thing has always scared me, but not as much as it does right now. It’s somehow different.”

I doubt it. “How? How is it different?”

Sandra shakes her head. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it. It just is.”

I put my arm around her and hug her. There’s nothing I can say to make her less afraid. Right now I have to find strength I don’t think I have to help support her through this. Her latest confessions have only made me more convinced that she
has
to go live with her dad in Oregon. “C’mon,” I say. “Let’s go swing.”

She glances over at a row of swings where we used to play together when we were little. “Okay,” she says.

We get up slowly and take off toward the swings.