My mother disappeared in the middle of the night when I was seven years old, and 16 years later she came walking back into our little Missouri town as if the road home had been waiting for her all along.
Chapter 2
I left the farm that night and drove to Aunt Linda’s house.
She found me sitting on her back steps after midnight with my shoes in the grass and my face swollen from crying. She brought out two mugs of coffee even though neither of us needed caffeine.
“I hate her,” I said.
“I know.”
“I hate Dad too.”
“I know.”
“And I hate Caleb for forgiving her.”
Aunt Linda sat beside me.
“That one scares you.”
I nodded.
Because it did.
I had spent sixteen years believing I was different from Rebecca. She resented the weight of motherhood and ran. I accepted responsibilities that were never supposed to belong to me and stayed.
Yet now I resented Caleb because he no longer needed me in the way he once had.
That realization made me sick.
“What if I’m like her?”
Linda turned sharply. “You are not.”
“I gave up college. I gave up everything.”
“You also loved that boy.”
“I still do.”
“Then anger doesn’t erase love.”
I stared across her dark yard.
“Dad forgave her in five minutes.”
“No, sweetheart. He loved her for sixteen years. That is different.”
“That makes him pathetic.”
“It makes him complicated.”
I did not want complicated.
Complicated was where excuses lived.
Three days later, Rebecca came to Aunt Linda’s house alone.
I almost refused to see her, but Linda said, “You have been talking to an imaginary version of your mother for sixteen years. Maybe you should hear what the real one has to say.”
Rebecca sat across from me at Linda’s kitchen table.
She looked older than she had at the farm. Tired, too. Not glamorous. Not like the photographs I had once secretly found online of her at fashion events in New York and Los Angeles.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” she said.
“Good.”
“I’m not asking you to call me Mom.”
“Also good.”
She nodded.
“If you want me to stay away from the farm, I will.”
I frowned.
“That’s my home,” she continued. “More than Tom’s. More than Caleb’s. Definitely more than mine. You held that place together when I should have been there.”
I looked away.
“Don’t praise me for surviving something you did to me.”
“You’re right.”
Again, she refused to fight.
I hated it.
“Why now?”
She swallowed.
“I don’t have one answer that makes me look good.”
“Try.”
“When I left, I thought if I got far enough away, I’d become the person I believed I was supposed to be. For a while I convinced myself I had.”
“You had sixteen years to come back.”
“Yes.”
“You could have come when I was eight.”
“Yes.”
“Twelve.”
“Yes.”
“Eighteen.”
Her voice dropped. “Yes.”
“Every birthday you stayed gone.”
“I know.”
“Every Christmas.”
“I know.”
“So don’t tell me you made one mistake. You made it every morning for sixteen years.”
Tears ran down her face.
“I know.”
That answer silenced me.
Most people apologize by asking the wounded person to help carry the explanation. Rebecca did not.
“I was ashamed,” she said. “At first I told myself you were better without me. Then enough years passed that coming back seemed selfish. Then more years passed, and I realized staying away was selfish too. I kept waiting until I could return as somebody worthy of being your mother.”
“You’re not.”
“No.”
The word came so quickly that I looked at her.
She pressed her palms together.
“I’m not worthy of that title. I know that. But I love you.”
I laughed bitterly.
“You didn’t even write that in the note.”
Her face crumpled.
“I know.”
“You wrote that I shouldn’t have happened.”
“I know.”
“And Caleb?”
She covered her mouth for a moment.
“I have thought about that sentence every day for years.”
“Good.”
“I deserve to.”
“Good.”
She nodded.
Then she said something I had not expected.
“Anna, if hating me is what you need, hate me. If you never want to see me, I will respect it. If your life takes you across the country tomorrow and I never hear your voice again, I will still love you. There is nothing you can become and nothing you can do that will change that.”
My throat tightened.
She continued.
“I should have said that when you were seven. I should have said it every day after. I didn’t. I can’t repair sixteen years. I can only stop lying about what I did.”
I looked at her for a long time.
There were a thousand questions I wanted answered.
Had she thought of me while drinking champagne at some party?
Had she remembered Caleb’s birthday?
Had she ever bought Christmas gifts and thrown them away?
Had she imagined us crying?
Had she ever driven halfway home and turned around?
But underneath every question was one that frightened me more.
Had I missed her?
Yes.
God help me, yes.
I had missed my mother my entire life.
I had simply renamed the feeling hatred because hatred was less humiliating.
That afternoon, I went back to the farm.
Nothing was magically fixed.
Caleb still barely spoke to me.
Dad was careful around me.
Rebecca did not come by for several weeks.
But the world had shifted by half an inch.
Sometimes that is enough to begin.
