Why Can't I Be You (21 page)

“I want to be,” Robbie said.

“If you can’t trust yourself yet, trust Heather,” I said. “She won’t let you fall short. She loves you too much. You’re not your father, and Heather isn’t your mother. Right?”

“Jess,” Robbie said.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t disappear again, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, because I didn’t want to. We lay back in the grass holding hands, staring up at the stars until the sky started to brighten again.

I
t was almost
daylight by the time Robbie and I made the trek back to Myra’s house. We snuck in. Heather and Myra were asleep on the couch, a head on each armrest, their feet tangled up in the middle. Robbie grabbed a quilt from the back of the rocking chair and sacked out on the floor next to Heather. I watched him kiss her cheek before he settled in. I pulled an afghan off the back of the love seat and curled up. I couldn’t have slept more than three hours before my phone started buzzing. In my sleepy haze, I accidentally answered it instead of turning it off. “Hold on,” I whispered into the receiver.

I could hear my mother saying, “Jenny? Jenny?” as I tiptoed through the kitchen and into the backyard. It was freezing outside. I didn’t have shoes on.

“What?” I said into the phone, allowing my voice to sound ever so slightly irritated, even though I knew I’d pay for it.

“I don’t like your tone,” she said. Her voice was dangerous, wounded. I could picture the look on her face too clearly. The sharpness in her eyes, the softness of her cheek as it trembled with anger.

“It’s still early here,” I said. “I was sleeping.”

“You haven’t called me back in five days.” She said it with the kind of accusatory inflection that other people would reserve for saying something like “You left me for dead on that desert island” or “You mass-murdered a school bus full of nuns before you ran over all those kittens.”

“I’m on vacation.”

“Well, I didn’t realize you needed a vacation from your mother.”

I wanted to tell her that she was what I needed a vacation from most of all. But instead I said, “I just need to go back to sleep, Mom.”

“Fine,” she said, “but . . . ,” and then she proceeded to tell me about every slight or perceived slight she’d experienced in the past five days: from the guy in the Cutlass Supreme who cut her off on 390 to the hairdresser who didn’t seem to take enough time bleaching her roots (“Like she was in a rush, Jenny! I mean, I had an appointment!”) to my dad’s latest infraction that had something to do with not sending her an engagement announcement, even though it would have sent her on a rampage of the “how dare he rub my face in his marriage?” variety if he had. I stopped listening about ten minutes in. I sat on the back step, rested my face against the splintery wood railing, and closed my eyes. I would have just put it on speakerphone if there wasn’t a risk of someone coming outside and hearing her call me Jenny. My butt was freezing, and my body ached from only getting a few hours of sleep curled up on a love seat. But hanging up wasn’t an option. Hanging up was never an option. It started an explosion that took days, if not weeks, to clean up. It set off a drinking binge. It made her my problem on a greater scale than she already was. Phone calls ended when she was ready for them to end, and not a moment sooner.

Once, in college, I’d been so desperate to pee that I’d brought my portable phone into the bathroom with me. I’d covered the receiver while I went and was about to get away with it, when someone in the stall next to me flushed.

“Are you,” she said, with heavy disgust in her voice, “in the bathroom? I raised you better than to talk on the phone in the bathroom!”

I made the mistake of saying, “You raised me better than to wet my pants.”

The next day I got a call from her saying that she didn’t think she could afford my tuition anymore and that it was hurtful to both her and my father that I had chosen a college with such high tuition, without giving a thought to her needs. She said she couldn’t believe she had raised such an ungrateful daughter. Because I peed and I talked back.

Instead of realizing she was acting crazy, I believed I was an awful person for choosing an expensive school. The shame I felt clouded the fact that she’d been proud of me for getting into Ithaca. She’d loved bragging about it to everyone she came into contact with. I had gotten enough of a merit scholarship to take tuition down to the price of a state school. But because I’d hurt her feelings, suddenly my choice of college was a horrible, hateful act. I believed her, because I was nineteen and she was my mother. I spent the next two years dragging around mountains of guilt just for getting an education the way everyone had always told me I should.

But I wasn’t nineteen anymore. And just because she was my mother, it didn’t mean she had the right to control me or guilt me or make me feel bad about myself.

The people sleeping in Myra’s living room were a family, not because of any genetic obligation, but because they loved each other. They made each other’s lives better. They weren’t a constant dead weight dragging everyone else down. It was a merit-based family. It counted so much more than the kind of family you just get stuck with.

I was never going to make my mother the person I needed her to be. I was never going to get what I wanted from a mother, no matter how many times I took her phone calls or cleaned her house and paid her bills and put her to bed when she was too drunk to walk upstairs by herself. Taking care of her had kept me from ever being part of a family of my own.

“Can you believe him? That he had the nerve to . . .” I heard her say, probably about my father. Yes or no wasn’t the right answer. Neither one would get her to stop ranting. My role in these conversations was to mumble “mmhmm” at appropriate intervals, which was something I could practically do in my sleep now. But my feet were cold and my muscles were sore, my breath was making clouds in the air, and I didn’t want to hear her list of grievances anymore. I hung up the phone without saying a word. And then I shut off my phone completely, so I couldn’t hear her call back.

“Hey,” Heather said.

I jumped.

“Sorry,” she said, sitting down next to me. She smoothed my hair away from my face. “Are you okay? You seem upset.”

“My mom called,” I said. “I think I’m starting to realize that she’s never going to be the mom I wish I had.”

“I’m so sorry, honey.”

“Yeah.” I waved my hand like I was ushering the problem out of the way. “It’s not even worth discussing.”

“Karen’s home,” Heather said. “She wants to meet for lunch. And Robbie said he’s fine without me for the morning, so why don’t we go pretend to be tourists and then meet Karen and Myra at Portage Bay for Mexican.”

“Works for me,” I said. As much as I knew it was going to be challenging to pretend to not be a tourist, I was excited to get to see Seattle. Staying busy would help me keep my phone off.

“B
each, shopping, or
Space Needle?” Heather asked, when we climbed into her purple Ford Escort to head into the city after Myra left for work.

“Beach,” I said.

“Thank goodness. If you’d said Space Needle, I would have lost a little respect for you. There’s a fun level of pretending to be tourists, and then there’s snow globes in the gift shop.”

“The beach sounds perfect.”

“Great!” she said. “I haven’t been to Carkeek in forever! And I could use a good walk.” She patted her impossibly small waist.

“You look fantastic,” I said.

“Yes, and there’s a reason for that,” she said. “I move. I hate the whole going-to-the-gym-in-spandex kind of exercise, so I just focus on making sure I’m always walking or hiking or stuff like that. I help Robbie move boxes at work.” She flexed her arm to show me her bicep. It popped up like an apple.

“Nice!” I said.

“I was so sedentary in high school. Blah.” She stuck her tongue out. “It helps that my husband is completely hyperactive.”

On the ride to the park, Heather told me about the house she and Robbie hoped to build. “Right now we live in a glorified mobile home, but when Fish is done building his house, he’s going to help Robbie start on ours.”

“Like a barn raising,” I said.

“Exactly,” Heather said. She filled me in on her dream kitchen and the fire pit they’d build outside. “Robbie wants to build on some of Fish’s dad’s land. But I already feel like I’m married to two boys sometimes. I’m not sure I could handle Fish living right next door.”

I laughed.

“I mean, I love Fish,” she said, “but those boys are even more inseparable now than they were in high school.”

When we got to Carkeek Park, we parked the car at a trailhead. Heather slung her little gray and pink messenger bag across her shoulder, and we were off.

We hiked along a creek. It was dark and damp. Lush ferns and moss everywhere. I didn’t understand how we would find a beach when we were so clearly headed toward woods. Heather walked fast, and even though my legs were much longer than hers, I struggled to keep pace, so we didn’t talk much. My feet were still bruised and blistered from the other day, and the mud made a mess of my loafers. Finally the path was drier, and there were little glimpses of water through the trees. We hiked down a steep dirt path, and then the ocean was right in front of us. We crossed a bridge over some train tracks and ended up on a gravel beach. “Oh,” Heather said, taking a deep breath and sighing, “I always feel better when I’m around water.”

She took off her shoes. “I know I’m going to regret this when my feet turn to icicles, but I love walking on beach rocks barefoot.”

I took my shoes off too, happy for the chance to let my blisters breathe a little.

“Geez,” Heather said, “what happened to your feet?”

“Hiking with Fish and Myra,” I said. “Myra had my old hiking boots, but they don’t fit like they used to.”

“I know!” Heather said. “You shed your baby fat and nothing fits the same. I’m so sorry! If I’d known I would have just parked over here.”

“No!” I said. “The walk was nice.”

She put her foot next to mine. “That’s so funny,” she said. “I remember you teasing me about my little hardly there baby toe, but yours is like that too.”

I curled my toes into the gravel. “I think it’s just because they’re so swollen,” I said.

“I think,” Heather said, “that it’s karma. Let this be a lesson to you, Jessica.” She smiled. “You make fun of stubby toes and you end up with them yourself.” She picked up a rock and tossed it out toward the ocean. It didn’t quite make it to the water.

We walked closer so she could try again. This time her rock went far, splashing into the water. My feet were freezing, but the cold numbed the pain. I picked up a rock and threw it. It made it about half as far as Heather’s rock.

We walked around, picking up beach glass, poking long strips of seaweed with driftwood. We sat on a log and looked out at the water. “You know,” Heather said, scratching a big
H
into the pebbly beach with a stick, “my parents are pretty great, but I’ve watched Robbie struggle with his. I know how much it hurts.” Her lowercase
e
was round and bubbly. “It wouldn’t be fair for me to sit here and say, ‘But she’s your mother,’ because all I’d be doing is filling in the blanks of your mom with mine.” Her
a
had a roof like a typewriter
a
. “I did that to Robbie for too long.” She looked up at me. “What I do know is that when I finally stopped telling Robbie how people are supposed to feel about their parents and listened to how he actually felt, we started getting somewhere. It gave him permission to focus on the people who do matter. He wasn’t putting so much time into the people who kept hurting him.”

When she finished all the letters, she drew a heart and handed me the stick.

“You’re right,” I said. “I know you are. It’s just hard to let go of the guilt.” I drew a giant outlined
J
, and instead of writing the rest of my name, I filled it in with stripes and polka dots.

“Everyone you have in your life, everyone you give time and attention and love to, should deserve it. You deserve to be loved back, honey.” She hugged me. “And if you’re not, it’s only human to want to take a break. Maybe she’ll only ever make a change if you force her hand. Maybe she won’t change at all, but you’ll be moving forward and it will hurt less than it does now.”

When the next wave hit, water filled in her name and my
J
and left them shimmering when the wave slipped back from the shore.

As we walked back to the car, Heather looked at her watch. “We still have almost two hours before lunch. Kayaking?”

I laughed, hoping she was joking.

“I mean, when was the last time we even went?” she said.

“I know! Right?” I said, and climbed into the passenger seat. Not only had I never been kayaking, but I was a terrible swimmer, which didn’t make me all that keen to go out on open water.

Heather drove us to Portage Bay. The sun was looking like it might make an appearance, and it had started to warm up a little. We parked near a giant drawbridge and walked to the boat shop. Heather asked the guy behind the counter for two kayaks.

“Okay,” he said, writing something on a piece of paper. “I’ll need a credit card and a driver’s license for each of you.”

I had enough cash in my pocket to cover a rental, but I couldn’t give him my driver’s license. I pulled my wad of bills out. My head spun through possible excuses. But then Heather said, “Oh no! My treat. Put both on here.” She slid her credit card across the counter and dug through her wallet for her license.

“Put your money away,” Heather said, pushing my hand back toward my pocket. “My treat.”

Normally I would have insisted on paying for myself, but I hoped if Heather paid, the guy wouldn’t want my license. He filled out the forms and Heather signed them. Then he said, “And if I could just have your license.” He pointed at me with his ballpoint pen.

I smacked at my pockets like I was looking for it. In truth it was hidden in the lining of my suit jacket, which was wadded up in the bottom of my travel tote. I thought it was safer not to carry it on me. If I was caught with my credit card, I could say I’d gone to lunch with my friend Jenny and we’d accidentally taken the wrong cards after we split the bill. I’d worked out a great story about how we’d promised to pay each other’s bills until I got back and we could switch again.

“I think I left it at Myra’s house,” I said.

Heather gave the guy a look. “I’ll vouch for her,” she said. “She won’t steal the kayak. Promise. I’ve known her my whole life.”

“All right,” the guy said, smiling at Heather. He obviously thought she was cute. “You have an honest face,” he told me. “I’ll let it go this time. But you have to sign your insurance form.”

I had to print out Jessica Morgan. But when I signed Jessie’s name, I just wrote a
J
and then two squiggly lines. I know it didn’t really make it any better, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually sign her name, even though it was such a thin and ridiculous line to refuse to cross after all the vast gorges I’d been leaping over.

The guy handed us life vests and paddles and walked us down to the dock. He held the first kayak steady. Heather took her paddle, placed it along the back of the seat, and used her arms to help guide her seamlessly into the boat.

I tried to do the same, but I got one foot in and the boat shook and then my arms shook and I had visions of ending up in the water right next to the boat. I very inelegantly rolled myself back onto the dock.

“Is this your first time kayaking?” the guy asked.

“Oh, she’s an old pro,” Heather said.

The guy raised his eyebrows at me.

“I’m rusty,” I said. “It’s been like thirteen years.”

“Okay,” he said. “Well, I’ve got the kayak. It’s going to move, but you have to trust that I’ve got a hold of it. It can’t go too far.”

I put my arms back on the paddle and just went for it. Both feet in one quick movement. The boat rocked back and forth, but I was in and everything was okay.

“All right,” he said. “You’re off.” He pushed my boat away from the dock. Heather was already out of the slip and ready to go. I used the paddle to push off until I couldn’t reach the dock anymore and had to rely on paddling.

I watched Heather carefully and did everything she did. Of course, while her paddles hit the water with a tiny
splish
, mine smacked the surface and sent water splashing everywhere.

“I guess it’s not like riding a bike,” Heather said, laughing. “But I’m sure it’ll come back to you.”

“I hope so,” I said. “My arms aren’t in the kind of shape they used to be.”

Heather was fast. Even after I got the hang of it, I could tell she was only paddling at half capacity so I could keep up. My arms hurt and my shoulders ached, but every time she looked back, I’d smile. It was even starting to seem like something I might enjoy doing once I got stronger.

We paddled past houseboats and pointed out the ones we liked the best. But then a boat whizzed by us from a few yards away. Heather turned her kayak like she was turning around, so the pointy part was facing the wave. I tried to do the same, but I couldn’t move fast enough, and before I knew it, the water hit the side of my boat and splashed into my lap.

“Oh!” Heather said, laughing. “That’s got to be cold!”

She rode the wave out and then paddled toward me.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying really hard not to cry. Jessie Morgan wouldn’t cry over a little water. Of course, Jessie wouldn’t have gotten doused to begin with.

“It’s about time to go back anyway,” Heather said. “Maybe they’ll have a towel for you.”