“Yes?”
“Were they so bad?”
“You mean, did I like them? No. I’m sorry, but that would be a no.”
Mary shook her head. “Not what I asked. Were they so bad?”
“No.”
“Could you do it all over again? Like from the start ’til this moment right here?” She pointed to the concrete between them. “From when we first met down here to now?”
He thought about the conversations. Some had been like pulling teeth. Some had been kind of easy. Others had wiped him out emotionally. One—or no, two—had actually made him vomit.
A few they had even laughed through.
“Yes,” he said. “I could do it all over again.”
Mary put her hand on his forearm. “Then you have exactly what you need to continue to heal and survive and thrive. If you can look me right in the eye, and say, yup, I got this. I can continue talking. I can keep learning about myself and my place in the world. I can express my doubts and fears, in a supportive environment, and know that I’m not dirty. I am not filthy. I was abused. I was a victim. And none of it was my fault—nor did it change the purity of my soul or the depth and beauty of my heart. If you can keep working those tendons and ligaments and joints? You will be okay, no matter how many times you feel as you do tonight.”
Z took another deep breath. “You know, I try to say those words in my head. When I get like this, when I doubt . . . what I am inside.”
“Good.” She patted his arm and dropped her hand. “Someday, you’ll believe them.”
He considered his chaotic, nasty thoughts. “How do you know that for sure?”
She leaned in and kept eye contact with him. “Because, my friend, they’re true.”
At ten a.m., Elle stepped out of the kitchen and into her father’s garage. Hitting the go button on the right side’s door, she blinked as the thing opened slowly, brilliant sunshine streaming in and illuminating her father’s car, the lawn mower, the row of trash rollers. The post-blizzard glare was so bright she had to shield her eyes with her arm, but things adjusted quick enough.
Not surprisingly, she totally bypassed the BMW.
On the far wall, there was a whole bunch of sports equipment, most of which was her father’s: Bats, gloves, balls, the volleyball net that was rolled up around itself, in-line skates, hockey bags. As she went over to the sprawl, the square-toed, hard-soled shoes she’d put on made sharp slapping noises. She’d had to put on three pairs of socks to get them to fit, but like she cared?
The cross-country skis were in an organized lineup at the end of the steel shelves, each pair mated together with bands at the top and the bottom, the poles more loosey-goosey and at a tilt.
She picked the Rossignols because the shoes had the same brand on them and the others said Head.
Getting the stuff out into the yard was a two-tripper, the thin, lightweight skis impossible to control along with the poles, assuming she didn’t want to scrape the side of her dad’s car—and she’d already been through enough with that sedan, thank you very much.
When everything was in the front yard, she entered the code on the exterior pad and closed things up. Taking a look left and right, she saw . . . a fuck ton of untouched snow. Nothing on the street had been plowed yet, not the road, not the sidewalks, not the driveways, although there were a couple of men just getting out their snowblowers and starting to work on their properties.
Like a dad-bell had gotten rung and it was a race.
Overhead, the sky was an impossible blue, so resonant and clear that she couldn’t reconcile it with the storm that had raged through the night. But maybe that was the point. The blizzard had wiped the slate clean, cleared it all.
Would that it had worked its magic in her own life.
Clipping the toes of the shoes into the bindings, she palmed the poles and started off. It was slow going at first, her balance bad, no rhythm to anything. She had only cross-country’d like twice before, but she was on the varsity track team, so at least aerobic capacity wasn’t part of her problem.
Soon enough, she found a stride, and it felt good to breathe in the cold, dry air. She proceeded down her street, and when she got to the end, she was hot, so she took off her wool hat and crammed it into the pocket of her parka.
The main road had been plowed, and she stayed to the shoulder, making really good time on the inch of powder that had sloughed back down the banks created after the city trucks had barged the majority of accumulation out of the way. There were few cars out and about, mostly high-clearance SUVs with the drivers looking smug, as if they felt that their automotive choices were being totally validated.
She knew exactly how far she went. Six point four miles.
She’d run the route so many times. In fact, all of that back-and-forthing had been the reason she’d made varsity cross-country.
Terrie, on the other hand, was a couch potato. The joke in the family had been that Elle and Dad were birds of a feather and Mom and Terrie were loungers without measure.
Not that anyone was making those comparisons anymore, even if Terrie was still playing on her iPad most of the time.
Elle knew she was getting close when the stores and the bus stops began appearing. More traffic congested the road, so she moved up onto the sidewalk—or where one would have been without the snow dump—and then soon enough, she cut across the narrow lawn of a CVS. After that, it was a diagonal on the Rossignols through the unplowed parking lot of a strip mall, and on the far side, the apartment blocks started, the buildings grouped by exterior paint jobs.
Gray and white. Dark brown all over. Cream and white. Dark green and tan.
The names were fancier than the facilities. Greystone Village. Elmsworth Court. Willowwalk Homes.
As she shhhhsht-shhhhsht-shhhhsht’d along, she figured whoever owned the places had chosen the names deliberately. It wasn’t that the units were nasty. But they sure weren’t old Brownsboro Place–worthy.
Her mother’s enclave was second to the last on the street, and Elle skied into the parking lot to find that everything had been plowed—so that all the sedans and minivans parked under the open-area carports were totally blocked in. Not that anybody was making a move to go anywhere. It was a Saturday, after all, and hello, the snow.
Plus who could have gotten any sleep in the whole city with all that wind? It was like Caldwell was gonna get blown off the map of upstate New York.
Her mom’s apartment building was two-story and split in half, the double-decker sporting an open-air stairway to feed the upper quartets. Her mom’s flat was on the second floor over on the left, and Elle didn’t bother to check and see if the Audi station wagon was parked in its spot. It was never not there. And it couldn’t have left this morning, anyhow.
Shucking the skis, she gathered them together, and it was messy work getting up the stairs with the poles, too. Fortunately, her mom’s door was the first one she came to. She knocked.
No answer.
Elle’s heart pounded as she got out the set of keys she had been given. Well, “set” was the wrong word. The keys she had to her father’s house were a set. There was his front door key, the key to her locker at school, the key to her bike lock. For her mom’s apartment, there was only the ring and one single, notched dangler.