“The bus is really the most efficient way for the girls to get up to Maine,” Susie said with confidence. It was clear she had done this before and optimized each step of the journey. “I think the nine-thirty bus in the morning would be best. They will still arrive at a reasonable hour.” She’d prepared packing lists for both the girls and read them out to the table. “Can’t forget bathing suits! Or sunblock. Eve would go for the tanning oil if she could but I insist on SPF10.” Eve rolled her eyes as her mother spoke.
“I do prefer tanning oil, and last summer I got the best tan that I’ve ever had even with the SPF10,” Eve boasted, crossing her arms.
Jane couldn’t help but grin. She brought her napkin over her face and pretended to wipe something from her mouth so that no one would catch her chuckling to herself. Silas wasn’t kidding about Eve’s tan after all.
To Jane’s relief, the conversation moved on quickly and Susie described her arrangements for Silas to pick the girls up at the bus station. She’d ensured he had a car she believed to be safe enough for her daughter to sit in the back seat of. “And I think that’s that,” Susie declared, clapping her palms together and then returning them to her lap.
Jane smiled and said, “You girls are going to have such a nice time over those couple of weeks.”
Jane spotted the corners of Susie’s mouth turn down. Both Parker and Cam were staring down into their food. Eve and Hazel were snickering as they looked onto the same cell phone sitting in Eve’s lap.
There was a weight, a thickness, a sense of loss in the room for all four parents. And the two girls were impervious to it. They had formed their own world now. And they were living in it.
Jane remembered back to when she was this way. Young and carefree. Energized about the life ahead. Happy and present. It felt long ago now. Long before she got the news about her parents. Long before she veered off course. Long before she made the choices she made to become a mother and then a wife and then a mother again.
She smiled seeing Hazel this way. She realized she had never seen her like this before. The Hazel she knew lately was using a fork to push her vegetables around her dinner plate or off helping to get the twins dressed or locked away in her bedroom quietly.
Jane’s heart lifted and sank at the same time. Her heart lifted looking at her daughter enjoying herself. Seeking new friendship. Sisterhood. Ready for adventure. But her heart sank realizing that she didn’t know this version of Hazel. She didn’t know this girl who got excited by other girls with messy buns and eyeliner. She didn’t know this girl who wanted to pore over a cell phone while dinner was on the table.
It was so clear to Jane now. Hazel’s journey to becoming her own woman was underway now.
The journey was underway for all of them now. There was no stopping it.
Oh, what a mess she had made. Silas had made. Susie had made. They all had made. And now their daughters would carry the burden of it all the way up to Maine.
Hazel was ready to go and Jane was just along for the ride.
* * *
After making it through another hour of dinner, Jane thanked the Warringtons for the meal with the biggest smile she could muster as Susie held the door open for their exit. Cam and Hazel made their way through the doorway. But before Jane could do the same, she felt Susie’s long fingertips curl around her elbow.
“I just wanted to say that I know what you’re going through,” Susie said. She kept her eyes locked on Jane’s.
Jane tried to interpret the look in her eyes. Was it sadness? Empathy? Pity?
Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to open up any friendship or understanding of this woman.
“I’ve been here before. It was only a year ago that this was happening to me for the first time. It was just last summer that Eve told me she had found Silas online and wanted to go see him. So I understand what you’re going through,” Susie repeated, apparently ignorant of Jane’s inner resistance.
Jane decided to make it more clear where she stood and pulled her elbow out from Susie’s grip. “I’m not sure you do, Susie,” Jane said, still not breaking their eye contact. “Our stories may be intertwined, but that doesn’t mean they are the same.”
“All mothers’ stories are the same,” Susie responded. “I know you think you messed everything up, I messed up, that we all messed up. But it’s going to be okay. Our girls are going to be okay.”
“Mom! Come on!” Hazel shouted from the car, breaking the thick tension of the moment.
“Well. That’s my cue,” Jane said through a closed-lipped smile and raised eyebrows and began to turn and walk toward the car.
“Wait!” Susie said, a little more frantically than Jane would. “I want you to have something”
Jane rolled her eyes a little, but something kept her in place, wanting to receive whatever it was. Susie crouched down in a way that restored her air of elegance and pulled a beautiful leather-bound notebook out from a wooden bureau next to the door. “Read it when you find yourself lonely this summer.”
Susie flattened her skirt and pushed her shoulders back as she stood up. Jane motioned to open it, but Susie pressed down on Jane’s hands and nodded knowingly.
“Mom! Let’s go!” Hazel shouted again, louder this time.
Jane took the book and walked briskly out toward the car, then took her place in the passenger seat.
“What was that about?” Cam asked innocently, like he was indifferent about the answer anyway, and reached over to put his hand on Jane’s thigh.
“Nothing,” Jane responded and propped her knee up so that the leather notebook was out of Cam and Hazel’s line of sight. She gingerly opened the cover and peeked onto the first page.
The Mess Your Mother Made, it read in big black carefully written script letters. Letters to my daughter I may never send.
Jane’s heartbeat came into focus. She could hear her own pulse. She didn’t know if she wanted to read all of it immediately or none of it ever.
“Doesn’t look like nothing!” Cam said with a smirk and squeezed Jane’s thigh.
With a tickle running up her leg, Jane burst out with laughter at him tickling her leg. She slammed the notebook shut and shoved it into the passenger-side door.
As they pulled out of the driveway, Jane’s eyes met Susie’s through the window. Perhaps there was something to learn from this woman after all.
9
HAZEL
A few days later, as Hazel left her mother’s car and approached the bus station to meet Eve so the girls could ride together, she prepared for her legs and arms and lungs and heart to float away from her and straight into the ether. For Hazel, sitting next to other girls on the bus to school was usually an act in self-vanishing. Just the simple truth that every single piece of her body could evaporate into the air without a single person noticing was enough to set the feeling off.