Move what around? he asked, like he didn’t feel his wife’s hand slide across his shoulder—or like he didn’t know what it meant.
I only looked at her after that. My father was wearing a confused expression, but not her. My mother’s began at sterile but gradually transformed into something like amusement, quietly mocking.
She didn’t interject. She didn’t tell my dad that it was natural for a child my age, with the life experience I’d had, to think it was as easy as that. My classmates at the academy had “fallen on hard times” before, after all, in far more scandalous ways. Someone or other’s parent had ended up on the news, walking silently past a group of reporters clamoring for a statement into their definitely illegal business practices, even though their lawyer intervened every time. One year, someone’s family “lost everything”—but everything didn’t include houses or boats or memberships. Everything was a feeling, a state of being. It was a sense of certainty that the world was as it should be, that reputations were intact. Everything was a status and a scorecard, and it only required patience. Whatever had happened only needed a few months or half a year to turn itself around, and there was always money to move from one place to another in the meantime.
How was I to know it wasn’t the same for us?
I could take this pathetically staged living room apart, leave them the debris of a life they’ve only been pretending at. But control. Instead, I do what she did to me. Instead of destroying something they don’t care about, I fall apart.
Plant my feet shoulder-width apart, and relax my shoulders until they droop.
Breathe deep and hold.
Three seconds the first time.
Now five.
Now ten.
With every exhale, I let my chin drift to my chest like I’m back in the water and the motion is coming from outside me.
I blink slow so I can tell when I get lightheaded . . . when my lids get heavy . . . when I’d rather keep them closed.
I give in, unlocking my knees so that I can feel my own weight, and then I stagger toward the couch. I embrace every suggestion of weakness my body makes; I draw it to the surface and sink inside.
This is where they’ll find me, out of sorts and out of place, asleep on their couch because the bedroom isn’t really mine. Because they lost what belonged to me and I have not recovered.
* * *
—
“DID YOU GET enough, Fair?” Dad kisses my forehead as he sweeps my bowl from in front of me and then hesitates, unable to take his eyes off me as though I might collapse again at any moment.
We’re eating at the kitchen island because the dining table—the one I carved into as a sixth grader when I didn’t understand the difference between a wooden cutting board and cutting my fruit on the wooden table—would dwarf this room. My parents never replaced it, so it and the series of carvings I made are probably in storage with everything else. Or shipped ahead to wherever they’re moving.
“Mm-hm.” I nod at my dad and fail to turn my lips up enough for a convincing smile. He’s still hovering, worried that I only finished my food by sheer force of will. Conchiglie with meat sauce and ricotta is one of my favorites, and it’s the first meal my dad’s made for me in weeks, but I’ve hiccupped several times, always toward my chest, and without excusing myself. As though if they haven’t noticed, I don’t want them to.
“Do you wanna take some for Cherish?” my mother asks, and I wrestle back the grimace trying to overtake my faint smile.
“Sure.”
Because even when she’s withholding something from me, of course my mother implies that Cherish deserves even this.
“That girl can eat some pasta,” Dad says, and my mother looks at him with an amusement that means the two of them are about to leap headlong into a series of memories I’m sure are meant to sound reassuring even as they make my blood boil. It’s supposed to seem lighthearted, like Mr. Whitman covering his eyes as though it was Cherish’s wedding day, but it’s calculated.
When I’m not here, they probably don’t even cook. They don’t clean this cramped kitchen together, and they certainly don’t reminisce about my best friend’s appetite.
The point is that Cherish deserves, and I do not.
“Did you ask the Whitmans to keep me so I wouldn’t know you were interviewing out of town, Dad?”
The question sounds involuntary, like I had to blurt it out to keep it from curdling in my stomach with the dinner I almost couldn’t eat.
Ben and Nichole Turner both look at me, and it’s delicious. It’s like someone hit pause. For a moment, I’m not sure they’re going to breathe or reanimate again, and then my mother’s eyes creep over to my dad.
But I didn’t ask her. I didn’t accuse her of masterminding their betrayal; I didn’t assert that it was intentional. This isn’t a confrontation at all; I’m a confused teenager trying to make sense of the life falling to pieces around me.
She has to give him the appropriate number of beats, in case he knows what to say or how to, but not so long that it’s obvious when she swoops in and saves him. Before she can—before she can say just the right thing to change my perspective and make me see how manageable or fortunate something is—and because this pause is proof I chose the right approach, I carry on.
“Because it’s only been a couple of weeks, so if you got hired somewhere out of state, you must’ve known it was a possibility when we were leaving home. Right?” I mean to sound fragile, but I don’t mean for my voice to crack. Some of this is genuine, but that can be forgiven. “Even when you were promising you’d still try to save the house, you were looking for work somewhere far from it.” And then I’m timid in my accusation. Even gentle. “It means you guys haven’t been honest with me. Right?”
Dad leans into his hands on the kitchen island.
“Not exactly, Fair,” he says, and beside him my mother shakes her head a little.
When my dad glances at her, when it occurs to him—maybe for the first time—that all this is Nichole Turner’s fault, I notice. Because the logical question is how I came by this news. How did I know there was another job, and another state to begin with? Perhaps he’s feeling a hint of betrayal, like me.
There’s a current traveling all through my body, and my skin is dancing. It makes my breath come more quickly, but that’s easy enough to explain. I’m upset, after all. There’s a reason my eyes keep darting back and forth between my parents, and it isn’t because I’m greedily devouring the tension brewing between them. For all I know, they’re a “united front.”
“I told her we were going to sit down with you,” she says through an almost whisper. She’s decided to follow my lead and take her chances with confession, but she’s clenching her teeth, and the words come out thin, like they’ve been through Dad’s pasta machine. “I really don’t appreciate Brianne taking it upon herself—”