I lean on the desk and read the email three more times before I grab the laptop and tiptoe upstairs. I lock my bedroom door and sit on my bed. My hands are shaking so hard I can hardly scroll through the emails, but there is no fucking way I’m not reading them. I start with the ones just before Dad left for Malaysia.
Soon 10:15 PM (August 12)
Greg Winters <[email protected]>
To Rebecca <[email protected]>
Sweetheart, I know it’s hard to wait. I know. But I need more time. The girls are still in school and I don’t want to pull the rug out from under them. And you know everything Hannah’s dealing with. I can’t risk her sobriety.
I have to do right by Lila, too. None of this is her fault. We will be together. I promise. You have my heart. You’ve had it since the first moment I saw you.
I love you with everything in me.
—G
“Fuck, fuck, FUCK.”
I grab my pillow and scream into it.
Then I keep reading.
Don’t Go 9:17 PM (August 17)
Rebecca Chen <[email protected]>
To Greg <[email protected]>
Please don’t get on that plane tomorrow. Please.
Re: Don’t Go 11:34 PM (August 17)
Greg Winters <[email protected]>
To Rebecca <[email protected]>
I don’t like this any more than you do, sweetheart. Every time I touch her I feel like I’m cheating on you. I tried to get out of this trip, but every excuse I had wasn’t working, and I couldn’t afford for her to get suspicious. I can’t miss out on this last year with the girls at home. I know I’m asking a lot, but, please, this is what we need to do. I want Hannah and Mae to love you as much as I do, and they won’t if they think you’ve broken up our family. They’re too young to understand. And I don’t want to live apart from them, not yet. Please trust me. What’s a year more when we’ll have the rest of our lives together? I promise that by the time I get home, Lila will know that forever is off the table. That’s reserved for you. I’ll be home before you know it.
—G
Re: Don’t Go 2:00 AM (August 18)
Rebecca Chen <[email protected]>
To Greg <[email protected]>
Baby, there will never be a good time to do this. I don’t want to be your secret anymore. I’ve been doing it for almost a year, lying to everyone I know.
If you don’t tell Lila by the time you get home, then I’m done.
B.
I’m sorry 6:23 AM (August 19)
Rebecca Chen <[email protected]>
To Greg <[email protected]>
That wasn’t fair, what I said. I’m sorry. I’m just tired of pretending. And there’s a reason we can’t wait—maybe we can talk about it, if you can get away. I love you. I want everything with you. It’s killing me that she gets to wake up next to you every morning.
Tell me we’re okay.
B.
Re: I’m sorry 7:30 AM (August 19)
Greg Winters <[email protected]>
To Rebecca <[email protected]>
We’re okay. I’ll be home before you know it. Gotta run—the airport shuttle’s here. I’ll call from Malaysia, okay? I love you.
—G
I scroll back, past this summer, reading every email. It goes on like this for almost a year. All of her emails hidden in a file marked GRADING. He’s been fucking her since I was sixteen.
I pick up my phone to call Micah, ready to lose my ever-loving mind, when I realize: Dad’s the only father Micah’s ever really had. If I tell him this, he’ll lose that. And Mae: I can’t tell her. She and Dad were crazy close, and this would do nothing but fuck her up as much as I am right now.
I hold Dad’s laptop and go to my door, listening. It sounds like they’re still downstairs, so I creep to Mom and Dad’s room and get Mom’s laptop. Back in my room, I search through her emails, but there’s nothing, no sign that she knew. Ignorance is bliss, right? Maybe Mom had no idea, and she died with the man she loved, end of story.
Because if she knew, if that wave was coming and she knew …
“I can’t do this,” I say out loud.
There’s a long, low breath behind me. The scent of roses.
I turn. My mother is doing a headstand.
I slump to the ground.
“Are you really here?”
I’m not high—yet.
Her hair is matted down with sweat. Or seawater. Her forearms rest on either side of her head, keeping her in balance.
I crawl to her. “Mommy?”
Her eyes stay focused on the mat, her long body in perfect alignment. That breath—ujjayi breath—which sounds like the sea. Like waves sliding to the shore.
I want to touch her, but I don’t want her to fall. She exhales a wave of breath, and I try to catch it with my mouth. How can the person who made you be gone?
I follow the line of her leg, up to her ankle, and I burst into tears: her right. The Om is on her right ankle.
“Did you know?” I whisper. “Mom. Did you know?”
Mom moves her left leg so that it bends at the knee, makes a four. A sort of upside-down tree pose, but with her foot sliding just behind her knee, so that her left shin rests against the back of her right thigh.
“Tell me what to do. I can’t do this, Mom. Please.”
Her muscles begin to strain just a little, and I remember her holding my feet as I wobbled on my hands: I can’t do this!
And almost like she can see that memory playing through me, Mom looks at me, smiles, and lands back on her feet like a cat.
And then she’s gone.
I lunge toward the mat, too late. There is one strand of long black hair—but it could be mine. I don’t know. I don’t know.
I collapse into child’s pose, and I cry for my mom like a little girl. I dig my forehead into the rubber, and I see the emails, hear them almost, and I see Mom hold a spoon of soup up to Dad’s lips for him to taste and I see Rebecca Chen at the funeral, see her puffy red eyes, and I see the wave, cresting over the beach—
“I don’t know what to do,” I tell her, even though she’s gone.
Do I tell Mae? Do I keep the secret forever? Can I hold this knowledge in me for the rest of my life?
It’s almost like a dream, the way I shove the laptop under my bed and reach for the pills and swallow one of the few I’ve got left with the warm can of Diet Coke on my bedside table. I lie down and wait for the floating and the forgetting and the not-me-ness of the Vicodin. I wait for the wave to wash over me.
In a few minutes, it won’t matter that my dad was a lying, cheating bastard.
In a few minutes, nothing will matter.
* * *
I like mail with no surprises, and it seems romantic, in these last few days here, to check our little postbox one last time.