Page 91 of What You Wish For

“I couldn’t believe my eyes tonight. I’ve never been so humiliated. You can’t take her anywhere.”

My mother’s voice broke. “Steven—”

“It’s too much for me,” he said, his voice tight. And then I heard the click of our front door handle.

“Don’t you dare walk out that door,” my mother said, her voice low and threatening.

“I can’t take it anymore,” my father said. “I never wanted this.”

“You did want this! When we decided to start a family.”

“You were the one who wanted to start a family. You pushed and pushed for a baby. And look what we got. I never should have given in.”

“How can you say that? She’s our daughter!”

“She’s also the thing that ruined our marriage.”

There was a long pause, and when my father spoke again, his voice sounded like it was made of wood. “I just can’t live like this anymore.”

Next, I heard the door shush closed behind him.

Then, it was quiet for a long time. I started to wonder if maybe she’d gone, too. If maybe they both had. I edged down a couple more steps, and from that angle, I could see my mom. She was pressed up against the door, totally still, almost like she wasn’t even breathing.

Mama,I mouthed—but without sound.

And then a deep, otherworldly sound started to fill the room, as she slowly sank to the floor, and I realized she was crying out—a kind of long, lowing, desperate sound of agony, like nothing I’d ever heard. When she reached the floor, she beat against it with her open palm until she started to cry for real—dark, ragged, body-racking sobs like I didn’t even know existed.

I hesitated for one second—unsure if I should go to her, if seeing me would make her feel better or worse. But then I couldn’t stand it. I skittered barefoot down the steps and across the Persian rug, and I threw myself down beside her.

She looked up, surprised.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said.

And she just knew in that instant, the way mothers always know, that I’d heard it all. She pulled me tightly to her chest and wrapped her arms around me. “It isn’t you, sweetheart,” she said, her voice still thick. “It isn’t you.”

But, of course… she was lying.

It was me.

She knew it, and now so did I.

I never thought about that night now. I hadn’t forgotten it, exactly, but I kept it somewhere at the distant edges of my memory. What was the point of replaying it? Nothing could change. Nothing could work out differently. My father would leave, and I wouldn’t see him again until my mother’s funeral, two years later—and even then he would look at me with bitterness.

He didn’t take me in after that. I’d go to live with my mother’s sister, and my father and I would spend the rest of our lives ignoring each other’s existence.

All because of this one thing that was wrong with me that would never be fixable.

Anyway, how could someone like Alice—cheerful, logical, tea-drinking Alice—ever understand something like that?

I couldn’t even understand it, myself.

She wanted to know why my falling in love with Duncan was bad—and for a second, I thought about trying to explain it to her.

But words failed me.

In Alice’s world, love was mathematical. Every problem had a solution.

But in my world, solutions had always been a hell of a lot less easy to come by.

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