Page 83 of A Series of Rooms
“Where was that conviction when I needed you?”
He might as well have slapped her. She stepped back, shaking her head. Her silence only drove his anger forward.
“You wanted to talk about it,” he threw back at her. “That seems like a good place to start. What did you think would happen to me when you kicked me out? Did you even care?”
Tears tracked down her face, just as they had the night Jonah left. “Of course I care,” she cried. “I always cared. Your father—”
“My father,” Jonah spat, “isn’t here. I’m asking you. You’re mymom. I needed you and you didn’t help me.”
Silence rang out through the darkness around them. The night sky had never felt so dark or so permanent overhead. In that moment, Jonah was sure he would never see the sun again.
“It’s late,” his mom said finally, her voice wavering. “And you’re tired.”
“I hated you,” he whispered. “For months, I couldn’t even think of your face because of how much I resented you for choosing him over me. And then...” He let himself pause, calculating how much exactly he was willing to divulge.
He thought about the time in the run-down clinic on the south side, getting tested for the first time, afraid that whatever diagnosis the doctor had for him would be a death sentence.
He remembered—only in hazy, grayed-out pockets—throwing up in the grass outside the car after a man had forced half a bottle of vodka down his throat, sure that the poison would kill him this time.
He remembered another man who had pulled out a gun inside the hotel room and made Jonah perform the full hour while thinking he wouldn’t see the other side of it.
“I thought I was going to die,” he settled for saying. “And that’s when I realized that I didn’t hate you. I loved you, still. Even after everything, I still loved you. And I didn’t want to die never getting to see you again, because you’re my mom, and you... and I...” He pulled in a deep breath. “I just can’t make it make sense in my head. I can’t understand how I could love you after everything you did, but you couldn’t even love me enough to just accept me for who I am.”
“Please don’t say that,” his mother begged. “Please, Jonah, don’t ever say that I don’t love you.”
“Did you ever try to come after me? Even once?”
She was quiet, her eyes on the grass.
“I did,” she said. “Once. It was a few weeks after you...” She shook her head. “It was a few weeks after. You were eighteen by then. When I talked to the police, tried to file a report, they said they couldn’t open a search on a legal adult who wanted to disappear.”
Jonah was momentarily stricken silent. “I didn’t want to disappear,” he whispered. “I didn’t—” His voice broke off. He pressed a fist to his mouth, but the sobs sputtered out around it anyway. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want this, mom, I didn’t... I didn’t...”
The fear that had turned to rage turned to despair and exhaustion, coming to a head as his knees found the grass. Jonah buried his face in his hands, and he screamed.
His mother’s hands on his back, light and frantic, were peripheral. The consideration of his neighbors hearing him was peripheral. The only thing that existed in the world was concentrated in the fire that tore his throat apart in the backyard of his childhood home.
It was impossible to tell if the screaming continued, or if the sound only reverberated in his head. He was lost, and with every second that passed, he became emptier. Devoid of weight and intention and strength.
When hands pulled him forward, his body obeyed. He collapsed against his mother like a child, weeping into her chest. On some level, it was a parallel to their first reunion in Chicago, but something was distinctly different this time.
There was a desperation in this embrace, a finality, that wasn’t there before.
He recognized, in that moment, that there was no world in which he could heal under that roof, sharing space with the ghosts of his past. Jonah clung to her this time because he knew it was a goodbye.
CHAPTER 38
Jonah
The view from the backseat of the cab was different than Jonah expected.
He had never been to New York. Every depiction in books and movies made it out to be a monolith of concrete and steel, but as the cab pulled away from LaGuardia airport, he saw a surprising amount of green.
It had taken him a full week after his breakdown in the backyard to gather enough courage to reach for the card—the one Jonah had shoved to the back of his nightstand drawer the first night back in Indiana. He could have thrown it away, and almost had, but perhaps some part of him had always known he would need an escape route.
He wasn’t even sure what he had hoped to get out of making the call, only that Antonio Ellis had written him a blank check of his assistance, and Jonah needed out.
To his surprise, Ellis had kept his word. There was no hesitation when he offered Jonah a room in his newlyinherited house in Queens—a private room, with a locked door, his own key, and no expectations.
