Page 58 of Ebbing Tides
I swallowed and glanced in the direction of the dining room, making sure the kids were still in there. When I saw them sitting at the table, eating and talking among themselves, Icleared my throat and admitted a secret I hadn’t let anyone else in on. Not even my sisters. Speaking of it for the first time in eight years.
“My mother committed suicide,” I said, keeping my voice low. “In my childhood bedroom.”
Melanie gasped, clutching a hand to her collar, as if the truth had attempted to strangle her, as it had me. “Oh my God, that’s … Max … I’m so sorry. I don’t even know what to say. That’s horrible.”
I nodded. “Yeah. It is.”
“Who … I don’t even know how to ask this … did you—”
“Find her?” I asked, saying what she didn’t want to, and when she nodded, I replied, “Yeah. I did.”
The image of her lifeless body, donning her signature robe, in the middle of the carpeted floor came to mind. Weird how I rarely allowed my brain to go back there and weird how simple it had been to keepthosememories at bay when, for so long, I’d had no choice but to mentally live in the frozen landscape of my front yard, with Laura’s lifeless body. But I saw her now, face down, in a puddle of blood and vomit. The stench was heady and pungent, one I’d been familiar with from my time at war, one I would never forget. The smell of death and putrid bodily fluids. I’d known she was dead the moment my eyes passed over her, the skin of her bare legs gray in color, but I’d checked for a pulse anyway, only to find none.
Melanie slipped her arms around my waist to press her cheek to my chest. “How did you turn out so good?”
I huffed a forced chuckle as I eased my chin down to touch the top of her head. “I don’t know that I’m good,” I mutteredhonestly. “But I’m better than they ever were. That’s all that’s ever mattered to me.”
She squeezed her arms around me, then took a step back, hastily wiping a rogue tear from her cheek before asking, “Drinks are in the fridge?”
“Yeah,” I replied, the sound coming out as a grunt as I recalled the night of my mother’s suicide on fast-forward.
We were supposed to be celebrating Grace and Sid’s son’s christening. I was running a little late—I’d overslept from my night at the cemetery—and when I texted Sid to tell him, he acted like the mishap was an answered prayer. He asked if I could stop at my parents’ place and grab the spare high chair they kept over there. They didn’t need it, it wasn’t the end of the world, Sid said, but it would be helpful. I was passing by, it was on the way, and I told him it was no problem. Except when I got to the house, I didn’t know where the damn thing was. It wasn’t in the dining room or in the kitchen. I scoured the first floor in a hurry, growing more irritated by the second, and I called Sid to tell him I couldn’t find it.
“Oh, it’s upstairs,” he said. “Your dad keeps it up there so it’s not in the way.”
Just like Dad, I thought bitterly as I headed up the stairs. Howin the waycould a compact, foldable high chair really be?
I knew my old bedroom had turned into a storage room of sorts, and it was the first place I checked when I got upstairs.
I never did find that high chair after discovering my mother’s suicide, and I called Sid to tell him something came up as I waited for paramedics to arrive.
I didn’t tell anyone what had happened until after the authorities came to take her away.
I didn’t want anyone else to see her like that. I figured it was the least I could do out of respect for them—and her.
I chased the memory away with a shake of my head. Funny how easy it’d become to do that with the amount of tragedy, trauma—whatever you wanted to call it—I’d experienced in my nearly fifty years on this earth. I sucked in a deep breath, blew it out into the kitchen, and headed toward the dining room to fill the time with something better, something happier.
Even if it ended the same way everything else did.
With a broken heart.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The last ten years of my life had been spent skirting the edges of a family unit.
My sisters had tried to pull me into the centers of their individual circles. Ricky and Sid did what they could to make me feel included. But after I was given a brief taste of what it was like to hold someone’s fragile, beautiful heart in my hand, to have small faces look up to mine with a combined expression of love, awe, and dependence, it was hard to want anything less than that again … but I hadn’t wanted it from anyone butthem.
Laura, the girls, and the baby growing in my wife’s belly.
Until now.
Until I sat at the head of my father’s dining room table, surrounded by Melanie and her trio of loud, rambunctious, good boys. Listening to their chatter and laughter, their bickering and scolding.
I was there in the middle of it, yet I felt like I was just standing beyond the threshold of a closed door, gritting my teeth against the desperation to pound my fist against it and beg for them to let me in, to let mestay.
But did I fit?
Melanie had been doing this thing on her own for so long, and it felt … itseemed… like she had it all down to a science. I knew she was lonely, craving the good things only another warm body could do to hers in the dead of night, after her sons were sleeping … but what about a partner in life? Did she want it? Did sheneedit? God, did anyone need the headache of anothermouth to feed after being so settled for as long as either of us had been?
