Page 71 of Ebbing Tides
There was hurt in her eyes as she took a steady pull from the cigarette. She felt sorry for me, and that was okay because right now, I felt sorry for me too.
Forty-eight years I had spent desperate for my father’s affection. I had granted every one of his wishes, I had gone to war, I had done every-damn-thing I could to make the man proud, to make him love me, and the best he could do was pretend when in the presence of my dead wife and her daughters. And now, it seemed the only thing that could make him even just the slightest bit happy with my existence would be to end his. As if the only point to my life, the only point to me being alive, would be to act as his personal angel of death.
Melanie held out the cigarette, and I accepted it, placing it between my lips and wishing the sweetness of her taste could overpower the bitterness in my heart.
“Why did you take the letter?” she asked softly.
I shrugged, taking a drag. “I don’t know. I think … I think maybe I didn’t want anybody else to read it first?” I offered, saying it as if it were a question, as if I wasn’t sure of the answer myself. “I mean, it was always assumed that she’d killed herself because of me or something I had done, or didn’t do, but it was always just that. An assumption. We never knew for sure. And what if … what if that letter”—I swept my hand toward thatdamn envelope lying on my desk—“is the proof that we were right?”
Melanie worked her bottom lip between her teeth, gnawing, as her brows tipped with concern and sympathy. She slowly turned her head this way and that as she stared ahead at me. I distracted myself, taking another puff of the cigarette. Not wanting to drown in the sadness held within her eyes.
“I’ve killed people before,” I went on, my voice rough as I passed the smoke back to her. “But that was war. And I didn’t kill my wife. Whatever sinister bullshit my father wants to believe I did, he’s wrong. But if I found out that I was truly the reason my mother swallowed two fucking bottles of painkillers, I don’t, um …” I pursed my lips and shook my head. “I don’t think I can live with that. I don’twantto live with that. But even less than that, I don’t want my sisters to look at me and blame me for—”
“Your mother made achoice, Max,” Melanie interjected, stern and harsh. “I understand that maybe it was her sickness or whatever was wrong with her that made her feel forced to make that choice, but it was still, at the end of the day,herchoice to make.”
I exhaled and raised my eyes to the ceiling. “Yeah,” I muttered, though I wasn’t convinced.
I wanted Mom’s death on my conscience just as much as I wanted my father’s. And I couldn’t expect Melanie to understand that. I couldn’t expect anyone to understand. Not when the possibility was far from reality for most people.
“Are you going to read it?”
I tipped my head and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I should burn it. Pretend it never existed.”
“You don’t know that it’s a suicide note,” she reasoned.
I turned my gaze on her and tipped my head, a challenging smile tugging at my lips. “Do you know itisn’t?”
Silence befell the room as her gaze held mine. The seconds slipped through my fingers like sand in an hourglass, drifting further and further beyond my grasp, despite my heart’s desperate begging to hold on, hold on, hold on.
Melanie held out the cigarette to me, and I lowered my eyes from her to stare at it and the ash clinging to the end.
She still wears her wedding ring, I noted, and I didn’t mind. God, I didn’t mind at all, and, fuck, maybe I should’ve, but … why? I still wore mine, for crying out loud, and besides, what good was jealousy now when there was nothing for us beyond Sunday?
There is no us. There is onlythem.
We were as permanent as that ash, now flaking off and drifting to the floor between my feet, and I took the cigarette from her then to stamp it out in the glass that was quickly filling with butts.
“Will you read it?” I asked her.
“You want me to read your mother’s suicide note?” She sounded shocked, perhaps even appalled.
“You don’t know that it’s a suicide note,” I said with a taunting smirk.
“Butyouknow it is,” she countered gently.
She was right about that. I knew exactly what it was, no matter how much I wished that it weren’t.
Melanie didn’t wait for my reply. She reached forward and snatched the envelope from off the desk. She looked at my eyes and waited for me to nod before ripping it open. She removed the letter and unfolded it. I could see my mother’s scrawling cursive through the paper, where the ink had bled through, and although I possessed the ability to read backward, only bits and pieces were legible.
My gut twisted into complicated knots as I watched her eyes scan the first few lines, watched for any change in her expression or body language, and when her eyes rounded with what I assumed to be surprise, I realized it’d come sooner than I had expected.
“What?” I asked as she put her fingers to her lips.
She shook her head, quickly lowering the letter and folding it. “I can’t read this.”
Panic struck my heart as she stuffed it back into its envelope.
“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
