I wasn’t sad I was with him. But I was sad I’d left Mum. I was sad I’d had to say what I had, sad I had to let it out the way I did. I felt like maybe I’d failed somehow, if there was a test on how to empathetically deal with addict parents.
I wasn’t sad I’d done it though. And now, finally, after all these years, I let myself cry for her. And more than that, I let myself cry for me too.
I cried for the child that saw what she did. I cried for the young teenager I was when she hopped on a plane and left me behind like a lost teddy. I cried for the two years I’d been forced to live through, feeling like a complete fucking stranger in my family home, having to put up with my idiot stepbrother, having no one in my family ever putting me first, not ever. And, as the darkened mountains whizzing past my passenger window morphed into a straight boring blur of American interstate, I realized I’d not really let myself cry at all, until now. Until this summer.
Maybe there in a set amount of crying your body needs to deal with any trauma. There’s a certain water-level of tears you need to shed until you can find acceptance or move on or whatever. And, if you don’t cry them out, they just catch up with you. I’d been on the cusp of crying since the day she didn’t take me with her. And yet I’d never quite allowed myself to open the floodgates. I turned all the emotion into rage instead – at my dad, at my stepmum, at the patriarchy (but, hey, at least that one’s helpful), and emotion kept bubbling up inside of me, like an underlying herpes virus, but something less gross and more poetic than that.
I whispered goodbye to the people I’d left behind at camp – knowing I’d never see them again, knowing they’d always wonder what happened to the two of us. Hoping, somehow, Whinnie and I would be able to find each other online.
But, other than Whinnie, I didn’t really care. Not really.
I cared about the boy squeezing my knee. I cared about the road straight in front of me. I didn’t care that I had not one holy clue where it led to.
In fact, that was what I liked about it.
Kyle eventually pulled up into this teeny town called “Lone Pine”.
“It’s got a great view of the mountains.” He backed the jeep into a parking space outside a cute yellow motel that looked like it had been shrink-wrapped in 1959 and never once let the air in. “You’ll see it in the morning.”
I nodded. Crying.
“I’ll go book us in.”
I hiccuped. “Do you need any money?”
He gave me a sad smile. “I’ll get this one. We’ll sort out money tomorrow, when we’ve both slept.”
I cried as he got us a room. I cried as we wheeled our stuff into it. It was cute – all wooden panelling and fake antlers sticking out everywhere. There was only one bed, which I lay face down on, and continued to sob. Kyle went out to explore, after asking if I was okay twenty million times first. I spread out on the bed – a big one, in total privacy, just for us. Last night, under the stars, this would’ve been our dream. Now the world had spun once on its axis and changed everything.
Kyle came back in, the hum of cicadas interrupting the steady hum of the motel’s air con.
“There’s a pizza place that’s open till half eleven over the road,” he said. “We have time to still go and order something.”
Was it not even midnight yet? It felt like three o’clock in the morning.
“I don’t think I’m hungry.”
“I don’t care. You’re eating…” He perched on the edge of the bed, and stroked my hair – the gentle touch of his fingers on my scalp calming me. “But you really need to stop crying before we go in…otherwise I’m going to have to answer a lot of questions.”
I hiccuped again. “I’m trying to stop but it just keeps coming out.”
He laughed quietly. “It really is a rather impressive display. I wish I had a stopwatch. I would’ve started timing you the moment you started crying and entered you into some kind of record book.”
It worked. I laughed. Then started crying again.
“Well that broke the sobbing for, what was it? Two seconds? I need to think of more jokes.”
I laughed again and took his hand. He looked at my face, and I saw the hurt I was causing him. He really stared into my eyes, and slowly pushed back a tendril of my hair, tucking it behind my ear.
It sprang straight back to where it was.
“I warned you before, you can’t do romantic shit with my hair,” I said. “It’s even more strong-willed than I am.”
“Are you…” he began tentatively. “Are you upset you came? I can drive us back?”
I shook my head fiercely. “No. Don’t. I just need…tonight… I think I’m grieving over something I should’ve grieved over a long time ago.”
“You see?” he said. “These stiff upper lips only get you so far.”
More laughter. A longer break from tears.
“Yeah, if it had been you,” I said, “you would’ve had extensive therapy with a shrink, dealt with all of it within ten sessions, had a ‘reconciliation service’ with your mother, and both started up some kind of ‘foundation’ to mark all your ‘emotional progress’.”
“It makes my heart hurt, in a good way, to hear you make a joke…” Kyle tried tucking my hair back again. “Do you think you could eat something?”
I did one final sniff and sat up.
“That depends. Is American pizza as amazing as you all say it is?”
“You’ve flown all this way and not tried proper American pizza?”
“No. I’ve only had camp food. And one burger and some raw food in San Francisco.”
“Oh, Amber.” Kyle picked me up off the bed and dragged me along the carpet towards the door, kissing my head as he did so. “No wonder you’ve been crying.”
SITUATIONS THAT ARE DESTINED TO FAIL:
Private sketchpads
+
Nosy sort-of boyfriends
Thirty-one
I woke up before Kyle the next morning.
It was the most glorious feeling – your consciousness returning with the heat from the guy you really, really like cuddling next to you. I’d managed to eat two slices of (admittedly amazing) pizza before the tears started again. Kyle immediately stood up, dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table and, with his arm around me, steered me back to the motel. I’d fallen asleep, crying onto his shoulder, as he held me – whispering that it was going to be okay, that we could always drive back, that he was proud of me, that everything was going to be fine.
On this new morning, I didn’t feel like crying at all.
I felt light – like all those tears I’d been carrying around, unshed, for two years had weighed a tonne.
I wiggled around so I could stare at Kyle’s face.
God, he was fit. I still couldn’t believe it. That I got to touch him, got to kiss him… I wanted to touch him then. The urge boiled low down inside me but it wasn’t fair to wake him. He’d driven miles the previous night and we had Lord knows how many to cover today.
So I sneaked out of bed, quickly changed into my swimming costume, and stepped outside in my flip-flops to check out the motel swimming pool.
After a night of motel air con, the Californian heat hit me hard and my body warmed up instantly. The motel ran around on itself like a square, and the swimming pool lay in the middle. I flip-flopped over, stopping to admire the incredible mountain view – even in midsummer, the very tips of them were covered in snow. The pool area was empty, and I let myself in through the small gate and chucked my towel onto a white plastic sunlounger. Without giving myself time to think about how cold it would be, I dived right into the deep end, swimming an entire length before coming up for breath.