My dad steps aside and allows Turk into his room. Turk closes the door.
I look at my mom, whose eyes plead for more information.
“I’m gonna hang out downstairs,” Aisha says, and she slips into the kitchen, heading toward the basement stairs.
When my mother and I are alone in the living room, neither of us speaks for a long time. I sit down on the couch, and she sits down in the love seat. I simply don’t know what to say. I don’t know what her excuse is.
Finally, she takes a deep breath, crosses her legs, and says, “I recognize that what you’ve done here is significant, Carson. I thank you for that. But that doesn’t change the fact that I feel like we need to have a real conversation about boundaries. I feel as though I allow you a lot of leeway, but I am your parent. It’s important for me to locate it when I feel as though my boundaries as a parent have been crossed.”
My face heats up. It gets hot, and then hotter. I feel like a teakettle with the heat turned way up, like if I don’t let something out right now, my head’s gonna start to whistle.
“MORE, PLEASE! ANYTHING, PLEASE! JUST … MORE!”
My mother reacts as if I’ve just socked her in the gut.
“I need more than that kind of talk. I mean it. You can’t do this to me anymore. I’m your kid. Who says that to their kid?”
“Who says what?”
“All this ‘locate,’ ‘own,’ ‘allow’ … You’re so clinical, so cold, Mom. You freeze me out.”
“You think I’m cold?” She sucks in her lips.
I don’t say anything. Her eyes redden and moisten. She swallows. A first tear falls.
This. This is what I’ve been afraid of all my life. This is why I count. So I don’t say something that melts my mom. I have melted my mother. I have made my mother cry.
“I don’t think —” I say, and then I stop. We’re here already. No going back. “I just think you sometimes play psychologist with me instead of, you know. Being my mom. You don’t show emotion. You don’t seem to care enough to get angry most of the time. You never hug me.”
This just makes the tears fall more, and she doesn’t wipe them away. It’s like she’s thawing. Liquid streams down her face as she speaks.
“Do you think I don’t know I’m not cut out for this? Do you think I haven’t told myself, every day since I had you, that I can’t do this? Every day, Carson. I hear the voice every day. Renee, you’re doing it wrong. You’re a terrible mother. I try to keep it together, and that only makes it worse.”
“I didn’t say you were a terrible mother,” I say. I look at her face, and she’s grimacing. “Mom —”
“You think you’re the only person with a mother who disappoints you? You think my parents were any better? My mother disapproved of every single choice I ever made. Driving around the country alone made me seem like a … prostitute. Getting pregnant before I was married? Do you have any idea? She wore black to my wedding, Carson. She told me your father was a huge mistake, that I was wasting my life away. When I came back to New York after the divorce, she told me I’d gone and ruined two lives. All I wanted to be was the kind of mother who didn’t do that to her child.”
I can’t imagine my grandma, my sweet, lovable grandma, doing these things. Saying these things. Is nobody pure? Is everybody fucked up? Is that life? Is that okay? Is it acceptable?
“Do you have any idea how much energy I spend trying to keep it together? Do you get that when I measure my words, I’m trying to protect you from me losing my … do you get that?”
“Maybe we should stop,” I say.
“Stop?”
“Trying to keep it together. Trying to protect each other from each other.”
Mom slides down from the love seat until she is sitting against it on the floor. I do the same off the couch. Our outstretched legs touch, and I’m waiting for her to pull her legs away. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t do or say anything.
I study her face. It’s tired. Discontent. She has a pimple on her forehead. She raises her head just slightly, and there’s just a bit of a booger visible at the end of her left nostril.
This horrible, stinky, sad idea strikes me and takes all the air from my body. My mom is just a person. A fucked-up person, like me, like Dad, like everyone.
It occurs to me for the first time in my life that it’s truly possible to know something and not know it at the same time. Because how could I not know that my mother is a flawed person? That she’s just me with slightly more experience? That she dropped me off at the zoo the first day we were here, not because her normal, brilliant understanding of the world had momentarily warped, but because she had no idea what else to do?
I crawl over to her and wrap my arms around her. She slowly gives in to the hug, uncoiling her tense body almost one vertebra at a time. I feel her letting go, and soon she turns toward me and hugs me back.
She leans her head against mine. I don’t pull away. “Thanks,” I say, marveling at the warm feeling of her skull against mine. “That was a treat. This is.”
She sniffles and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “It shouldn’t be.”
We keep our heads connected, and we talk. For basically the first time in our lives, we talk for real. I like feeling the vibration of her words inside my ears. I tell her about how Grandpa died, and she shuts her eyes and nods as she takes this information in. For the first time in my life, I can feel my mom’s love for my dad. I feel it in my scalp, this palpable love, despite everything, that she has for him.
That feeling is confirmed when she tells me it’s been hard to be back here, but she’s realized that she still cares for Dad, all this time later. Part of me lights up when she tells me this, because it’s the missing puzzle piece, and it flickers brighter.
I tell her about all the people we met on our trip, and all the adventures. She pulls away a bit, and I remember that while Aisha and I were doing all that, I was actively ignoring her.
“Mom,” I say. “It’s okay, really.”
“What’s okay?”
“That you’re pissed at me. I’d be pissed at me too.”
I feel her nod. “I am … pissed.”
I lift my head off hers and look her in the eye.
“If you have to, like, yell at me, you should yell at me,” I say.
“You want me to yell at you?” she asks, like she’s not sure if I mean it.
“I want you to yell sometimes. When I screw up.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
She mock-screams, “No! I won’t yell at you!”
For the first time, I realize my dad is not my only parent with a weird sense of humor. This makes me smile. She smiles just a bit too.
“You’re grounded, by the way,” she says. “Incredibly, outrageously grounded. Possibly for eternity. And if you ever, for any reason, even a very good one, leave the state you’re supposed to be in without telling me, I will come find you and make you sorry you ever lived.”
“Maybe pull back on the yelling a tad,” I say.
She smiles again, and my whole body relaxes. My mom.
When Aisha comes back upstairs, my mom and I are still hanging out, chatting. I can see Aisha take in that something has happened here, and then she just goes with it, pretends that it’s not unusual for Mom and me to talk like we’re actually inhabiting the same world. Turk and my dad are still in the bedroom, and I am anxious for them to come out so I can see how Dad is doing with all this.
Aisha and Mom talk for really the first time ever too, and I get to see a different side of my mom. She’s still her psychologist self; I mean, I guess I’d be surprised if she ever lost that therapist tone. But she also opens up a bit about how scared she felt when she didn’t know where I was, and at the same time how glad she was to know I had Aisha there with me.
“You’re more than welcome to stay here as long as we’re here,” my mother says. “I know how important you are to Carson, and that’s meaningful to me.”