I know she’s trying to be more conscious of how much of her emotional burden I tend to take on, but her vulnerability lances my chest. “I know, Mom, but it’s okay to be sad.”
“I know you’re sad, too.”
“I’m sad as well,” Dad mumbles, “in case anyone was wondering.”
The silence that follows this statement is the size of a crater on the moon.
Mom’s eyes spring fresh tears. “So many years we spent there.”
Dad echoes hollowly, “So many years.”
“To think we’ll never be back.” Mom presses a hand to her heart and looks over her shoulder at me. “Whatever happens, happens.” She reaches for my hand, and I feel like a traitor to Dad if I take it, and a traitor to Mom if I don’t. So I take it, but briefly meet his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Mae, I see the wheels turning up there, and I want you to know it’s not your job to make sure that we are all happy next year and the transition is smooth.”
I know she believes that, but it’s easier said than done. I’ve lived my entire life trying to keep every tenuous peace we can find.
I squeeze her hand and release it so she can turn back around.
“Life is good,” Mom reassures herself aloud. “Victor is well, his girls are grown, with kids of their own. Look at our friends.” She spreads her hands. “Thriving. My two children—thriving.” Is that what I’m doing? Thriving? Wow, a mother’s love really is blind. “And you’re doing fine, right, Dan?”
Dad shrugs, but she isn’t looking at him.
Beside me, Miles nods in time to the music.
“Maybe it’s time to try something new,” Dad says carefully. I meet his eyes in the rearview mirror again. “Change can be good.”
What? Change is never good. Change is Dad switching medical practices when I was five and never being home again during daylight. Change is my best friend moving away in eighth grade. Change is a terribly advised pixie cut sophomore year. Change is relocating to LA, realizing I couldn’t afford it, and having to move back home. Change is kissing one of my oldest friends when I was drunk.
“It’s all about perspective, right?” he says. “Yes, the holidays may look different, but the important parts will stay the same.”
The cabin is the important part, I think, and then take a deep breath.
Perspective. Right. We have our health. We have each other. We are comfortable financially. Perspective is a good thing.
But perspective is slippery and wiggles out of my grip. The cabin! It’s being sold! I made out with Theo but I want Andrew! I hate my job! I’m twenty-six and had to move home! Miles applied to schools all over the country, and will probably be a homeowner before I’ve moved out of my childhood bedroom!
If I died today, what would be written about me? That I’m an obsessive peacekeeper? That I put together a serviceable spreadsheet? That I also loved art? That I couldn’t ever figure out what it was that I truly wanted?
Tuning out the sounds of Judy Garland on the radio, I close my eyes and make a silent plea: Universe. What am I doing with my life? Please. I want . . .
I’m not even sure how to finish the sentence. I want to be happy, and I’m petrified that the path I’m on now is going to leave me bored and alone.
So I ask the universe, simply: Can you show me what will make me happy?
I lean my head against the window, my breath fogging up the glass. When I reach up to clear it away with my sleeve, I’m startled to see a grimy Christmas wreath decorated with an equally grimy bow. A blaring horn, a blur of shaggy green hurtling toward our car.
“Dad!” I shriek.
It’s too late. My seat belt locks, and we’re hit from the side. Metal screams and glass shatters in a sickening crunch. Whatever was loose in the car is airborne, and I somehow watch the contents of my purse escape and float with surreal slowness as we roll. The radio is still playing: Through the years, we all will be together, if the fates allow . . .
Everything goes black.
chapter four
Shooting an arm out to the side to brace against the impact of the collision, I come to with a gasp. But there’s no car door there, no window; I smack my brother directly in the face.
He lets out a rough oof and catches my arm. “Dude. What the hell, Mae?”
I bolt upright against a lap belt, clutching my head and expecting to find blood. It’s dry. I suck in another deep, jagged breath. My heart feels like it’s going to jackhammer its way up my throat and out of my body.
Wait. Miles is on my right. He was on my left in the car. I reach for him, holding his face in my hands, and jerk him closer.
“What are you doing?” he mumbles into my shoulder.
I don’t even mind his heavy-handed Axe body spray right now, I am so intensely relieved that he’s not dead. That I’m not dead. That we’re all . . .
“Not in the car,” I say, releasing him abruptly.
I whip my head left to right, wildly searching. Confusion is a startling, bright light. It’s the white noise of an engine, of a vent overhead. It’s the dry, overheated recycled air. It’s rows and rows of heads in front of me, some of them turning to look at the commotion behind them.
I’m the commotion behind them.
We aren’t in the car, we’re on an airplane. I’m in the middle seat, Miles in the aisle, and the stranger in the window seat is trying to pretend like I didn’t just wake up and flip out.
Disorientation makes my temples throb.
“Where are we?” I turn to Miles. I have never in my life been so off-kilter. “We were just in the car. There was a wreck. Have I been unconscious? Was I in a coma?”
And if I was, who put me here? I’m trying to picture my parents carting me, unconscious, through the airport and loading me into this seat. I just cannot imagine it. My dad, the meticulous physician; my mom, the overprotective worrier.
Miles looks at me and slowly pulls his headphones off one ear. “What?”
With a growl, I give up on him and lean toward where Dad is unfastening his seat belt across the aisle. “Dad, what happened?”
He stands and crouches next to Miles’s seat. “What happened when?”
“The car accident?”
He glances at my brother, and then back at me. His hair and beard are white, but his brows are still dark, and they slowly rise on his forehead. He looks fine, not a scratch anywhere. “What car accident, Noodle?”
What car accident?
I lean back and close my eyes, taking a deep breath. What is going on?
Trying again, I pull Miles’s headphones all the way off. “Miles. Don’t you remember the car accident? When we left the cabin?”
He rears back, giving my barely restrained hysteria a semidisgusted look. “We’re on a plane, on our way to Salt Lake. What do you mean ‘when we left the cabin’? We haven’t gone yet.” He turns to Dad, hands up. “I swear she’s only had ginger ale.”
We’re on our way to Salt Lake?
“There was a truck,” I say, straining to remember. “I think the back was filled with . . . Christmas trees.”
“Probably just a weird dream,” Dad says to Miles, like I’m not sitting right here, and returns to his seat.