Meanwhile, my dad has stood on the perimeter, not as much like us, watching and applauding and joining in as much as he can. All my life, everyone loves us, the two Llewelyns. Everyone, apparently, but him.
“Clew,” he says again. “It’s not because I don’t care about you.” Even now, at this moment, as the floor of my room is disappearing, as I’m staring down, past my feet, wondering how I’ll ever stand again, he can’t bring himself to say love. As in It’s not because I don’t love you.
And then he says, “I just can’t have a family right now.”
And maybe he says none of this, really, but it’s what I hear. And at that moment I stop looking at his tears and his beard and I am staring at the place where the floor used to be. All I can think is how one minute the floor was there and now it’s not. How you could go through an entire day, every day, not thinking about the floor or the ground because you just assume it will always be there. Until it isn’t.
* * *
—
The real conversation goes more like this:
Dad: “I need to talk to you.”
Me: “Okay.”
“I don’t want you to think there’s anyone else. It’s important that you know that. But your mom and I are separating, and she asked me to tell you because it’s not her idea; it’s my idea.” He looks away when he says this. And then: “I just can’t do this right now. I can’t do it.” Followed by: “It isn’t you and it isn’t your mom. It’s me. We wanted to stay together for your senior year. We didn’t want to uproot you. For the next two weeks, we’ll stay here together in this house, and then we’ll separate.”
When he says separate, I think of a heart being cut open, of limbs being sawn off.
“But yesterday you drove me to school.” What I mean to say is, Yesterday we were normal. We ate thumbprint cookies and rode in companionable silence and drove faster than anyone on the road.
“It’s something that’s been building for a while,” he says. “We’ve just been trying to figure out what’s best for you and your mom and me.”
So he knew about this as we drove across Main Street Bridge. As we drove downtown. As we ate cookies outside Joy Ann.
I suddenly feel left out. Like all these years, even when it was Claudine and Lauren, Lauren and Claudine, I believed it was the three of us married to each other, and I’m only just realizing it was the two of them all along.
“I don’t want you to talk to anyone about this, Clew, not even Saz. Not until we get everything sorted out. I know you love Saz and her parents, but they’re our good friends and we’re not ready for them to know. We’re not ready for anyone to know. Not yet.”
This is how numb I am: I don’t get angry; I don’t even ask why. I don’t say, You can’t tell me who I can or can’t talk to about this. You don’t get to tell me the world is ending and then ask me not to share it. Instead I just sit there, hollowing out, hands withering in my lap, heart withering in my chest, feet dangling over the bed into space because the floor is nowhere to be found.
He says from very far away, “This town’s so goddamn small—the last thing we need is people discussing your mom and me because they have nothing better to do. And I don’t want them making this harder on you than it has to be.”
I don’t hear anything else after that.
* * *
—
After he leaves, my mom comes in and puts her arms around me. She tells me we can talk if I want to, that it’s important to talk and get things out. “You have to let the tears come,” she always says. “Because if you don’t, they’ll come out eventually—maybe not as tears, but as anger or something worse.”
“So this is real,” I say.
“This is real.”
And, all at once, there is this rush of feeling in my hands, in my heart, in every part of my body that just went hollow and dead, and I nearly double over from the pain of it. I feel as if a bomb has dropped from the sky directly into my room, directly onto my head.
“I know it’s sudden. And it’s a lot. And I’m sorry. So sorry.” She pulls me in tighter.
“Dad says I’m not allowed to talk about it.” For a minute I wonder if she can hear me, because my voice is so far away, as if it’s locked in a dark, empty room with no windows or doors.
“Not outside the house, just while we try to figure this out.” I attempt to strangle the hope that bubbles up over while we try to figure this out, as if this whole thing is something fixable and undecided.
“How are Saz and I supposed to go on a road trip without me saying anything?”
“I’m not sure the road trip is going to happen, Claude. At least not right away.”
“But we’ve been planning it.”
“I know, and I’m sorry.” And I can see that she’s as lost as I am. “Honestly, I’m trying to understand all of this myself.” She goes quiet, and I can almost hear her choosing her words so, so carefully. “But what you need to remember is that it has nothing to do with you. Your dad and I love you more than anything.”
* * *
—
After she leaves, I lie in bed. No pile of books. No dreams of Wyatt or plans for a road trip. Just me, wondering where the floor disappeared to.
I lie there for a very long time.
The house is so still, except for when I hear the whirring of the garage door and the roar of my dad’s car driving away. And then, a little later, when there is a banging at my door, which is my cat, Dandelion, wanting to get in. But I can’t move. So I lie there.
And lie there.
When Vesuvius erupted, the citizens of Pompeii were caught completely unprepared, but we know from the letters of a survivor that there were warnings. Plumes of smoke. Earth tremors. How could I not have seen the signs? How could I not have known?
I think of all the people in the history of the world whose lives have changed in an instant, like the woman I was named for. Claudine Blackwood, my mom’s great-aunt, was only five years old when her mother shot herself in the bedroom of their Georgia island home. It was after breakfast on a Thursday, and Claudine’s father had left the house moments earlier. Claudine was the one who heard the gunshot, who found her mom lying in a pool of her own blood. It was one of those tragedies that my mom the writer refers to as a defining moment: that moment when life suddenly changes and you’re left picking up the pieces. She says it’s actually how you pick up the pieces that defines you.