“No plot,” she said. “Just so damn tired of staring at those four walls.”
I was out. After eight weeks, and forty tuna sandwiches, and ten thousand dollars’ worth of inpatient rehabilitation treatment costs—covered, mostly, probably, hopefully, by Medicaid once Mom filled out a small mountain of paperwork, which Maya and I would help with, to the extent that we were able—I was home. Back at my real life. Back in my bedroom, with the Boy in the Mirror, and my Secret Stash of Diet Cokes, and the Computer Full of Things That Make Me Feel Worse About Myself.
Getting better is boring. Getting better is slow and frustrating, and you don’t want to hear about it. You need to take my word for it, though: it was hell. Every decision was difficult. Every third thought was a terrible and destructive one. I fought with myself five times a day.
It is still a fight. It will always be a fight.
That photo of Skinny Mom still hung on the side of our fridge. Life and genetics could gang up on me at any moment.
“Okay,” Mom said, once the waitress brought menus. “Grown-up conversation time. We’re all adults now, or close enough to have actual Grown-Up Problems, so we should be able to talk like it. Okay? So let’s ask each other anything we want.”
“Anything?” Maya and I said.
“Anything. But let’s respect each other’s boundaries, so if somebody doesn’t want to answer your question, we won’t hound them about it.”
“They can plead the Fifth,” Maya said.
“Exactly,” Mom said. “Go on. Ask me anything.”
Maya and I exchanged a look. The wide-open endless galaxy of questions we could ask was terrifying. What if one of our questions broke her heart? What if one of her answers broke ours?
Maya started us out, asking cautiously: “What are you going to do about a job?”
Mom laughed. “Well, Maya. Funny you should ask. Because I got the call yesterday—the engineering firm that the state hired to rebuild the town, after the governor declared a state of emergency, has offered me a job.”
“So that’s why we have the money to go out to eat!” she said.
“Well, we will,” Mom said. “Soon.”
“Doing what?” I asked, picturing my mom heaving a hammer, laying bricks, and my heart hurt, because of course she could do it, but she shouldn’t have to, at her age, after working so hard for so long.
“Actually, I’m going to be the site supervisor for several different locations, including the water-treatment plant and the slaughterhouse. White collar, all the way. Driving from site to site, drinking coffee from a thermos, bossing people around.”
“Damn,” Maya said. “That’s amazing. How did you swing that?”
“My boss came through,” she said. “He wrote a hell of a letter on my behalf. And even called the place, to follow up.”
Bastien’s dad. So he hadn’t seen me, blind as he was, when I marched a pig army into his house to demolish it. And Bastien hadn’t said anything. Who would have believed the truth, anyway? Probably he didn’t believe it himself. Probably he thought he was dreaming, or that his memories were twisted by the trauma of having his house destroyed before his eyes. The human mind is weird like that. It’ll do anything, construct any crazy story, rather than accept a truth that breaks the rules of the world as we know it.
“I’d have been screwed without it,” Mom said.
“What about our house?” Maya asked. “How are we going to pay the rent?”
“Well, we haven’t gotten an eviction notice yet,” Mom said. “Although we might, any day now. The landlord is pissed, but he’s being patient. I pay him what I can out of our savings. Which isn’t much. But I suspect that having half his properties utterly destroyed by marauding pigs has got him pretty strapped for cash, so he’ll probably take whatever little bit of money comes in. Hopefully that’ll last ’til the new job starts and my first paycheck comes in. And you, Maya? What are you doing about school? College? You missed most of the application deadlines . . .”
“Not much motion since we met with the principal, and they arranged for me to do the work at home until I’m ready to return. I might even graduate with my class. They’ve offered to help me with deferred college applications, but to be honest I’m not a hundred percent sure I want to go that route. You know? Maybe community college, maybe instant rock stardom?”
Mom laughed out loud.
“I have a question for you, Matt,” Maya said, and paused and looked me dead in the eyes so I knew the jokes were being put on hold for a moment. “Why?”
Tariq had asked me the same question. At the time, I’d tried to answer it but all I’d been doing was looking for lies. Ways to not tell the truth. I couldn’t be honest with Tariq back then because I could not be honest with myself.
My eating disorder had never been about Maya. I could see that now. My Mission of Bloody Revenge came from the same damaged place as my hunger. I had spent my whole life listening to stories about what a man was supposed to be. Do. Look like. How a man was supposed to act. It had cost me so much hurt and suffering and courage to come out of the closet, to reject a huge piece of The Masculinity Prison that I never noticed I was still stuck inside it.
“I wanted to be . . . strong,” I said. “I was weak and disgusting. And when I started to go without eating? For once in my life, I felt like I had some kind of control. Some kind of power. So I kept doing it.”
“Oh, my baby,” Mom said, and reached across for my hand.
“I knew it was stupid,” I said, grateful for the same old security-blanket warmth of her giant grip. “I knew it was hurting me. But I knew that if I let go of it, I’d have to confront . . .”
I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know how to. They didn’t ask.
“Well, nobody asked me what my plans were,” I said. “But I want to start applying to jobs in town. Stupid stuff. Retail, minimum wage. Just so I can have some spending money, start saving for college.”
And so I can buy my mother an acoustic guitar so she can get back to some dreams she stopped dreaming right around the time life started hitting her upside the head.
“Whatever’s wrong with you kids is my fault,” Mom said, tossing her menu dramatically in that way she always did when she’d made her food decision, and talking fast, like she’d been working up the courage to say this for a long time.
“Don’t be stupid,” Maya said, scribbling on a napkin. “Whatever’s awesome about us is your fault, too. And we’re pretty awesome.”
“Yeah, we are,” I said.
“Yeah, you are,” Mom agreed. “But I tried to hide my problems from you, and they’re your problems, too. And if you don’t know about them, you can’t control them.”