Only One (Reed Brothers)

Carrie

When I get home, Dad’s car is already there. I have a big bouquet of roses and several pricked fingers. Roses have thorns when you cut them directly from the bush, apparently. I lift my wounded thumb to my mouth and try to suck the pain away. It doesn’t work.

I let myself into the house and don’t see Mom or Dad anywhere, so I go to the kitchen and put my roses in a vase. Then I go to put them in her room, but I open her bedroom door and pause. I hear murmuring from the bathroom and tiptoe far enough inside that I can see them.

I stop short. The rose vase tilts, and water drips onto the floor. I right the vase and wipe my foot across the spot to spread out the wetness. I stand very still so they won’t know I’m there.

Mom is naked, reclining in the tub. Dad is kneeling beside her and he’s rubbing a soapy cloth over her shoulders. He’s dressed like he was this morning, but she’s not wearing anything. He’s helping her take a bath? What?

Mom grabs his hand and he stops, heaving a sigh. “You can’t tell her. If you do, she’ll hate us both.”

Dad leans his forehead on her arched knee and breathes heavily. I can barely hear his voice, and he’s stuffy like he’s been crying. “I have to tell her,” he says. “I’m going to do it when she gets back. Right away. I should have told her a long time ago.”

Mom has dark circles under her eyes and she’s sniffling, too. I don’t know what happened when I was gone, but I do want to know. I just don’t want to know this.

“I don’t think you should,” Mom says.

Dad soaps the washcloth and picks up her arm, washing her tenderly and slowly. Intimately. Like lovers. Like husband and wife. He drags the cloth across her mastectomy scars in slow, sweet, tender sweeps. “I wish I’d been with you through this,” he says.

“I wasn’t even with me when I first found out, John.”

“I know. That doesn’t make it any better.”

“It won’t get better.” She grabs his hand again and holds it tight against her heart. “I have a month, if that long. Can you stay?”

Dad breaks. A sob shakes his shoulders.

“Come here,” Mom says, and she opens her arms, sitting up a little. She holds him to her and he runs his hands up and down her naked body.

“So much wasted time,” he says. “I don’t want to waste anymore.”

I can almost see Mom visibly relax. She sits back a little and looks into his face. “Are you sure?” she asks quietly.

“I love you, Pattycakes. I’ve always loved you. Let me have this last month, will you?”

“Okay,” she says quietly. Then she kisses him. And he kisses her back. It’s soft and sweet at first, and then it becomes more. More than I am comfortable seeing. I leave the roses on the dresser and back out of the room. Then I leave them a note and go to find Amber and Rose, and I pretend like I didn’t just see what I saw. Mainly because I don’t know what to do with it.

***

At eight o’clock, I leave Amber and Rose, despite their protests. I go home, but only because I know Nick is going to be there. He’s going to come and find me, and hopefully take me away from whatever is going on between Mom and Dad.

I let myself in the back door and find Mom standing in the kitchen. She looks up, and her cheeks redden. Does she know that I know? Dad is standing beside her chopping vegetables. She’s drinking a glass of wine, and I can’t help but remember that this is how it used to be before she messed it all up. We were happy. We were like this.

“Carrie,” Mom says. “I’m glad you’re back. Just in time for dinner.”

“How are you feeling?” I ask.

“Much better. I’m sorry I scared you last night.”

I nod and steal a piece of the zucchini Dad’s chopping. He swats my hand with a roll of aluminum foil.

“You look much better than you did last night,” I say to her.

“They gave me some blood. Plasma. Something. It feels better just having stopped the chemo, honestly.”

Dad passes her the knife. “Feel good enough to chop?” he asks.

“John,” she warns. “Don’t.”

I look from him to her. “Don’t what?”

She shakes her head and starts to chop.

“Let’s take a walk,” Dad says. He jerks his head toward the sliding glass door that leads to the beach.

Mom bites her lips together like she wants to say something, but she doesn’t. She just chops.

Dad and I step out onto the sand and he’s quiet as we walk down to the water. “What did you want to talk about?” I ask as we turn toward the lighthouse.

He doesn’t say anything. He just looks toward the horizon and gnaws the inside of his cheek. I wait him out. Finally he looks at me.

“It takes two people to make a marriage,” he says.

I wait, because I don’t think he’s done.

“And two people to break a marriage,” he goes on to say.

“O-kay,” I say slowly, dragging out the word as a prompt.

“Your mom and I had settled into a rhythm. One I’d got used to. So had she. But she was struggling more than I realized.”

We walk in silence.

“I should have known,” he says. “I should have paid more attention, but I was busy with work, and we were both busy with you.”

Walk. Silence.

“Your mom was really depressed, and I didn’t realize it. She came to me and told me how unhappy she was, and I blew it off because we had the perfect life. We had a wonderful daughter and great jobs and a big old house. We had the American dream. But her dream was a nightmare and I didn’t realize it.”

More walk. More silence.

“I thought she would come around. But she didn’t. Then one day, she left. I know now that it was her way of isolating herself, fueled by her depression. But at the time, I blamed it on a man that didn’t even exist. Your mom never cheated. She did leave. But she did it because she felt alone even in a house full of people. Even in a crowded room, she felt like no one was there with her.”

“There was no man?”

He shakes his head. “I swore there had to be, because what other reason would she have to leave, you know?” He throws up his hands. “I believed with all my heart that there was someone else.”

“She still left, Dad.”

“She left because she had to, not because she wanted to, Carrie. That’s what you need to know.”

“She never even came to see me, Dad,” I protest. “Not once.”

He stops walking and turns me to face him, holding my shoulders. He looks into my eyes. “I wouldn’t let her. She tried. But I was bitter and jealous and angry and I wouldn’t let her back in our lives. Not even yours.”

I gasp. There’s no way he did that. “She tried?”

“Yes, she tried. She tried really hard. She started seeing a doctor for her headaches. You remember how bad they used to be?”

I nod.

“They put her on a low-dose antidepressant for her pain, and she immediately started feeling better, like she could cope. So she started in therapy, and got the right dosage of antidepressants, and started to exercise, and she started to live again.”

“But she still didn’t come back.”

“She was about to. Then she got sick the first time. She decided that she hadn’t seen you in a while and she didn’t want you to see her sick, when it had been so long. So she went through treatment and the mastectomy all alone.” He bites his jaw together and tears fill his eyes. “I’ll never forgive myself for not being there for her through that.”

“But even then…”

He holds up a hand. “The cancer never went away. She kept getting treatment, even after her surgery, and it just lingered. She kept thinking it would get better, but it didn’t. Then she asked for you this summer even though she knew it was over. The treatments are over and she’s going to die. And it’s all because I didn’t pay enough attention when she needed for me to notice what she was going through.”

A tear rolls down his cheek.

“Dad,” I sigh, “it’s not your fault.”

“Why is it that you can forgive me, but you can’t forgive her?” he asks. His voice is accusing, and it makes me bristle. I stand a little straighter. “I’m just as much to blame as she is. I caused it just as much as she did, and I let you believe she left us for her own selfish reasons, when that’s not the case.” He holds my shoulders again. “She was never selfish, and she’s still not selfish.”

“She’s dying,” I say quietly. And my voice breaks.

He pulls me against him and lets me sob into his shirt. I feel like he just pulled my heart out through my throat. Like he has gutted me. I am absolutely choked by the hatred that I have held in my heart for so very long as I finally get to set it free.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. He runs a hand down the length of my hair.

“Me too.”

“Now what do we do?”

I turn and walk back toward the beach house, and he takes my hand like he used to do when I was three. I jump into the shallow water and kick a wave at him.

He wipes his face with the tail of his shirt. “I can’t believe you did that,” he says, but he’s smiling so I’m not worried.

“We’re going to be okay, Dad,” I tell him. Then I kick more water at him.

“Yeah, we are,” he replies. Then he runs toward me and picks me up and tosses me directly into a wave.

I come up sputtering. “I can’t believe you did that,” I say. Then a wave knocks him over, too, and he lands on his butt beside me. He laughs and laughs, until I realize he’s crying. I get up and take his hands, pulling him from the water. “Come on,” I say. “We’re wasting time not being with Mom.”

His eyes meet mine in the waning light. “You’re not angry?”

“I don’t have time to be angry,” I say, jogging backward. Then I call out, “Race you!” and I sprint toward our deck. He comes up right behind me.

“Oh my gosh!” Mom yells as we come through the door. She’s standing at the kitchen counter with Nick and they’re both chopping. Dad and I run to her and we smoosh her between us like she’s the filling of a sandwich. “You’re all wet!” she cries.

Nick throws his head back and laughs.

“Oh, you want to be next?” I taunt. He dodges around the counter and ducks me.

“Go change clothes!” Mom yells, jerking her finger toward the hallway. “Dinner is in five!”

We go down the hallway laughing. I close my door and lean hard against it.

What Dad doesn’t know is that I’d already forgiven her. And him, too.