New Girl in Town

Chapter 31

She's not just physically gone. That's the thing. Jennie's gone from my life the way I'm gone from her heart.

Was I ever in it? I couldn't have been, if she was able to discard me so quickly. A blink, a tilt of her head, and I was gone. Dismissed like a lip gloss she no longer wanted to use.

"I wanted to show you something," Marco says.

It takes me a moment to drag my eyes away from the TV. I've been planted on the couch for what seems like weeks, but it's just been a few days. Time's lost all meaning, just like everything else.

Does she even think about me as much as I think about her? She's probably dancing her heart out, laughing, while I'm crying in the shower, and every time I smell citrus or flowers I think of her.

Marco's holding something in his hands, and when he sits down next to me and hands them over, their smooth edges beckon me.

"I just found them," he says.

I stare down at the photos and suddenly all thoughts of Jennie are driven from my mind. It would be a blessed respite, but the photographs bring a different kind of pain. They're of Mom and Marco and me; I must be two or three, dressed in a puffer jacket in the snow. God, she looks so young. Almost unrecognizable.

Not because of how young she looks. But because of how happy she looks.

My fingers trace down the photo, circling around the tiger's-eye pendant she's wearing. She really did keep it, all these years. What did that mean? Did she still love him, even at the end? How could she, after he decided staying behind was better than being with us?

"Your mom was so funny," he says. "I never laughed more than when I was with her. We had a friend, this snobby Harvard guy who was kind of slumming it, hanging with our crowd. You probably know the type. But he used to call your mom 'a true wit.' It was the one thing he got right. She really was."

He's quiet for a moment as I shift to another photo. Mom alone this time, in profile, a floaty red dress that tied around her neck, one hand resting on her pregnant stomach, the other pointing to the camera—probably at Marco. Her head's tilted toward the blue sky, the smile on her face so free. She doesn't know what's to come. She doesn't know who I'm going to be. How Marco's going to leave us. How she's going to leave me.

Would she do things differently, if she had some sort of crystal ball that told her what was to come? Was there some sort of path we all could have taken that would have left us whole and intact—a family?

I have to keep my hands from crumpling the photos. I place them on my lap, unable to continue flipping through them.

"She was a woman of big highs and big lows," Marco continues, like he knew her. Like the sixteen years I spent with her isn't comparable to what, the handful he spent with her in their twenties? The anger sparks inside me like a forest fire: it starts slow and then spreads, fast and greedy for any fuel that'll grow it further. And the more Marco talks, the more fuel he gives me: "I know how hard it was for her, when she was low," he continues. "If you're feeling like that, Lisa—"

I jerk up from the couch, the photos spilling on the ground. He immediately crouches to gather them like they're precious, and that flares the anger hotter. Of course he thinks pictures are meant to be handled with care.

Not actual people.

"Why would you show me these?" I demand.

His eyes widen, his hangdog expression making me want to slap it right off his face. "I was happy I found them. And I'm ... I'm happy you're here, so I can share them with you."