getting wrong. “Anyway, I was so embarrassed the next morning. It was so out of character for me, and honestly, I just wanted to put it behind me and go home and rework my thesis.”
Lucas, God bless him, turned to her and said (with enough disdain that Cleo understood this wasn’t a peace offering): “Wait, you’ve told me my whole life that girls can do whatever they want with their bodies.”
“Sweetie, I didn’t know what I was doing. Women then, well, I mean, we were strong, I guess, in our ways, but we weren’t like your generation—or I wasn’t, at least. Like Marley having two boyfriends or Esme speaking up to her mother.” Cleo hesitated. This wasn’t what she wanted to say. “This isn’t about that, though. This was about the fact that I was so ashamed of myself for doing something reckless, for not being in control, that . . . I think I wanted to pretend that it never happened.”
“So you wanted to pretend that I never happened?” Lucas said, his face a mix of heartbreak and rage.
“No, no!” Cleo wanted to get through the rest of the story now. “This had nothing to do with you and only to do with me. Lucas, I had spent so long making sure that everything was in alignment and propelling me to the next step that I couldn’t forgive myself when I believed that I’d screwed up. And that screwup ended up being the best part of my life.” Cleo thought of her dad, how similar they were—but different too; Georgie was right about that, and she reached for Lucas’s hand. “I promise. There was never any doubt about what I was going to do—keep you, I mean. If anything, you made me realize that I couldn’t be on my own forever.”
Lucas didn’t reply, and Cleo quickly realized that framing the pregnancy as a screwup was exactly what she didn’t intend. This was why she was always prepared. Accidents happened, mistakes were made when she was not.
She swallowed. She knew what she had to say next, and she knew that however he reacted, she deserved it. All she wanted to do was stand and leave and close Lucas’s door and slink back to the kitchen and not ruin the past fourteen years she very well realized she was about to ruin. But she owed him more than that; she owed her son his truth, even when it meant he would finally see her as she really was: flawed, deceitful, human, but also, his mother who tried her best. She really thought she had. She could see now why she hadn’t.
She said it quickly, before she lost her nerve. “Anyway, this isn’t your father’s fault. I left Northwestern without telling him. He never knew. He doesn’t know.”
Lucas started crying then, his chin quivering and giving way to real tears, and Cleo wished she could go back and redo the entirety of his life.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I just didn’t know how else to do it.”
“There were a million other ways to do it,” he managed.
“Yes,” Cleo said. Because she knew now that there were.
They sat that way, in silence, mother and son, until Lucas stopped crying and closed his eyes and turned toward his wall, and after a while, Cleo thought he’d fallen asleep. Which was just as well. She didn’t expect to get much further than they’d gotten. Not now anyway. She watched his back rise and fall, and she missed both her parents so acutely, she was certain she felt an actual hole in her heart. Maybe that’s why she kept the list after all these years: it was what she had left of them, especially her father, to carry around, to plug that hole.
She rose from his bed. She wanted to share this with Georgie, to see if maybe she thought this made sense.
“You shouldn’t have done it that way,” Lucas said, not asleep in fact and still facing the wall.
“I know,” Cleo said, because all that he was accusing her of with those few words was fair. And she thought of her evening, of Francis, of their fall. “I didn’t want to admit that I was wrong, that I’d made an absolute mess of the most important thing in my life.”
“So fix it,” he snapped, turning to look at her, to meet her dead in the eye.
Cleo stepped forward and kissed his forehead and then made her way out of his room, closing the door behind her.