of it. I’ve long since stopped hoping for, or expecting, motherly love from her. All that matters to me now is that she is, in fact, my mother, and that I love her. All that matters is she’s on the short list of people I’d do anything for, protect until my dying breath, and love unconditionally, forevermore, whether she’s capable of returning my devotion, or, shit, even simply liking me... or not.
Chapter 19
Reed
In the yoga room, I discover Mom at the front of the class with her boyfriend, Lee—a paranoid schizophrenic who’s so heavily medicated, I’ve never heard him say more than four words during any given visit. At the moment, the class, including Mom and Lee, are attempting to do the Warrior Two pose, although what they’re managing, to be generous, isn’t exactly the stuff of yoga instructional videos.
“Reed is here,” the instructor says to Mom, making her turn around. And when Mom sees me standing in the doorway, she claps, rises from her pose, and makes her way over to me.
When Mom arrives, I squeeze her frail body into a tight hug and tell her I love her. She doesn’t return the words, but that’s not a surprise. She once told me those words aren’t in her vocabulary, because whenever she says them, someone dies. So, really, I suppose I should consider my mother’s refusal to tell her only living son she loves him a gift. She’s merely trying to save her son from dying, after all. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
“I can’t stay long today, Mom,” I say. “I have to catch a flight back to LA for a concert. For work.”
For Georgina.
Again, the force of nature that is Georgina Ricci flashes across my mind. I imagine her showing up backstage tonight at the RCR concert, excited to begin her first day on the job with a press pass around her neck... and then being greeted at the backstage door by... me. Oh, God, I can’t wait for that delicious moment when our eyes meet again. When she realizes she’s got to play nice with me, whether she likes it or not. In truth, I’ve been obsessing about it all week long.
“LA,” Mom says with disdain. “I never should have let Terrence convince me to leave my family here in Scarsdale to move to LA. That was the beginning of the end for me.”
I take a deep breath and bite my tongue. Mom says something like this every time I visit, and it’s a whole lot of crazy. First, let’s be real here: the fire was the beginning of the end for her. Doesn’t she realize her family perished long before she even met Terrence Rivers? Which means my father didn’t “convince” her to leave her family, or anyone else, to move to Los Angeles. Actually, as far as I understand it, my thirty-five-year-old father convinced his deeply troubled, but stunningly beautiful, pregnant nineteen-year-old bride to leave Scarsdale, in the hopes she’d be able to leave her traumas far behind, and embrace the new life growing inside her. To begin a new chapter, in a new place, with a new husband.
Or, shit, maybe Mom is simply acknowledging she would have preferred to stay in Scarsdale forever, with the ghosts of her dead family, than move to California and become the mother and wife, and then, unhinged ex-wife, she ultimately became.
Either way, the comment annoys me whenever Mom makes it, because it’s my mother’s dead family that presently ties her to this facility in Scarsdale. And that’s a huge fucking inconvenience for me. I’ve begged Mom, more times than I can count, to let me move her to an even better facility in Malibu—a place right on the cliffs overlooking the glittering Pacific Ocean. But, no. She won’t do it. No matter what I say or do, or how many brochures of the Malibu facility I show her, Mom says she won’t leave her “family,” ever again. Plus, she steadfastly refuses to leave Lee, her “boyfriend,” so, it’s a double non-starter. Of course, I’ve offered to move Lee to Malibu, along with her, on my fucking dime, by the way—which wouldn’t be cheap—but she always says Lee won’t leave his brother, who apparently lives in the City. A fact she’s apparently been able to extract from a man so medicated, he constantly drools down his chin and says not more than six words a day.
“You have to stay for lunch,” Mom says brightly to me. “They’re serving