it again. Not the police, not my lawyer, not my family. Tig took a deal, pleading guilty for a reduced sentence, and no one even told me that. I saw it in the News Journal. I had no way to know where he was sent or what happened to him there. I had no contact information, no shared friend, and I was too ashamed to call his mother or his ex-stepdad. My father took a job in Boston, and we moved away.
For the next three years, the length of Tig’s sentence, I couldn’t eat. Food had long been my comfort, and I did not deserve to be comforted. I wanted the hunger. It was an angry, alive thing that I let loose inside myself as punishment.
I thinned and dwindled, and though I was wan and weak, my skin a little loose on my young frame, I finally looked like a daughter that my mother might have wanted. But what I had done could not be shed, and her gaze still slid toward me and away, glancing off air, never quite landing on me, as if my edges were still two feet farther out than my surfaces. Shame had applied itself onto my bones, swelling around me until I was mired, and, to her, fat and shame were almost the same thing.
We never got much better. These days my relationship with my family was a lukewarm phone call close to Christmas or my birthday, in which we traded empty words about getting together sometime.
Now I had made my own family, and we weren’t like that. I let Maddy be her mercurial, brash self, and Oliver was growing up secure and adored. With me Davis had felt safe enough to whisper that he’d wanted his wife gone, not fixed, even though her absence hurt his kid down to her small bones. I had made our home into a place full of love and acceptance, but I had locked myself outside it.
I never did whisper my worst thing in the dark to Davis. I kept the lights out when we made love, so he wouldn’t see the stretch marks on my body; I never told him about the night that Mrs. Shipley died, much less that moment, mid-interrogation, when I’d remembered sliding in behind the wheel.
This was why Roux’s game had gotten to me. It wasn’t the gin, or the force of her personality. In that moment, in my basement, I’d felt that she saw me, fully, all the way down to the bottom. She’d looked into me as if she knew what I was capable of doing and sustaining. It had horrified me, and yet a piece of me had liked it. A piece of me had wanted to drink more gin, lift my shirt to show her the faint white marks on my breasts and belly, let the truth be in the room with us. Isn’t that what diving gave me? To float in the same space as the truth, silent and unafraid.
I knew from long experience that I only had to wait the feeling out. People say, I don’t know how she lives with herself, but every single one of them was living with their own worst thing, just fine. No one walks around holding their ugliest sin in the palm of their hand, staring at it. Our hurts are heavy, and we let them sink. Every day they drift lower, settling in murky places where the light can’t reach. All I had to do was wait. My bad would fall down into darkness again, because the bad things always do.
All I had to do was make blondies. Update the neighborhood directory. Call Divers Down and get back on the teaching schedule. Feed the baby. All I had to do was all my jobs, and let time pass.
Today my job was Madison.
I needed to talk serious with her about boys and cars and lying by omission. My jangled nerves demanded that I hand down groundings and extra chores, too, but I wasn’t going to do that. Maddy wasn’t me, and Luca wasn’t Tig Simms. They’d stolen a two-mile ride in a cool car, dead sober, in the sunshiny morning. This was normal teen behavior, and I would react to it as such, not to my own past.
I was in the keeping room playing peekaboo with Oliver when I finally heard the front door open and Maddy’s stompy walk ringing out against the hardwoods.
“I’m home!” she hollered.
“Back here,” I called. “Come