be close to them. “You can’t have that one,” my father said, and then, “We might expand.” It did not occur to me that Laurene was pregnant, or what he might mean by “expand.” When I asked him about it, he said, “Sorry, kiddo.” Only later, soon before I moved in, after my brother was born and slept in the bedroom I’d originally picked, he said I could have a bedroom too, and told me to choose between the two that were left. Both were far from their room. One was over the garage at the end of a long, dark, musty corridor. The other was downstairs, near the kitchen.
“It’s small,” my mother said, “but I like the view. And you know I love these tiles.” For years she’d been talking about wanting terracotta tiles.
She walked to another small room at the end of the hallway. I was starting to worry that we’d be caught—that the front door would jangle open and my father or Laurene would find us here together. I wished she would hurry. At the same time I didn’t want her to leave. I needed her to stay close and protect me.
“There still isn’t any furniture,” my mother called out, her voice echoing in the hallway.
“I know,” I said. “I wish they’d get a couch or something.” Most of the rooms were empty. Sound traveled unobstructed and bounced off glass and clay and brick, did not catch or absorb or muffle. For the years I lived there, I longed for more furniture; the longing would grow into a feverish craving for the furnished rooms I’d seen in other houses.
“All right,” she said. She was standing in the doorway of my room, her eyes watery. “I’m going to miss you. I hope this is for the best.” We hugged. “Don’t worry about me, I’m going to be fine.”
“You’ll go to Greece,” I said.
“Yeah. I’m not looking forward to it right now,” she said. Her skin became luminous when she was sad, like it was backlit.
“It’ll be great,” I said.
In October, she left for three weeks to travel in Europe, in Italy and Greece, a trip my father had promised her as a kind of restitution when I moved out. He’d given her ten thousand dollars.
She would be traveling alone, going to Venice and to a yoga retreat in Greece. My mother had taken up yoga for the first time since I’d moved out.
Later she would tell me how lonely she’d been, how she cried the night she’d arrived in Venice—absurd, foolish, all that water instead of streets!—but how the next morning she’d flung open the layers of curtains, then the shutters, then the windows, and there it was before her, shimmering in the morning light, the coruscating Grand Canal.
But over the next months when we weren’t talking for the first time in my life and I didn’t know how she was doing, guilt would be heavy on my chest, like a large animal hunched down. Some crime I’d committed but couldn’t quite remember. Leaving my mother? Dropping Reed? Sometimes I would be unable to speak, terrified to say the wrong thing and wound others with the slightest mistake.
I followed her out of the house and stood near the door. At the gate she turned and waved: the flap of a bird’s wing in the sharp white light.
My mother and I had agreed to his conditions. I sensed it was a drastic rule for two people who’d hardly missed a few days together for thirteen years—and that the formation of a new family needn’t hinge on the eradication of the existing one. Secretly, I also felt relief. It gave me the perfect excuse: I would not have to see my mother for six months, my mother who was angry at me, and yet it wouldn’t be my fault, because he had required it, even if later I would feel guilty and complicit.
Also, I figured that if I demonstrated such loyalty to my father, it would impress him, and make him love me more. In fact, I was so convinced that he would understand the extent of the sacrifice he’d required, that when, later, he did not seem to understand but said I did not give enough to be part of the family, I was confused. I’d thought it was clear: I’d given him everything.
That first summer away from my mother, I continued to go to Lytton Gardens, an assisted-living facility, a couple of days a week for a volunteer