to contribute.
I wished my head were clearer. I wasn’t prepared for any of this. At the very least, I thought my mother would have arranged it so that I could still use the house for a couple of weeks each summer. She knew how much I loved Cape Cod.
I sat quietly for a moment. Then: “Mom,” I said, “I think you need to leave.”
My mother’s expression grew cool. “I’ll leave when I’m good and ready,” she said, but she rose and went to the kitchen to collect her things. There was the tinkle of melted ice cubes meeting stainless steel as she dumped out her shaker. By the time she turned back to me, anger had transformed her face.
I had seen Malabar’s temper on countless occasions—knew the way her eyes narrowed and her chin lifted—but I couldn’t recall being the lone object of her wrath. She stood close enough to me that I could feel her breath on my face. I recalled the legendary fight that she’d had with her own mother some twenty-five years earlier. She had confessed to me on many occasions that she’d wanted to kill Vivian in that moment, had described how she’d wrapped her hands around her mother’s neck and squeezed. I still don’t know how my grandmother, twenty pounds lighter and three inches shorter, found the strength to throw off her daughter and send her stumbling backward into the stone fireplace. Malabar was in a full-leg cast for the duration of the summer, although at the time, she told everyone, including my father, Peter, and me, that she’d dislocated her knee getting out of bed.
Now I had managed to stir some deep rage inside Malabar. Her pained expression seemed to foreshadow physical violence. I was prepared for her to hit me.
Instead, my mother said, “Has it ever occurred to you, Rennie, that I don’t want you anywhere near me?”
Given all the compliments and kind words my mother has said to me in her lifetime—and there have been many—it seems unfair that my brain formed such a deep wrinkle around this particular sentence. Why is it that an insult stays with you forever, whereas love and praise passes through you like water through a sieve? To this day, I can relive the moment of this insult more easily than almost any other.
No, it hadn’t occurred to me that she wouldn’t want me anywhere near her.
Not once.
I thought my mother loved me in the same way that I loved her: with singular and blind devotion. She had been my everything, more important than any partner, including the man I’d married.
But I had overlooked the simple fact that now that Malabar finally had Ben, that hard-won prize, she no longer needed me. My supporting role in her romance was over, and my mother wanted me to exit the goddamn stage. I knew too much about the past, too much about how she’d acquired everything she now had. Malabar had made it to the glorious final act and it was time for the denouement, not for a new plot twist about the daughter’s unhappiness. If the essential dramatic question was, Had it been worth it?, Malabar’s answer was yes. If there was one truth that I’d learned from all my reading, it was this: Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene. This time, that someone was me.
* * *
Following that terrible evening, my mother and I spoke infrequently and saw little of each other. Malabar and Ben’s adventures continued, and months turned into seasons, seasons into years. On the occasions that I showed up for Christmas or a birthday, I stayed there only for the meal, not for the week, and rarely even for a night. Technically, I still had a mother, but in every way, I felt motherless. For the next decade of summers, my father vacated his Truro home for a week or two in August so I could have a house to myself on Cape Cod, the place I still loved more than any other despite the complicated memories it held.
Although the separation was painful, it was long overdue. Dr. B. had been right—in a perfect world, I should have taken flight in adolescence, some fifteen years earlier, and my mother should have supported my doing so, navigating privately whatever sorrows my new independence kindled in her. Instead, at the very age I should have been breaking free, Malabar bound me to her with her