“How is he?” Maureen asked. She started swirling the wine again, then took a sip.
“Okay,” I said. I put my hand on the back of a chair. “He’s home now if you want to talk to him.”
Maureen just laughed through her nose, a sound of disbelief. “Talk to him,” she repeated. “Oliver and I don’t talk. Or rather, he doesn’t talk to me.” She laughed again, but it sounded more like a sob. “You know, I’ve thought of a million different scenarios for him coming home, but not one of them ended with him hating me.”
I sat down in the chair across from her. If my parents weren’t going to steer this boat, then it was time to grab the oars. “Oliver’s in so much pain right now. He doesn’t . . . I don’t think he knows how to talk to you, or even what to say, you know? Everything is so different for him. It’s like . . . it’s like he barely knows who he is, much less who he is supposed to be.” I was trying to explain things without betraying his trust, but all I could do was fumble for words. And Maureen was a woman who had been given a lot of platitudes in her life.
“I don’t even know how to help him,” she sighed. “The guilt he must feel, the responsibility—”
“You have to ask him about who he is now,” I said. “Trust me. He has a lot to tell you. He doesn’t think you want to hear it, though.”
Maureen blinked away tears. “I don’t think he wants me to listen. I don’t think he wants anything to do with me at all.”
“Look,” I said, my voice sharper than I meant it to be. “When I was eight, my parents wouldn’t let me go to this slumber party because they said I was too young to stay over at someone else’s house. And I was so mad at them because everyone else was going, even Caro, but they wouldn’t let me. So I wrote this note and put it under their bedroom door. It said, ‘Dear Mom and Dad, I hate you. Love, Emmy.’”
Maureen smiled a little. “Like you would ever hate your parents.”
“But see? That’s my point. I didn’t really hate them, but I got mad at them because I knew that no matter what I said, I was safe with them. I could tell them I hated them in a thousand notes and they would still love me because they’re my mom and dad. I think . . . I think Oliver’s taking it out on you because he knows that, deep down, you’re not going to leave. You never really did. You just have to wait for him to come back around to you.”
Maureen’s eyes were filling with tears and I sat back in my chair, suddenly nervous. I wasn’t sure where “making Maureen cry” ranked on the list of things my parents didn’t want me to do, but I imagined it was pretty high up there.
“No, no, sweetheart,” Maureen said when she saw my face, quickly wiping her eyes and reaching for my hand. “It’s all right, I’m not upset. Well”—she laughed a little to herself—“I am, obviously, but not at you. You’re just very smart.”
“I feel like that’s still up for negotiation,” I said, and then glanced up as my mom (finally, oh my God) came into the room.
“Everything all right?” she asked as Maureen started to stand up. “Maureen, do you—?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I should probably go home. Emmy says that Oliver is there, so . . .”
My mom wrapped her arm around my shoulder as Maureen gathered her things, and I let her keep it there. Usually, it feels like a trap, like maybe this time she’s not going to let me go, but for the first time in a long while, I wanted to stay close to her.
It had been a long, long night.
“I’ll walk you home,” my mom said to Maureen, giving me a final squeeze, and my shoulders felt cold when her arm left them. “Just to make sure you get there safely.”
Maureen nodded, then took two quick steps forward and grabbed me in a hug. I suspected that its fierceness and strength was meant for Oliver, not me, but this wasn’t the first time I had felt that way. For the first few months after Oliver went missing, she would hug me so hard that it made me wince.
It was just frightening to think that even now, with Oliver home and safe in his bedroom, Maureen still reached for me instead of him.
“Your daughter is very smart,” Maureen said to my mom as she pulled away, then rubbed her thumb across my cheek.
“Yes, she is,” my mom said, then gave me a wink as she pulled the sliding door open for Maureen. I could hear Maureen say something to my mom, but she was already outside, and I waited until my mom shut the door behind them before making a hasty escape out of the room.
I found my dad in the kitchen. Or, to be more exact, I found my dad’s socked feet standing behind the open refrigerator door. There was a lot of muffled shuffling sounds, followed by a clatter. “Dad?”
He poked his head around the door. “Oh, hi,” he said, like I had been there all along. “Are you starving? I’m starving. I don’t know about you, but that wasn’t the most relaxing dinner.”
“Are there leftovers?” I asked, coming into the kitchen and boosting myself up on the countertop. Unlike my mom, my dad didn’t shoo me down.
“Are there leftovers?” he repeated. “Is that a joke? Have you seen your mom’s organizational skills?”
“I caught her using the label maker once,” I told him. “She said she wasn’t, but I know she was.”
“She was,” my dad agreed. He rummaged around, then pulled out a Tupperware container. “What do we think this is? Guess correctly and you win it.”