Page 122 of The Treasure House

“I need you to go.”

She gave me a sharp, feral look at that. “You need me to go?”

My stomach clenched but I stood my ground.

“You’ve got some nerve, asking your own mother—who you haven’t seen for years, who you haven’t once visited, who you kept a whole kid from—to go.” She was bitter, even through her high. “You didn’t send me so much as a goddamn postcard from this backwater hole,” she said, her voice picking up pace until she was talking so fast the words all blurred together. “Who do you think you are cutting me out of your life? After all I went through for you!”

“I’m not discussing it,” I said numbly. Each word she spoke was a direct hit to my heart. But if there was one thing I knew, it was that I didn’t want Flo to go through a repeat of my childhood. I didn’t want her knowing what meth smelled like, or how to recognize signs of using.

“We’re not done talking.” Tina followed me to my car, oblivious to the icy snow on the soles of her bare feet.

“You know what, Mom?” I said as I climbed into my car. “We are.” I looked up at her. “We can talk if you ever get clean.”

Even if she got clean, Tina would still be an addict. And for the rest of my life, I’d be the child of an addict. That was my issue to deal with, and it was time to deal with it. “I needed you to stop using a long time ago,” I told her, my hand white-knuckled on the door of the car.

“Yeah, well, I needed you to stop judging me a long time ago.” She scowled at me. The neon lights of the motel sign formed a corona around her in the sheeting snow. “Tate and I will come by for a visit with my grandkid tomorrow,” she told me sharply. “You can’t get between us like this.”

But I could. And I would. A part of me would always want my mom, but I didn’t want her near my daughter.

Twenty-Eight

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, 1962

Marly wanted her mom. That was her first feeling when the doctor confirmed she was pregnant. She wanted to cry on her mom’s shoulder, feel her arms around her, and be told everything was going to be okay. But Mom barely even knew who Marly was anymore and there was no comfort to be had in that hospital room.

Marly doubted there’d be any comfort to be had from her father either. He was the old-fashioned sort, and this would shock him to the core. But what choice did Marly have? Dad would find out eventually, as her stomach swelled out like a balloon, and the first thing he’d ask is whose baby it was. She knew she couldn’t tell him, though. How could she, when she wasn’t even going to tell the baby’s father?

Freddie de Marche had made a habit of spending his leave from the army in Oxeye, where he tumbled into bed with Marly as soon as he hit town. They’d been blurry, blissful weeks, out of ordinary time. Marly had been sure she could drink her fill of him and get him out of her system, but it didn’t seem to work like that. Instead, she couldn’t get him out of her head. She thought about him all the time. She lived for the weeks in Oxeye, counting down her year until she saw him again.

“Hey, pixie stick!” he’d holler, sweeping her off her feet and carrying her upstairs.

And then they’d reach the end of the interlude and Freddie would head off to wherever he was stationed, and Marly would… wait. Which she hated.

She drove him to the airport the last time he visited, feeling irritable and cheated. Freddie himself was cheerful, which only irritated her more.

“I was thinking maybe you could meet me in Paris sometime,” he suggested, as he kissed her goodbye. Their goodbyes could take a while. There was a lot of kissing.

Marly had pushed him back, with the heel of her hand on his chest. “I thought we were just a summer thing?” Only they weren’t, were they? Because she was obsessed with him spring, fall, and winter too.

Goddamn him. Why didn’t he feel it too?

Freddie had grinned at her. “We are a summer thing. But we can also be a thing at other times, can’t we?” He kissed her again. “We can walk along the Seine, find a nice comfortable bed somewhere…” The kissing got serious. Too serious for the front seat of a car in an airport parking lot.

“You just want a sure thing while you’re on vacation,” she gasped.

“And what’s wrong with that?” he teased. And then he was dashing off to his life, which only included her as a name and address on a postcard.

She was sitting by her mother’s bedside one Sunday afternoon, reading through Freddie’s latest letter, which was as chummy as ever, when she decided enough was enough.

Dear Freddie, she wrote, I’m afraid I won’t be able to host you at Oxeye next summer. I hope you’ll understand. There comes a time when a girl has to trade flings for the real thing. Much love, M

And then, in spectacular timing, one week later she discovered she was pregnant.

“Who?” Dad asked her when she finally screwed up the courage to tell him. He was turning red. Marly had expected him to explode, but he didn’t. He just took a few deep breaths.

“Does it matter?” she said, knowing she was needling him. She wondered if she was trying to find the limits of this remarkable composure.

“Of course it matters.”