Page 127 of The Treasure House

The last photo in the album showed Amber at around Flo’s age; she was holding a kitten like it was a baby and grinning gap-toothed at the camera. In the background Marly was standing on the black-and-white checked linoleum I recognized from the kitchen, a vinyl record dangling from her hand. She was laughing.

“Freddie took that,” Marly said softly. “I remember that day like it was yesterday. Just an ordinary day.” She sighed and closed the album. “The best ones always are.”

“Not all of them,” I said, remembering the ordinary days with Tina. My childhood couldn’t have been further from these photographs. I wondered when Freddie had died. Had it been while he was in the army? In Vietnam maybe? Had he left Marly a single mother? Had she had the same starkly lonely experience of parenthood that I’d had?

Marly considered me. She reached out and took my hand. “Jake told me not to pester you, but what do men know? A trouble shared is a trouble halved. So, do you want to tell me about it?” There was something so direct and disarming about her. She wasn’t motherly exactly. It was more that she saw me. She looked me dead in the eye and didn’t flinch.

“I think I just sent my mother back to prison.” The words came out bluntly, brutally.

She still didn’t flinch. “Is this a story that requires something stronger than hot chocolate?”

I started crying again, and for the second time that night my whole past flooded out of me, like a dam had collapsed under the pressure of it. I thought I had nothing more to unburden after the Nar-Anon family meeting, but it turned out I had a lot left to say.

And Marly was a good listener. “Mothers put you through the wringer, don’t they?” she said eventually, sighing. “My mother broke my heart slowly, too, although in a different way.” She gave me a kind, sad look. “Life comes with its share of grief.”

“I don’t want it,” I said quietly, panic rising at the thought of these feelings lasting forever.

“Of course you do. If you want the good, you’ve got to take the bad.”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t. I don’t want good or bad. I just want simple and ordinary. Boring.”

Marly rolled her eyes again, reminding me even more strongly of Lainey. And of Flo. It was that preteen eye roll. “Even boring has pain attached to it,” she told me. “No one gets away without hurting.”

“But how do you survive it?” I wailed. “How did you cope, losing your mom and Amber and Freddie?”

She frowned at me.

“Life’s just misery.” I burst into tears again. “And it just keeps hurting. I don’t want to lose people.” The thought of raising Flo only to lose her made me feel wild with pain. And the thought of her one day losing me and being alone in the world hurt even worse.

“But you don’t just lose them,” she told me, exasperated, tapping the photo album. “You get to have them too.”

I shook my head. “No. You get to borrow them. Look at your daughter. Look at Freddie. All that love and then all you end up with is a house filled with junk.”

“You’ve got everything backward.” She was frowning in earnest now.

But before she could say anything more, we were interrupted by a commotion in the hall and we felt a blast of cold air billow through the house.

“Zoe?” Jake burst in and all but hauled me off his grandmother’s couch and into his arms. “I’m so sorry, honey.” He pressed his cold lips to my forehead, then my cheeks and my lips, as though he were trying to kiss my tears away. “I should have told him not to call the police until I’d talked to you again.”

I closed my eyes and pressed my face to his chest. I didn’t remember the last time I’d been held so tight. It filled me with a golden warmth so strong I could barely breathe. “It doesn’t matter.” Nothing mattered now that he was here. It was like his arms kept the world at bay.

What was happening to my mother was my fault, not his. If his cousin hadn’t called the police, they still would have picked her up. Because of me.

“It does matter. You matter.” He pressed a fierce kiss to my lips.

“What matters is you didn’t take your boots off at the door,” Marly scolded him, pushing him off her rug. “Let the poor girl breathe, and get your wet feet off my floor.”

“I’m sorry I took so long to get here. The girls took forever to round up.” He shot Marly an irritated look as she separated us.

“You can kiss her to death later. For now, I want you to drive us somewhere.” Marly took me by the arm and pulled me with her toward the entryway.

“Drive somewhere? Where?” Jake was irritated as he followed after us.

“Hush up and come on.”

I realized where we were going as we drove past the sign. The Sea View Care Home was on a hill overlooking the sprawl of Camden and the harbor. It was still decorated for Christmas and colored lights twinkled through the falling snow.

“This isn’t a good idea,” Jake protested. “She’s exhausted. The last thing she needs is this.”