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And I stand there. Frozen.
If you think someone is going to take her own life, don’t you try to stop her?
Don’t you call the cops? Don’t you break down walls to find her?
The station starts to fill again, slowly. A mother with her toddler. A man with groceries. Three hipsters in flannel with beards. The crowd starts gathering faster than I can clock them now.
I need to get on the next train to see my mother and leave Evelyn behind me.
I need to turn around and go save Evelyn from herself.
I see the two soft lights on the track that signal the train approaching. I hear the roar.
My mom can get to my place on her own.
Evelyn has never needed saving from anyone.
The train rolls into the station. The doors open. The crowds flow out. And it is only once the doors close that I realize I have stepped inside the train.
Evelyn trusts me with her story.
Evelyn trusts me with her death.
And in my heart, I believe it would be a betrayal to stop her.
No matter how I may feel about Evelyn, I know she is in her right mind. I know she is OK. I know she has the right to die as she lived, entirely on her own terms, leaving nothing to fate or to chance but instead holding the power of it all in her own hands.
I grab the cold metal pole in front of me. I sway with the speed of the car. I change trains. I get onto the AirTrain. It is only once I am standing at the arrivals gate and see my mother waving at me that I realize I have been nearly catatonic for an hour.
There is simply too much.
My father, David, the book, Evelyn.
And the moment my mother is close enough to touch, I put my arms around her and sink into her shoulders. I cry.
The tears that come out of me feel as if they were decades in the making. It feels as if some old version of me is leaking out, letting go, saying good-bye in the effort of making room for a new me. One that is stronger and somehow both more cynical about people and also more optimistic about my place in the world.
“Oh, honey,” my mom says, dropping her bag off her shoulder, letting it fall wherever it falls, paying no attention to the people who need to get around us. She holds me tightly, with both arms rubbing my back.
I feel no pressure to stop crying. I feel no need to explain myself. You don’t have to make yourself OK for a good mother; a good mother makes herself OK for you. And my mother has always been a good mother, a great mother.
When I am done, I pull away. I wipe my eyes. There are people passing us on the left and the right, businesswomen with briefcases, families with backpacks. Some of them stare. But I’m used to people staring at my mother and me. Even in the melting pot that is New York City, there are still many people who don’t expect a mother and daughter to look as we look.
“What is it, honey?” my mom asks.
“I don’t even know where to start,” I say.
She grabs my hand. “How about I forgo trying to prove to you that I understand the subway system and we hail a cab?”
I laugh and nod, drying the edges of my eyes.
By the time we are in the backseat of a stale taxi, clips of the morning news cycle repeating over and over on the console, I have gathered myself enough to breathe easily.
“So tell me,” she says. “What’s on your mind?”
Do I tell her what I know?
Do I tell her that the heartbreaking thing we’ve always believed—that my father died driving drunk—isn’t true? Am I going to exchange that transgression for another? That he was having an affair with a man when his life ended?
