Briana said it was karma. She also said Neil didn’t seem to be too upset about it, so at least there was that.
Alexis came in holding a coffee. “Are you two going to be home for dinner?” she asked. “Daniel wants to know how many veggie burgers to grill later.”
“I’m going to the VFW with Doug,” Maddy said.
“So you won’t be home tonight.” I gave her a wry smile.
“No, I won’t be home,” she said. “I’m going to let that tall drink of water slam me like a door.”
Alexis sat in front of her charting computer. “I could have gone my entire life without that visual.”
I was laughing when Doug popped his head in the room. “Hey, babe, ready for lunch?”
Maddy skipped over to him and stood on her toes to kiss him. She was a full foot and a half shorter than him. He wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her back a little too enthusiastically, and Alexis and I shared an amused look.
Maddy broke away and grinned up at her boyfriend. “Let me run to the bathroom real quick.”
Doug watched her go as I collected my purse. “So, when are you two moving in together?”
“I keep asking her,” Doug said. “She tells me to shut up.”
Alexis snorted.
“That woman scares the absolute shit out of me,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t get enough of her.”
“I think the feeling is mutual,” I said. “She’s only scary when she cares.”
Alexis was laughing.
A minute later Maddy came back down the hall and Doug took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders before they walked out.
I’d never seen Maddy like this for a guy. And I realized now that was partially my fault.
It wasn’t easy to have a relationship when you moved every few months. And I knew now that she’d done that for me more than for the adventure.
We’d had a lot of long talks since we’d come here.
She told me how much she’d worried about me over the years. How she had to stay with me because she knew if she let me go out on my own, I’d never come back.
She was right. I would have become Amber.
Only unlike Amber, self-preservation built me to be independent. So I never would have called for help or money. I just wouldn’t have called at all.
I would have distanced myself from her until I was so small there was nothing left of me and her. She knew this. And she loved me enough to keep it from happening.
I used to never be able to say I love you. It was something I was working on in therapy. To say it meant to give someone power over me and the ability to hurt me.
But I could say, with my whole heart, that I loved Maddy. She was one of the great loves of my life. And the thought that I would have given that up because of what Amber made me was a cautionary tale that I would never let myself forget.
I hoped Maddy moved in with Doug when she was ready—that she knew I was ready to have a normal life now and it was okay to let me go a little because I wouldn’t disappear when she did. I would never get that small again. I might fall back on old coping mechanisms from time to time. I would always have to work on it. The urge to isolate would always pop up when I got scared or stressed or hurt by someone. But I had the skills now and I knew what to do when I felt myself shrinking.
I’d done three months of CBT and I had a talk therapist I really liked who specialized in trauma. She had me do a once-a-week drive down to Rochester to meet her for EMDR treatments for my complex PTSD—another thing I hadn’t known I’d been dealing with but made sense to me once I was diagnosed. I’d talked to Doug, who also dealt with it, and he’d said EMDR really helped him. So I’d tried it and it did help, tremendously. A few weeks into therapy I asked Daniel to put my luggage in the attic. I didn’t want it under the bed ever again.
I felt stable for the first time in my life. Steady. Like I could stay somewhere, be someone who people got to know and depend on. I was capable of that now. It didn’t scare me.
Well, it did. A little. But I was still ready for it. And that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t come to Wakan. Maddy had been right about that, like she was right about most things.
It was weird, but I’d gotten to know this place through my mother in little flashes my whole life. There had always been tiny pieces of Wakan in Amber. And it made sense. Daniel and Amber had been raised by the same people. I learned why Mom was so crafty. Grandpa had been a woodworker like Daniel, and Grandma was a seamstress. The whole family gardened, something Mom passed on to me. The little sayings she had, Daniel would say too. All of the good parts of Mom that I’d lost when I let her go weren’t totally gone. A lot of the best of her was here. Wakan was an untarnished version of her. And I was glad Daniel bought Grant House. Mom would have ruined it. She wouldn’t have cared what happened to it, the same way she didn’t care what happened to me.
There were a few times over the last six months that my phone rang from a number I didn’t know. For the first time in my life, I let it go to voicemail.
I was at peace with my decision to have no contact with my mom. I felt free in a way. I no longer worried where she was, or if she was okay. She wasn’t my burden anymore and I hadn’t even realized how heavy she’d been for me to carry because I’d done it for so long. I finally set her down. And that started with me forgiving her.
I chose to believe that she didn’t want to be the villain in my life—even if she was. I didn’t lose my beautiful empathy, as Maddy called it once. I still believed what I always had, that people are complex and nothing is black and white. I believed that now more than ever.
I knew from talking to my cousins and my aunts and my brother that Amber had shown warning signs of who she would become since she was a teenager. Manic and depressive episodes, acting out, drinking at thirteen, probably to self-medicate whatever she was dealing with. Maybe they hadn’t known how to help her. No internet back then, and therapy was stigmatized. Maybe in this little town with no mental health services, they legitimately couldn’t help her. Her mental state made her vulnerable. More prone to risky behavior and trauma inflicted because of it.
Cracks.
A baby at fifteen that she had to give up.
Cracks.
Tumultuous relationships with her parents and siblings—cracks. One leading to the next and she never learned to fill them. She just tried to outrun them, and Maddy was right. You can’t outrun yourself.
Being here, I understood her now, probably better than I ever had. And at the end, I just felt sorry for her.
Alexis was still at the computer when I grabbed my jacket. “You’re cutting out early, right?” Alexis said, looking at her watch.
