“I was in a car accident,” she said. “I was drunk. And Allison was in the car with me.”
My mouth dropped open. My mother kept talking.
“You had your seat belt on, but there were no car seats back then. When . . . when the car . . .” She gulped. “I drove into a telephone pole. You broke your arm.”
My body felt icy. “I don’t remember any of this,” I said, but something tickled at the back of my mind. A whining buzz, hands on my shoulder, a burning smell in the air, a man’s voice saying, “Hold still, and you’ll get a lolly when it’s done.”
My tongue felt thick as I tried to talk. “Did you get arrested?”
She shook her head. “Back then . . . back then it was different. But your father . . .” She buried her face in her hands. “He was so angry he took you away for a week.”
I didn’t remember that, either. “Where did we go?”
“Down the shore. It was the summertime. He must have rented a place, you know, that little cottage in Avalon where we’d go? It belonged to one of the partners at his firm. I never asked, I never knew for sure, but I think he went there. And when he came back, he told me . . . t-told me that if I ever hurt you again, if I ever did anything to put you in danger, that he’d leave me, and he would never come back. He would take you away and I’d never see either one of you again.”
Puzzle pieces clicked into place in my mind. Keys slid into locks. Doors opened, revealing a different world behind them. “So you stopped driving.”
She nodded.
“But you didn’t stop drinking.”
Her eyes welled up again. “I couldn’t,” she whispered. “I tried, so many times. I wanted to. For you. For your father. I wanted to be a good mother, and a good wife, but I . . .” She shook her head. I shut my eyes, remembering scenes from my girlhood. Being seven or eight years old, having a friend sleep over, and telling her to whisper when we got up the next morning. “My mom sleeps late.” But she wasn’t incapacitated. By ten o’clock most mornings, she was at the tennis court . . . and, if she sipped white wine and seltzer all afternoon, I never saw her sloppy, or tipsy, or heard her slur or saw her stumble.
“So you made sure Dad would never get mad at you again.” By acting like a little girl, a bubbleheaded teenager, I thought but did not say, as my mother nodded again.
“And you stayed away from me.”
She looked up, her eyes accusing. “You didn’t need me!”
“What?” I looked at Kirsten, hoping she’d jump in. “What little girl doesn’t need her mother?”
“You were so smart,” said my mom. Her voice was almost pleading. “You could do everything by yourself. You never wanted my help getting dressed, or picking out your clothes, or with your homework. You didn’t want me walking you to school.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I felt like you were ashamed of me. Like you knew what I’d done. How stupid and reckless I’d been. You didn’t want anything to do with me.”
I closed my eyes, trying to imagine my mother, my beautiful, distant mother, as an alcoholic, who’d kept this secret for more than thirty-five years. How circumscribed her life must have been. No car. No friends, not real ones, because who could she trust, and how could she talk honestly to anyone? No relationship with me, and a kind of desperate, clingy, please-don’t-leave-me marriage, in which other people—my dad, me—did everything because she didn’t trust herself to do anything. It explained so much.
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
She didn’t hesitate before shaking her head. “How could I have told you that I’d almost gotten you killed? How could you ever forgive me? But now . . .” She lifted her head, looking around. “If I’d known that you were at risk I would have said something. I would have warned you. But I never thought . . .” She shook her head again, and pressed her hands together. I saw that she was trembling, and that there was a fine mist of sweat at her temples, and above her upper lip. She must have wanted a drink so badly. I wondered what it had cost her, to get herself out of bed, and dressed, and all the way out to New Jersey, alone and sober. I wondered if she had a flask in the car, or if she’d tucked one of those airport-sized bottles into her purse, and if she was counting the minutes, the seconds, until she could slip away, into the bathroom or the backseat, to unscrew the lid with slick, shaking hands, to raise the bottle to her lips and find that relief.
“You weren’t like me. You were strong. You had it all figured out.”