Memories in the Drift: A Novel by Melissa Payne

Author:Melissa Payne [Payne, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781542004725
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2020-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Saturday, February 2

I wake up screaming from a dream I can’t remember but that has left me in a cold sweat, and I kick the covers off, needing space, air, anything but this claustrophobic feeling that presses against me. Immediately, I see the whiteboard. Dad died of a heart attack on September 21. All that comes out is a broken whimper. I read the journal, which describes my seizure and includes the fact that Dad died of a heart attack. It takes a while for everything to sink in but eventually it does, and the pain ebbs. Today is Saturday, February 2, and I’ve been waking up the exact same way for four months now.

An ache unfolds across my skull, and I rise unsteadily to my feet. It’s past nine in the morning—late for me to be starting my day but it doesn’t matter. Dad is dead. I didn’t have to read it because I feel the loss of him in the darkness that hovers at the edges of my vision, shrouds my heart.

There’s a knock at my door, and I hold my breath because for the briefest of moments I think it’s Dad. I read the line again. Dad died of a heart attack on September 21. Remind myself that he is forever gone and try to ignore the worn-out stickiness under my eyelids.

I pull on sweatpants and a T-shirt and make my way to my desk. I check the dry-erase calendar. Nothing planned for today or for yesterday. My hair clings, limp and greasy, to my face, and hunger pains suggest I haven’t eaten in a while. I move with a sluggish reluctance.

I look through the peephole and pull back at the face I see because I’m surprised to see her . . . but also I’m not. It’s written on my whiteboard that my mother lives here now.

“Mom,” I say when I open the door. She stands tall—older, her face more rounded, a healthy pallor to her skin. Sober. And here in Whittier. Yet a thick layer surrounds my heart, making it impossible to feel anything but suspicion and disappointment, and for the first time—or for all I know, the hundredth time—I wish I could feel something more for her. “I don’t want to see you.”

“I’m coming in, Claire.”

“Why?”

“You’ve been holed up in there for weeks now and it’s not healthy. I’m making you breakfast, and I’m going to cut your hair. You look like a shaggy dog.”

I touch my hair; the ends brush long against the sides of my neck. I feel like a shaggy dog, can smell a staleness that tells me I haven’t showered, and I don’t know if it’s that or the weakness that runs through me when I read Dad died of a heart attack on September 21, but I open the door all the way. “Okay,” I say.

She arches her eyebrows, surprised—I can guess—that I’m letting her in, and walks past me with a cloth bag slung over her shoulder and a pink-and-white polka-dot carrying case held in her arms.

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