Page 59 of The Getaway List
I turn my eyes to him, slowly setting the trash bag down. I had a feeling that cleaning might lull Tom into opening up a bit, but I didn’t expect him to say something this grim.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Tom gestures vaguely at the space in front of himself. “I just mean—she hardly ever wants to know what’s going on with me. And then suddenly she does, and she has all these questions about, like—my friends and my classes and what I’m up to in the city. And even when I tweak the truth to make it sound like I’m not a total loser, she just zones out again on me anyway.”
My heart feels a little bit more like it’s splintering with every word. That anyone as clever and kind and genuinely passionate as Tom could ever be made to feel boring. Especially from the one person who is supposed to know and love him best.
He lets out a breathy, self-conscious laugh and says, “Not that it matters. She doesn’t even remember half the things I tell her. I tried telling her about Mariella once and she’s called her ‘Gabriella’ for, like, a year.”
There are a lot of things I want to knock into Tom’s head right now about how this is anyone’s fault but his. But first I look him square in the eye and say, “Tom—does your mom not have any idea how much you’ve been struggling here?”
His eyes immediately skim the floor and I feel my stomach churn.
“I talked to her about it when we first got here. She tried to help, but she just sort of—started taking me everywhere with her. Like she could feel like she was doing something about it if we were in the same place.” He looks at me ruefully. “Surprise, surprise. She basically had no time for me then, too.”
I don’t even know where to start. I knew things weren’t great between Tom and Vanessa, but in my head it was just that she was too busy to notice Tom floundering. Not that she was actively part of it by making him feel like he wasn’t important enough to listen to in the first place.
“Have you talked to her about … all of this? Like not the part where you were struggling. But the part where she’s not listening to you at all?” It’s a struggle to keep my voice steady, the anger licking under my ribs. “Because shit, Tom. That’s fucked up.”
Tom’s eyes get glassy. “It feels like it’s a bit my fault, too. Like maybe if I were different—” He shakes his head, and the pain that streaks across his face stops the protest that’s about to fall out of my mouth. “Or if I were the same as I was before. Back in Virginia. She wasn’t like this back then. I’ve changed. You’ve seen it. You know.”
For someone so tall he looks so breakable in this moment that I’m almost afraid if I reach out to touch him he’ll splinter like glass. He looks more like his little-kid self than he ever has, not because he’s on the verge of tears, but because he’s on the verge of something worse—a soul-deep uncertainty. A basic human need to love and be loved in return.
I reach out and pull him into me. It’s not like our usual hugs, where we’re practically competing over how many bones we can crack. It’s soft and steady. I feel him let loose a shuddering breath against me, easing into it.
“Tom, you didn’t change,” I say into his ear. “You adapted. You had this whole new life thrown at you and you tried the best you could with the support you had, which apparently was pretty close to zero.” I press my hand into the back of his neck as if to press the words into his spine, to help him hold himself up again. “Your mom is the one who changed. Into someone I kind of want to scream at right now, to be honest.”
Tom laughs, but I don’t. There’s nothing funny about this. I’m so angry on his behalf that even as I hold him to me, the heat rising in my chest makes me feel like I’m about to breathe fire.
Tom lets me go and says with red-rimmed eyes, “We’re not doing so well on the mom front right now, are we?”
This giant chasm that exists between Tom and his mom makes whatever is going on between me and my mom look like a hairline fracture. I feel freshly upset with myself for putting off the conversation with her, because yes, it’s going to suck. It’s probably going to involve some tears and some yelling and plenty of things neither of us wants to hear. But I know there will never be a single moment of it, during or after, that I’ll have to question whether or not the things I say matter to her. Whether I matter to her.
My mom might have gone about things in the wrong way, but I’ve never had to question whether she did them out of love.
“Tom, my mom and I aren’t seeing eye to eye. Yours isn’t seeing anything at all.”
Tom tries to shrug this off, but it’s disjointed like a puppet. “Yeah. Well. It kind of snuck up on me. I just don’t want the same thing to happen with you and your mom. You two have always been super close.”
This is something Tom and I haven’t talked about much, even if it’s been one of the thickest threads that’s tied us together our whole lives: being kids who only ever had a mom and nothing else. Not just that, but being kids our moms actively chose on their own, without anyone else’s input. Tom because his mom used a sperm donor, and my mom because she chose to have me in a position where a lot of other people wouldn’t—something I’m only starting to understand the depth of now that I’m close to that age and know for a fact I wouldn’t decide it for myself.
“You don’t have to worry about us,” I say. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
Tom looks like he’s about to shrug again, but it stops before it can reach his shoulders. “I always worry about you,” he says. “That’s our deal.”
I take a small step toward him, only because we’re already so close that there isn’t much distance left to take.
“It is,” I say. “Which is why I really think you should let me clear out before your mom gets here. I’ll come to dinner or sightsee. But I think before you go you have to have a real talk about it. You said when she gets back she’s all hyperfocused on you—maybe that’ll make it sink in more.”
On the heels of that is another thought that’s only just occurring to me, one I didn’t know enough about the situation to form before. That maybe it isn’t New York Tom is trying to leave; maybe New York isn’t the problem at all.
It feels selfish to ask it because there’s no denying I’ve got my own stake in this, but it feels even more like it needs to be said. “Do you think maybe this has something to do with why you want to leave? Less New York and more this stuff with your mom?”
Tom hesitates for the slightest beat before shaking his head. Even then it doesn’t seem like he can commit to it, like the thought is weighing him down.
Neither of us says anything for a moment, and I feel more useless than I ever have—torn between what Tom probably needs a friend to say to him right now, and knowing that I might be saying it for the wrong reasons if I do. There’s no way to pretend that digging into this isn’t just another way of asking, Can’t you just stay here?
Tom twists his lip to the side and says, “I’ll talk to her. I will. But it’s really just everything, you know? I need a clean slate.”
