Page 93 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

PART FIVE

35

CHLOE

I was having a hard time deciding whether the book I was reading was more of a comedy or a tragedy. At college, I once took a Shakespeare class where the professor posited that old William’s best works were the ones where he fused the two. Real talent, she’d said, was the ability to showcase the light in darkness and the darkness in the light.

I wasn’t sure how true any of that was, since I’d had to drop the class halfway through, but I felt pretty sure that when it came to making me want to both laugh and cry, Shakespeare had nothing on a young Catherine Martin.

“What’s so funny?” my mother asked as she walked into the living room where I sat with my legs tucked under me and the copy ofWuthering Heightsopen in my lap. “I could hear you chuckling to yourself from outside.”

I smiled faintly at her. I had yet to get used to her walking in and out of the front door as if she, well, owned the place, but I was getting better at not showing my strain.

“I’m reading one of the books Jasper gave me yesterday,” I said as I held it up. “Catherine wrote all kinds of notes in it for him back inthe sixties. Look—right here, it’s the part where Catherine is about to die. ‘“She’s fainted or dead,” I thought, “so much the better. Far better that she should be dead, than lingering a burden and a misery-maker to all around her.”’”

My mom wrinkled her nose in a way that looked exactly like Theo puzzling over a difficultMinecraftbuild. “That doesn’t sound very funny to me. You forget that I’ve read that book. I remember how it ends.”

“It’s not supposed to be funny,” I explained. “But in the margins, Catherine wrote,‘You already know how I feel about the heroine-must-die-to-save-the-hero trope, but there’s truth in this. What’s the point of living if all you’re going to do is make everyone around you miserable? What are we put on this earth for if not to make life better for those we leave behind?’”

My mom’s frown only deepened. She crossed her arms and leaned against the doorway in a gesture I’d almost forgotten about. She always used to look at me exactly like that whenever she’d come in to find me reading under the covers long after bedtime. “That’s not very funny, either.”

I sighed and closed the book. “I know, but she was literally staging her own death while she wrote it. She was killing off the heroine—herself—in order to save the hero—Jasper. But instead of going to her grave, she went off and lived the kind of fabulous life most of us only dream of. It might not beha-hafunny, but there’s irony in there for sure.”

I paused, studying my mother for a long moment. When she’d first arrived at the house, with Todd behind her holding enough suitcases for an around-the-world cruise, she’d looked as though she’d stepped onto the front porch straight from the catwalk. Her hair had been salon-straightened, her nails filed to delicious red points, her heels so tall that she towered over me. Now, a little over a week into her stay, and she looked…different. Everything that had been bright and shiny about her had dulled to a faded, weary gray.

“She was only a few years older than Trixie when she wrote this,” I added, since I had to say something. One of us needed to move this conversation along, and as usual, that someone was going to be me. “That’s the thing that gets me the most about their whole situation. They were little more than kids at the time, but they carried the weight of the whole world on their shoulders.”

“Don’t,” my mom said suddenly. She flung up a hand as if to keep any further discussion at bay.

I blinked up at her, startled by the vehemence of her tone. “I’m sorry. Is it tedious for me to go on and on about them? I’ve been a little obsessed lately, I’ll admit, but—”

“Chloe. Please.”

“I’ll stop,” I promised, trying not to show how much her words stung. While it was true that I didn’t have very many conversational gambits outside books and the kids, I liked to think that I wasn’t acompletebore. In fact, for a little while there, before I’d learned that Zach was only using me as a way to get close to his grandfather, I even thought I’d had a little dazzle.

I set the book aside and fixed my attention on my mom instead. “What’s up?” I asked. Suddenly realizing that the house was awfully quiet for a change, I added, “And where is everyone? I know Theo and Trixie are at school, but—”

“Noodle and the dog are at that man’s house. Next door.” My mom took a step into the room, changed her mind, and stepped back out again. “And I sent Todd to pick up a few groceries. Just some staples and things. I’d like to leave the house well stocked when we go.”

I shared none of my mom’s hesitance. I was on my feet and across the room in flash. “Wait. You’re leaving? Already? Before Noodle’s even out of his walking cast?”

She winced in a way that felt like a slap across the face—though whether it was her face that was being slapped or mine, I couldn’t say.

“This isn’t easy for me,” she said, her voice small and growing smaller by the second. “None of it—coming home again after all these years, seeing how grown up everyone is, how much they hate me…”

I knew it was my job to protest, to reassure her that Theo and Trixie were only struggling with their emotions and hormones and that all would settle down eventually, but I couldn’t. Not only would it be a lie, but I wasn’t so sure she deserved to hear it.

Less than two weeks. That’s how long she lasted this time.

“Please tell me you’re at least going to stick around long enough to say goodbye,” I said, feeling the ice coursing from my veins into my voice. “They survived it once, but I don’t think you realize how close of a call it was. It took memonthsto go through the whole guardianship process and get them back under this roof. In fact, I’m still paying off the legal fees.”

“I’ll have Todd write you a check to cover them,” she said with a complete disregard for the point. “And I’m going to send money home this time—every month, I promise.”

I closed my eyes, hoping that by cutting off the sight of her, I might cut off all the rest: how tired and sad she looked, how drained by all the memories this home carried. I also wanted to cut off my understanding.

Because Ididunderstand. That was the thing that annoyed me the most. When my mom stood inside these four walls, she didn’t see how full of memories and life this house was. She didn’t notice the sticky notes set up around the computer monitor where Theo liked to remind himself of all he had planned for hisMinecraftkingdom: creeper cages, a slaughterhouse for the cows, underground lava tubes in the shape of a pentagram. She also didn’t see the stack of books that Trixie kept meticulously piled next to her bed: all of them biographies of famous legal minds, and all of them so far above her reading level that it took her months to get through them. Noodle she still treated like a little boy afraid of his own shadow instead of a young man who was finally coming into himself—soft and sweet and, yes, a little bit strange.

And me, well. Sometimes I thought she didn’t see me at all. If she did, she’d have never walked out on these kids without first giving me a heads-up. She had to have known that I’d do anything for them—that I would continue doing everything for as long as they needed me.