Page 87 of Rescue

“What? You don’t want to talk about the tour?” I know my tone is nasty, know that Haylee doesn’t deserve to sit here and listen to me like this. But I can’t help it. “What should we talk about instead?” I gesture down at the scrapbook. “Looks like you know all about how we’ve been, huh? So what about you? How have you been, Mom? Been keeping busy?”

She swallows, straightening her shoulders, like she’s walking into battle. “I have been, yes. Giverny is a very nice little town and close enough to Paris for an afternoon trip once in a while.”

“And what do you do here, in this nice little town?”

If my tone is affecting her, she doesn’t show it. “I’m an artist.” She gestures at the wall next to the fireplace. “I’ve been selling my paintings for several years now. My garden sculptures bring in more money, but it’s the painting that I really enjoy.” Those wire and glass sculptures outside. She made those. And the painting on the wall—maybe all of them? I squint at the one near the fireplace. A swirling sea of blue and green, a bright, oversized sun above casting light onto the waves. I try to imagine the woman I knew painting that, painting anything, and I can’t. Her life now has no connection to the life we had then. No connection to who she used to be. No connection to us.

Except for this book. When I don’t reply, Haylee takes a deep breath. “Lennon and I saw a lot of beautiful art in Paris,” she says, clearly trying to keep things civil.

My mother’s face brightens. “Did you go to the Louvre? What was your favorite?”

“Uh, no, not the Louvre. We spent a lot of time at Musee d’Orsay.”

I can see Paige’s face so clearly in my head, looking at me in the van outside the museum. Telling me that she chose it specifically for me. That it reminded her of me. Because Paige knew me.Your heart is, Paige told me when I asked her about beauty and light.

After my accident this summer, I refused to talk to anyone. Once Levi and my father dropped the bombshell of what had been happening with me, my brothers freaked out. There was so much yelling that night. Cash had broken things. Punches had been thrown. When the doctors finally kicked them out of the room, I refused to let any of them back in for days. Not my father, not the boys, not Levi. I couldn’t face them, not after what I had done. In the end, it was Daisy who finally forced her way in to see me. She sat next to my bed for three hours and talked to me about everything that had happened. Talked to me about her suicide attempt two years earlier and what her recovery had been like. Told me how it felt in her head and her heart back then, how hopeless and broken and worthless she had felt. And then she held my hand and told me that it could get better, just like it had for her.

I can’t look at my mother anymore. I can’t think about how Daisy and Paige know me better than she does. How they were with me on the worst day of my life. Or how Haylee was the one with me for the happiest moments. And my mother wasn’t around for any of them.

I stare down at the book in my lap, idly flipping through the pages. Toward the back there’s a magazine clipping, an article from a gossip magazine. It’s Daisy and Daltrey walking into a restaurant back in Nashville, before the tour. He has his hand on her back, opening the door for her. It was still summer then, and she’s wearing a tank top, the material stretching across her slightly swollen stomach.A baby makes three?questioned the headline. On that page my mom had used a paperclip to attach another picture. An old Polaroid of four little boys sitting on a couch. The older two looked a lot more similar back then than they do now, the color of their hair the only really distinguishing feature. The third is barely a toddler, looking up at his older brothers and laughing. A baby is laid across the oldest one’s lap, and none of them seem to know what to do with him.

He used to cry all the time, I think, bringing the tip of one finger to Daltrey’s tiny face. That is the first thing I remember about him. That he would cry. And Reed and Cash used to sing songs at the top of their lungs to cover the sound, to make me laugh.

I go to the very front of the scrapbook and turn the pages with shaking fingers, looking at every single one, moving faster and faster until I get back to the end. The shot of us with Daltrey the day he came home from the hospital is the only real photograph.

“Lennon?” Haylee asks, and I look up, realizing they’ve both stopped talking to watch me. I toss the book onto the table in front of me, knocking over one of the empty tea cups.

“One photo,” I say, unable to stop my voice from shaking. “One photo of us.”

Her face crumples. “I didn’t have the chance to take more.”

One photo from the day Daltrey came home and then not another reminder of us until we became famous. And all those years in between—moving, starting over, birthdays, crushes, learning to play music, all those shitty gigs we played as teenagers, all those heartbreaks—nothing.

Suddenly I want to turn the table over, want to rip the paintings from the wall, to destroy this sunny, happy little room filled with her art and her colors. I understand, for the first time, why Cash likes breaking things so much when he’s upset. I want to breakeverything.

“This was a mistake,” I say, standing. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

“I’m glad you came,” my mother says, crossing to me, her face desperate. “I’m so glad you came. Please, let’s talk—”

“What’s there to talk about?” I cry, feeling savage satisfaction when she flinches. “You don’t know me, and I don’t want to know you.”

“Of course I know you, Lennon—”

“Shut up!” I scream, turning to grab the book and throwing it to the ground at her feet. “A lot happened between that picture and the start of the first damn tour.”

“I understand that.”

“I don’t think you do! I don’t think you could have any idea what it was like for us after you left.”

She flinches. “I can’t ask you to forgive me, Lennon. I don’t deserve to be forgiven. But I am sorry. I’m so very sorry.”

I hate myself for the tears in my eyes, hate myself for wishing she would touch me, that she might put her arms around me. “Then why didn’t you come back?” My voice cracks, and I sound fifteen years younger. Like a little kid, left behind, wishing his mom would come home. “You had years to change your mind, to be sorry. Why couldn’t you come back?”

It isn’t until she wipes her eyes that I realize tears are streaming down her face. “Because you all deserved so much better than me. Icouldn’tcome back.”

“That’s bullshit. It’s an excuse.”

“No, Lennon, it’s the truth.” She reaches for my arm, and the yearning I feel for her touch is so strong it horrifies me. I jerk away from her. “I couldn’t come back.”