Lola is Just Like Me

Chapter 13

The Thursday morning sunlight was bright, intense, and filled my room with an unsettling light. I shrugged into a loose, cheap hoodie and faded jeans (making sure to take my letter), pulled myself out of my room. None of the lights in the house were on, but my father’s shoes were tossed on top of each other on the mat next to the front door, and the smell of coffee was growing stale on the layers morning sunshine. It was well past time for the school bus, but that didn’t worry me. I came into the kitchen to find five or six bottles of over-the-counter drugs that had fallen out of the open cabinet and onto the floor and counter. I had to step over them to get to the cold cup of coffee on the counter. For some time, I just stared into it, thought about every facet of its perfume. It smelled, to me, like my father. I wrapped my fingers around the cold mug and took it to the table by the window. When I drank some, the bitter taste ran its way down my throat and sat like a lump of coal in the pit of my empty stomach. It made me shiver, but I didn’t care. I chased the unlikeable feeling down with the rest of the cup and let myself outside.

The grass was damp with the settled dew, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The fragments of my mother’s smile were still scattered on the lawn. I made it a slow business to gather them up and deposit them in the pocket opposite the letter. Such aimlessness taught me what it’s like to grieve. To grieve and remember it.

Having no aim in my head, my feet took to the roads that brought me to the only place where my friends were bound to be. I walked to the back row in the harsh morning light and lie on the grass above my little friend. The dew soaked through my thin jacket and through my t-shirt and chilled my skin, and the smell of freshly-turned dirt drifted in the morning air. I took Marie’s letter from my pocket and, without thinking twice on it, ripped the envelope open. The paper was lined and written on ink in a beautiful script. Just the look of the words was strikingly melancholy. The letter read:

“To my daughter Tylar,

I’m sorry I had to leave your father. I want you to know that it has nothing to do with you. I want what’s best for you, and I think you know that. Over the years, I have done my best to keep you safe and happy. I know you never liked me very much until maybe recently, but that’s okay. I know you might not think much of me, but I understand you and how you feel. And I want you to know that everything is going to be okay. Give your father some time, some space. He loves you more than anything in the entire world, and I know you love him. You will make a good family if you try to understand him.

Someday, you will need to learn the truth. I hope I can show it to you soon, and you may not like it but that’s how it will be. I’m prepared to see you get angry with me. I just know that you will thank me later. And even if you don’t, remember that I cared for you. I may have made some mistakes, but I try to put that behind me. I hope you can forgive me soon. I probably won’t be there to apologize.

One more thing: I know you don’t like that Trevor boy, but I’d like it if you tried not to give him such a hard time. He has nothing against you and probably likes you, so he’ll never fight back. It would be easier on your dad, too, if you tried to tolerate people just a little bit. If you give them a chance, sometimes you’ll find that there is more than one good person out there.

Love you always,

Marie"

The note did nothing to ease my burden or move me at all. None of its words felt genuine or characteristic of my situation. I folded it again along its creases and slipped it back into the envelope. At some point in the night, the old loathing of her expensive nature had crept back into my bones and nestled there. Perhaps it did so lighten my regrets upon walking away.

After a time (who knows how long, I had no use for minutes or hours or days), I heard someone speaking, imagined my name being whispered. I turned over in the damp grass and looked down the row of space between headstones in the children’s section. There was no one in either direction and for some ways past my feet. But in one of the rows farther that way, under a willow tree, was a new grave and a boy of about my age sitting on the dark mound of dirt. I caught his gaze; he had been looking at me before I noticed him. It took me only a moment to recognize him. My defenses were too strong to allow for the predictable embarrassment to tumble through. Loneliness caught me in a lasso and pulled me to the willow tree. Loneliness is such a strange, potent thing.

“Hey,” Trevor said. I sat down next to his mound of dirt, the ghost of the notion that maybe he was dead, too, creeping up on me. But he was there, real. The only real thing for miles above ground. I reached out and touched his face for a moment.

“Your grandmother died, didn’t she?” I asked without tact. Trevor nodded, suspended in confusion. “Sorry.” I lay down on sparse grass and looked through the mass of the willow at the way the sun filtered through the skulking morning light. It was so dreamlike; it could bury the most alert man in a trance. I heard the scuffling on the mound that was Trevor lying down and looked over into his eyes. The feeling of treading over spider web fractures in a thin coat of ice had completely melted away. Something in his eyes gave way for the floodgates to open on a rush of old feelings, tearing open the dusty boxes in the locked-away attic. Disgust was perhaps the only emotion lost in the mix, stolen and passed through my lips and into his. At that moment, it was immediately apparent to me that what had been my destination all along should have been my means of transportation. The truth became my end when it should have been my means. Using it as I had, I was left without a goal, no specifications. But somewhere in the dirt and the apologetic gestures and the smell of overturned grass I found the sense that perhaps it wasn’t completely oppressive. I didn’t have to have a destination to make a journey.

When Trevor saw my bag, he asked me where I was going. I told him, “I’ll go wherever I have to.”

“Will you go home?”

“Only if I must.” And my eyes didn’t wander on the tears in his eyes or furrow in his brow. They caught instead on the clouds, the trees, the colors of things that had been, for me, years in the fog.

“Then I won’t go home, either,” Trevor said. He linked his hand with mine, and I held no desire to pull away. In a foolish way, I felt in love. In love with the trees, in love with the sky, in love with Oregon, myself, my past and future, and with the boy who lay beside me. I was no longer suspended in the thick fluid I had lived in for years. I could hold onto a sensation, a feeling in my heart that there was something waiting for me outside my old stubbornness. Had I stayed in that moment forever, I could never have been sure whether or not there was more for me, more beyond Lola and my mother and father. But there was one triumph I had made out of my journey through circumstance: I could ask, seek, and wonder. The horizon of my imagination held my limitations, and I then made it my lifelong goal to set my destinations beyond that point. So long as I held that in my heart, the journey would be good, regardless of whom I met or laid to rest. Therein, I found, was my drive.