His comment, after their amazing oregano sex, about Josie meeting his mom, made her gut seize up and her lungs freeze. He was so normal. His mom was a clinical psychologist superwoman who had a baby as a teenager and raised him to be a doctor. They were normal people, not like her family. No dead father, no mom who tried to f**k the band director at her college graduation. And the band director wasn’t the only faculty member her mom had come on to.
Marlene’s insatiable needs were legendary. Of all the parts of the brain to be injured and never recover, the worst was the sexual filter. It just…broke. Josie flashed back to the night before, with Alex, and how it felt to take risks. Not the outdoor sex, strangely.
The very internal risks she took with him. Wanted to take with him.
Wanted to take for him.
She’d been ignoring Alex, leaving his text messages unanswered, and the two voicemails hung out on her phone like dark, wet clouds waiting to unload their burdens. The tension that came from not replying to him and her own internal struggle to figure out what the hell to do about her fear, about her sense that this was going too fast and that she couldn’t give Alex what he really wanted, had made her grouchy and confused.
Tears welled up, threatening to make her voice break and to rack her body with sobs. This was all too much. Too many feelings. All these layers of integrating what had happened when she was eleven, of growing up with an irrevocably changed mother, of fleeing her childhood home and coming to Boston to hit “reboot,” to redo life living under a shell of normalcy.
Alex threatened that because he was normal. Accepting. Loving? Could she dare use that word? And if so, was it a weapon or a talisman?
He lived in an emotional reality she couldn’t fathom. What was it like to be raised by a mother who loved you so much and who struggled to reach her fullest potential—and to instill that in her child? Josie had gone to college in spite of Marlene. Not because of her. How many nights had she endured the grousing about wasted tuition money (which Josie had earned and paid for herself) and wasted gas in the car (which Josie had paid for) and how she’d never succeed?
Getting away had been so hard.
And yet she really hadn’t escaped anything, had she? Marlene was all-pervasive, affecting Darla’s travel here, influencing what her extended family felt they could and couldn’t do, and infiltrating Josie’s finances. And worse—living inside Josie, the voice of doubt and self-criticism and ragged pessimism.
Why should Alex accept her as she was? Who was Josie, really? Just a person who ran away from something bad, but who didn’t have an inner core. She was defined by what she wouldn’t be—couldn’t let herself be—but other than that?
How do you build a world with someone when you don’t know what you are? How do you offer something to someone when you spend your life being not that? For the past decade she’d been so focused on the counterdependence of making sure she wasn’t Marlene that it hadn’t occurred to her that maybe she needed to zero in on what she was.
That gaping hole inside her couldn’t be filled with Alex. It wasn’t fair. He didn’t have a hole like that, and she certainly couldn’t ask him to fall into hers just because she was so damaged and incomplete.
Better to hide it.
Because letting him in meant he could plummet through the endless abyss.
And right now, she knew exactly what that felt like, and wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Not even Marlene.
Meeting his mom for lunch had seemed like a great idea at the time when she’d offered it but now, with three days of complete silence from Josie, Alex was dreading the event. Meribeth Derjian was a force of nature. Pregnant at seventeen and rotund as she walked across the stage to accept her high school diploma, she had juggled single parenthood, college, and later, a master’s and a Ph.D program throughout Alex’s childhood.
She looked like Alex’s older sister and even now, at forty-six, just eighteen years older than her son, most people assumed that she was a sibling and not a mother. The way that she treated him, however, was purely maternal. Her drive and good-natured calmness had infused in Alex an amalgam of her, his educational role models, and his grandfather.
Blessed with the same chocolate brown eyes and dark hair as Ed in his youth, Meribeth had inherited his grandmother’s tininess. She looked like the average man could pick her up and snap her in two. At just over five feet tall, she was even smaller than Josie. Alex’s height came from his biological father, whom he’d never met. Meribeth remained tight-lipped about him, though over the years as she’d moved into clinical psychology she’d shared more. Alex was the product of Meribeth’s short-lived high school romance with a Harvard exchange student from Finland; he assumed that was where he got his height.
What his mom lacked in height and girth, however, she made up for in spirit. Never needing to know exactly when she was arriving, he could sense a change in the energy of the atmosphere in any social setting and know instantly that his mother was present. Today was no different.
As he sat in the Ethiopian restaurant in Cambridge, drinking water and sipping clove-flavored espresso, the sound of the door’s bells had fooled him once or twice as other diners entered, and then boom. Like a genie in a puff of smoke, there was his mother.
The giant, tight hugs, the kisses on cheeks and the assurances that he looked ragged and exhausted and that she would start to call the chief—she just said chief and never really indicated who she meant—to berate him for tiring out her poor child at the hospital were par for the course. Sitting down, she sighed deeply. Dressed in a light and airy peach combination of floating fabric and tight cotton knit, he didn’t know quite what to make of her. The necklace around her throat was a series of chunky gemstones and twisted silver, her lips were painted a darker shade of peach from her clothes, and her eyes glowed when she narrowed them and stared at him intently. If he hadn’t already known she was clairvoyant, he certainly would have realized it today.
She’d always possessed the uncanny ability to look at him and know what he was thinking, and he’d learned to just let her. Years ago he’d tried to fool her, thinking about baseball, or the Watchmen, or Mentos and Diet Coke experiments on YouTube—but none of it had dissuaded her from figuring out what was really going on inside him emotionally. Perhaps it really was a mother’s intuition, but he suspected that she was part witch and that someday an invitation from Hogwarts would come for him.