Page 27 of Way Down Deep

I could say my grandma’s pool.

I could say Super Mario Kart.

I could say driving out near Sandia in the middle of the night to watch meteor showers.

I could say a hundred things, but looking back it’s hard not to say my mom. Maybe that’s because I lost her a couple years ago, or maybe it’s simply because she’s there, in just about every good memory I have. Even Mario Kart. (She was always Donkey Kong, which I thought was pretty badass for a girl.)

I had a happy enough childhood. My parents were married, and they did a decent job. It was just me, no siblings, but they didn’t spoil me.

My dad and I were never super close. He’s not a bad guy, just one of those men who struggle to relate to kids. Even his own. He’s … odd. Even as a child I knew it. I worried when I was younger that I might be weird like him, like I could inherit it the way I had his eyes. Probably has everything to do with my old need to pass for cool.

But we did have good times. He’s an astronomy nerd, so he’s the one who wanted to drive out to the mountains at one in the morning on a school night to see the meteors or a lunar eclipse or whatever planet was orbiting extra close to the Earth. I was mostly in it for the hot chocolate and some bank shot facsimile of his attention, but I liked it okay, too.

It always felt like his telescopes were way more interesting to him than me, but he didn’t land me in therapy or anything. And I can still identify a fuckload of constellations, which has got to be a dying art.

Since my mom died, he and I almost never talk, if only because we got lazy, relying on her to pass the phone and spur our few yearly conversations. I call on his birthday and Father’s Day, but to be honest, I’m always a little relieved if it goes to voicemail and I can just leave a message.

It’s embarrassing how little we have to say to each other. Sometimes I wonder if he maybe has Asperger’s. It would make me feel better to find out he’s awkward with me because of that and not because there’s something inherently broken about us as a unit.

But my mom was amazing. I’d say my best childhood memory was the day I woke up and she told me I was sick.

She just announced I was “sick” and that I didn’t have to go to school, and that we could do anything I wanted for the entire day.

I was really young, so it probably bleeds over into other memories, but I know for sure I asked for water balloons. There’s nothing as good as pelting your mom with a water balloon. And I know we went to McDonald’s and she let me order off the grown-up menu, and I got the meal with two cheeseburgers.

That was the day I saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in the theater, even though she had to know it was way too scary for a seven-year-old. My friends were all so jealous. It was righteous, as we said in those days.

Looking back, I wonder if that happened just after she got sick for the first time. It would have been the same year, I think. She always got a little impulsive and sort of … aggressively fun when there was a recurrence. Maybe my sick day was actually her sick day.

I wish she was here, so so badly. Alive, of course, but also here, with me. I wish the boy could meet her. I wish she’d be here five years from now, when he’s seven, to inform him he’s sick and take him out to some righteously age-inappropriate matinee in the middle of a school day.

That’s probably my biggest wish. What’s yours, stranger?

Talk again once the boy’s asleep. I’ve got a penne bake to assemble and a toddler to bathe and bedtime songs to sing to the world’s least enthusiastic audience.

6.55pm

I feel terrible for not wanting to talk about it a lot—of not knowing how to talk about myself a lot—because I love hearing your details so much. I just want to go over all of them and ask you what this one felt like and what happened after that. But it doesn’t seem fair when I only offer shards in return.

So I’m going to try. Maybe start with Mario Kart.

Because oh I love love loved it too. I was only friends with a girl in my year so I could play it. And I was good at it. I could nail anyone with a green shell or a banana—and I was never ever sorry. In fact, it was the one thing that I didn’t care about hurting feelings over.

Feel my blue shell of death you turd licker was a common refrain of mine, for those afternoons at Lindy Potter’s house.

Man, I lived for those afternoons.

I would have probably lived for afternoons at your house, too. Playing games and eating burgers and water balloon fights. Even the stargazing sounds amazing—all of it like all of my daydreaming about being a kid in some warm American suburb. Back then I devoured films and books about ballparks and bubblegum and picket fences. I was Ramona Quimby and Stacey from the Baby-Sitters Club.

Hell, I was the murdered girl in a Point Horror novel over being myself. Being dead there seemed infinitely better than being alive where I ended up.

Though of course I know none of that’s really true. I totally get that it was just a fantasy, and the reality isn’t any different. Or at least the pain isn’t any different when something terrible happens. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have had those things with your Mom and then lose her. Or to be so close to something like a great relationship with your Dad, and then so far.

I don’t know if I would want it, knowing that it could be so easily taken away.

I’m so sorry you had to go through it.

Can that be my wish, to wish you hadn’t?