The Apple Falls Far, Rippling Out on the Water

Day 806

(2 years, 2 months, 15 days)

I stare at the top email entries in my junk folder.

A sharp breath slices into my chest as if hands claw around my throat. Like a balloon artist pinching the latex before tying off a knot, the air stagnates in my lungs. Even though I know what I’m looking for won’t be there with the litany of unread mail, I can’t let the breath go.

Despite time passing from days into months into years, I can’t keep this unbroken habit from seizing my fingers every time I open the Outlook app. No amount of time changes the result.

Maybe I’m crazy, like actually crazy, and I just don’t know it yet.

The thought passes quickly. I barely pay attention to the self-loathing bullets my mind shoots through me anymore.

But when I sigh, the anticipation finally releasing me, the melodic strings of The Sixth Station ringing from my phone break the relative quiet of the room. Sitting with my laptop on a make-shift pillow-desk, I carefully slide the impromptu workstation aside before accepting the call.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Hey,” my partner says. His calming voice chisels away the stiffness in my shoulders, even though it translates poorly over the line. “I was just talking to Melanie.”

“Yeah,” I say, switching to speakerphone as I pull the laptop back in front of me. “She have anything else to say about the funding issues for the department?”

A derisive, tired laugh greets my ears, which tugs one corner of my mouth into a self-satisfied smirk.

“No,” he says, but it’s nearly a groan. “But… she had an update on your dad.”

My hands tremble over my keyboard.

“Yeah?”

Despite the nails slicing through my throat, the word comes out clear. Even that can’t fool Jamie though. The quiet static from the phone’s speakers is enough to tell me that much.

“He’ll be back to work in a few days,” he continues, his voice pitched lower, cautious as the fingers of a bomb squad technician.

“That’s good,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “Actually, Melanie was joking that he could definitely sue the school for his fall since there wasn’t a CAUTION sign out.”

“My dad would never do that.”

“I know,” he says, the tempo of his speech slowing once he realizes the bomb in my head, ready to explode, is just a dud. “That’s what I told her. It’s just not like him to do something like that.”

“Exactly.”

I stare at the wall ahead of me, my fingers stretching out the numbness left behind from hovering over my laptop.

Transposed over the egg-wash, plain-white wall, images flash like a brainwashing slideshow. Too many to focus on any single one, but at the center of them all is my father – from taking me on bug safaris as a child to helping me with science projects to my undergraduate program graduation to the days just after his triple bypass surgery. The whiplash of memories untethers me from my own skin.

“So,” Jamie says, pulling my attention back from the brink of overthinking. “I’ll be home soon. Just have to finish one thing, and then I’ll be on my way.”

Glancing at the time on my phone, I make a mental guess at when he’ll be home. The thought pulls my lips into a smile.

Day 957

(2 years, 7 months, 13 days)

It sucks having my birthday on a weekday.

I sigh with the thought when a giant fluffball with gradient gray fur pounces from the nearby couch onto my lap.

“Why hello, Shadow,” I say, smiling despite myself, and motorboat purrs instantly join the ambient sounds of the room.

I lean back into the loveseat.

Jamie’ll be back home after work, and we’ll celebrate then… but until then…

I eye the 50” TV mounted to the wall and decide to kill some time by watching a classic favorite from my collection – Teen Wolf.

As I watch, picking up from my favorite season, my hand absently glides over Shadow’s soft fur.

“Be your own anchor,” the voice says, echoing out from the TV speakers.

The character’s words bring heat behind my eyes and a chokehold around my throat. As a teenager, I watched the same scene dozens of times, soaking in the drama, the heartbreak, the multi-faceted love depicted on the show. The community built around a literal teenaged wolf-pack warmed unknown numbness somewhere deep in my chest at the time.

Now, as a newly 28-year-old woman, I watch the parents watching over their kids. And when Melissa McCall, mother of the titular teen wolf, Scott McCall, pulls her son off the edge of chaotic transformation, my cheek chills under the icy trail of tears.

I sniffle, adjusting my position on the couch, moving my tingling limbs through the awkwardness settling into every muscle and tendon. But only Shadow is there to witness such anxiety. And with the movement, she straightens with a disgruntled meow.

“Sorry, baby,” I say, my voice as hoarse as a frog’s croak.

She gives me a look of indignation but jumps back up to lay beside me on the armrest.

“I love you too.” When she glances at me, she slow-blinks twice before curling around herself and shutting her eyes for a nap.

The chime from my phone pulls my gaze from the peaceful cat, alerting me to a new notification. Grabbing it from the coffee table, I check the lock screen.

My fingers freeze as I process what the notification says.

With shaking breaths and shakier hands, I open my voice messenger app. Navigating through the complicated options, I find the voice mail.

The number is as familiar to me as the shape of my hands despite the passing years since I’ve seen it.

I consider waiting to hear it. Waiting for Jamie who can ground me through this inevitable lightning storm. But it’s my birthday, and I know that if I wait, curiosity will scrape me away until my skin is torn and ragged and my bones are peaking through the raw, shredded mess.

So, I click the play button.

“H-hi… Alinna. Um. I just wanted to say… Happy Birthday, sweetheart. You kn-know that I – uh – I love you. I love you so much. I would do anything for you. Anything. So, uh – please, please give me a call. I’m your mother, and I love you. And I want to wish my daughter a happy birthday. Okay, that’s all. I love you.”

My chest tingles.

My body aches.

Everything swims around my phone – at the very center of what I can see.

I’m not sure if I’m thinking straight, but I notice the whites of my knuckles as they fasten like an iron grip to the tiny device.

With wavering breaths, I try to pull in the oxygen I need to stave off the vasovagal response that brings a cloudy haze around my vision. I let my head fall back to the couch cushion and close my eyes.

The words of the message are gone now, erased from my head almost as soon as they were said, but the impression they left opens wounds I thought were long past scarred.

Happy Birthday.

My mother’s voice haunts my ears like a vengeance-seeking ghost.

Day 1,293

(3 years, 6 months, 16 days)

Shadow scurries underfoot as Jamie and I pull shovels, trowels, gloves and other supplies from the closet by our back door. Peeking around a corner, she meows at me when our eyes meet.

“It’s okay, baby,” I coo at her. “Daddy and I are just gonna do some gardening outside.”

“That’s right you little chicken,” Jamie says, joining in with a smirk.

With big, round eyes that question our every movement, she sits and watches, her tail curling around her.

But time afflicts the garden whether we tend to it or not. So, turning away from her, we head for the door when those Sixth Station strings ring out from my phone.

“Just a sec,” I say to Jamie as I shift my gloves from one hand to the other. Balancing the shovel in my left hand as I add the gloves to its load, I reach for the phone in my back pocket with my free hand. “Oh. It’s my aunt.”

Jamie nods, reaching for the supplies I hold before I press the button to answer the call.

“Hi Aunt Cordelia,” I say while I pass the items to Jamie, mouthing a quick thank you before he turns for the door.

“Alinna!” she says. “My darling niece, how are you?”

“I’m doing alright.”

“How’s work been,” she asks, her voice as sweet as sun-ripened fruit even through the phone.

“It’s good,” I say, and I meander over to the couch. “We just started Spring Break… which means I’ve got a week to catch up on grading before we go back.”

She chuckles.

“How about you,” I ask, leaning back into the cushions.

“Well, actually,” she starts, and her tone shifts from honey to vinegar. “I ran into Regan recently and well…”

Uncle Regan?

I try recalling the last time I talked to him, but my thoughts clam up, a murky smoke clouding everything inside my head.

“Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah! No,” she says, but the words bleed with uncertainty. “Everything’s fine. It’s just I… I wasn’t thinking, and I probably said something I shouldn’t’ve.”

A gnawing sensation sets my stomach aching, creeping up from my gut.

“Did he say something about my mom,” I ask, my throat dry.

“Kind of,” she says, and I can almost hear her brows crinkling together in consternation. “No. He mentioned you, that your mom’s worried about you. They’re both worried about you.”

Right.

The biting sarcasm almost flies out my mouth, but I clamp my lips down to hold it back.

“I see,” I say instead.

“Well, I didn’t think about it really, until after the fact, but I think he was probably trying to get some info about you,” she says, and the rhythm of her words grow more erratic. “I was trying to calm things, but every time I tried, he’d just cut me off.”

I breathe, drawing in a long, slow breath just like my therapist taught me. I could guess where this was going, and my muscles were already stiffening with tension.

“’Alinna’s completely cut her mother off,’ he’d said. I tried to remind him that Jonna’s a little pushy… and she doesn’t give you space, but he wouldn’t hear it,” Aunt Cordelia continues.

“Yeah,” I say.

“So, he just got louder, finally just saying ‘We don’t even know if Alinna’s dead!’”

Unhinged laughter bounces off the walls, filling the small living room space around me. I don’t even realize it’s coming from me until Aunt Cordelia joins in with her own shaky laughter. Though hers are more relieved than mine, tinged with madness.

“I told him,” she says, “if something like that were to really happen, I was sure Jamie’s family would find a way to let your parents know.”

“I’m sure they would,” I say, still trying to stifle the giggles bubbling out.

“Anyway,” she says. “I was worried I might have given too much away. I realized I should’ve just not said anything at all.”

“Oh,” I say, searching for a way to assuage the guilt dripping out of her voice. “No. I mean… it’s fine, Aunt Cordelia. I know how he is, and what you said… it’s really not anything revealing.”

“Thanks hon,” she says. “But um – he said something else.”

My lips purse, clenching all the way through to my jaw as I swallow air that scrapes down straight into my lungs.

“What was that?”

“He mentioned worrying that you might regret not doing what you can now to repair things with your parents before… you know… your mom’s gone.”

I suck in another breath just to sigh it back out with a scoff.

“That assumes I haven’t already done everything I possibly could,” I say, the weight of every appeal, every bargain, every denial I ever had dragging through the breath that gives voice to my thoughts.

It all fell weightless on them.

Time-worn words whistle through my head like the high-pitched scraping of a dentist’s tools against teeth:

“I don’t remember that.” My mom’s response to a tearful recount of a haunting four-year-old’s memory. Her tone was oblivious, painfully so – more than if she had just acknowledged and dismissed it. At least then, the ghost of that trauma would feel warranted.

“What about forgiveness?” My father’s plea to the whole torrid account of their stifling, puppeteering strings threaded through my childhood.

“But we love you.” How many times had they said that? How many times had it been an excuse? How many times had I been expected to say it back? Or face the potter’s tears of my mother, shed to mold my actions to her whims.

To hold my ground, assert myself, make choices based on my own cultivated values… if they clashed with my mother’s expectations for her vision of the dutiful daughter, I would face the backlash from my father as he gazed upon her alligator tears with reverence.

All I wanted was acknowledgement in my adulthood, coming to terms with the effects of puppet strings I ripped from my own flesh… Acknowledgement that I was born not out of the pure love a parent should hold for their child, but that I was born to satisfy the needs of my mother.

My appeals died in their ears.

And I wasn’t a god who could revive them.

“I’ve done all I could,” I whisper to the phone as the memories swirl away, leaving behind a cold sweat at the back of my neck.

“I know you have, hon,” Aunt Cordelia says, and the tenderness in her voice pulls my lips into a weary, battle-scarred smile.

Seconds tick by and the conversation floats to airier topics as the back door clicks open. While Aunt Cordelia relays her own life updates, Jamie’s eyes meet mine when he passes the threshold into our home. I learn about my aunt’s new job lined up in Montanna for the summer as Jamie quietly puts away the gardening supplies before sitting beside me.

In only a moment, his fingers weave through my hair to cradle my head. With a gentle push, he pulls me into his arms as dry tears sting behind my eyes.

And with the warmth of his body holding mine, I listen and talk with my aunt until we both have to move on with our days.

Later, long after the phone call but not long after Jamie’s eyes have shut for the night, I open my computer and re-read the final communication I had with my father – a letter I wrote nearly 18 months ago.

Despite all the memories tainted with muck and smoke, there were moments of light. Memories of playing video games with my dad; of him sitting with me at ungodly hours to help me through chronic migraines; of him watching me as I climbed trees; of him listening to me, really listening, when I talked about being bullied in elementary for the first time; of him getting angry on my behalf.

When I close my eyes and think of those small points of light, I can remember only my father… and that I truly felt that he cared for me during those times. And that mattered then and still does.

So, I sent him a letter. To tell him just that.

And after all strings, ties, and communication were cut 1,293 days ago, I left one backdoor open.

I had changed my address.

I had changed my phone number.

But I never changed my email.

So, if the day ever comes that my father could face me, acknowledge me for the person I am, I would receive it in the junk folder of my email.