​​​​Chapter Fifty
Wren

Mimi.

It’s like being hit with a wave and trying not to drown. She’s dying. That’s the worst part. Obviously. No, the worst part is that up until now, she hasn’t been dying, and I haven’t been able to see her.

The hate is loose and looking for a target. And all I see is Mom.

But I grab my dirty sweatshirt and walk-run right past Natalie Reynolds moping on the couch. Sorry your life is a sinking ship, lady, but I’m tired of hanging off the side.

I don’t mean that.

I find Mimi almost at her car. The Jaguar. After all these years. She walks too slow like every step hurts. I walk behind her slowly, too. I don’t want to scare her.

“Mimi,” I whisper and then clear my throat. “Mimi.” I say it louder, definitively the second time, and she turns around. I try to ignore the creeper sitting fat on his haunches in his hoodie, watching us like a movie.

“Wren.” She walks towards me, and I meet her halfway. She smells as she always does as I hug her, but she feels different. Too skinny.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“For what?”

“For anything she said in there.” A small bubble escapes her. A laugh.

“Oh, she didn’t say anything I can’t handle. Your mom’s...had it rough.”

“I guess that just means she needs to hop in line.” I stare down the hoodie who’s pinching a cigarette. He’s a black smoke stack against our powder blue building.

“I’ll try not to elbow anyone in the process.” She looks at me, and it’s like seeing the past. A ghost. I miss Dad.

“She’s pregnant, you know.” And then my eyes become traitors, and I’m crying. I guess I’m growing up and that maturity thing is smacking me hard with its fat hand because I’m not the saddest about myself. I’m the saddest about the baby my mother’s stupidly growing, and I’m not sure what I’m more worried about: if it dies or if it lives.

“I know,” Mimi says and takes me in her arms again. I’m lost there. I don’t know how I’m going to add this all up in my head and be okay with it. There’s nobody left. Literally. Except for Mimi, and I know she’ll be gone soon, too. It’s what everyone does.

“I’m going to miss you.” The words clink out of my mouth like falling change.

“You have no idea,” she says. She pulls me off, and I feel like an octopus clinging. She finds my eyes and says, “Remember when you were little, and I was taking you to church. And I said, ‘Don’t look at me, look at Jesus?’”

“Yeah,” I say, faintly remembering. I remember the dresses she bought me from Dillard’s and the way she curled my hair. I felt like a princess and would sit with her. I had a hard time understanding what the pastor was saying, but afterwards, she took me for pancakes and milkshakes, and she would break it down. And it kind of always felt like she was saying that nothing had to be a burden, if I didn’t want it to be.

“Hold on to that. Hold on to the hope in that, Wren. Because there will come a time when someone will fill every little part of you, and you’ll confuse yourself. You’ll start to think that who they are and their actions define what it is you were made to be. But only Christ can do that. You have to hold onto that. You have to believe with your whole being that only He covers all wounds. Otherwise you break off. You shrivel up. And there will be nothing left to give.”

“Okay,” I say, but I feel six again, trying to define every word she’s thrown at me.

“He loves you, Wren. It starts there, with fully knowing that.”

“But If He loves me He wouldn’t have done this to me.” I stare at the smokestack again, but he shrugs off the B movie we’re making. He grunts his way up the stairs.

“No? Love isn’t necessarily getting what you want. Sometimes, love is an absence of it. Trust me. I’m the queen of receiving and watching it all be taken away. And guess which one saved my life?”

Her eyes almost scare me. She’s looking into me, and it’s foreign. If you have to lose everything to save your life, I should have nine of them right about now.

“Mimi?”

“I love you,” she says. And for a second, I almost understand.