Had I understood grief and the secrets that Mom was keeping, I would have known that they, and not Amy and I, were to blame for her increasing inability to control her anger. It never occurred to me to wonder, did she want to be able to do what Dad had done, to disappear, escape from everything and everybody? Even when she did it, when she disappeared one night not long after the funeral, I did not make the connection that her behavior was less a reaction to something Amy and I had done than to what Dad had done to her. She probably didn’t, either.
It was spring, it was warm, and Mom was angry at the two of us for bickering with each other.
“I can’t take this anymore,” she said. We followed her into the garage, promising that we’d stop, but it was too late.
“I can’t take you two fighting,” she said, and she pressed the button that opened the garage door.
Amy and I pleaded with her in pretty much an exact re-enactment of the Saratoga coke-spilling incident: “Don’t go! We’ll stop! Don’t leave!” It did no good. Mom climbed into the car, put it in reverse, and backed out. The garage door rolled shut before we could see which way she had gone. She had succeeded in breaking up our fight, but in the process, she had done something far worse. This was much more traumatic than when Dad had disappeared: we’d had no idea when we bid him goodbye on March 7 that we would never see him again.
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