Crawling From the Wreckage Read online

  I should, but I don’t.

  Mom pauses outside an open door leading to a generous private office and raps on the steel frame. A man in a Polo shirt and khakis, bland office casual attire, looks up from his monitor.

  “Hey, Christina, what’s up?” he says.

  “Hi, Chip. Sorry to bother you,” Mom says. Before she can make her introduction, Chip gazes past her to get an eyeful of me. “This is my daughter, Carrie.”

  Chip breaks out in a big grin, and he hustles out from behind his desk, hand outstretched in greeting. “Carrie! It is so nice to finally meet you!” he gushes.

  No kidding, he’s gushing. Over me.

  “Christina has told me so much about you, I feel like I already know you. She says you’ve been in outer space? Is that right?” he asks much the way he’d ask a ten-year-old about her time at summer camp.

  “Um, yes?”

  “Wooowwww. That’s something else. I bet you have some amazing stories.”

  I plaster on a fake smile and nod because I swear to God I have absolutely no idea how to respond to any of this. He’s acting like it’s all perfectly normal to meet an employee’s space-faring super-hero daughter, and it is seriously weirding me out.

  “As a matter of fact, she just now got back from outer space, and I was hoping to take off early to help her settle back in,” Mom says. “The presentation for Thursday’s all buttoned up, so —”

  Mom doesn’t even finish making her request before Chip waves her off. “No, you two go on. Spend some quality mother-daughter time together.”

  “Thanks. See you tomorrow.”

  “See you tomorrow. It was so nice meeting you, Carrie,” Chip says, shaking my hand again.

  “You too,” I say, then I follow Mom to her office a few doors down. Wait, what? “Mom, you have an office now?”

  “Hm? Oh, yes,” she says. “It came with the promotion. I was named project manager for the Bose account back in, what? March, I think?”

  “The Bose account? As in Bose Industries? As in Edison Bose?”

  “Mm-hm. Edison’s been a client for years, but when he found out I worked here, he insisted I take over his company’s account.”

  “Uh,” I grunt, having nothing of substance to say about this totally unexpected instance of worlds colliding — but that’s okay because I have plenty to say about the nameplate sitting on Mom’s big, expensive, executive-quality desk. It reads CHRISTINA BRIGGS. Not CHRISTINA HAUSER; CHRISTINA BRIGGS.

  “I thought it was very nice of him to recommend me,” Mom says, scooping some file folders into a snazzy leather laptop bag emblazoned with the VMA logo. “Considering how badly I tore into him, he could have easily —”

  “How badly you —? Why did you tear into him?”

  “Ah, well, after Sara filled me in about, you know, about you and the Squad, Brian and I met with Edison — Concorde, I should say, we didn’t know who he really was at the time — and I laid into him pretty hard. I blamed him for what happened, for encouraging you and your friends...” She throws her hands up. “I was distraught and I took it out on him.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. Fourth time I’ve apologized, and it still feels weak and worthless.

  A tall, skinny guy who might as well be wearing a bright orange T-shirt reading INTERN in big block letters appears behind me. “Christina? I finished reviewing the PowerPoint presentation for —” He does a double take and beams at me with a dopey fanboy grin. “Oh my God, you’re her! This is you! You’re you!”

  “Yes, I am. And you’re you,” I say, wondering whether it would be rude to run away. I’m rather inclined to say no, no it wouldn’t.

  “Tad,” Mom begins, “this is my daughter Car—”

  “Lightstorm, yeah, I know!” Tad says, whipping out his phone. He throws an arm around my shoulders and snaps off a selfie. “Oh, man, my friends are going to be so jealous I met you.”

  “Tad,” Mom says. The ambient room temperature drops ten degrees. “What was that about?”

  “I was going to post this on Instagram.”

  “No, you’re not. Delete that picture, right now.”

  “But I —”

  “You touched my teenage daughter and took a picture of her without her permission. Delete it. Now.”

  “Come on, Christina, she’s famous now. She has to expect this kind of stuff.”

  Mom’s eyes flash, and she goes into that calm-before-the-crapstorm state she enters when she’s on the verge of completely losing her mind. I’ve seen this eerily blank expression on many an occasion. It’s never not terrifying.

  “Maybe you should expect to lose your paid internship and kiss any letters of recommendation goodbye,” she says. “And it’s Ms. Briggs.”

  Tad the intern taps his phone a couple of times and shows Mom the screen to prove he deleted the photo. Mom dismisses him with a flick of her hand. Tad slinks off.

  “Whah. Hardcore mama bear action,” I say.

  “Oh, please, you’ve seen worse.” Mom laughs. “You’ve been on the receiving end of worse.”

  That is true — and by all rights, I should have caught some of that maternal rage by now, but no. Mom is displaying impossible, almost godlike levels of chill.

  We walk back to the elevator. As Mom reaches for the call button, the doors slide open, and Ben steps off, his nose buried in a file. He stops short of bowling us over.

  “Oh, sorry, Christina,” he says. He squints at me, like he’s not sure whether I’m real. “Carrie?”

  “Ben,” I say, and on impulse, I hug him. He returns the hug, albeit awkwardly. Can’t blame him for being thrown off. I think this may be the first time I’ve ever hugged the man.

  “Hey. Hi. Are you back?” He chuckles. “Dumb question. Obviously you’re back.”

  “Yeah, got back maybe an hour ago?”

  “Ah. Okay. Good. Well, uh, it’s nice to see you again.”

  He smiles, nods at me, nods at Mom (sans the smile), and dashes away.

  “Is everything okay with you two?” I ask. “Ben was acting kind of — I don’t know. Off. And you didn’t say a word to him.”

  Mom sighs. “Ben and I aren’t together anymore.”

  “What?” I say with genuine dismay. I won’t lie; I did not like the man at first, not one bit, but that was all on me. Mom had been divorced from Dad all of three months when she first hooked up (and yes, I do mean hooked up) with Ben. I hadn’t yet come to terms with the split, so I was not in the right frame of mind to welcome a new guy into my mother’s life. Eventually, I pulled my head out of my butt, made peace with the fact Mom had moved on, accepted Ben, and all was well.

  I spend the elevator ride waiting for Mom to fill me in. We get off on the ground floor. We leave the building and cross the street to the neighboring parking facility. We get on and off another elevator. Mom still hasn’t said a word.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened with you and Ben?” I prod.

  “When I said it was my fault you don’t have a secret identity anymore?” Mom says. “That’s not quite true; it’s only partly my fault.”

  Mom, inconsolable over my disappearance and the surrounding circumstances thereof, turned to Ben for comfort, which is totally understandable; that’s what boyfriends are for. Besides, it would have been impossible for her to keep a secret like that from him.

  “Two days after I told him, he went out drinking with some of our coworkers and decided to run off at the mouth,” Mom says. “It was all over the office the next day.”

  “So you dumped him?”

  “Not right away.” We reach Mom’s car. She sets her briefcase down on the trunk and leans against the rear fender. “I was furious at him for betraying my trust, but that wasn’t what pushed me over the edge. It was the fact he was completely unapologetic about it. He hurt me, he hurt you, and all he could say was, ‘I made a mistake, big deal, let’s move on.’ He wouldn’t accept any responsibility for himself.”

  “Mom, I’m sorry,�
� I say yet again. The words have become nonsensical noises without any meaning.

  Mom smiles and says, “It’s okay,” and I just can’t take it anymore.

  “Stop saying that! It’s not okay!” I explode, my voice echoing off the concrete walls. “I ran off and scared the hell out of you and made you miserable and I screwed up your relationship with Ben and it’s not okay! Mom, please, yell at me! Chew me out! Tell me what a crappy daughter I am but stop telling me it’s okay!”

  I fall back against the neighboring car, gasping for breath. My chest hurts. My stomach hurts. And what does my mother do? She gives me a comforting, loving smile I don’t deserve and hugs me.

  “You should be so pissed at me,” I say.

  “I can’t be angry with you, honey. I just can’t,” Mom says. “I’m too relieved and grateful and happy that you’re home safe.”

  That should make me feel better. It doesn’t.

  “And what happened with Ben has nothing whatsoever to do with you. We were having problems well before you left. We weren’t going to last.”

  I repeat: should make me feel better; doesn’t.

  “I’m still sorry,” I say.

  “Don’t be. Seriously. I’m doing fine without him.” Mom unlocks the car and tosses her briefcase in the back seat. “All right, you. Let’s get you back home where you belong.”

  THREE

  It’s official: Christina Hauser — sorry, Christina Briggs has achieved a state of perfect mellow that nothing can harsh upon. It takes us a half-hour of crawling through Boston traffic to reach the highway, and she doesn’t curse out the other drivers. Not once. We get onto Route 93 and reach cruising speed right away. Rush hour is a couple hours off, so it should be smooth sailing all the way back to Kingsport.

  “You must have a million questions for me,” I say for the sake of breaking the oppressive silence.

  “Only a few hundred or so,” Mom says. “Sara filled me in on a lot of the backstory — how you got your powers, starting up the Squad, et cetera.”

  “Hit me. What else do you want to know?”

  “It can wait until we get home.”

  My foot taps an anxious rhythm on the floor, and I swear the air conditioner isn’t doing any good. The air in here feels hot and heavy, and all I can hear is the low, steady drone of the road beneath us, but it isn’t enough to drown out the other sounds, sounds only I can hear and wish to God I couldn’t. I turn the radio on and crank the volume. A schmaltzy soft rock station comes on, and never in my life have I been so grateful to hear “I’m All Out of Love.”

  Mom turns the music down. “You okay over there?”

  “It was too quiet. Can we please talk about something? Anything?”

  “Sure, honey. Is there anything you want to know? A lot’s happened while you were away.”

  “I’m becoming aware of that, Ms. Briggs.”

  Mom purses her lips and nods. She was waiting for this one. “You’re not Carrie Briggs, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “After Ben and I broke up, I had an epiphany: I’d made a mistake by getting serious with him.”

  “Because he turned out to be a bad boyfriend?”

  “He was not a bad boyfriend,” Mom says with a mild frown, “and he wasn’t the problem. Not really. I’d been out of a sixteen-year relationship with the first and only man I’d ever been with for — what? Six months at most? — when I got involved with Ben. I hadn’t taken any time to figure out who I was as an individual.”

  When she puts it like that, it’s hard to be upset with her for ditching her married name. She moved to Kingsport after the divorce to start a new life, but getting into a relationship with Ben turned it into a soft reboot. Dumping him gave her a chance to do it right, and that included reclaiming her pre-marriage identity.

  “Any other surprises I should be aware of?” I say.

  Mom considers the question for a minute. “None that you should hear from me.”

  Fair enough.

  ***

  There must be a word for what I feel when I see my home for the first time in months, a swell of joy and relief tainted with a very specific sense of disorientation, the kind you feel when you see something familiar from a different angle for the first time. There has to be a word for this sensation. If there is, it’s probably German. The Germans have a word for everything.

  My chest tightens as Mom eases the car into the driveway. Granddad’s car is gone. Mom must have sold it. I always thought I’d get it when I got my license — an achievement I should have unlocked already. Maybe Mom would have given me the keys for my seventeenth birthday.

  I’m seventeen. I turned seventeen five months ago.

  “Honey?” Mom says.

  “I’m okay,” I say automatically.

  We go in, and my low-grade disorientation doesn’t get any better. It doesn’t get any worse, but it doesn’t go away. I think the living room is exactly as I left it but I can’t be sure. Has the couch always been perfectly positioned in the dead center of the room? Is that a new TV?

  “While I do like your stylish new outfit,” Mom says, “maybe you’d like to change into something a little more comfortable?”

  “This is comfortable,” I say distantly as I take in the living room, searching for a single detail that doesn’t fill me with doubt. I could have sworn the carpet was a darker color.

  “That is definitely new,” I say out loud, pointing at the Siamese cat that comes trotting out of the kitchen, meowing like a fire engine siren on full blast.

  “That’s Wednesday,” Mom says. “A co-worker needed to get rid of him, and since we don’t have to worry about Dad’s allergies anymore, I thought it’d be nice to finally have a cat.”

  Wednesday sniffs my foot experimentally, and I apparently pass muster because he starts rubbing up against my leg.

  “Hi, Wednesday,” I say.

  He meows at me. We’re buds now.

  “Go change,” Mom says. “I’ll get you something to eat.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Sounds good.”

  I reach the top of the stairs, and I actually have to pause for a moment to reassure myself that yes, my door is on the immediate left. My bedroom is on the left of the hallway and overlooks the backyard. Sara’s room, Granddad’s old room, is on the right, halfway down, and Mom’s room is at the end of the hall.

  My room smells stale, as if this is the first time anyone’s stepped foot inside since I left. No one’s touched my bed, that’s for sure; it’s as unmade as the day I —

  Huh. I remember that I didn’t make my bed that morning. I didn’t have time. Edison called me at stupid o’clock in the morning and told me to go watch the news. I went right downstairs and turned on the TV, and there it was, the Nightwind, hovering off the Kingsport shore. It was the day everything changed for me. Somehow, I remember that morning so vividly.

  That’s a good sign, right?

  I peel off my uniform and grab a pair of jeans out of my dresser. The denim is coarse, like burlap. I pull on a plain cotton T-shirt that scrapes my skin like sandpaper. Everything itches, and nothing feels like it fits me properly, but I totally forget all about it when I head downstairs, and the unmistakable aroma of my mother’s lasagna hits me. My stomach rumbles, and I start salivating like Pavlov’s dog.

  “Oh my God, I missed that smell,” I say. “I had no idea how badly I missed that smell.”

  “Thought some lasagna might pick you up. Is that a tattoo?” Mom asks upon noticing the symbols marking my inner forearm.

  “Yes and no,” I say, turning my arm to better show off my little souvenir from my time in space. “I guess a tattoo is as accurate as anything, but it’s actually the melanin in my skin manipulated at a genetic level. It’s more like a big, organized freckle than a tattoo.”

  “Huh,” Mom says, continuing her frankly baffling trend of not freaking out about anything. Teenage daughter is a super-hero? Okay. Same daughter takes off for de
ep space for several months? Cool, whatever. Comes home with (metaphorical) ink? Neat, let me see it. She takes my arm and leans in for a closer look. “What is it? Like a tribal design, or...?”

  “It’s Joennese for ‘Fargirl.’ It was my nickname in the Vanguard.”

  “They must have liked you if they gave you a nickname.”

  “Not really. It was meant to be insulting, but I decided to throw it in their faces by owning it.”

  “That’s my girl.” The microwave beeps. Mom grabs an oven mitt and removes a steaming hot plate of pasta and meat and cheese and her patented secret sauce, and it looks and smells so good I could cry. “Go sit.”

  I head into the dining room. Mom sets the plate down along with some silverware. She apologizes for not having any garlic bread to go along with it, but who cares? It’s a big plate of my favorite normal human food. She could slather it in shaving cream, and I’d still eat it.

  “What would you like to drink? A little wine, maybe?” Mom asks.

  “Wine? I didn’t age that much while I was gone.”

  “I was wondering about that. You look older. I thought maybe relativity was a factor and you —”

  “Relativity?” I laugh. “Where’d that come from?”

  “What’s so funny? I know what I’m talking about,” Mom says with an air of mock offense. “I’ve learned a lot about science hanging out with Gwendolyn.”

  Whoa. Stop. Hold on.

  “Gwendolyn?” I say. “Not Gwendolyn Quentin.”

  “Yes, Gwendolyn Quentin.”

  “How do you know Dr. Quentin?”

  “After you left, Sara asked Gwendolyn to come over so I’d have someone to talk to. You know, someone who understood what I was going through and could help me process everything.”

  “Oh. Did she? Help, I mean?”

  “So much. Having someone who could relate to what I was dealing with made all the difference. We became friends pretty quickly after that. We get together for lunch whenever she’s in the city.”