“Will my mother be charged?” I asked.
There was a pause. “At this stage, we don’t have evidence that she participated before or during the crime. Knowing after the fact and failing to report can be complicated legally. The prosecutor will review her statement if we obtain one, but I can’t promise anything.”
Of course she would remain just outside the reach of consequence. My mother had always been gifted at standing close to damage without appearing to hold the match.
After the call, I sat there until the oatmeal went cold. People moved around me in the lobby, dragging suitcases, checking out, checking in, living lives with doors and closets and private bathrooms full of ordinary belongings. I wondered whether Weston had been frightened when the police came. I wondered whether my mother cried. I wondered whether either of them had thought of me standing barefoot on concrete while my apartment burned.
My answer came that evening.
My phone rang just after seven. Mom.
I watched her name pulse on the screen until the call ended. A minute later, she called again. Then again. On the fourth call, I answered and said nothing.
“How could you?” she cried.
I almost laughed. The question was so enormous, so perfectly backward, that for a moment I could not believe she had spoken it.
“How could I?” I repeated.
“They arrested him in front of the neighbors. They put him in handcuffs like some kind of criminal.”
“He is a criminal.”
“He’s your brother.”
“He burned down my home.”
“He was scared, Ivy. He needs help, not prison.”
“He needed help years ago. You gave him excuses instead.”
She made a wounded sound, but I had no room left inside me for her pain. I had spent decades making room.
“You don’t know what I’ve been through with him,” she said. “You’ve always been independent. You don’t understand what it’s like to have a child who can’t stand on his own.”
“I understand exactly what it’s like to be punished for standing on my own.”
Silence.
The words surprised both of us. They had risen from somewhere old, somewhere deeper than the fire. I saw myself at sixteen, getting a part-time job to buy my own school clothes because Mom’s money had gone to cover Weston’s traffic fines. I saw myself at twenty-two, cleaning out my father’s apartment alone because Mom said funerals made her uncomfortable and Weston said he could not handle grief. I saw myself at twenty-nine, trying on wedding dresses without her because Weston had been dumped by a girlfriend and needed her that weekend. I saw the pattern in its entirety, bright and merciless.
“You made me the child who didn’t need anything,” I said. “Then you acted like that meant I wasn’t allowed to need anything.”
“Ivy, that’s not fair.”