Page 13 of Spectacular Things
The Dark Daze of Heartbreak
Q actually leaves. Liz doesn’t. Technically, she’s in her bedroom.
But with Q gone, she’s a different person.
Not the mom she was before his arrival but a crying, lethargic mess who never wants to do anything.
Sometimes, she’ll call Mia’s name through the closed door and ask her to come in, come cuddle.
And Mia always obliges, holding still in bed and not mentioning the stale air or the sunlight just beyond the blackout curtains that Q installed.
Liz doesn’t emerge from her bedroom until Mia’s school year starts up, ten days later.
During drop-off and pickup, Mia notices her mother’s hair is greasy for the first few days, then matted, then hidden under the faded blue baseball cap Q left behind.
“I’m sorry,” Liz tells Mia every morning on the drive to kindergarten.
Rimmed in red, Liz’s eyes look extra blue in the rearview mirror.
“I wish I were stronger,” she says, using her sleeve to wipe the freshest batch of tears.
From her booster seat, Mia tells her it’s okay.
Unlike her mom, the adults at school never cry in front of Mia, or even seem sad. In fact, the only time Mia’s two teachers sound down is when she overhears them talking about her mom, who has worn the same shirt every day that week, and it just so happens to be inside-out and visibly stained.
“She’s younger than us, you know,” says one teacher to the other. Through the classroom window, they watch Liz make her way across the parking lot. “Like, significantly younger.”
The other teacher shakes her head. “Super tragic,” she says in a tone Mia doesn’t like at the time. Only later will she identify it as pity.
The teachers don’t realize that Mia hears them—and that Liz does, too.
Their voices carry through the open window and across the parking lot.
Unlike her daughter, Liz knows exactly what pity sounds like because she’s been subjected to it ever since senior year of high school after everyone found out she was pregnant.
She will not be pitied, and she will not subject her daughter to pity, either.
Liz drives straight home. She tosses Q’s baseball hat in the trash and washes her hair with three rounds of shampoo and conditioner.
Three is her lucky number, and she is feeling lucky.
Combing out the remaining knots in the mirror, she tells herself she is ready to begin again.
She snaps the hairband on her wrist. It’s time to reset and to reclaim Victory as her own, on her own, and so she will need champagne, her daughter, and sequins. Lots of sequins.
Liz throws a New Year’s Eve party that very night, on a Wednesday in September.
“We’re not waiting for December thirty-first to start over,” she explains to Mia on the drive home from school.
“Tonight we’re celebrating our new beginning—put this on.
” She hands Mia a purple feather boa and silver plastic crown that she procured from the Dollar Store.
“At midnight, we jump in the ocean—it’s called a polar plunge, and it’s supposed to be totally life-changing. ”
“Okay,” Mia says, because she doesn’t like to leave her mom hanging.
That night it’s sequins and glitter and enough rhinestones to make Elton John blush as Liz and Mia lower the lights and dance in the living room, each holding their own bottle of bubbles—cheap prosecco for Liz and Martinelli’s sparking apple juice for Mia.
“It’s almost midnight,” Liz says, catching her breath between Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. “Let’s find your shoes and get ready to leave—we need to be in the ocean when the clock strikes midnight for the magic to work.”
“Do I have to put my head underwater?” Mia asks, pulling open drawers in search of a pair of goggles they most likely don’t own.
“Yes,” Liz answers with a straight face. “For a full New Year’s polar-plunge reset, yes.”
“Are you going to put your head under?”
“Absolutely.”
Before they leave for the beach, Liz pours boiling water from her tea kettle into two hot-water bottles, which she then wraps in the towels they bring with them—along with the noisemakers and sparkly scepters and a box of firework poppers they chuck at the sidewalk, laughing at the sparks.
At 11:59, stripped down to their bathing suits and holding hands, they scream as they run toward the black water at high tide, voices bouncing off the jetty. They sound strong as they count down before they both hold their breath and dip below the water’s surface.
Time freezes.
Mia is only under for a second, and yet the water pricks her like a gazillion needles and the Earth buzzes with a high frequency, and even though her eyes are closed, she swears she can see her mother grinning down there, away from the world, the two of them keeping each other safe until they pop back up into the chilly night air, amid the dazzle of stars, the empty beach.
“Happy New Year!” Liz shouts. “Race to the towels!”
On the sand, Liz folds Mia into a terry cloth burrito and holds her to her chest as they admire the diamond-studded sky.
“Hot chocolate?” Liz asks.
The teenage boy working the window at Dunkin’ Donuts takes one look at Liz and insists their drinks are on the house. Even with wet hair and eyeliner smeared down her cheeks, Liz is beautiful. Mia knows this for the fact that it is, and not the subjective bias of being her daughter.
“Do you feel reset?” Liz asks. Mia nods from the back seat, whipped cream tickling the strip of skin between her nostrils. She’s unsure what a reset means, but if it involves hot chocolate at midnight with her mom when the rest of the world is already asleep, count herin.