I know how that sounds. I (38F) know exactly how that sounds. My daughter Becca died fourteen months ago – she was nineteen, a car accident on Route 9, gone in four minutes according to the paramedics. I have a mortgage on the house she grew up in, a bedroom I haven’t opened since November, and a grief counselor named Pat who I’ve been lying to for six months about how I’m doing.
I want to be clear about something before you judge me. I am not a person who does things like this. I was a middle school librarian for eleven years. I coach a girls’ rec soccer team. I am the person who returns shopping carts in the rain. What happened on Tuesday was not me being me. Or maybe it was, and that’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
I was at the Riverside Road stop waiting for the 47, which I take every Tuesday to my sister Donna’s house for dinner. A girl got off the bus going the other direction. Dark hair, just past her shoulders. A green army jacket with a patch on the left shoulder – Becca had the same jacket, bought it at Goodwill sophomore year, wore it until the zipper broke. This girl had the same walk. That’s the thing I can’t explain to anyone. The exact same way of stepping, slightly pigeon-toed, like she was always about to turn around.
My bus came. I didn’t get on it.
I followed her down Riverside, past the CVS, past the dry cleaner. I wasn’t running. I wasn’t calling out to her. I just – I needed to see her face. That was the whole thing. Just her face, so I could confirm she wasn’t Becca and go home and maybe finally sleep more than three hours.
She stopped in front of the coffee shop on the corner and turned around.
And I don’t know what I was expecting. I don’t know what I WANTED to happen. She looked at me – a stranger standing too close on the sidewalk, clearly staring – and said, “Can I help you?”
I said, “I’m so sorry. You look like someone I lost.”
She stared at me for a second. Then she said, “I know. You’re Becca’s mom. She showed me your picture once.”
My whole body went cold.
She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her phone. “I have something she wanted you to have. I’ve been trying to figure out how to find you for months.” Her hands were shaking. “But there’s something else I need to tell you first. About the night she died. About why she was on Route 9.”
She turned the phone toward me and said –
The Name I Didn’t Recognize
Her name was Caitlin. Caitlin Pruitt. Twenty-one years old, worked at a plant nursery out past the county line, had known Becca since they were both seventeen and in the same ceramics elective at the community center two towns over.
I had never heard her name once in my life.
That’s the thing that got me standing there on the sidewalk outside that coffee shop. Becca told me things. We were close, the kind of close you think is permanent, the kind of close where you believe you know the whole map of your kid’s life. And here was this girl in the same jacket, shaking, telling me she’d been carrying something for fourteen months.
Caitlin had tried to find me through Facebook. Becca’s account was still up – I couldn’t bring myself to memorialize it, I still can’t – but the privacy settings blocked messages from people who weren’t already connected. She’d thought about calling the house but didn’t know the number. She’d driven past what she thought might be our street twice, she said, and felt too afraid to knock on doors.
“I almost gave up,” she said. “I’m sorry it took this long.”
We went inside. I don’t remember deciding to go inside. One minute we were on the sidewalk and then we were at a corner table with two coffees neither of us ordered, and the barista, a kid with a nose ring, had just set them down and walked away without a word. I think he could tell something was happening.
What Becca Didn’t Tell Me
Caitlin wrapped both hands around her mug. She didn’t drink from it. She just held it.
“Becca was coming to see me that night,” she said. “She was on Route 9 because she was coming to my apartment.”
I waited.
“We’d had a fight. A bad one. Three weeks before the accident.” She looked up. “She’d found out I was going through something and I hadn’t told her, and she was hurt. Really hurt. She felt like I didn’t trust her.” A pause. “She was right that I didn’t, at first. I was scared. I was scared about a lot of things.”
She stopped. Started again.
“I called her that night. I told her I was ready to talk. And she just – you know how she was. She said okay, I’m coming, and she hung up.” Caitlin’s jaw moved. “She didn’t even ask where I lived. She already knew. She’d looked it up weeks before. She was just waiting for me to be ready.”
Route 9 was forty minutes from our house. It was raining that night, the kind of cold October rain that makes the roads go slick before you notice. The other driver ran a red. It wasn’t Becca’s fault. The police were clear about that. But I had spent fourteen months not knowing why she was on that road, in that direction, at 10:40 on a Tuesday night. I’d told myself she was going to a friend’s. I’d told myself it didn’t matter.
It mattered. It had always mattered and I’d been lying to myself the same way I lie to Pat.
What She Pulled Up on the Phone
Caitlin unlocked her phone and set it on the table between us, screen up.
It was a voice memo. Labeled with a date: October 3rd. Nine days before the accident.
“She recorded it for me,” Caitlin said. “She said she wanted to say some things out loud and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to say them right in person. She sent it to me and told me to listen when I was ready.” She pushed the phone closer to me. “I listened. And then I thought about whether she’d want you to hear it too. I’ve been thinking about it for over a year.”
I looked at the phone. I didn’t touch it.
“She talks about you,” Caitlin said. “That’s why I decided yes. Because of what she says about you.”
My hand went flat on the table next to the phone. Not picking it up. Just next to it.
Becca’s voice, when it came out of that speaker, was so normal that it knocked the air out of me. She sounded like she was sitting in her car in a parking lot somewhere, which she probably was. That was her thing, recording voice memos in parking lots. She thought out loud and she’d always been a little embarrassed about it, so she’d do it alone.
She talked for four minutes and eleven seconds.
I’m not going to write all of it here. Some of it is Caitlin’s. But Becca said, near the end, that she’d been thinking about calling me more. That she’d been bad at it lately and she knew it and she was going to fix it. She said – and this is the part where I had to put my hand over my mouth – she said, “My mom is the most stubborn person I know and also the best one. I think I got both of those from her and I’m still deciding if that’s a compliment.”
That’s exactly what she would have said. That’s her. That’s the whole of her in two sentences.
The Thing in the Jacket
After the voice memo ended we sat there for a while. I don’t know how long. The coffee shop filled up and emptied out a little. The kid with the nose ring wiped down the counter twice.
Then Caitlin reached into the jacket pocket again, the left one, the one with the patch. She pulled out a small envelope, the kind that comes with a bouquet of flowers, sealed with a strip of tape gone yellow.
“She gave this to me at the ceramics class,” Caitlin said. “Like two months before she died. She said ‘hold onto this for me, I’ll tell you when to open it.’ She never told me. I didn’t know what to do with it.” She held it out. “It has your name on the back.”
It did. In Becca’s handwriting, which was terrible, always had been, big loopy letters that looked like a middle schooler’s. Just: Mom.
I didn’t open it there. I couldn’t. I put it in my bag and held the bag in my lap with both hands and told Caitlin thank you about six times, which probably sounded strange but was all I had.
She walked me back to the bus stop. We stood there and she told me a little about the ceramics class, about how Becca had made a lopsided bowl and been furious about it and then given it to a girl in the class who’d admired it, just handed it over on the last day like it was nothing. That was her too. That was so completely her.
My bus came. This time I got on it.
What Was Inside
I opened the envelope on the bus. I had to. I couldn’t carry it all the way to Donna’s and pretend to eat pasta and not open it.
Inside was a folded piece of paper and something small wrapped in a strip of paper towel. I unwrapped the paper towel first.
It was a ceramic bead, roughly round, painted dark green. Imperfect. Lopsided on one side. She’d made it at the class, I think, or somewhere like it. There was a small hole through the middle, like it was meant to be strung on something.
The note said: I’m making you something. This is the first piece. Don’t ask what it is yet because I don’t know. I just know it’s going to be green because you always said green was the color that made you feel like things were going to be okay. Love you. B.
She never finished it. There’s only the one bead.
I’ve been sitting with that for four days now. The bead is on my kitchen table next to my coffee cup. I look at it every morning.
I haven’t called Pat. I haven’t opened Becca’s bedroom door. But this morning I stood in front of it for a while, with my hand on the frame, and I thought: she was going to her friend. She was going to do the right thing by someone she loved. That’s what she was doing on Route 9.
I don’t know if that helps. It does and it doesn’t, the way everything does and doesn’t right now.
But I know her name was Caitlin Pruitt. I know Becca had a friend I never met and a voice memo and a plan to call me more. I know she thought I was the best person she knew even when she was bad at showing it.
I know she was making me something green.
—
If this one got to you, pass it along to someone who might need it today.
For more stories about life’s unexpected twists and turns, check out My Brother’s Wife Started a Sentence About My Disabled Son and I Told Her to Finish It, My Grandmother Left Me Her House. Then My Aunt Said the One Thing That Ended All of It., or My Wife’s Brothers Accused Her of Manipulating Their Dying Father at the Will Reading.
