Maternal abandonment and the longing for love

Maternal abandonment and the longing for love shape Tully Hart’s understanding of intimacy: because Cloud repeatedly leaves her, Tully experiences attachment as both essential and precarious. The novel gives that history force through recurring scenes of physical comfort, grief, and separation. Kate Mularkey can offer the care Tully needs in the moment, but her friendship cannot erase the maternal absence; when Tully finally asks Cloud why she was never loved, the answer is not reconciliation but a painful recognition of the limits of what Cloud can give.

The wound beneath Tully’s fear

Tully’s fear of being left is not presented as an abstract insecurity. When Cloud disappears during the documentary, Tully is stunned by the sense of betrayal, and the feeling takes her back to being a ten-year-old abandoned on a Seattle street: she feels worthless and unwanted. The present loss acquires its force from the earlier one. Tully wants to ask what is wrong with her that nobody stays, but cannot bring herself to say it to Johnny Ryan; instead, she accepts his embrace and the comfort of his hand on her head before returning to the camera and declaring the documentary over.

Even as an adult, Tully understands risk through the wish for a life in which she would not have to keep exposing herself to harm. After a documentary leaves her feeling that she has put herself in danger again, she envies Kate’s life. Half-asleep, she tells Kate that she is lucky because she has Johnny and children who love her, but the thought breaks off and Tully falls asleep crying. The moment joins longing for maternal care to a broader yearning for secure belonging: Tully envies not only a particular family but the apparent certainty of being loved within one.

Kate’s friendship as care

Kate repeatedly responds to Tully’s distress with presence rather than judgment. After Tully starts crying, Kate hugs her without a speech or demand for explanation. Tully initially flinches at the unfamiliar contact, then finds herself unable to pull away; she clings to Kate, afraid that without her she will drift away and be lost. The image makes the need for comfort bodily and immediate: for Tully, being held is at once strange and urgently necessary.

That trust deepens when Tully tells Kate that Pat Richmond raped her. She has been carrying the truth as something that might burn her up if she cannot speak it. She expects shame or blame, and cannot bear to look at Kate while waiting for her response. Kate asks quietly whether she is okay. The exchange makes Kate a witness to what Tully has suffered, not a replacement for Cloud, but a friend who can receive the truth without turning away.

Kate’s care also gives Tully somewhere to take grief that has accumulated across different losses. When Tully tells her that Ima Hart died while Kate was away, she names Cloud, Gran, and God as possible targets for her anger. Kate holds her while she sobs, offering the sorrow and sympathy Tully has been waiting for. Later, when Kate is gravely ill, the direction of care reverses: Tully steadies her when she becomes dizzy, insists on riding with her in the ambulance, and repeats that she is right there. Their friendship becomes a lived answer to abandonment—not a guarantee that loss will not happen, but a practice of staying beside one another.

Inheritance and the limits of rescue

Tully’s longing also appears in her effort to protect and support Kate’s daughter, Marah Ryan. When Marah wants to attend modeling school, Tully offers to go with her and help her through it. Kate sees the offer as a challenge to her authority as a mother and insists that keeping Marah safe is her responsibility. Tully’s intervention can be read as care shaped by her own experience: she wants to be the adult who accompanies a young person into an uncertain situation. But the conflict exposes a limit. Tully’s willingness to help does not make her Marah’s mother, and the very impulse that feels protective to Tully can undermine Kate’s role.

A sharper version of that contradiction emerges when Tully intervenes in Kate and Marah’s relationship on live television. She tells Kate that both she and Marah need help, explains that Johnny begged her to intervene, and says Marah is afraid to confront her mother. Tully intends to make a hidden family problem speakable, but she does so publicly, and Kate reacts by wrenching her arm away and demanding to know what Tully is doing. Her willingness to act for people she loves is genuine; it does not ensure that she has understood what kind of support they need or whether they have consented to receive it that way.

The same distinction between care and control matters in Tully’s relationship with Cloud. Concern for Cloud can draw Tully back toward her mother, but it cannot turn Tully into the person who can make Cloud dependable. At the hospital, Johnny warns Tully that the cancer in Kate’s brain has affected her faculties and that Kate might not recognize her. The warning sets another painful limit on recognition: even among people who love one another, illness can interrupt the response they long for. Tully nevertheless takes her place beside Kate, making her presence an act rather than a test of whether she will be recognized.

Asking Cloud, and choosing to return

When Tully finds Cloud injured and asleep in a shadowy room with two beds, one empty, her attachment is still alive beneath years of disappointment. She has been wounded by her mother throughout her life: as a child she loved her, as a teenager she hated her, and as an adult she tried to ignore her. Cloud has let her down repeatedly, yet Tully cannot stop feeling something for her. The scene refuses to treat the bond as a simple consequence of good parenting. Tully’s feeling persists even where trust and dependable care have not.

Tully finally asks the question at the center of her longing: why Cloud never loved her. Cloud tells her to forget about her, then says she wishes she could be what Tully needs but cannot, and that Tully needs to let her go. Tully answers that she does not know how: after everything, Cloud is still her mother. Cloud counters that she was never truly a mother to her. Their exchange brings no easy repair. It gives Tully the painful clarity that love, need, and a functioning parental relationship are not the same thing.

Yet Tully does not describe their connection as finished. She realizes that, though they are damaged, she and Cloud remain connected in a strange and profound way, and says she will keep coming back; perhaps someday Cloud will be ready for her. The promise is an expression of hope, but not evidence that Cloud has changed or that Tully has been given the care she sought. Its uncertainty distinguishes it from the steadier commitment Tully shares with Kate. The promise also recalls the vow Tully cannot bring herself to repeat aloud, because it reminds her of Kate and hurts too much.

Staying when the ending is near

The novel’s final movement gives Tully’s longing a changed form: she cannot undo the losses that shaped her, but she can choose presence in a relationship that has sustained her. On Kate’s last night in the hospital, Tully persuades Johnny to take the children home and takes the other bed in Kate’s room. She pushes it across the linoleum until it nearly touches Kate’s, brings a tape of her final show, and watches it beside her friend, like two girls at a sleepover. The gesture turns companionship into a concrete arrangement of bodies and beds: Tully makes herself physically near when the time together is ending.

Kate asks Tully not to treat her as if she is dying. She needs Tully to be herself, she says, because that is the only way she remembers who she is. The request clarifies what Tully’s care can offer: not rescue from death, and not a promise that no one will leave, but the familiar presence of a friend who will meet Kate as Kate. Across Tully’s story, the longing to be held and chosen begins in a mother’s absence. Its most durable answer comes from chosen friendship, while the relationship with Cloud remains unresolved, tender, and beyond Tully’s power to repair alone.