“Why did you really do it?” I asked, my voice muffled against her chest. “I know you didn’t really believe that a lie was best for us. You have never believed that about anything.”
She sighed and stroked my hair in long, lazy strokes. It felt so nice to allow myself to seek comfort in my mom with no worries about acting like a baby or seeming strong. I had no reason to feel strong just then.
Her hands still moved through my hair, fingers gliding across my scalp as she answered. “If I’m being honest, Hannah, I didn’t hesitate.” Her jaw jutted out and, in that moment, she reminded me of Ari with her stubborn defiance. “Here was your dad, the only man I’d ever loved, and he was suddenly sick. He was a good man and he was scared. God, Hannah, he was so scared and so vulnerable, and I’d never seen him weak.”
Her voice broke and I was scared for her, worried that she would carry him in her heart even after she found love with her pudgy, bald man, even if they married, even if she stopped being alone. My dad was like this ghost in our house; a presence Ari had never known, a series of memories for me, and for Mom . . . well, for Mom I think he was still everything.
Ari was laying in her bed when I walked into her bedroom. She was staring at the ceiling and focusing so hard that she didn’t even notice me standing in her doorframe. I watched her for a minute, smiling to myself as her lips moved wordlessly to some song only she could hear.
“Ari,” I said, and she yelped, then laughed that hysterical, high pitched kid noise as she insisted that I’d scared her. “Get up,” I ordered. “Put on a coat. I’m taking you somewhere.”
She was excited to see the playground and mad when I told her that wasn’t the destination, but she cooled off when I followed that up with a promise to stop and play on the way home if she still wanted to. We walked through the rose garden and I let her take her time and look at all the dormant, grey plants that would bloom again when Spring returned. Finally, we walked down to the dusty path that led to my little bridge.
“Where are we going?” Ari asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“I want to show you the place I go to when I want to be alone,” I responded. I’d thought about it all day, thought about the best way to frame the whole “Dad is mentally ill and can’t be around us” thing. There wasn’t a handbook as far as I knew, although once, while browsing Amazon Prime, I’d found a book about a bunny whose dad goes to jail, so who knew really. Maybe there was. But it certainly felt like the kind of thing I would have to play by ear.
The leaves crunched beneath our feet as we walked and I cursed myself for not wearing a scarf as I braced myself against the savage Huntington wind.
“Do you remember what you said the other day about not remembering Dad?” I asked, and I reached over to grip her little hand in mine, my wide fingers wedged between her smaller ones.
She nodded and I turned my head to the sky, taking in the gray, still air that had suddenly ceased all wind, all movement, all life. With a breath so deep it hurt my chest, I readied myself. Ari couldn’t be left with no legacy of her father, and I wasn’t going to give her only the heavy one. I couldn’t give her the whole picture, but something was better than nothing.
“Dad walks with a kind of bounce in his step,” I started. “And I don’t mean he’s just peppy, like the expression. I mean there’s a weird sort of bounce that happens on the ball of his foot every time he takes a step.”
She giggled and I figured she was picturing the man from our photo album hopping along as he made his way down the street.
“He loves hats. It drove Mom crazy, but every time we went to the mall, he’d go to that cap store to see if they had anything he liked, and then every single time, he would come out and complain about how they only sold baseball caps. One day Mom told me he’d been doing the same thing since the first time they’d ever gone to the mall together.”
The space around us felt thick and I could feel the heat prickling my eyes. It was too much for me, sitting on that bridge sifting through my memories of dad trying to paint a picture for Ari when every single memory I recalled made me wonder if it still applied. If we went to the mall, would he still bounce his way into the hat store? Did he still go to the mall? The gaps were too much. It was like trying to put together a puzzle with all the edges missing.
“Hannah?” she asked uncertainly, turning her small face up at me. “What’s wrong?”
With a laugh, I shook my head. She was so damned sensitive. I’d never met a kid so young who was so tuned in to how other people felt.
“Dad is sick, Ari,” I blurted out. “He has schizophrenia. He didn’t leave because he didn’t love us or even because he didn’t love Mom. He got sick and he was scared of what would happen if he stayed, so he left.”
She was silent a long time. I poised myself to pull a tissue from my sleeve and wipe away tears or to rock her in my arms like an even smaller girl, but no tears came. There was a blankness to her face that scared me more than tears ever could because for the first time since I’d known my live-wire little sister, she was sitting stark still, frozen like Dad had on that night in my memory. Her hands gripped the bridge and I wished I’d made her bring gloves as I noticed how red and chapped her long, piano player fingers looked.
“My songs are about them, you know,” she said. “Mom and Dad.”
She could have said anything else in that moment and I wouldn’t have been as shocked as I was by this revelation. She could have told me she was a purple, two-headed-sloth and she left her bed every night to kill kittens and I wouldn’t have been as shocked. Her sad little tunes and songs about walking away, about love that’s perpetually doomed. She hadn’t needed to experience those things because they were her story from the time she was a baby. Her songs had been her way of making sense of that story.
“Oh, Ari,” I breathed, the steam rising like a vape cloud from my lips.
There was nothing else for either of us to say. I scooted closer and slung my arm around her shoulders and she leaned into my chest. Time passed in a way that was divorced from reality. We could have been sitting there for two minutes or twenty, but when snot started to solidify in the rims of my nostrils and the cold got so bad that there was pain when I bent my fingers, I stood up and pulled Ari up after. Together, we walked wordlessly down to the playground. When we got down there, I asked her if she still felt up to playing and she shook her head at me before running towards the swings, her hair blowing like a curtain behind her.
I sat on a bench and watched her play, watched her legs dangle from the monkey bars and her quick little kicks as she made her way across the space. After a few moments of watching, my phone chimed. I pulled it out and saw that it was a text from Dad. For a minute, I considered not reading it. There wasn’t much more we could say; he didn’t know us and we didn’t know him. Then Ari smiled at me from the bars and I thought to myself, if Ari can bounce back, if she can carry this weight, maybe I can, too. With a glance back at the screen, I read his message:
I don’t know what to say about what I’ve done, but I do love you and I do love Ari. Please don’t give up on me.
Sometimes in life people say things to me and the words all make sense as far as definitions go, but I don’t actually know what the person is trying to say. Me, not give up on him? The idea was baffling. He was the one who’d lived a life away from me while I wrote him letters I didn’t send. I had shown up for him. I could keep trying and keep giving him the chance to fix everything, but at what point was he going to decide not to give up on me? When was he going to dig in his heels and stick with us? After all, if he’d decided not to give up in the first place, we wouldn’t even need to have that discussion. There wouldn’t be any tense conversations that left me sweaty with heartburn. Things would be normal.
I’d thought making the dating profile would be the hardest part but logging on to check for messages was way worse. It gave me butterflies, but not the good kind. More like the kind you get when you are watching a scary m
ovie and you can feel a jump scare so you are on edge, but it just won’t happen.
I had barely started to browse profiles when a little green dot indicated that I did have a message. When I clicked into my mailbox, I saw the message was from someone calling herself Window. The message was straightforward: You look so thoughtful and lovely in this photo. I would love to know what (or who?) you were thinking of while you stared off into space.
In my mind, I had pictured her first message being different. It wasn’t like I’d had a sample message typed up in my own head or anything, but I had this expectation that the person who wrote me would write something long and expressive that made me feel this automatic chemistry and I would just know that she was my match. Like most of my expectations, I knew it was pretty unrealistic the minute the thought pooped into my head, but it was still what I wanted. If I couldn’t have instant bonding, though, this was a pretty good second place: straight to the point and not cheesy. Sweet without being overly flattering.
When I looked at her profile, I hesitated. She had no photo, which was usually a bad sign. I wouldn’t consider myself shallow, but I did want to have a shot with someone and yeah, sexual attraction was a big part of that for me. I thought about all those teenage movies where boys had virginity pacts and how that would be supremely embarrassing to me and pretty much every girl I knew. I still felt that pressure, though, to be able to talk about the experience of having been with someone in that way. Like pretty much everything about sex, all my ideas about what it would be like came from movies, so I had this image in my head of me confessing to Marley that I’d finally done it while we were both wearing pajamas and having a sleepover. When I told her, I’d clutch a pillow to my chest and get this dreamy expression, like I was seeing the whole event playing out in front of me and was mesmerized by the memory. The reality would probably be more awkward, or at least anti-climactic.
Sex had always been the most uncomfortable part of being gay for me. I knew that when I was with someone, she’d be female, but it was just so shrouded in mystery. It wasn’t like my mom had had the same kind of talk with me that my classmates had likely received: the one where she sat down on my bed and explained the mechanics of the act in vague floral language that would also leave me confused. Or maybe no one had received a talk like that and I was basing both my perceptions of the talk and sex itself on teen movies featuring girls like Molly Ringwald (who never seemed to have sex in movies) and Winona Ryder, which would suggest that not only did I need more knowledge about sex, but a more current library of films.
Also, I never knew what to say when kids my age talked about sex. It was my worst nightmare that people outside my friends group would know how naïve I really was, but opportunities to reveal my inexperience kept on presenting themselves. It really started in sixth grade. I was already out at school and people were starting to talk about sex in that innocent middle school way kids do. That was the closest I had ever come to Lennox’s experience in Columbus: a scrawny, long haired kid named Ben Parsons started asking me all kinds of questions about how I would have sex if I was gay.
“Do lesbians really scissor?” he asked me, leaning across the aisle so far I thought, no hoped, his desk would tip over.
I could feel the other kids eavesdropping on his rude questions even as I actively avoided looking around. No one deserved the satisfaction of seeing the shame in my face. God, why did my face have to be so much like a canvas with every single emotion painted so clearly across it? Why couldn’t I be better at hiding my reactions? I whipped my head around to face Ben and my braids smacked me in the face from the force of my movement. With what I hoped came across as anger instead of shame, I hissed at him to be quiet with my teeth clenched.
“Why don’t you ask your mom?” Jake answered the scissoring question. Jake and I had grown up a few houses apart and he had been part of the reason I had come out to everyone at school: a friend had mentioned to me that Jake was thinking of asking me out. After that I became slightly more open about liking girls and it didn’t take long for the whole place to get the memo.
I shook my head in an effort to conjure the present and, for the most part, it worked. Sex could wait, both literally and in a more philosophic sense. The message was still there in front of me, haunting my screen and it wasn’t something I could let myself put off because if I did, I would probably never answer. I really did like the simplicity of the message. Was a black box instead of a face really such a deal breaker? That’s why people dated, to see if there was chemistry. If she had a profile picture, I could still show up and meet someone boring with halitosis or something. Determined, I readied my hands to respond.
Hey, I typed, I’m not going to lie, I almost didn’t respond to this because of your lack of profile pic. I’m not like shallow or anything; just playing out scenarios where you are one of my best friends getting ready to punk me, lol. What do you do for fun?
Cringe worthy message, but if you can’t be generic and awkward with your internet blind date, who can you be generic and awkward with? With a shrug, I clicked the “Browse Profiles” tab, fairly certain that I’d blown my shot with my secret (too secret) admirer.
Less than five minutes had passed when I heard a ding indicating that I had a new message. I went to my mailbox and there she was again: Heh. I guess I’m old school about the picture. I figure if we hit it off, then you can see me when we meet and we will know if we have chemistry. I’m not in the closet, but I also don’t want just anyone to see me on here. I guess I’m kind of private.
What do I like to do for fun? Hmmm. I like to bake. I made a three-tiered cake for my mom for her last birthday. It didn’t turn out like the picture, but it tasted good, and she joked I should go on one of those baking competitions. I’m pretty shy, though, so that’s never gonna happen. I like true crime podcasts. I play the piano. I have taken lessons since I was four years old, but now I just play to relax.
It occurs to me that this message makes me sound like someone’s grandmother. If you are into geriatrics who can feed and entertain you, I’d love to hear from you again.
I snorted at the last line and had to fight to resist the urge to immediately respond that I was totally into grandmas just to get a reaction. I frowned when I re-read the line about not wanting people to see her picture on the site, though. I understood the desire for privacy and I didn’t blame her for being protective of her personal life, but how could I be sure this wasn’t just going to be a Lennox 2.0 situation where I put effort into this great, soul sucking blackhole?
With my fingers threaded in my lap, I swiveled my chair and stared off into space. It could be a Lennox 2.0 situation. There was absolutely a chance that it would all be a huge waste of time where I put a bunch of time and feelings into a relationship that turned into nothing because my girlfriend didn't want to be seen with me in public. There wasn’t any actual way to avoid that possibility. It could also be the opposite. We would hit it off and it would turn out that she was just a shy person who wassn’t embarrassed or ashamed of her identity at all. It could all be great. And I hated myself for letting my thoughts circle back to Lennox, but I couldn’t help it: how could I sit there and condemn her for focusing on the negative and refusing to take a chance if I wasn’t even willing to take my own advice?
With a firm command to myself not to babble or be boring, I put fingers to keyboard and took a chance.
Chapter Sixteen
Lennox
“Mom, Dad, I’m sick of pretending to be something I’m not. I’m gay,” I said to the full-length mirror hanging on my door. “Mom. Dad. You are just going to have to suck it up and realize you can’t always get what you want.”
My door was a great conversationalist. Not a single time did it flinch at the mere mention of the word gay. Not a single time did it say the word “Hell” or mention “brimstone” in response to my revelation. It had just stayed there, mounted to the wall, being chill. There was no way my parents were going to cooperate
that well.
Not for the first time, Noah’s situation popped back into my head. I didn’t have to tell them. I could keep my secret safe at home and be myself the rest of the time. I could date Hannah, but just tell my parents she was a friend. It was like meeting myself halfway.
Fuck it, I thought as I stared at the big-eyed girl in the mirror. I’m not doing this halfway. I have to do it the right way, and I'm doing it today, but I’m not doing it without chocolate.
It had been awhile since I’d baked. Since I cut off my hair, I had made an active effort to avoid doing things that would give my dad any false hope that there was still a chance that I would blossom into some kind of housewife-ready girlie girl. Things felt different; it was like I didn’t have to try to be one way or the other anymore. Like if I was going to come clean to them anyway, I might as well embrace all my parts.
It was cheesy as hell and maybe a little cliched, but I liked the whole metaphor of me as a baked good. The idea that all these different parts had to fit together just right to get the desired result. That there could be parts I absolutely hated, like touching flour and feeling its chalky grit on my skin, and parts I loved, like mixing in chocolate chips and thinking about the gooey bite they would give my brownies. That it would take time for all the ingredients to come together, but when they did, the result would be something delicious.
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