Second Time Around

by Christine L'Amour

  Valerie stared at her door. She wanted to go. She wouldn’t do it. Monica hated her, Monica had hated her for nearly fifteen years, and Valerie hadn’t like that, but she had never begrudged Monica her hate, either.

  When her mother called, she answered automatically, unthinkingly. She didn’t want to talk to her mother, but it felt important, suddenly, that her mother had known Monica, that her mother had been there when they had been together, when things had been easier.

  “Hey,” Valerie said vaguely, still at the door. She was still gripping the knob, even though she had decided not to go.

  “Hello,” her mother said, surprised that her call had been answered and so quickly at that. Valerie could almost see her floundering for something to say. “Uh, how’s work?”

  “Mom,” Valerie said, “did you know I met Monica again? Remember her? She works at the same place I do. Isn’t it funny?”

  Her mother was quiet. It was a heavy, heavy silence. Valerie knew her mother was judging and panicking and loathing and hating it all, and most of all she knew her mother was deathly, deathly afraid of doing something that would make Valerie hang up on her. Because she had lost Valerie once; it had taken years for her to reach back, for them to find her. For completely, entirely selfish reasons, her mother did not want to lose her again.

  But it felt good, for once, to have someone not want her to leave.

  “You didn’t tell me,” her mother decided on, choking on the words.

  “Do you remember,” she said, “when we were teens and we would spend all our time together and you hated her, and me, and all of it, and things were awful, they were fucking terrible, but somehow they felt easier, too?”

  Her mother paused. “Um. Yes.”

  She was a terrible person for Valerie to speak to. Valerie didn’t want to talk to this selfish, awful person, but Valerie didn’t have anyone else. Valerie wanted to grow roots, but she was so fucking terrible at it.

  “I guess things had never been simple,” Valerie said with a sigh. “Hindsight just makes it look that way. Look, everything’s fine. I’ll call you later.””

  “Wait,” her mother said, “I’d called, um, I’d wanted to talk about the dogs, about the holidays—”

  “I agreed to calls, Mom,” Valerie said. “I said I never wanted to see you again, and that’s still true.”

  She hung up and took her hand from the knob, deciding that she would eat some instant something and take a goddamn nap.

  Chapter Fifteen

  David glared at her, one spoon clenched in white-knuckled fingers. He would not eat. Monica ate her own pasta with barely restrained patience, spearing one little loop at a time, eating one by one. He kept on staring, and by the way his face was growing red, he was holding his breath also.

  Monica lifted her fork to inspect it. One of its teeth was dented, probably because David had thrown it around somewhere. She tried not to think of it. She tried not to be angry, even if she couldn’t stop herself from feeling annoyed. It wasn’t his fault. He was just a child.

  “You lied to me!” David shouted, having reached his breaking point. He threw the spoon at her and she flinched, then glared at him; he glared right back. “We didn’t go to the park, we didn’t have playdates, you don’t take me to grandma anymore, and Val hasn’t come back!”

  “Christ, why did you fixate on her?!” Monica snapped, setting down her fork too strongly. David’s expression crumbled. Monica felt something in her crumble, too. She wished she could be better. She wished she didn’t have to do so much alone. “David—”

  “You’re stupid,” he said, then shouted: “Stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid! Why are you sad all the time?”

  Monica flinched. She flinched because she was and she hadn’t wanted her to know; she hadn’t wanted to know it herself. She was miserable, she had been miserable for years, and she didn’t want to face the fact that she hated—Christ, so much. Nearly everything. She hated nearly everything about her life, from the lying to her stupid boss to her awkward relationship with her parents.

  “I’m not sad,” she lied. “Is this what this is about? Is that why you’re throwing a tantrum? Why do you think I’m sad?”

  “You laughed when she was here,” he told her, tone accusing. “You played along! You smiled! And now you’re not and you won’t do what I say and I can’t fix it!”

  Monica felt her heart snap clear in two.

  “Dave, it’s not on you to fix it,” she said, a bit desperate, leaving her chair to kneel by his. She caught his hands in her own, and they were so small, God, David was four, she had never wanted any of this on him. “Mommy is dealing with it. I’m sorry it’s making you sad, too. But Mommy is taking care of it, I promise.”

  It was a lie, of course. Monica had no earthly idea what to do.

  “But you’re sad,” he wailed. “You laughed when she was here and now you don’t and you’re always working or in bed and you never take me to the park—”

  “I’m sorry,” she said helplessly, so guilty it felt like it would kill her.

  “Is it my fault?” he asked her, eyes so terribly blue, so terribly wide.

  Monica swung him into her arms and stood up, cradling him like he was four months old instead of four years old, pressing her nose against his hair and trying not to shake. He was just four, God, he was four years old; of course he was going to think it was all on him. He was an only child; he thought the world revolved around him.

  “No, baby, no,” she said, trying to be soothing and mostly failing. “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay.”

  ***

  Monica sat at her parents’ table on that Sunday and stayed very quiet.

  She had avoided, in the past few years, being with her parents when they stayed with David for her. A part of her ached, because she thought she should be more careful with how they interacted with the boy, homophobic, terrible people that they were, but she had never wanted to; it had always hurt. But her mother had been insistent and David had been crying for anything that wasn’t staying at home and watching her as she moped and was miserable, so here they were.

  She sat, eating a lunch that was far too bland on her tongue, and watched.

  “—and then Mike said I couldn’t jump to the third bar without my hands, but I told him I could, an’ he said I really, really couldn’t, then I said I was going to do it, then Mrs. F ran and picked me up and didn’t let me!”

  “Oh, thank God,” her mother said, though amusement and fondness were showing bright on her face. “You could have fallen and gotten hurt.”

  David’s little face scrunched up. He was waving his arms around and food was slipping from his fork and falling all over the table and the floor, but no one said a thing. Monica ate carefully.

  “I can do it!” David shouted.

  Her father ruffled her son’s head with a smile on his face.

  “I know you can,” he rumbled softly. “But maybe you shouldn’t, son. Better not to have your Gran worry so much.”

  He hadn’t looked her in her face, yet. Her father. She hadn’t seen him in months and he hadn’t looked her in the face, and she ate softly because this wasn’t her home and these people didn’t love her. They loved her son. They loved David brightly, unconditionally, because he was too small to have irredeemable faults; they loved him exactly like they had loved her, once. She had been too small to have irredeemable faults too, after all.

  “Do you remember Valerie?” Monica asked.

  She cut her mother off. She hadn’t been paying attention, hadn’t even noticed the woman had started to speak. She turned to stare at her, while her father stared at the table, a smiled fixed on his face. He still didn’t look at her. David straightened up in attention at the name.

  The silence was heavy. Monica was looking forward, but not at David. She was staring at the wall in front of her.

  What a stupid question. As if they would ever forget Valerie.

  “I know I told you about the new hire, M
om, months ago,” she continued. “That was her. Valerie Dawkins in the flesh, so many years later. What a coincidence, that she moved to the same town we did.”

  “I see,” her mother said. Her tone wasn’t icy or angry or guilty, just blank.

  “Valerie’s nice,” David said, looking around with a frown. He didn’t know why people had grown so quiet. “She visited and we played and she didn’t complain that I threw things or wanted to watch too much TV.”

  “You let her meet him?” Monica’s father said, and their eyes finally locked.

  Monica didn’t have her parents’ eyes. They were both brown; her blue ones had come from long dead German great-grandparents.

  If Valerie had taken Monica with her, Monica would never have needed to see them again.

  The thought was crystal clear, so much it hurt. She wanted it so badly, that life she never had, that life Valerie didn’t share with her. They could have been gloriously, stupidly happy together, out in the world with no strings attached to these people, and Monica would have been free. No guilt, no sorrow, no fucking Julien or this awkward, stupid relationship with her parents. Her father’s eyes had veered away; he had never forgiven her, when it should have been the other fucking way around.

  Monica breathed in to speak and her mother cut her off:

  “Oh, no.”

  Oh, no indeed, Monica thought.

  “She was right,” she said; she thought it would come out hollow, guilty, resigned, but it came out sharp and angry instead. “All these years—Christ, I was so mad that she had left me that I was spitting venom with it, but I should have followed. I should have gone after her the second she walked out of my view. I’ve been so stupid.”

  David was blinking, confused, and Monica didn’t want to look at her parents’ faces. She really had been stupid. Fundamentally, earth-shatteringly, monumentally.

  What the fuck was she doing here?

  She was miserable. Why was she letting herself be miserable? Why had she fought with Valerie when Jerry had been the one tearing them apart? Why had she broken up with Valerie—Christ, she thought to herself, she had left Valerie. She had hated Valerie for years for doing this to her, then she went and did the same thing back to her. Just how much of an idiot could she be?

  Monica stood up. Her mother stood up as well.

  “Monica, be reasonable,” she ordered. “Don’t start this nonsense again. You’re thirty-four, you have a son. Sit down and finish your lunch. You can’t be serious about running after that girl again. Look what happened last time!"

  “Dave,” Monica said softly. “You were right.”

  The boy, who had started to hunch, uncertain, because he knew the adults were fighting, perked up with bright eyes.

  “I was?”

  “Yes,” she said, and walked around the table to get him. She hoisted him onto his arms and he latched onto her. She wasn’t a perfect mother. She wished, sometimes, that he could stay quiet, that he could stop bothering her, that she didn’t have him. But she was doing her best and she loved him, and she knew she would love him no matter what.

  Her father stood up, his chair scraping against the floor with a high, grating sound.

  “Monica,” he said, strained.

  “Why don’t we go eat ice cream?” she asked her son, smiling down at him with his same blue eyes. “How about it? We go have ice cream, and later I’ll invite Valerie over, just like you said. You were right, baby. Mommy was being silly.”

  He beamed up at her, pulling at her hair. “All right!”

  “You can’t just leave,” her mother said, baffled.

  Monica marched out and didn’t say goodbye. David looked at his grandparents over her shoulder, eyes wide and confused, for all that they were happy too. She knew he would be sad not to see his grandparents again, so she wouldn’t simply tear him from them, but she wouldn’t let them have such hold on him. No. She wouldn’t let them break his heart like they had broken hers.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Monica didn’t march to Valerie’s house immediately, even if she wanted to. She took David to eat ice cream and tried to explain to him what had happened, because he was confused and she didn’t want him to be. She said Gran and Grandpa didn’t like her very much, and that it made her sad, and that she wanted to spend more time with him instead of leaving him with them, and mostly he got it. He hugged her and spread ice cream all over her clothes and it was fine.

  They went home and watched a movie and Monica left him playing and went to her bed to recover. He wanted to stay with her, but Monica needed to lay down and think, or maybe to try not to think. She had a headache. Her heart ached, too.

  She felt stupid.

  Stupid for having taken her boss’ side, for having spat venom at Valerie, for having let herself nearly drown in this life she hated. She had been happy with Valerie, as turbulent as life had been after her arrival. She shouldn’t have grown so quiet, so resigned, when Valerie left; she shouldn’t have stopped fighting. Valerie had left her parents and not given them her address, her number, any way to reach her—why was Monica letting hers raise her son?

  She closed her eyes tightly and vowed to talk to Valerie.

  ***

  She went to her the next day, early in the morning, leaving David with the neighbor. She walked, enjoying the brisk breeze. It helped her wake up. She left her hair loose instead of braiding it or binding it in a bun and thought about cutting it short again.

  Valerie’s building was small. Monica rang the bell to her apartment and waited. Nothing happened. She straightened her spine and rang again.

  On the fourth time, a bleary, woozy voice answered: “Wha’?”

  “Oh,” Monica said, relaxing all at once. “You were asleep, not ignoring me. I mean—sorry for waking you up. It’s Monica. Can I come up?”

  There was a moment of stunned silence.

  “Um,” Valerie said, hesitant. “All right. You can. Head right up.”

  Monica did. When she arrived at the right floor, the door was open, and she hesitantly peered in and then walked in, closing the door behind her. Valerie came barreling through the small hallway that led to the bedroom, fingers tumbling on their way to buttoning up her shirt. Monica looked at the bare skin visible on her chest as she drew her shirt closed and swallowed nothing.

  Valerie’s hair was wild, her curls puffed up and everywhere, and her trousers were creased in a way that meant she had slept in them. The living room still had boxes stacked around and nearly no furniture, and Monica tried to reign in her fear that Valerie was ready to leave.

  “Hi,” Valerie said, breathless and hesitant and confused. “You… want some coffee?”

  “No, it’s okay,” Monica said, just awkward. Her eyes veered away, around the room. “I just wanted to talk. We didn’t end… I didn’t end our last conversation well.”

  Valerie winced at the reminder.

  “I get it,” she muttered, then sighed. “I also said some things I regretted, all right? I’ll talk to Jerry, I don’t know. I’ll quit if I have to. It’s not like I’ve been here long, even if it was a short time to stay even for me.”

  Monica’s heart leapt to her throat. Valerie stared at her, her eyes dark and wide and very close, and Monica realized they were closer than they had been before—because she had taken three striding steps forward and caught Valerie’s wrist in a tight grip.

  “Don’t leave,” she said, too loud.

  Valerie swallowed nothing. “I don’t want to. Not really. But if that’s what’s needed…”

  “I don’t care,” Monica said, and it was so true that she repeated it, loudly and sharply, tightening her grip on Valerie’s hand. “I don’t care. Fuck Jerry and the competition and the promotion and the demotion and the entirety of this fucking city, Valerie. I swear. If you leave again—Valerie, I am going to do something very stupid. I’m not eighteen anymore, I have a kid, but if you leave, I’m going to hunt you down until I find you.”

  Valerie s
tared at her with wide eyes.

  “All right,” she said weakly.

  “I was stupid,” Monica said, voice breaking on the words. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken Jerry’s side, why did I do that? I hate that you snapped at him and threatened to sue and made things worse, but he’s the one who’s threatening to fire us and demoted me, not you. I… I wish I had the courage to threaten to sue him. I wish I hadn’t just resigned myself to this sort of bullshit for so long.”

  “Oh,” Valerie said, and: “Monica,” the word soft and sad. “I’m sorry. It’s all my fault. You’re right, I—I’m always mucking things up, I’m always fucking getting things wrong, I swear I didn’t mean to ruin everything, I just—”

  “You didn’t ruin everything,” Monica swore. “I’m miserable. Miserable, Val. I didn’t know how sad I was all the time until I lost you again. I’m damn tired of it, of this shitty life. We can find a way to make things better, can’t we? Can’t we find better jobs, move to a better town? Can’t we be happy? I’m so fucking tired of being alone.”

  Valerie kissed her, hands like brands on each side of Monica’s face. They were a promise: that Monica would never be alone again. She was helpless against it, holding Valerie’s hips as tightly as the other woman was holding her, kissing her back like it was the first time. It had been so long. She was tired of fighting, of being bitter, of looking back. She wanted to look forward, to the future.

  They kissed and kissed, mouths open and hot and wet, tongues sliding against each other. Valerie cupped the back of her neck, then closed a hand like a shackle around a fistful of hair. Valerie pushed her back against a wall and Monica gasped at the impact, then moaned when Valerie’s body impacted with hers. Her body was on fire everywhere they touched, like her body was gun powder and Valerie’s hands a spark. Monica kissed her back, twisting her head to deepen the kiss, winding her arms around her. She splayed her hands open wide on her back, pressing her close, as close as she would come.