Relative Strangers

by Paula Garner

  Gab flashed a smile at me. “It was just what you’d expect, looking at him. Not that long and kind of thick.”

  I giggled, then cleared my throat when Leila gave me a look.

  “You approve of this?” she asked.

  I hesitated. “I don’t think it’s really my job to approve or disapprove. I’m just, you know, listening.”

  Leila’s lips tightened. Tension filled the air. She turned to Gab and said softly, “Are you ever going to think before you act?”

  “Yeah, I knew that was coming.” Gab stood up. “Okay, then. That’s that. You’ll like Jules’s story much better.” She gave me a pointed told you so look and went to her desk. “I have a shit-ton of homework, so can you guys find somewhere else to talk so I can work in peace?” She collapsed loudly into her desk chair and logged in to her computer.

  I bit my lip. Leila had just arrived.

  “Let’s go to my house,” Leila said to me.

  I glanced at Gab. “Okay, Gab? I’ll see you later?”

  “Whenever,” she said without looking up.

  Her words stung. I knew they probably weren’t personal, but they brought that feeling I knew and loathed — that sense of being unsure of how welcome I was. “Should I come back tonight?” I asked. A lump formed in my throat, which made me feel stupid.

  She glanced at me, then sighed, no doubt realizing she’d hurt my tender feelings. “Of course come back.”

  Leila gave me a quizzical look.

  “I’m staying with Gab for a while,” I told her.

  “What? Why?” She looked lost. “What else have I missed out on?”

  “I’ll explain in the car,” I said. “If you could swing by my house first, I need to pick up a few things.” I gently dislodged Faustus, who immediately turned around and tried to climb back onto my lap. I petted him and stood up. “I’ll see you later,” I said to Gab.

  “Yup.”

  Leila and I slipped out the front door and into a chilly gloom. The air smelled of damp earth and decaying leaves.

  “So what happened?” she asked as she pulled out of the driveway. “And why is everybody mad at me?”

  I turned to her. “I’m not mad at you! Why do you think that?”

  “You’re doing everything with Gab and leaving me out.”

  “What? I wasn’t trying to leave you out.” I was horrified to realize I’d hurt her feelings. “It wasn’t really a thing with Gab,” I said. “She just offered to drive me — and you had your cousins’ brunch anyway. I’ve been dying to talk to you!”

  Her lips trembled. “Well, it sure hasn’t seemed that way!”

  “Leila.” I reached out and touched her arm. “I’m so sorry — so much has happened. I’m not mad at you at all! I love you!”

  Leila tried to smile. “At least one of you does.”

  I sighed. “Gab loves you. She just — you know, she feels like you judge her.” I hoped I wasn’t overstepping. I couldn’t deny that Leila was not high on Gab’s list lately.

  Leila pulled up to a red light, her left turn signal clicking neatly. She turned to me. “Jules. Some of the stuff she does? Come on.”

  I shrugged. “She’s just — living her life. The way she wants to.”

  “I just don’t want to see her get hurt. She does the stupidest things without thinking first, and then she has to face the consequences.”

  “She did one thing,” I argued. “She slept with someone. People do that. She did it of her own free will, and she used protection. Why are you so upset about it?”

  “It’s not just one thing.”

  “Well, what else?”

  She was silent for a moment. “Nothing.” The signal changed, green light washing all over Leila’s pale face, and she pulled into the intersection to wait for her chance to turn. “She acts like she’s got everything figured out, but she doesn’t. She’s going to do so many stupid things, Jules — I can see it coming.”

  “But you’re not her mother,” I said gently. “You do sort of judge her. Just be her friend.”

  “She judges me, too,” Leila said defensively. “She’s always telling me I’m too uptight and psychoanalyzing me, which pisses me off. She acts like she’s such an expert because of her parents. I hate that. She thinks she knows everything about me.”

  “Doesn’t she?” I asked, before I thought better of it.

  “No.”

  I wondered what that meant. What did Gab not know? If Gab didn’t know, then I guess I didn’t know, either. And I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

  When she asked me about Luke, I gave her the short version, saving the details for later. My stomach clenched and knotted. We were almost at my house.

  “So you’re really packing your bags?” Leila said, glancing over as she drove down my street. “That’s serious.”

  It was serious. It scared me, and it also made me feel guilty, but somehow it felt important, this literal or symbolic departure on my part. My mom had abandoned me, and some part of me wanted to do the same to her. Was that just spite? Revenge? Or was it me doing some necessary separating?

  Leila pulled into the driveway. “You want me to come in? Or wait in the car?”

  “Wait, please,” I said apologetically. “I’ll be out as fast as I can.”

  I let myself in the front door and called out a hello. I slipped off my shoes and went in. I found my mom sitting on the floor in her studio, across from her painting. She looked up when came in.

  “You got my message?” I asked, pausing in the doorway.

  “Why?” she asked. Her expression . . . she looked so hurt and afraid.

  I couldn’t look at her. I didn’t want to feel ambivalent or guilty. I just wanted to fucking be mad for a while. Was I not entitled to that much? “I need to be with my friends for a while. A lot of bombs have been dropped on me lately. I need some space.”

  I turned and went to my room. I grabbed some makeup and a hairbrush and threw them in my backpack with my books and school stuff. I pulled a tote bag off my closet hook and started shoving some clothes in. I didn’t even hear my mom in the hall, so I jumped when she spoke from the doorway.

  “You know, all I’ve ever tried to do is — is just to do right by you.” Her voice broke. “I know I haven’t been perfect, but do you have to punish me?”

  I squeezed past her into the hall.

  “I know I’m too wrapped up in my painting. I’m sorry. Is that it? Is it because I can’t give you a nice house and nice things like your friends have?”

  “Oh my God!” I stared at her. “You think it’s about money? About houses? You don’t get it at all!” I grabbed my things and ran out the door, worrying that I was pushing my mom into relapse. And I was mad that I was worried. It was on her to stay sober.

  But if she didn’t, I knew I might never forgive myself.

  “I still can’t believe you were ever in foster care. Who would have imagined that we had that in common?” We sat on the floor in Leila’s bedroom, eating the pillow-soft gnocchi with rich mushroomy meat sauce that her mother had left on a tray outside the door with a discreet knock. Despite my best effort at a cheerful greeting when Leila and I came in, my post-ugly-cry face was unmistakable. Her mom’s concerned look just made me want to ugly-cry all over again.

  “You were in foster care?” I asked, scraping the last of the sauce from my bowl. “I thought were you in an orphanage.”

  “It was an orphanage,” she conceded. “I just meant that someone else took care of us when we were babies. Not our parents.”

  I glanced up at her. “And there’s really no way to find out who your birth parents were?”

  “Nope.” She pushed her plate away. “I was left on the doorstep of an orphanage in a dresser drawer, according to the records. I have no idea why, or who my parents were, or if I had siblings or other family . . .” She hooked a lock of hair around her fingers, twisting it.

  “Does that bother you?” I asked hesitantly. To me, the very word “o
rphanage” was a tragedy, conjuring images of cold, hungry, neglected children. I had tiptoed around the subject the entire time I’d known Leila.

  “Of course it bothers me,” Leila said, her brow furrowing. “Do you have any idea how much I’ve always envied you and your mom? You look exactly like her! I don’t look like anybody. I was dumped on the doorstep of an orphanage, and I have no idea why. Did you know most Ukranian orphans have at least one living parent?”

  I was stunned. That didn’t fit the definition of an orphan as I knew it.

  “I know you and your mom aren’t that close and everything but, God, Jules — she got sober for you! It’s like, you and her against the world. She fought for you. Do you know how much she must have loved you to do all that?” Leila picked up her glass of ice water and took a sip, then set it back on the tray on the rug. “Not everybody cares that much about their kid.”

  This was a total 180 in paradigm. I spent my life envying Leila only to find out that she envied me?

  “I know you don’t have a lot of money and things at your house aren’t perfect,” Leila went on, “but your mom moved mountains to win you back and take care of you. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”

  There was the patter of little feet in the hall. Leila’s door opened and Garrett tumbled in, pink-faced and damp-haired and smelling of baby soap. “Night, Leila,” he said so softly, it was almost a whisper. He fell into Leila’s arms and she hugged him, flipping him over and tickling him. She gave him three kisses and stood him back up. As I observed the love and trust between them, something tugged in me, an ache I could almost name now.

  In the hallway, Leila’s mom picked him up as he ran out, giving us a gentle smile. “There’s cake,” she whispered to me, pulling the door closed.

  “There’s cake,” I whispered to Leila.

  She laughed. “Want to get some?”

  “Yeah. In a minute, though.” I shifted and lay on my side on the floor, head propped on my hand. “Leila? Do you — have memories?”

  “Of the orphanage?” She lay down across from me, mirroring me (to the extent that a model-thin blue-eyed blonde could mirror me). “Yeah. I dream about it sometimes.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “It’s the thing I can’t control. I mean, I speak English, I dream in English, I live an American life. . . . And then suddenly, there I am. Lying in that hard little bed next to Olga, patting her back while she cries.”

  “Olga?”

  Leila nodded, then looked away. “She was younger than me. She had” — Leila gestured toward her mouth — “that deformity, what’s it called?”

  “Cleft palate?”

  “Yes! It split her whole upper lip and made it hard for her to eat. She just cried and cried.”

  Suddenly Leila pressed her hand to her face, her shoulders shaking.

  “Leila?” I crawled over to her, alarmed. I had rarely seen Leila cry. I was the crybaby of our little group, and God knows I did it enough for the three of us.

  “I wish I knew what happened to her,” Leila said, sitting up. “I feel so bad, leaving her there. She’d be sixteen now. I doubt she ever got her mouth fixed.” She sniffed and gave her head a shake, trying to pull herself together. “I still remember some of those kids, and one of the staff — the one who took care of us most. Vera.”

  She pronounced it like Vyeh-ra, with a hard r.

  “Do you remember much else?” I asked gently, worrying that I was prying.

  Leila took a breath and sighed, leaning back against the bed. “When we went to bring Garrett home, I discovered I remembered a lot more than I realized. It just — came back. But . . .” She trailed off, shaking her head. “It wasn’t good. It brought back things I didn’t want to remember. I made things so hard for my parents when we there — I was so clingy and whiny.”

  I scooted closer and put a hand on hers.

  “I was afraid to sleep when we were there. I slept with my mom, and my dad slept in the other bed in the hotel room. I just wanted to get back on that plane and get home with Garrett. I was so anxious there. Even now, it messes with my head, hearing Ukrainian or Russian. It echoes. It’s like the dreams — I’m just being dropped into the past, out of nowhere, and I can’t do anything about it.”

  I remembered when she went to Ukraine to get her new brother. I never knew it was so hard for her — was hard for her still. “Maybe you should see Gab’s mom,” I half joked.

  “Ha! How do you think I met Gab?”

  I stared at her, confused. “Kindergarten!”

  Leila shook her head. “When my parents brought me to the States, I didn’t talk. After a while, they were worried enough that they took me to a therapist — Gab’s mom.”

  “You’re kidding! How old were you?”

  “Three and a half or four.”

  “So Gab’s mom taught you to talk?”

  Leila shook her head, smiling. “Gab did. I met her when my mom brought me over for therapy in Mindy’s home office — she used to work out of the house, and Gab had a nanny. Anyway, Gab just took me by the hand and dragged me off with her, and when Mindy was going to stop her, my mom said no, let them go. My mom had never seen me interact with another kid before.”

  I stared at her, stunned. “I never knew any of this! How did I not know?”

  Leila shrugged. “Gab’s probably not supposed to talk about my psychological history. Anyway, my mom would bring me over to play with Gab, and I had to talk to get a word in edgewise, otherwise Gab would just steamroll right over me. Everything always had to be the way she wanted it to be.” She gave a dry laugh.

  “Wait,” I said. “So you were there when Daniel was still at home?” I had always thought Leila and I were both after Daniel’s time.

  She nodded. “He called us Gumby and Pokey.”

  I tried to smile, but I was stunned. The things I was on the outside of . . . they just seemed to grow in number, and it never stopped stinging. “So,” I said finally, “Gab taught you how to talk?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “God. No wonder you two are such a mess. You’re practically siblings. It’s always felt like that to me . . .” I picked at a loose thread at the hem of my shirt, hesitant to say how left out I sometimes felt. “Like we were all friends, but you two were like something else. Like you had something I just couldn’t penetrate.”

  “Well, don’t envy it,” Leila said, reaching for a box of tissues on her bedside table. “Your relationship with her is way less screwed up.” She wiped her nose and tossed the tissue into the wastebasket. “She was so used to holding my hand and bossing me around and mothering me that she just never stopped.”

  “It’s funny,” I said, smiling. “I see you as the maternal one.”

  “Yeah, but — I just feel oppressed by her, you know? Like she still thinks she’s the boss of me.”

  “I think she feels just as oppressed by you!” I exclaimed.

  She raised her eyebrows and let out a huge sigh. “We are seriously messed up.” She stood and picked up the tray. “Let’s get some cake.”

  “What kind is it?” I asked, following her downstairs.

  “It’s a chocolate cake with a mousse filling. Espresso and caramel, I think.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” I said.

  We sat at the banquette, kitchen lights dimmed, eating the most perfect cake I could have dreamed up. Chocolate, espresso, and caramel. Rich, bitter, and sweet. As Eli had observed, my favorite combination.

  When Leila asked me if I wanted more, I couldn’t say no.

  Of course I wanted more. When didn’t I?

  Back at Gab’s, I tried to study in Daniel’s room, since Gab seemed to be in the zone with her work. At the rate I was going, I was going to end up failing my biology test and turning in my English paper late. I just couldn’t concentrate. I thought about the big weekend I had coming up — if all went as planned, I was going to meet Mima. Or I guess I should say see her, not meet her. Because five hund
red days.

  I couldn’t resist poking around Daniel’s room, looking at his awards and knickknacks and books. I tried to imagine having a brother right across the hall for six years. More, including when he was home from college. Gab was so lucky. So fucking lucky.

  By the time I tiptoed into her room, she’d gone to bed. I wondered if she would have preferred for me to sleep in Daniel’s room, as opposed to my usual place in the twin bed across from hers. I told myself that I was probably being oversensitive as usual, and I slid into bed in the dark as silently as I could.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Sorry — did I wake you?” I whispered.

  “No. You okay?”

  “Yeah.” I hesitated, wondering if I should tell her about what Leila had shared about their past. Maybe it would help. “Leila told me that you taught her how to talk.”

  She laughed softly.

  “She really loves you,” I said.

  “Did she say that?”

  I wanted to say yes, but that wouldn’t exactly be true. “It’s obvious.”

  Nothing. Finally I heard her sigh and roll over.

  Then, just when I figured she was asleep, she said, “I love her, too.”

  As anticipated, I failed my biology test on Tuesday. I stooped to the “personal problems” plea for mercy, which I had never done in my life, in hopes of being granted a retake. I was both relieved and ashamed when this worked on Mr. Stewart, who made allowances “due to my exemplary record.”

  Similarly, Miss Hoffman granted me an extension on my English paper, which I just didn’t have the focus to complete. I managed to scrape by in the rest of my classes and get through the week.

  I did homework and read books. Spread mustard on rolls. Proofed pages for the yearbook. Caught up with Eli. Stayed with Gab. Worried about Leila. It had been hard for me not to think about her languishing in that orphanage, and what a tiny, sweet thing she must have been. What if she hadn’t been adopted? What would have become of her? And Gab and me — what would our lives be like today?

  I was also haunted by the little girl with the cleft palate. If I was Luke’s lost one, Olga was Leila’s. But unlike me and Luke, Leila would probably never find her. And if she did, maybe they’d have nothing in common. Not even language. Maybe Olga would resent Leila for all her unfathomably good luck. Who could blame her? Life was so fucking arbitrary.