The Best Possible Answer

by E. Katherine Kottaras

  “That’s why you went back to school?”

  “And that’s why I kicked him out this year.”

  “I thought he left.”

  “No,” she says with a quiet laugh. “Not at all.”

  “Then why is he back?”

  “You haven’t been well,” she says. “I thought you needed your father.”

  “Oh, Mama, what am I supposed to do now?” I’m crying again. “How can you expect me to trust anyone? Or Mila? What are we supposed to do?”

  “Look.” She grabs a box of Kleenex from my nightstand, hands me a few tissues, and then wipes her eyes. “There are good people in the world. Whoever she grows up to love—whoever you grow up to love—let that person be good to you. You will have to. You will have to trust that person. You will just have to make that choice.”

  “Mama”—I take a deep breath—“are you going to leave him?”

  She drops her head. “Oh, Viviana. I don’t know. I think I will stay with him until I am finished with my degree, until you are done with college and Mila is old enough to understand a divorce. I think we will stay together for the good of the family.”

  “Which family?” I’m instantly sorry for saying it.

  “Viviana. Do not be sarcastic. Not about this.”

  I sit up. “I’m completely serious. Please don’t stay together for the ‘good of the family.’ That’s not a good reason. Not at all.”

  She doesn’t respond to this. She bites her lip and then looks at me.

  “Please, Mama. Don’t tell me you stayed for Mila and me. It’s not fair of you to put it on us. We didn’t ask for you to stay.”

  “Why do you think I’m in school? Why do you think I’m starting over in the middle of my life? It’s so you and Mila can see that starting over is possible. That life doesn’t end just because your heart is broken.”

  “Okay, so that means you’re going to leave him, then, right?”

  She doesn’t answer my question. Instead, she looks me straight in the eye and says, “You understand, don’t you? That’s why I pushed you so hard all this time. I came here with nothing. I wanted everything. And then, when you were born, I wanted everything for you.”

  I think about this. Her life. Her choices. The pressures she’s put on me to be better than her. “You had no right to shame me for what I did with Dean.” I don’t know where this comes from, but I know it’s something I have to say. That I should have said months ago.

  “Lower your voice, please.”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s not fair. You can’t do what you’ve done and then go and judge me.”

  “Viviana, please understand. That’s why it hurt so bad, to see you make that mistake. I wanted better for you. I’ve always known you could do better than I have.”

  “I don’t know what to say to that.”

  “Say that you understand. That you understand where I’m coming from.”

  I don’t know that I can.

  There’s a gentle knock at the door.

  “Mama? Vivi? Can I come in?”

  My mom looks at me.

  I nod. “Let her in.”

  She gets up and opens the door. “Yes, honey. You can. Come join us. We’re done talking for now.”

  Mila climbs into my bed in between my mom and me. She doesn’t ask what we were talking about. She just cuddles in under the blankets and lets us rub her head. She falls asleep first, and then my mom follows soon after. I lie awake for a while, staring at these two people: my mother, my sister. My father may be gone from my world, but I still have them. They still love me.

  I think about everything my mom told me. I want to be angry with her. But I also want to understand her.

  I don’t know that I’ll ever understand.

  I do know that I love her, even if I don’t agree with what she’s done.

  I lean my head against the window. The sky turns dark, and the city lights up.

  I’m home.

  * * *

  When I wake up the next morning, my bed is empty. I make my way to the front room, but no one’s there. I remember it’s a weekday. My mom’s at work and Mila’s at camp.

  There’s a drawing on the table from Mila. It’s the three of us—my mom, Mila, and me—as stick figures. We’re holding hands on a line of grass. There are two rainbows over our heads and heart-shaped raindrops falling from the white puffy clouds in the sky.

  My dad’s not anywhere in the drawing.

  Mila’s right. She’s much smarter than any of us give her credit for.

  I put the picture on the fridge.

  Even though Evan must think I’m a hot mess, especially now that he has the whole story about my idiotic transgressions, he was right, I think.

  I’m going to be okay.

  And Mila’s going to be okay, too.

  * * *

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No. We just messaged.”

  “What did he say?”

  We’re sitting on Sammie’s balcony. We haven’t talked about our fight. I tried to start with that, but she just pulled me out here so we wouldn’t wake her mom.

  Sammie reaches into her pocket and pulls out the phone. “Here.”

  Virgo: Is this really Viviana?

  Sammie: Please delete it.

  Virgo: Evan didn’t believe me.

  Sammie: Pleeeeeeeease delete it.

  Virgo: I will. I promise.

  I hand it back to her. She slides it into her pocket. “I deleted the photo, too.”

  “Again.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is going to follow me the rest of my life, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, Vivi.…”

  “I’m sorry I make you crazy with my drama—”

  Sammie takes my hand and squeezes it. “Stop. Just stop. We both said mean things.”

  “Yes,” I say. “We did.”

  “We’re both impulsive, okay? It’s what makes us us.”

  I nod. “I talked to my mom.”

  “You did?”

  “Impulsively, yes.” I tell Sammie about the conversation. “I don’t know what’s going to happen with them, but I’m going to ask her to demand that my dad pay for me to go to therapy.”

  “Oh?”

  “I can’t keep dumping on you.”

  “You can always dump on me, but I think it would help to have someone else—someone who knows what the hell they’re doing—”

  “To help me figure out what the hell I’m doing,” I say.

  “Exactly.”

  “I agree completely.”

  I get a text from my mom: I thought I should call you: Your father’s coming home early. He’ll be here tonight. I understand that you might want to stay at Sammie’s, but I do think you should talk. I won’t be home until later, but I can try to schedule a sleepover for Mila at her friend’s house. Let me know.

  I show Sammie the message. “What do you think? Should I start figuring it out tonight?”

  “It’s up to you.”

  Yes, I text back. Do that. I want to see him.

  * * *

  My father’s obviously nervous. He’s doing that thing where he shifts his glasses on his face and then coughs and shifts them again.

  “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  I’m looking at my father, and I don’t see the god that Mila sees or the once-handsome grad student my mom fell in love with. I see a pockmarked, wrinkled, sad old man. The lies of his life, the stress of his life, they weigh down on him. He’s hunched and tired.

  “How was Acapulco?”

  My father shudders at this. “What are you talking about? I was in Singapore.”

  “No,” I say. “You were with Paige. And Ella. And your other kids.”

  My father pushes his chair back and stands up. “Who told you?” He pounds his fist on the table. “Did your mother tell you?”

  “No, Dad. You might want to put a pass code on your phone.”

  He sits back down
in his chair. “Son of a—”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Who?”

  “Oh my God. Mom, of course.”

  He slumps over the table. He gets quiet and still.

  “Did you ever love her?”

  “One day you’ll understand.”

  “Dad, what the hell kind of answer is that? One day I’ll understand what, exactly?”

  He lifts his head and looks at me. “Responsibility, complications. It’s life as you know it, and you’re comfortable enough to be petrified of any other version. You’re close enough to withstand the other’s habits—even if it involves other entanglements—to be okay with your own version of love. You’re committed to this and there are other people—other hearts—involved. And what? Are you going to destroy their lives because of your principles? There are no principles. There’s only survival.”

  “What does that even mean?” I want to cry or maybe laugh or maybe scream or maybe hit him. “Screw that, Dad! Talk to me. Answer my question: Did you ever love her? Or was your love just another lie?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Oh my God. Do you even feel bad about everything you’ve done to us? To them?”

  He pushes his glasses up his nose and leans toward me. “There’s this concept—did you study it in your summer program thing?—called the ‘hindsight bias.’ We have it all the time in the engineering world. You can have all this data about the resisting forces that might weigh on your building—whether it’s gravity, wind, temperature, erosion—you still don’t know before you implement it what the real outcome will be. It’s easy to go back to a failed design and say ‘I would have done this differently’ or ‘I would have done that differently.’ It’s easy to piece the failure together later. We can predict a lot, more than ever, but the reality is that every structure in this world will fall down eventually. We still can’t predict the exact moment of collapse.”

  “Are you saying we were a design experiment?”

  “I’m saying that human impulses are larger than any physical reality. It’s impossible to make predictions about a human life. You just never know what the right answer is. You never know exactly what the outcome will be.” He looks at me. “I certainly couldn’t have predicted this.”

  “Dad, are you ever able to give a straightforward answer?”

  “I am not a liar, if that’s what you want to know. I have been honest about my love for all of you.”

  “You know what? I can see that. I think you perceive the world as you want to. Someone else, who doesn’t know you as well, might say you’re lying to us, to the world. But the very sad truth is, you’re lying to yourself.” I push back my chair and stand up. “And you’re the one who’s going to collapse.”

  “What do you want me to say?” He stands up and hovers over me with his height, with his anger. “I’m your father, and you can’t change that.”

  “No,” I say. “You’re right. I can’t.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “To go live your life with Paige and your other, perfect family. I want you to leave Mom alone. To leave us alone.”

  “You know I can’t do that,” he says. “Your mother wants me here.”

  “You’re only going to hurt Mila worse if you stay.”

  He shifts uncomfortably. “Are you going to tell her?”

  I hear myself say, “I’m not sure yet. I mean, she’ll find out eventually.”

  He looks down at the table. “You disappoint me, Viviana.”

  “Dad, I’m always disappointing you. All you ever wanted was for me to be like you, to be smart like you, to be exactly like you.”

  “I never said I wanted you to be like me.” He looks up at me, adjusts his glasses again. “I said I wanted you to learn from your past mistakes, to learn from my past mistakes.”

  “Dad, even you don’t know how to do that.”

  I grab my bag and storm out of the apartment. This time, he doesn’t follow, thank goodness. I’m able to leave him there, alone with his twisted concepts and ridiculous theories about love and human impulses and right and wrong answers.

  I run to the stairwell and let the door slam behind me.

  But I don’t know where I want to go. Not Sammie’s. Not the pool. Not the endless, wandering streets.

  I do know that I need to be alone.

  I head up the stairs. There are twenty-one floors between the roof and me. I could take the elevator, but I feel like I need this walk upward. I assume that, despite my father’s crazy talk, the engineers of this building calculated that it won’t fall down today. I assume it’s strong enough to hold me, even with the weight of my burdens and regrets.

  I feel this deep need to push against gravity, against my father’s sick and twisted ideas about how the world works, about how life works.

  So I walk up and up and up.

  * * *

  I return to my apartment a few hours later and find my father’s gone. I find my mom on the balcony, alone with a glass of wine. I open the sliding door. “Can I join you?”

  She nods.

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “It is over. I will not allow him to lie to us anymore.”

  I sit down next to her. “Really?”

  “Yes,” she says, taking a sip from her glass. “Really. I got the cancer removed from my neck. Now I will remove your father from my life. He is another kind of cancer.”

  I sit back in my chair. “What about Mila?”

  “She will see him when he is in town. But he will not stay here.”

  “Oh.”

  “You can see him, too, if you want.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Okay.” She nods. “But he will pay for your college. He’s promised me that.”

  I take a deep breath, try to hold back the tears. “What college? Dad was right. No one’s going to accept me, not after what I did.”

  She puts down her glass. “You will get in somewhere. Plus, there are many options, many routes toward many different futures.”

  “I don’t think so, Mama.” I think about Virgo’s texts to Sammie. “That picture has me doomed.”

  “Viviana, no.” She reaches her arm around my shoulders. “You are so very young. Your life has only just begun. Don’t let your mistakes define you.”

  I want to believe her. I want to so much.

  The tears start to come. The tears and the nausea and the dizziness.

  The city below us sways and swirls.

  “I don’t know, Mama—”

  “Come here, honey.” She pulls me toward her. I rest my head against her chest. The tears come fast, but I don’t try to hold them back. “It’s okay. You can cry. Let it out.”

  So I do.

  I cry until I’m nearly out of breath. My mother rubs my back. She doesn’t tell me to calm down or stop crying or anything. She just lets me be.

  Finally, when I feel like I’ve run dry, I lift my head. “Are you getting a divorce, then?”

  My mom looks at me. “Viviana, there is no divorce.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “Oh, honey. Don’t you get it? We were never married.”

  “Oh, Mama. I didn’t realize.”

  She goes on to explain that it will be a clean break, one that won’t require lawyers or courts or papers signed and certified. He will just be gone. He will just disappear. “I had hoped that you would never find out. I’m so sorry, Viviana. There are so many things I would have done differently if I could have.”

  I shake my head. “Don’t let your mistakes define you.”

  She strokes my hair. “You make me very proud, Viviana. Thank you for pushing me. Thank you for believing in me.”

  She reaches out for a hug, and I hold her in close. I feel like this is the first time we’ve ever really talked to each other. I feel like I never want to let go.

  “I want to go to therapy,” I whisper. “I need t
o talk about all of this with someone.”

  “Yes,” she says, sitting back. “He will pay for that, too, at least until I am finished with school. And then I will take care of it all myself.”

  “I have all the money from my job.”

  “No. That’s your money. If he doesn’t come up with the money, I’ll find a way to pay for it as long as you need it.”

  “Thank you, Mama.”

  “No, Viviana.” My mom reaches her hands out to mine. “Thank you.”

  College Essay Tip

  Offer a specific, authentic experience from your life. Provide details from your life so that the colleges can get to know you as an individual.

  Viviana Rabinovich-Lowe

  Common Application

  FINAL DRAFT

  Prompt: Mainly, colleges want to see that, while you’ve made mistakes in your life, you have grown from these mistakes and will use the lessons to function as a mature college student. Write about a mistake you’ve made and the lessons you’ve learned as a result.

  I’m on the cusp. And it’s so scary. I’m about to leave high school, enter the world of college and everything that comes after. I will be expected to “function as a mature college student.” The question is: Considering the mistakes that I’ve made, can I do it?

  My whole life could open up, and it could go in a million different amazing or horrible directions, but I don’t know. I don’t know which way to turn. My mother says I’m the one to determine my tomorrows, but that seems like too much. Too much power. Too much control. This life is too wild for me to have any say. This life is too strange, too wonderful and horrible. It’s too much all at once, sometimes.

  I did make a mistake—a grave one—during my junior year of high school, one that has followed me for months, and one that might very well follow me the rest of my life. I trusted someone with some personal information, and he proceeded to share this information with the world. Soon after, I discovered some truths about my family, deep, dark secrets that made me question who I am, where I come from, what I am made of. But that is all I want to say about both debacles.

  That being said, I’ve learned so very much because of it. For a while, I thought I’d never trust anyone again. But I will. I already do. There’s definitely one person in this world I know I can count on. She’s there in the mirror. And if I listen to my heart, if I trust in that voice that sits deep in my soul, that untouched being of truth—I know it’s there—I will discover the answers eventually. Maybe not immediately. Maybe not tomorrow. But if I don’t open myself to possibility, I’ll never know what it means to have lived. I’ll never know what it means to have loved.