It's Complicated

by Julia Kent

  Marlene’s insatiable needs were legendary. Of all the parts of the brain to be injured and never recover, the worst was the sexual filter. It just…broke. Josie flashed back to the night before, with Alex, and how it felt to take risks. Not the outdoor sex, strangely.

  The very internal risks she took with him. Wanted to take with him.

  Wanted to take for him.

  She’d been ignoring Alex, leaving his text messages unanswered, and the two voicemails hung out on her phone like dark, wet clouds waiting to unload their burdens. The tension that came from not replying to him and her own internal struggle to figure out what the hell to do about her fear, about her sense that this was going too fast and that she couldn’t give Alex what he really wanted, had made her grouchy and confused.

  Tears welled up, threatening to make her voice break and to rack her body with sobs. This was all too much. Too many feelings. All these layers of integrating what had happened when she was eleven, of growing up with an irrevocably changed mother, of fleeing her childhood home and coming to Boston to hit “reboot,” to redo life living under a shell of normalcy.

  Alex threatened that because he was normal. Accepting. Loving? Could she dare use that word? And if so, was it a weapon or a talisman?

  He lived in an emotional reality she couldn’t fathom. What was it like to be raised by a mother who loved you so much and who struggled to reach her fullest potential—and to instill that in her child? Josie had gone to college in spite of Marlene. Not because of her. How many nights had she endured the grousing about wasted tuition money (which Josie had earned and paid for herself) and wasted gas in the car (which Josie had paid for) and how she’d never succeed?

  Getting away had been so hard.

  And yet she really hadn’t escaped anything, had she? Marlene was all-pervasive, affecting Darla’s travel here, influencing what her extended family felt they could and couldn’t do, and infiltrating Josie’s finances. And worse—living inside Josie, the voice of doubt and self-criticism and ragged pessimism.

  Why should Alex accept her as she was? Who was Josie, really? Just a person who ran away from something bad, but who didn’t have an inner core. She was defined by what she wouldn’t be—couldn’t let herself be—but other than that?

  How do you build a world with someone when you don’t know what you are? How do you offer something to someone when you spend your life being not that? For the past decade she’d been so focused on the counterdependence of making sure she wasn’t Marlene that it hadn’t occurred to her that maybe she needed to zero in on what she was.

  That gaping hole inside her couldn’t be filled with Alex. It wasn’t fair. He didn’t have a hole like that, and she certainly couldn’t ask him to fall into hers just because she was so damaged and incomplete.

  Better to hide it.

  Because letting him in meant he could plummet through the endless abyss.

  And right now, she knew exactly what that felt like, and wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

  Not even Marlene.

  Meeting his mom for lunch had seemed like a great idea at the time when she’d offered it but now, with three days of complete silence from Josie, Alex was dreading the event. Meribeth Derjian was a force of nature. Pregnant at seventeen and rotund as she walked across the stage to accept her high school diploma, she had juggled single parenthood, college, and later, a master’s and a Ph.D program throughout Alex’s childhood.

  She looked like Alex’s older sister and even now, at forty-six, just eighteen years older than her son, most people assumed that she was a sibling and not a mother. The way that she treated him, however, was purely maternal. Her drive and good-natured calmness had infused in Alex an amalgam of her, his educational role models, and his grandfather.

  Blessed with the same chocolate brown eyes and dark hair as Ed in his youth, Meribeth had inherited his grandmother’s tininess. She looked like the average man could pick her up and snap her in two. At just over five feet tall, she was even smaller than Josie. Alex’s height came from his biological father, whom he’d never met. Meribeth remained tight-lipped about him, though over the years as she’d moved into clinical psychology she’d shared more. Alex was the product of Meribeth’s short-lived high school romance with a Harvard exchange student from Finland; he assumed that was where he got his height.

  What his mom lacked in height and girth, however, she made up for in spirit. Never needing to know exactly when she was arriving, he could sense a change in the energy of the atmosphere in any social setting and know instantly that his mother was present. Today was no different.

  As he sat in the Ethiopian restaurant in Cambridge, drinking water and sipping clove-flavored espresso, the sound of the door’s bells had fooled him once or twice as other diners entered, and then boom. Like a genie in a puff of smoke, there was his mother.

  The giant, tight hugs, the kisses on cheeks and the assurances that he looked ragged and exhausted and that she would start to call the chief—she just said chief and never really indicated who she meant—to berate him for tiring out her poor child at the hospital were par for the course. Sitting down, she sighed deeply. Dressed in a light and airy peach combination of floating fabric and tight cotton knit, he didn’t know quite what to make of her. The necklace around her throat was a series of chunky gemstones and twisted silver, her lips were painted a darker shade of peach from her clothes, and her eyes glowed when she narrowed them and stared at him intently. If he hadn’t already known she was clairvoyant, he certainly would have realized it today.

  She’d always possessed the uncanny ability to look at him and know what he was thinking, and he’d learned to just let her. Years ago he’d tried to fool her, thinking about baseball, or the Watchmen, or Mentos and Diet Coke experiments on YouTube—but none of it had dissuaded her from figuring out what was really going on inside him emotionally. Perhaps it really was a mother’s intuition, but he suspected that she was part witch and that someday an invitation from Hogwarts would come for him.

  At least, that’s what he had hoped when he was a teenager. Alas, no invitation had arrived, and instead he’d gone off to UMass Med School. Which, while more expensive than Harry Potter’s world, still taught him a means to fight evil. In a manner of speaking.

  They knew the menu backwards and forwards and ordered Injera, the giant sourdough pancakes that came in a communal dish with various savory meals piled on top. From curried cabbage, carrots and potatoes, to some unidentified beef dish with a little bit of field greens, tomatoes, and feta in the middle, this was his favorite meal and his favorite restaurant. Meribeth tolerated it—she enjoyed the food well enough, but Thai was more her flavor.

  As they waited for their food to be delivered, she ordered a mango drink. And then, the formalities dispensed with, she leaned forward, elbows on the table, and said, “Who is she?”

  “She?” Alex said, playing the game.

  “Alex.” Meribeth drew the word out. “Don’t make me drag it out of you.”

  Mom would like Josie, he thought. They were both small and feisty, smart with sharp wits—but where Josie was closed off and behind a shield, Meribeth was all open and out there. She’d never held any secrets and she’d never really patronized Alex as a kid, choosing to err on the side of letting him explore the world and discover for himself where his own boundaries were. As he’d grown into adulthood he’d appreciated that more.

  Josie was more the type to set up the boundaries and stay inside the lines until forced out of them. While Meribeth had never given him any lines, she’d just let him draw them himself. Except when it came to talking about his love life. Then she crossed all the lines.

  Josie was sharper. Fiercely loyal and very open-minded. The way she’d handled everything with Laura’s birth, how she accepted the threesome’s unique relationship, and the way she could read Alex so well...there was something so special about her that his throat tightened and his heart soared thinking about her.

  The wai
tress delivered his mom’s mango drink and she sipped as she stared at him expectantly. “There’s a woman. She’s different from the other ones—this isn’t someone you just hop into the sack with—”

  “Mom!”

  “And you’re not talking about her because… something is wrong.”

  “You should try out for a reality TV series, Mom. You could call it My Mom, the Medium or Honey Mom Mom. No”—he held up one finger—“how about The Hover Mother. You appear in a helicopter at moments where I’m trying to be my own man and—”

  “I don’t need a reality TV show. I just get to torture you—that’s all the fulfillment that I require.”

  They would spar for a few minutes if he let this go on, but she would win and he knew she would win. She knew she would win. So, Alex decided not to try to play.

  “She’s not—”

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Josie.” Even letting her name roll off his tongue filled him with a warm comfort. Unfortunately, it also came with a touch of concern. Not hearing back from her for days was making him nervous. His mom could smell it from miles away, her mother-sense as acute as Spiderman’s spidey sense.

  “Josie? Your grandfather’s nurse in the research trial?”

  “You’re an encyclopedia.” He stuffed a large amount of food in his mouth just to get a break from talking.

  “No. I’m a woman. We remember details. Josie is a pretty old-fashioned name. It’s not exactly common around here, where all the children are named Emma and Jacob. Or Caleb. Or MacKenzie.”

  “Don’t forget Renesmee,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “She’s an interesting choice for you,” Meribeth continued between bites. “Not the shallow type you normally pick.”

  “Mom!” he barked, wiping his mouth with a napkin and sucking down half a glass of water. The curry was particularly spicy today, the sourdough pancake not cutting it. He reached for a handful of salad to cut the spice.

  “Please. I’m not telling you anything you didn’t know.”

  He shrugged in acquiescence. Point taken.

  And then she added, “You don’t know how to have a long-term relationship because I didn’t model one for you.”

  Oh, boy. The never-ending dissection of Alex’s relationship issues.

  “I don’t have long-term relationships because I haven’t met anyone I like enough for that. Oh, and the hundred-hour weeks I work. And the babies born at odd hours. And—”

  “And because I didn’t bring a man into your life until you were in high school, so you missed out on that kind of relationship modeling during your formative years. You didn’t see the emotional and sexual—”

  “MOM!”

  Meribeth pursed her lips and took a big bite of potato, pointedly ignoring the outburst. He knew he couldn’t win; dissembling about his love life and the psychological underpinnings of it with a psychologist who was his mother was like trying to convince Rick Santorum to be the master of ceremonies at Pride Week. Not gonna happen.

  “Do you like her?”

  He shot her a look that said duh. “Yes.”

  “More than the others?”

  A few seconds of hesitation was all she needed. Really, it was all he needed, too.

  “A lot,” he said.

  “Finally!” she said loudly, golf-clapping for him. “And someone I’ve met, too! We need to have her over for dinner.”

  “We?”

  “You do have a stepfather,” she said drolly, picking out a spicy carrot and folding a ragged piece of pancake around it.

  “Of course I do. Can he keep his pants on this time?” The last time—the only time—he’d brought a woman home, John had been in the living room sans pants.

  “He was putting on a kilt for his bagpipes.”

  “Uh huh. Is that the euphemism your generation uses now? I don’t need to know about your sex life, Mom,” he teased.

  She threw a piece of pancake at him.

  “That’s it. He’s playing a nice Scottish piece for your Josie when she comes over for dinner next week.”

  Your Josie. My Josie. It had a nice ring to it. Nervous again, he checked his phone.

  No texts. No calls.

  No Josie.

  Ignoring Alex’s texts was like listening to a Justin Bieber acceptance speech at the Billboard Music Awards.

  Torture.

  Once again, Laura was impossible to reach. Her calls to Darla were ignored. Who else was she supposed to talk to? Crackhead? As hours ticked by, and then two days, she started to think he was her only option.

  How had it gotten this bad? When had her isolation become so complete? It wasn’t like she didn’t have work friends she went out with for drinks here and there. Small talk was easy and they laughed at each other’s stories and jokes. But when she thought about it—really thought about it—not a single one of those people were someone she could turn to in the middle of the night in an emergency.

  Only Laura and Darla.

  Alex was the kind of man who could join that club. He was. She knew it. Josie felt so fucked up compared to Alex. Her mother was fucked up compared to his mother. Crafting an adult life that made sense had been an enormous struggle, without any of the guidance that people normally get from their parents. Life bisected into two parts: before the crash and after the crash. Drawing strength from life “BC” had kept Josie going for a very long time, propelled her out of Peters and here, to Cambridge, in a life that looked like it made sense from the outside.

  And it had.

  Until Alex rocked her world.

  If you define yourself by what you’re running away from, then how do you know when you’ve arrived at where you’re going to? So many years of pulling herself away from a dysfunctional life, of establishing herself as a professional, as a financially stable young woman, had melded into one big concept of not. Josie was not her mother. Josie was not a sociopath. Josie was not incompetent. Josie was not the source of Marlene’s problems.

  Josie was not.

  Then what was she? How do you live a centered life when you don’t know where or what your center is? The thought looped through her mind a thousand times a day, the only anchor in her life. It weighed her down, pinning her in place, and as toxic as it was, at least it was there. Unlike Laura and Darla, who were absent at the most critical juncture of her life.

  Show up for your own life, Josie, a voice said. You don’t need them. Do the right thing. Find your core on your own.

  And that was the problem with Alex. At the core, he was grounded and stable and knew himself deeply. What kind of doctor deferred to CNMs and patient wishes so fully? One who knew himself, who trusted his instincts, and who drew faith from an inner sense of truth.

  What kind of man accepted her for who she was, quirks and all? Screeching brakes in her head made that thought come to a dead halt, because that was the fulcrum of her imbalanced soul. When Alex got to see the real her—the abyss inside that stretched on for eternity, the hole where Josie was supposed to be—he would change. Or leave.

  Because that’s what people do.

  How could she develop any sense of grounded self when her mother was a whirlwind of splintered chaos, seeking to find her own center in Josie?

  Worse—consistently and persistently destroying Josie’s core because Marlene only felt better about herself when others around her were failing. She couldn’t bear to watch someone else succeed, as if it were an implicit judgment against her. Narcissism at its finest, a character disorder not inborn but one created by a car crash that changed her brain. Insidious and disabling, it had made her mother wholly dependent on sarcasm and cruelty.

  Josie maintained the former, but actively eschewed the latter.

  For as painful as it was to shut him out, it was too dangerous to let Alex in.

  Because when you say “I love you” to someone and mean it, what happens when they say it back—and there is no “you”?
Who would he love if he said it?

  Josie didn’t know.

  And that was the true torture.

  Josie was turning him into a stalker. Not really, but he didn’t need to go for a run nearly every day now. That his path happened to involve her street, and that running the loop around the park happened to take him past her building was sheer coincidence. Not creepy. Not obsessive. Or juvenile or silly or any of the other words he berated himself with on a daily basis as the tortured absence of contact with her extended from hours to days.

  Her car was there every time, but that didn’t mean anything. Taking the T was the norm around here. Pushing past her building slowly, he wished he had the balls to go up to her porch and ring her bell.

  And what? Face rejection in person? He’d already been spurned electronically. Why add to it?

  What had he done wrong? Sex in the park was astounding. Life altering. Phenomenal and passionate and exciting and…all of it. Josie was all of it.

  Falling for her was killing him.

  Work didn’t help. A minor issue with a patient had snowballed, making his bosses frown and a few administrators schedule case reviews. Whatever it was, Alex didn’t like it, and it made him uncharacteristically angry. Being questioned so that patient care was at its best? Absolutely fine. Having his judgment nitpicked and Monday-morning-quarterbacked and a whisper campaign of rumors and innuendo used to undermine him? Fuck that. He hated how other respected residents had been rattled and shredded by similar hospital processes and he despised this part of his job.

  As his legs pounded on the sidewalk, his heart rate steady, body pushing air in and out, legs stretching, he hit a flow state. Body occupied, his t-shirt soaking with sweat at the neck and underarms, he reveled in the fact that something worked right. No matter what, he could count on two things: his body and his mind. Both had served him well when he took care of them. Exercise regularly, eat reasonably well, and reduce stress. That took care of the body.