The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

  “Did you know the Fletchers were getting divorced? Did you know why?”

  My mother glanced at my father, panic skipping across her face. “Sweetie—”

  My father interrupted. “Why don’t you sit down, Julia.”

  “Do you want to know why I really got fired? Or did you know the whole time and you just didn’t feel like telling me?”

  He took off his glasses, placed them carefully in his pocket. “Julia. You know I’m bound by attorney-client privilege. You know what that means.”

  “I’m your daughter. Doesn’t that mean something?”

  “Of course it does,” my mother said. “Honey, it just didn’t seem like it was going to make it any better. You were already going through such a hard time. We didn’t think—”

  “What? You didn’t think I deserved the truth?”

  “Watch your tone,” my father said, his voice snapping into firmness.

  “James, that isn’t necessary.”

  “Nina, don’t coddle her. And Julia, for God’s sake, this isn’t all about you.” This was the voice I’d overheard through the years, during so many fights and arguments. His end-of-the-rope voice. I’d never before been on the receiving end. I’d never dared. But a new anger was bubbling up in me. My parents, all that time, listening to me complain about my firing, letting me humiliate myself with every retelling of the story, choosing to keep quiet about the truth. The knife twisted again.

  “So you were fine with it,” I said. “You were fine with them thinking I was some stupid slut. I guess that’s more important to you, right? I mean, God forbid you defend me. You would never want to stir anything up with the beloved Fletchers.”

  “Enough.” He stood up and pointed at the stairs. “That’s enough. Go to your room.”

  My mother looked like she was on the verge of tears. She started to open her mouth. My father barked, “Nina, don’t. She needs to get control of herself.”

  I scoffed. I knew he would hate it, this show of insubordination. “I’m not a kid anymore. You don’t get to talk to me like that.”

  “You are. You’re a child, you’re our child, and you’ll listen to me.”

  “I’m a person,” I shouted. “I’m a fucking person, Dad.”

  My mother came upstairs, knocking light as a butterfly on my door. She sat on the edge of my bed. I was curled up, facing the wall. I had stopped crying an hour earlier, but my pillow was still damp with tears.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I mumbled.

  She reached over and laid her palm on my forehead, like she was checking for a fever. “Honey. I’m sorry about your father. He shouldn’t have lost his temper like that.”

  Why were we always apologizing for the wrong things? My father and his temper, Dot and her paranoia, my betrayal of Spire’s secrets. They were all proxies for the real problem. We talked in circles to avoid what we didn’t want to admit. My father, the chauvinist. My selfishness, my complete lack of empathy. But I feared my problems were anchored by even deeper roots than that. I didn’t know what it was to love. I had never known. All I had to do was look at my parents. My heart had grown a hard shell a long time ago, long before I had ever thought of boyfriends or lovers or careers or a life of my own. Maybe, under other circumstances, that shell would have made me impervious to heartbreak. But it was only a brittle barrier, and with enough pressure it had shattered and left me exposed.

  * * *

  A month later. Spring unfurls into summer with a string of sunny days. I scan job listings and compose halfhearted cover letters, but each attempt sinks like a stone. I hear about other classmates getting laid off, too many to count, classmates who have also moved back home or applied to the shelter of grad school. I ought to find solace in this company, in the collective misery of the country, but it does nothing to mitigate the specific pain—it’s like taking painkillers that flood the body when you have a big, throbbing splinter in your thumb.

  There is a certain comfort to bottoming out. To knowing what you’re capable of enduring. These past months at home, I kept waiting for things to improve, for the upward swing to arrive. There was one more thing left, though. The last piece of the puzzle. A memory, one I had tried so hard to forget, that finally helped me understand why things had gone so wrong last year.

  * * *

  The night of the day when I found out the truth from Abby, after my mother left me alone in my room, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What, really, was wrong with me? Why had I done the terrible things I’d done? The nasty voice that had started dogging me the summer after graduation, the doubts and insecurities: it seemed clear where that came from. I had always been the girl who did everything right, who had followed the rules and checked every box. The problem emerged from my failure to continue that trajectory. I had grown too unsure about everything. I hesitated, I wavered. I needed someone to tell me what to do next.

  There was the clink of cutlery downstairs. My parents were going to eat dinner like it was any normal night, pretend that fight hadn’t just happened, like we’d been pretending all along. Then I heard a soft tap on the door. “Julia?” my mother said. “I made you a sandwich. I’m going to leave it here, okay?” Silence, but I could tell she hadn’t walked away. “Sweetheart. We were only trying to protect you because we love you so much.”

  I took a long shower. I meant to leave the sandwich untouched in protest, but I was hungry, and my mother’s words had softened me. And while I ate, I started thinking. What if I was wrong? What if I hadn’t needed someone to tell me what to do next? Last year, after graduation, I’d had no idea what I was supposed to do with my life, and I wanted an answer. But what if the point was the question, not the answer?

  It’s so tempting. Being told: this is who you are. This is how your life will go. This is what will make you happy. You will go to the right school, find the right job, marry the right man. You’ll do those things, and even if they feel wrong, you’ll keep doing them. Even if it breaks your heart, this is the way it’s done.

  That night sophomore year. The memory I had been trying not to think about for so long. After Adam invited me into his room, upstairs at his party, he stepped close and backed me up against the wall. He leaned in and kissed me. For the first time all night—all year—I stopped thinking. I stopped thinking about everything confusing and difficult and uncertain. Doubts about my relationship, about friendships, about what I should major in. The sickening look of disappointment on Evan’s face, downstairs. The feeling of having too much space and not ever knowing what I was supposed to do with it. It vanished. Adam was such a good kisser. My mind was finally at peace, focused on only one thing: the person in front of me.

  Then a bang sounded from the party below, a speaker blowing out, the music stopping abruptly. We pulled apart, and Adam looked at the door. A loud chorus of booing filled the void. And then, a second later, the music started again. Adam, satisfied that the problem had been fixed, turned back to me. There was a gleam in his eyes, a hunger for something he knew he was about to consume.

  But I was frightened of myself, of what I was doing. I’d been this person before—a cheater, a liar—but I didn’t want to be that person again. I wanted to be better. Adam slipped his hands to my waist. The clash between temptation and resistance made me nauseous. I wanted this; I didn’t want this; I’d been daydreaming about this for months. He kissed me harder and started sliding his hands under the hem of my dress.

  “No,” I said, turning so his lips grazed my cheek. “No, Adam, I can’t do this.”

  “Yes, you can,” he muttered, kissing me on the collarbone.

  “No,” I said, more forcefully this time. “No, I can’t. Please stop.”

  I pushed him away. He looked confused. “You’re joking, right?”

  “No, Adam. I have a boyfriend. You know that.”

  “You’re serious?”

  I started for the door, but he grabbed my hand. “Let me go,” I said.

  �
�What the hell, Julia? This is exactly what you wanted.”

  “No, it’s not. Adam, stop.” I tried to wrest my hand free.

  He laughed. “You are such a fucking tease.”

  “I’m not—I’m sorry if I led you on. I thought we were just friends.”

  “You’re sorry? Julia, what the fuck do you want? You really want to go back to Evan? Like he’s going to make you happy?” He laughed again. “He’s never going to make you happy. Anyone can see that.”

  I shook my head. “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong, Jules. I mean, you guys are going to break up sooner or later. It’s so obvious. So what’s the problem here?”

  “You don’t know him. You don’t know anything about it.”

  “I know exactly who Evan is. And I know who you are. You’re bored. You want more, don’t you? You want something better. I know you do.”

  He was waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, he stepped closer, his hands against the wall on either side of me. He leaned in so his mouth was next to my ear.

  “Let me tell you how this is going to go,” he said in a low voice. I closed my eyes. “You’re going to forget about Evan. Forget about everything else. It’s just you and me, right now. Isn’t that what you wanted?” I could feel the damp heat of his breath against my neck. “I know you, Julia. The real you. I know what you want. You’re going to stay here with me.” I was thinking: Is he right? Does he know the real me? Is that so impossible to imagine? “You’re going to take that dress off. And then you’re going to—”

  “I’m leaving,” I said, ducking under his arm. He didn’t know me. I’d been so stupid, letting my boredom disguise such an obviously bad idea as a good one. I wanted to be better than I had been before. I was better. Adam didn’t know the real me. He was wrong.

  But he grabbed my hand and yanked me back. He pinned me against the wall with his weight and used one hand to pull up my dress, the other to unbutton his jeans.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I squirmed away from his hands.

  “Come on, babe,” he said, trying to kiss me. He pressed against me, harder.

  “Let me go. Adam, stop!”

  Finally I got my hands onto his shoulders and used the leverage of the wall behind me to shove him away. He stumbled backwards, tripping.

  “Fucking asshole,” I said, gasping for air.

  He stared at me, his cheeks flaming red, then cooling. Then, after what felt like an eternity, he shrugged. “You know what, babe? I feel bad for you. I was just trying to help you out.”

  I straightened my dress and wiped his spit away from my mouth. “Your loss,” he called as I slammed the door shut.

  He graduated two months later. It took more than two years before he finally acknowledged what had happened that night. And by then—as awful as that night had been—the scar tissue had hardened so much that I couldn’t even feel the original wound underneath. I saw Adam again, and I didn’t remember what had come before. I didn’t want to remember. From the moment Adam came back into my life, I grew restless and unhappy and yearned for something new. I thought he was the answer. I never stopped to think that Adam was the source of my unhappiness. I thought my life was the illness and Adam was the cure. But the more time we spent together, the deeper my dissatisfaction grew. His presence was the only thing that could distract me from it. And so I kept returning to the well, drinking deeper and deeper.

  Maybe that’s why, even though I’ve spent so much time thinking about last year, I don’t think about Adam that much. In the end, what we had went no deeper than the quick hit of a drug. All those dinners, those bottles of wine, those nights in his bed—they add up to nothing. The lie I told myself collapsed in one shattering moment, and now I can only start from scratch.

  * * *

  In the past month, I’ve carved out a new, careful routine for myself. I wake up early. I’ve started running again in the mornings, before the heat sets in. I take Pepper on long walks through the woods, throwing sticks for him until my arm is sore. I come home and eat lunch, leftovers or sandwiches, cleaning up after myself like a guest. My father is always at work, and my mother is always at her meetings and committees. Most days it’s just me and Jasmine, the housekeeper. We move on our separate tracks, nodding when we pass each other.

  I have a stack of books from the local library. I’m filling the holes in my education, all those English classes I never took because I thought I hated the subject. Austen, Dickens, Brontë. Ovid and Homer, Woolf and Joyce. I have a vague plan to work my way up to the present. Some of the books make me laugh, some make me cry, some bore me to death, some I suspect I am utterly missing the point of. It doesn’t really matter. It’s the act of concentration that I need to relearn. I am trying to be present. Some afternoons I go to the Boston MFA, where I spend hours sitting in the galleries, losing myself in the artwork, grasping at the feeling I had in Paris.

  In the mornings, I scan the news for a mention of Spire. The coverage has lessened as the months have gone by. In the beginning, the story was everywhere: the investigations, the plummeting of WestCorp’s shares, the promises of full cooperation with the authorities. Michael Casey ducking and covering his head whenever the cameras chased him. In those early weeks, every ringing phone or approaching car put me on edge. I was certain it had caught up to me. An officer at the door, ready to serve me with a subpoena, ready to haul me off and take my statement.

  But that’s not what anyone cared about. The leak paled in comparison to the laws that had been broken, and Spire and the feds had bigger fish to fry. What mattered was the crime, not the telling. And I bet no one suspected Evan of being connected to it. Evan was chosen precisely because he would never run his mouth. I studied every picture in the paper and every clip on TV for a glimpse of his face, for evidence of what had happened to him. But there was nothing. The cameras were focused solely on Michael Casey, the one whose head the public demanded. Once or twice I saw Adam on TV, commenting on the latest update in the Spire story, grinning broadly under the hot studio lights. He’s finally as famous as I always thought he would be.

  * * *

  My mother, meanwhile, has been watching from a wary distance.

  Most days she’s out the door before I’ve even left for my run, on her way to one of her appointments or Pilates classes, but the other morning she lingered at the kitchen table. I looked up from the paper and found she had a rare gaze of contentment.

  “Julia.” She reached for my hand. “Sweetie, I’m proud of you. I’m so glad you’re feeling better. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  She stood up. Sentiment over. While she fussed for her purse and car keys, she kept talking.

  “You know who I ran into at the coffee shop yesterday? Rob’s mother. She didn’t know you were back.”

  “Oh. That’s nice.” I hadn’t told Rob, or anyone, that I was back. I couldn’t find a way to mention it without inciting cloying pity.

  “Rob’s coming out from Cambridge for dinner on Friday night. His mother’s invited you over, too. I think it would be really nice if you went. She seemed a little hurt that you hadn’t been by to see them. She’s always loved you.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not—”

  “She’s not going to take no for an answer. I’m not going to take no for an answer. Call her and tell her you’ll see her on Friday. It will be good for everyone. Okay?” She kissed the top of my head, rearranging a few rogue strands of hair before she left.

  Friday evening, I knocked on Rob’s parents’ door. In the past, I would have let myself in.

  Rob opened the door. He grinned and kissed me on the cheek. “Come in,” he said, gesturing me into the front hall. “They can’t wait to see you.”

  Rob’s parents weren’t so different from my parents—this was true for all my friends except Evan—and the flow and contour of the conversation made me feel at home. It was instantly comfortable in a wa
y I hadn’t quite expected: the same worn wood of their kitchen table, the familiar view of their backyard through the window. Rob’s father was a lawyer, and his mother had a successful career as a cookbook ghostwriter. She was an excellent cook. The wine, the chicken Marbella, the fragrant basket of bread and the yellow butter—the flavors were unchanged. His mother had a deep, lusty laugh I had always loved. His father still liked a Cognac after dinner. For a moment, it felt like the last four or five years had been a mere skip of the record.

  After we finished dessert, a homemade pear tart, Rob and I stood to help his parents clear the table. His mother shook her head. “No—you two go on. I’m sure you want to catch up.” I wondered if she was in cahoots with my mother.

  Rob held the front door open. “Let’s go for a walk. It’s a nice night.”

  He filled me in on everything that had happened since Thanksgiving, when I’d seen him last. He had been accepted at Harvard Medical School. He’d also been accepted at Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Columbia, but he’d decided on Harvard. He wanted to be a neurosurgeon eventually.

  “So you’re staying here? I mean, in Cambridge?”

  “Yup. Hey, you remember Mindy? From biology senior year?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “She’s going to be in my class at Harvard.”

  “The girl who threw up when we dissected the pig? Mindy wants to be a doctor?”

  He laughed. “I wonder how she’s going to handle anatomy.”

  We walked in silence for a stretch. I was tempted to take his hand; it only felt natural to do what we’d done so many times before. I stole a glance at him when we got to the park near his house. His face was illuminated by the far-off floodlights on the tennis court. I was trying to decide if he was different. He looked almost the same as he had in high school. Maybe a fraction taller, more stubble in his beard. But he was still, mostly, the person I’d fallen for when I was sixteen years old. What I was wondering was whether I was mostly the same person, too.