by Tim Murphy
You’re right about that last line, bud, she thought ruefully. But as for the needing-a-break line, she wanted to shout back: You needed the break from me. At least be honest with yourself.
Still, Milly couldn’t get it out of her head that he was so nearby. When she ran errands in the neighborhood, she was terrified she’d somehow run into him. Then the day came when she put on her floppy-brimmed hat and large sunglasses and walked down to the site for the UnderPark. Of course the entrance was guarded and cordoned off to the public. Inside a deli across the street, she sat on a stool near the window, nursing an iced tea and feeling like a fool. She scrutinized every person who came and went past the guards.
Finally, she saw the guy, Char, the transgender black man whom she knew he worked with, come out, wiping his hands on a rag. Char turned back around, said something, and a moment later, right behind Char, there he was. Oh my goodness, Milly thought, there he was. Twenty-eight years old now! Oh, look at him! So lean and fit, his arms covered in tattoos. So he worked out now. Not that skinny dopesick kid she remembered, the kid she used to lose sleep over. So handsome, so healthy! With a red bandanna tied around his head, just like how he wore it the year he finally became a skater boy. Her hands flew to her lips watching him.
Then she realized, with horror, they were coming her way—they were taking a deli break. She fled the deli, twisting her head and neck to the left under her glasses and hat as she hurried down the street. Only at the end of the block did she dare glance back. They were out of view. Milly walked home stunned that she’d seen him, relieved to know he looked healthy, desperately hoping he hadn’t recognized her.
“Why didn’t you say something to him?” Gallegos asked her two days later.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “I’m not a glutton for punishment. I don’t need to debase myself.”
A couple days later, there was a horrible early-summer rainstorm that caused flooding all over the city. Milly rode it out uptown with her father and didn’t come back downtown for two nights. But when she finally did, she woke up again in the Christodora to the familiar morning sounds of dogs barking and children playing down in the park. She walked to the window. It was late May and the temperature was already up in the high eighties at—what time was it?
She peered at her tablet. Ten A.M. Good Lord, she thought, I can feel the heat already. She idly watched people dart through the park on their way to work. The usual neighborhood bums were already gathering, paper coffee cups in hand. A young, dark-haired man on a bench, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and white sneakers, was reading a tablet.
Then he raised his head and looked straight up at Milly’s window.
She stood up and stepped back, her heart pounding, hand over her mouth. Was that him? Was she crazy? She turned, walked slowly back to the window, peeked out from the side. The young man was gone.
Then her buzzer buzzed.
She just stood there with her hand over her mouth. It buzzed again. She walked toward the door, pressed a button. “Who is this?” she asked.
“It’s Mateo,” a voice said. “I just saw you.”
She put her hand on the wall. Then, finally, a hand on the “talk” button. “What do you want?” she asked.
“Can I come up and talk to you?”
“Just give me a few minutes,” she said.
She walked away from the buzzer, sat down on the couch. Suddenly, the past bitter, lonely decade of her life broke over her like a giant wave. Lost years, lost years! she thought, balling her hands into fists. Why should she talk to him now?
Finally she managed to go to the window again. Mateo was sitting there on the bench again, his back to the Christodora.
Milly opened the window and stuck out her head. “I’ll be down in a minute,” she called to him. He turned around and held up a hand in recognition.
She washed her face, brushed her teeth, combed her hair and pulled it back in an elastic. She put on some jeans and a T-shirt and flats, took the elevator down the six flights, walked out the door of the building, across Avenue B, into the park and toward the bench Mateo was sitting on.
Mateo stared at her inscrutably as she approached. The first thing she thought was What a handsome man I raised. The second thing she noticed was that he had some gray flecks by his temples and furrows in his brow. And finally, she was just so relieved that he wasn’t a scarecrow anymore.
She sat down on the bench a few feet away from him. “You look just like you look in all the tablet photos,” she said. It was about all she could think of to say.
Mateo smiled dutifully and looked down again. Milly made idle patterns with her index finger on the leg of her jeans. Occasionally, she glanced at him. He was looking down in his lap, at his tablet screen, which had reverted to swirly sleep-mode patterns.
Milly noticed Ardit, the super, sweeping the sidewalk across the street in front of the building. He kept glancing their way, trying to be subtle. “Ardit’s watching us,” she finally said.
Mateo laughed a little, the way someone in an uncomfortable situation might allow a distracted laugh. Then the two of them continued to sit there in silence.
“Thanks for coming down,” Mateo finally said, his voice scratchy.
“For some reason it was easier for me to come down than to have you come up,” Milly said.
“That’s okay.” Mateo made another scratchy, scraping sound in his throat. “I wasn’t going to just buzz you by surprise,” he said. “I was getting ready to call you on this”—he pointed toward his tablet—“to see if you were okay with talking.”
“It’s okay.”
“But then I saw you in the window and I just got up and buzzed. That was kind of stupid.” He looked away again. He’s barely been able to make eye contact with me, Milly thought.
“No, no, it’s fine,” she said. “I mean, here we are now. It’s all fine.”
But Mateo just kept looking down, paining Milly. “You look good,” she continued, trying to brighten her tone. “You look healthy. You’re healthy, right?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty healthy,” he said, still looking away. “I’ve been clean ten years now.”
“I know,” she said. “Kyla told me. That’s wonderful. And you’ve done really well for yourself.”
Finally, he looked at her with stricken eyes. “You look good, too,” he said.
“Oh, please!” She laughed. “I’m an old lady. Withered on the vine!”
“No,” he said. “You look good. Maybe like you need to eat a little more, though.”
Milly laughed again. “Well, now you know what I used to think every time I looked at you.”
At last Mateo laughed softly. “Okay,” he said. “Fair enough.” He flashed her an amused look, then turned away again.
They fell back into silence. “How’s the UnderPark going?” Milly finally asked.
That earned her another glance. “Pretty good,” he replied. “We had a setback with the rain. We had to vacate the site for four days while they remediated.”
“Remediated! Wow. Is that the word they used?”
“That’s the word they used.”
“Very high-tech,” she said.
He laughed again. “Yeah. It’s a very high-tech, high-grade, high-stakes operation, painting leaves on a wall.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s more than that. I’ve seen your work with your partner. It’s beautiful.”
“Char?” he asked. “Yeah, well, it all started with her. I mean with him. I’m always slipping on the pronouns.”
“That must be hard to keep straight,” Milly said, “after knowing someone for so long.”
“Just the pronoun thing, mostly,” he said. “Char was basically always a man, from the day I met her. Him.”
More silence. Ardit sure seemed to be taking his time sweeping the sidewalk today, Milly thought. It was a ve
ry funny thing to live in a doorman building. They didn’t need to see much to put things together.
“How about you?” Mateo finally asked. “You doing okay?”
Milly sighed. “The last few years haven’t been the best. Bubbe died.”
“Yeah, I know,” he muttered. He was ashamed, Milly could tell, because he hadn’t gotten in touch when it happened.
“That was an awful, drawn-out thing,” Milly continued. “And Zayde’s going senile now. He takes up a lot of time.”
He glanced at her, shook his head.
“So no, I can’t lie to you. The past few years haven’t been great. Past many years, actually. Life’s just kind of . . . emptied out.” Milly didn’t mean to make him feel overly bad, but she didn’t feel like putting a fake smiley face on things, either.
Suddenly Mateo pivoted toward her, his eyes glassy. “Can you accept an apology from me?”
That came so suddenly to Milly! She caught her breath, then sighed and looked down. If only he realized it was about so much more than an apology, she thought. It was about everything; it was about all those years together and why the void that followed walloped her.
“You want me to just shut up and go?” he asked.
“No, no,” she said. “It’s just—I have been hurting for so long, Mateo. Really, really hurting.”
“I know, I know,” he said, all in a rush. “I know, and I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just—I never knew. I never really understood why you adopted me, why you wanted me, and why you kept taking me back. I fucked up so many times, it got to the point I couldn’t look you in the face. I didn’t know what to do but to be alone. Every time you looked at me, all I can remember is I saw disappointment, I saw pity.”
“Pity?” Milly interjected. “You saw pity? Is that why you think we adopted you?”
“Why else would you adopt a fucking AIDS orphan when you could have your own kid? Bubbe brought you to the boys’ home in Brooklyn one day and you saw me and you ended up taking me home out of pity.”
“I fell in love with you, Mateo,” Milly snapped back, quite peeved to have had her intentions mistaken. “I fell in love with a little boy with a big bushel of hair and a bunch of Crayolas and craft paper in front of him. And I didn’t want to give birth to a kid because I didn’t want to watch my kid go through what I went through and what my mother went through with mental illness. So you’re where I put that love instead, okay?” Milly took a breath, winded from the sheer volume of her revelation.
Mateo was silent, tracing finger patterns on his tablet. “So why’d you never tell me that?”
“I thought it was obvious. I thought it was obvious every single day I held your hand and walked you through this park. Mateo, those first years with you were the happiest years of my life.”
He looked up. “They were?”
“Yes, they were. But then you hit a certain age and I think suddenly you started asking yourself all these questions—”
“I did! I did!” he said, worked up. “That’s when it started, when I was fourteen or fifteen.”
“Yes,” Milly continued, “and you know? You know what? We should have sensed it; we should have gone to therapy with you instead of sending you yourself and putting it all on you. We should have talked this all out then. But—” Milly was smudging away tears now; she felt rather overwhelmed from suddenly putting words to something she hadn’t fully understood at the time. “I guess I was just scared of you and I stepped back. It was wrong, it was wrong. Then the drugs started, and then I was really scared.”
Mateo looked at Milly, eyes wide. “Those years are, like, such a blur to me,” he said. “Just, like, years lost.”
“And then suddenly you were in the sober house in California and you said you weren’t coming back. And when a boy grows up and says he wants to be set free, what can a mother do?”
Mateo snapped his mouth shut, considered. “You really thought of yourself as my mother?”
“You are absolutely thickheaded!” she exclaimed.
Mateo laughed. “Well, I don’t know if Jared saw it that way.”
Oh God, thought Milly. Now he’d gone and said the dreaded J-word. “Well, I’m not speaking for him,” she said firmly. “I’m speaking for me. Millimom. The bleeding heart.”
Mateo looked at her sidelong. “You do have a bleeding heart, you know. It used to drive me fucking crazy.”
“Well, it drove—” Milly caught herself before saying the J-name herself. “It drove him crazy, too. He used to mock me for it and tell me I was a pushover.”
“Do you talk to him?”
“No,” she said. “Well, through lawyers.”
“Can I go back to my original question?”
“What was that? I can’t even remember at this point. My head is swimming.”
“Can you forgive me for being a fuckup and wrecking ten years of your life?”
She looked at him again. I can’t believe I raised this man is all she kept thinking. This is the boy who elaborately matched his frites to his condiments? Who kicked his feet against his butt while he drew? My God, she thought, with a catch of fear in her throat. Life is zooming by, slipping out of my fingers like salt, more than halfway gone.
“I’m just glad it’s over,” she said. “It’s really over?”
“It’s really over. I mean—”
“I know, I know,” Milly stopped him. “One day at a time, that’s how it goes. Kyla’s told me that a million times. Just for today.” She said it in kind of a singsong, and he laughed. “But it’s still really over, right?” she asked again.
“Yes.” He shrugged. “It’s over.”
“Well,” she began, “then I forgive you.” She paused. “I can’t believe you thought all those years we took you in out of pity. If that’s what you were really thinking, then it explains a lot.”
He looked at her keenly. “There wasn’t just a little bit of pity in there?”
She opened her mouth, about to protest. Then she considered. She held her open hands aloft. “Mateo, what can I say? I am a middle-class, old-school-liberal Jewish New York woman. A dying breed. Look at my mother!” she pleaded.
“That’s exactly what I mean!” he said.
“I know what you mean. But I don’t think pity is quite the word I’d agree with. I visited you with Bubbe and I saw a little boy without a home, who’d lost his mother, with a lot of talent. And it just so happened that I needed you and I didn’t know it yet. And the more I came back, the more I fell in love with you.”
Finally, Mateo managed to look at her with a yielding softness in his face. He made a fist and held it toward her.
“What’s that?” Milly asked.
He frowned. “It’s a fist bump. Remember the Obamas and the fist bump?”
“No one’s ever offered me a fist bump before.”
“Well, here you go.”
Milly made a fist and bumped it against Mateo’s.
He smiled. “Not bad. That’s a start.”
“Not a bad start?” Milly asked.
“Not a bad start.”
They sat there silently for a moment. Milly felt at once deeply contented and wiped out, like she’d just run a marathon. There were a million other things she wanted to say, to ask him about, swimming in her head, but somehow she couldn’t grasp onto one of them. Then something occurred to her.
“I have something upstairs I need to give you,” she said.
Wariness flashed in his eyes. “I don’t think I’m ready yet to see the apartment after all these years.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You mean the scene of your sculpture demolition?”
He held a hand up to his forehead. “Oh, shit, please not that.”
Milly erupted in laughter. “You don’t know what perverse joy that memory has given me these past few years. On
ce I got over the initial horror.”
But her remark seemed to discomfit him. “I owe him an apology,” Mateo said.
Milly regarded him keenly. Then she sighed. “Sometimes I think I do, too,” she said.
“For what?”
But she shook her head. “It’s too much to go into now. And suffice to say, sometimes I think I don’t, so . . .” She trailed off. “Anyway, just wait here a second.”
In the lobby, she smiled sheepishly at Ardit while she waited for the elevator.
“Reunion,” he said.
“Ish,” she replied.
Upstairs, she pulled the Polaroid from between the pages of a book on a shelf where she’d safe-kept it, then tucked it in a small manila envelope from her desk. Back outside, she sat down beside him again and handed it to him.
“You’ve gone a long time without this,” she said.
He glanced at her, then opened the envelope. He looked at the Polaroid, then buried his face in his hand. Then, only then, she noticed the small letters tattooed on his fingers. I, S, S, and Y.
“Issy Mendes,” he said, his face still buried away.
She sat closer to him, put an arm around him, and nestled his head on her shoulder. “Yes indeed,” she said. “Thank you, Issy Mendes.”
Three days later, Milly walked down to the UnderPark. “I’m Mateo Mendes’s mother,” she told the security guard.
“Yeah,” said the security guard, waving her through. “He told me to look for you today.”
Milly walked down a sloping old concrete passage that slipped suddenly underground into musty darkness, old wood and stone on both sides of her and above. Then the passage opened into a garden the size of a parking lot, full of an eerie sunlight filtered down from above. There were workers everywhere, laying down paving, carrying greenery, hoisting beds of tile up onto scaffolding.