by Robin Reul
And my brother. To find him only to lose him all over again.
And my mother, somewhere halfway across the country, and who couldn’t be bothered to show up for me the way I needed even one fucking time.
And Hallie, who’d only just met me but shared this amazing connection, and yet she had no problem walking away, not even wanting to keep in touch.
What is it about me that makes me so easy to leave? Because everyone I care about seems to eventually—if not physically, then emotionally.
I cough, and it makes me gag. The grief flattens me. I want it to stop. I want to feel like me again, but I don’t even know who that is anymore.
I just want, more than anything, to close my eyes and wake up to find everything the way it used to be.
I dream that I wake up to the sun shining and the distinct smell of coffee brewing. It’s an olfactory hallucination, of course, because I’m the only one here. I rub my eyes, stand up, and as I crack open my bedroom door, the smell only grows stronger.
I swear I can hear someone banging around in the kitchen. I tiptoe down the hall and hear voices. Male and female. What the—
I walk into the kitchen, and there’s my mom, pouring a cup of coffee, adding a splash of hazelnut sugar-free coffee creamer and then filling a second mug black, no room, and putting it on the table. I see a hand reach for it, and I’d recognize my father’s hand anywhere. Thin, precise fingers, the silver-and-gold band of his watch against his tanned wrists. But that’s impossible.
My mother turns to look at me as I enter and says, “Oh, good, you’re up. We were just going to check for a pulse,” she says, like that kind of joke could be funny in our house.
“Dad?” I want to go to him and hug him, but I can’t move.
“You okay, bud? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He cracks a smile and takes a sip of his coffee.
And then Alex walks in, his hair askew in the way I remember from back when he gave zero fucks. He goes to the refrigerator, opens it, and takes a swig of OJ straight from the bottle.
“Alex! Cut that out! That’s disgusting!” my mother chastises, which only encourages him to take another sip just to taunt her.
“Sorry, Suzanne,” he mumbles and puts it back, then steals a slice of bacon from the plate on the counter and winks at me.
“Stop calling your mother Suzanne. You know she doesn’t like it,” my father says.
Alex slides into the chair opposite him. “Sorry,” he says and then adds quietly under his breath, “Suzanne.” My father rolls his eyes as Alex snickers, and then all three of them are staring at me because I’m still standing there wide-eyed.
I try to move again, but my legs feel as if they have twenty-ton weights attached.
“I was just telling Mom that it was a beautiful day for a hike. Any interest in joining?” Dad asks. He was always trying to get me to hike with him, and I wish I’d said yes more often. Before I can answer, Mom responds.
“He can’t until he finishes all his work.” My mother lays the plate of bacon on the table and one of eggs and another of toast and then motions with her chin toward the table. “Sit down, Jack.”
“Oh, right,” Dad says and puts a spoonful of eggs on his plate.
“What work?” I ask.
She looks at me in disbelief. “What work? You have to finish taking all the tests for your college classes up front because they want to see how much they need to teach.”
“That makes no sense,” I tell her.
Alex shakes his head. “Why do you always have to look for things to make sense? Haven’t you been paying attention?”
What the actual hell is going on?
“Is this real?” I ask. “Are we all sitting here in the kitchen having breakfast right now?”
My parents exchange a concerned look. My mother walks over to me and puts her hand to my forehead like I’m five years old and she’s checking my temperature. “Jack? Can you hear me?”
Dad tells her, “Let him rest, Suzanne. He’ll be all right. He has to figure out how to fly with his own wings.” It’s the translation of the Latin phrase on Hallie’s bracelet.
Before Mom relents, she gets right in my face—checking my pupils to see if I’m high, I’m guessing—and when she backs up, I turn to look at Dad and Alex, but they’re gone.
Someone is tapping my cheek, gently at first and then harder.
“Jack?”
It takes me a minute to orient myself to what is happening. I’m back in my room. The sun is shining in the window, and I’m still here on my bed in the clothes I’ve been wearing for the past two days. My eyes fly open, and I nearly jump out of my skin.
It’s my mom. I let out a little yelp, and it startles her. She retracts her hand and clutches it dramatically to her chest.
“Oh, thank goodness. I kept saying your name, and you didn’t respond. You’ve been sleeping since I got here, and it’s nearly three.”
“What are you doing here?” I scrunch my eyes against the light and sit up abruptly.
“I should be asking you the same thing,” she says with a little more edge to her tone. She’s entitled. She’s tried to reach me about a million times, and I’ve ignored it, which was kind of an asshole move. Still, I’m disoriented and ill-prepared for this confrontation to take place. When I don’t answer, she adds, “Alex called me. Apparently, you showed up out of nowhere having some sort of life crisis, and amazingly he did the right thing and let me know. He was concerned about you.”
For a second I feel as if Alex betrayed me, but then I realize in his own way, he was probably looking out for me. He knew when he didn’t show up, I’d probably go home and that it was the right thing to do. I could only run from my problems for so long—something he knows all too well.
“I’m glad somebody is.”
I didn’t mean to utter the words out loud, but it cuts to the heart of everything I’m about to say. She immediately looks hurt and confused as she stands up and faces me, arms crossed over her chest. “You think I’m not concerned? I called my editor on a Sunday night at home and let her know I needed to end the tour because there’s a family emergency. If that doesn’t qualify as concerned, I’m not sure what meets your criteria.”
“You didn’t have to come,” I tell her.
“Of course I had to come. You’re my son. So take a shower, because frankly, you smell like you crawled out of a sewer, and then come have a cup of coffee and help me understand what is going on.”
I appreciate the buffer of being given time to wake up and refresh my brain before launching into everything with her. I take a long, hot shower and then throw on a fresh pair of jeans and a clean T-shirt and pad barefoot on the cool wooden floors, following the scent of my mother’s Chanel N°5 until I find her in the kitchen. There’s a half-empty bag of Milano cookies on the table. I plop into the seat Dad usually occupied. “Okay, here I am. Let the lecture begin.”
“Is that supposed to be sarcasm?” she asks.
“No, actually it is sarcasm.” I shove a cookie in my mouth. It’s slightly stale, but I eat it anyway. Her eyes lock on my thumb as she places a mug of coffee in front of each of us and sits down adjacent to me at the table.
“What’s on your finger?”
“I got a tattoo.”
“A tattoo?” She raises her eyebrows. In all fairness, I did tell her the other morning that I was going to get one. I just didn’t know I wasn’t joking. “This is quite serious, Jack.”
“Not as serious as lying to me for the past two years about Alex, telling me you didn’t know where he is.”
“It’s not that black and white, Jack.” She sighs deeply and shakes her head. “At the time, it was what your father and I thought was best for everyone involved. It was for your own good.”
“You have no idea what I needed. You never asked. Not then, no
t now, not ever.”
“Part of being a parent is sometimes having to make impossibly difficult choices that on the surface seem like they’re not caring but are actually just the opposite.”
“Were you ever going to tell me the truth?”
“Yes, of course, but if you want me to be honest, I worried about him coming back into your life when you seemed so emotionally fragile. Despite that, I invited him to come to the funeral, except I didn’t tell you so that you wouldn’t be upset if he didn’t show. When he didn’t, he only proved to me that he still hadn’t moved beyond only thinking of himself. So, hearing you’re looking to him for life advice like he in any way has your best interests at heart has me, understandably, a little concerned.”
“At least he was willing to try to help.”
She tries to redirect the conversation as she doctors her coffee, pouring in her hazelnut creamer. “Look, Jack—I need you to explain what is going on. I can’t fix anything if you won’t talk to me, and hopefully it can be fixed. I’m sure changing tickets or calling your new boss is no problem. We’ll tell them something came up and you’ll be able to start later in the week. And worst comes to worst, we’ll buy another ticket.”
“But that’s the whole point, Mom. I don’t want you to fix anything. My whole life, everyone else has been thinking for me. Not once has anyone asked me what I want, so for the longest time, I’ve believed it didn’t matter. But it does. I’m tired of feeling like being anything less than the person you want me to be is not good enough for you.”
Her eyebrows form an agitated V, and she huffs. “Don’t put that on me, like everything you’ve done is because I held a gun to your head.” She averts her eyes to the plant in the center of the table and begins picking off the yellowed leaves. There’s no shortage of things that have suffered from a lack of attention around here. “This is what you’ve always wanted to do.”
“No, this what you’ve always wanted me to do, and I went along with it because it seemed to make you guys happy. But if I can’t trust my own voice, why should I trust anyone else’s?”
I’ve never stood up to my mother in my life, and my doing so takes her by surprise. I’ve got her full attention.
“Are you saying you aren’t interested in being a doctor? Or you aren’t interested in going to Columbia?”
Here we are. It’s all come down to this moment. I need to make a decision, and the more I talk, the more my choice becomes clear. I shake my head. “All of it.”
“I see. And what sparked this sudden change of heart?”
“It’s not sudden. Since before Dad died, I’m realizing. Honestly, it’s always felt like if I didn’t do this, you might not be proud of me—both of you.” I take another cookie out of the bag and crack it in half before putting it in my mouth. “For the past year, all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball. The future is suddenly imminent, and it doesn’t look like I’d expected. It’s like I’ve lost my sense of place and purpose and my ability to see anything good up ahead, and it scares me a hell of a lot more than letting go of this.”
I feel a wave of sadness building offshore. I don’t want to fall apart in front of her. She’ll write it off as anxiety and start analyzing me, and I’ll lose ground. It’s more than that.
Predictably, she says, “Maybe we should talk to Carole about going back on an antidepressant.”
“That’s not the solution for me. I know they’re amazing for some people, and they helped for a while, but I don’t personally like how they make me feel. I want to have agency over my life and learn to deal with whatever happens without having to rely on meds to feel okay,” I tell her. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I’ve realized I’m just not ready. Like life has kept moving forward but I’m standing still, and I need some time to catch up. I don’t know if that’s a few months or a year, but I don’t want to rush into something that doesn’t feel right. It seems unrealistic for me to have my whole life figured out at eighteen. And frankly, I shouldn’t have to. Maybe I can talk to Columbia about deferring so if I decide it’s what I want, that option is still there—I don’t know.”
Her jaw tenses. “That would be wise.”
“Most of all, I want to be happy, to wake up every day and feel good about who I am and how I’m walking in the world. And how I’m choosing to do that should be secondary for you because it’s not about you.”
She sighs deeply. She can’t refute that, and she knows it. It’s why my father also once said I’d make a good lawyer. “I think you might be making a very big mistake that you will possibly regret someday.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. If you think about it, everything we do is potentially a big mistake we might regret deeply one day. We’re always one decision away from changing our whole lives.”
I know you can’t hold on to anything forever. Not a person, not a situation, not a plan. Perhaps my problem is I keep trying.
We talk late into the evening. Really talk, like we haven’t in years, if ever. I’m glad to find I haven’t given her enough credit. She has her own feelings about everything I’m saying, but surprisingly, she’s not discounting mine.
Before we call it a night, I ask her, “Do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you’d made different choices? Would you be happier? Or would it have just been a different series of disappointments and heartbreaks?”
As she turns off the lights and we head down the hall to go to bed, she answers, “I think disappointment and heartbreak are unavoidable. But giving up the painful, messy moments that come from those choices would mean giving up the positive ones that came from them too.”
I nod. “So—are you flying back to New York tomorrow? I mean—I know you still have three weeks left on your tour.”
She shakes her head. “No. I want stick around here for a while in case you need me—which I know you don’t, sounds like you’ve got this under control. But you know what I mean.”
“I’ve always needed you, Mom,” I tell her. She folds her arms around me, and we stand there like that for a long time.
Chapter 24
Jack
Wednesday, June 23, 1:22 p.m.
I spend the first two weeks of summer mostly hanging out with Ajay, playing video games, applying for a handful of minimum-wage jobs, and watching a lot of shows on Netflix.
Still, two weeks out from shooting off an apologetic email to my supervisor at the internship I won’t be taking and another to Columbia University’s admissions department to inquire about deferring, I’m not as relieved as I might have expected. I’m guessing it will take a while to sink in.
Today, I’m taking a break from organizing my bookshelf alphabetically to go the mall with Ajay. He needs to get some new clothes for his upcoming trip to Europe where he’s spending the summer with his cousins in Paris, and I’m that bored that I’ve offered to tag along. Ajay thumbs through stacks of identical-looking tan shorts at five different chain stores until he finally settles on some and buys three identical pairs. We linger in GameStop for a while chatting up the guy behind the counter about Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild sequel and then head to the Starbucks kiosk for rejuvenation.
“So, have you talked to Natasha?” he asks as we loop around the turnstile and enter the queue.
“Nope. Should I have?”
“No, it’s just—you guys went out for a long time, and then it ended kind of weird. I don’t know where that leaves me exactly. I mean—I’m friends with both of you.”
“Has she asked about me?” I ask.
“I haven’t actually talked to her since the day after Carly’s party, when she was having a meltdown.”
“Nobody’s expecting you to choose sides. We broke up with each other, not you. We can be mature. We’re all adults here.”
“That’s a terrifying thought,” he jokes.
“Seriously, it’s fine. I�
��m fine. Things could not be finer. I am the King of Fineland.” We order, and Ajay doesn’t even make a move for his wallet. He’s distracted by something, and there’s someone waiting behind us, so I pay. “No problem, I’ll get it.”
“Cool—so—if your paths crossed suddenly and without warning, you’d be totally chill?” he asks, his gaze remaining fixed somewhere over my shoulder.
I let out a single laugh. “Yeah, totally.”
“Excellent, because she’s standing at the counter right there waiting for her drink.”
For a single beat, I wonder if Ajay is trying to prank me, but it’s not his style to twist the knife. He’s more about trying to embarrass me in public. And then I hear the barista yell out, “Triple venti, half-sweet, nonfat, caramel macchiato, extra hot!”
I’d recognize that high-maintenance drink order anywhere.
I scan the faces arcing out around the pickup area at the end of the bar and spot her copper curls, piled on her head in an intentionally sloppy bun. Our eyes lock as she reaches for her beverage. She’s caught off guard, and the sight of me so clearly unsettles her that she knocks into not one but two people behind her as she steps back from the counter. Her face is as white as if she’s seeing a ghost. In a way, she is.
We exchange awkward smiles, and I raise my hand in hello. For a millisecond, I feel a twinge of something I used to when I looked at her, but then I realize it’s more of a conditioned response, like Pavlov’s dogs. The truth is, I haven’t thought much about her these last few weeks.
“Iced coffee for Cade!” the barista calls out, and my attention is now drawn to the guy standing to her left that I hadn’t noticed at first. It takes me a minute to recognize him as he approaches the counter because he’s wearing sunglasses and a wool beanie even though it’s hot as Hades out. As he comes to stand alongside her, I realize it’s Cade fucking Krentzman. The same Cade Krentzman from grad night.