Rend
Page 19
Rhys nodded and got out of bed and when I stood up, he wrapped me in his arms and hugged me so tight I could hardly breathe. Rhys’s hugs felt like they had the power to reshape me into another form, squeeze out everything rotten and broken and leave me with only the parts his body touched.
“You’re really good at this fighting thing,” I muttered.
Rhys finally laughed, and it was so fucking good to hear.
“I’m laying it on a little thick, I know. I just don’t know how else to prove to you that I can be upset with you and we can fight, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love you. That fighting doesn’t mean leaving.”
His expression was utterly sincere.
“Thanks. It’s…it’s probably a good plan.”
He gave me one last squeeze, and we went downstairs.
We made coffee and Rhys got a bowl of cereal and I hacked off a piece of the pumpkin pie. Rhys’s eyes got big and he leaned in and snagged a bite of my pie.
“Mmm,” he said, and I pushed my plate toward him, opting to eat from the pie tin.
We sat in the living room, where lemony sunlight poured in the windows. Birds chirped and leaves rustled and pumpkin filling melted on my tongue.
It was a perfect moment, except that my stomach was in knots.
“I guess I should tell you things now?” I said.
I didn’t know you could sigh with your whole body until I saw Rhys do it. “I wish you would.”
“Can you…” My breath came short. “Can you hold my hand again?”
Rhys nodded. He took my hand and brought it to his lips, then held it tightly.
“Rhys. Don’t…don’t say anything bad about my mom when I tell you, okay? I—she…just don’t.”
“I promise.”
I let out a breath.
“I thought she was glamorous. She worked as a waiter at this Spanish restaurant that had music and dancing. Her uniform was one of those skirts with all the ruffles and layers and stuff? When she walked, it swirled around her legs like she was dancing. I would sit on the stoop and wait for her to come home and sometimes I would see her skirt before I saw her. It’s how I always picture her, in that skirt. Big fake red flower in her hair.”
“Was her hair curly like yours?” He stroked my hair, and I leaned into his hand.
“Curlier. Sometimes on the weekends, she’d try to make it more like waves with those thingies?” I gestured.
“Hot rollers?”
“Yeah. But it didn’t really work. She hated her hair. I thought it was pretty.”
My mother with her hair up in those rollers and a bandanna tied around them, fussing with herself in the mirror exasperatedly. All she saw was every flaw. I thought she was perfect.
“We were living with my aunt and my cousins. It was always crowded and loud. The neighborhood was really bad when I was a kid. Drugs. I didn’t mind that much because my mom was there, but…Oh man, she wanted out so bad. She hated the apartment and she hated the neighborhood. She hated my dad for leaving; she hated him before he left. She hated everything.
“My father had lived with us on and off when I was little, disappearing for months at a time. He’d left for good when I was five. I didn’t remember anything but yelling. A mix of English, Spanish, and Italian, but mostly anger. I think they hated each other. After he left, my mom brought us to live with my aunt. She always called her my aunt, but I don’t think they were really sisters because my aunt had reddish hair and was a lot older than my mother.”
The few bites of pie I’d eaten soured in my stomach. I was speaking calmly but my voice sounded like it was coming from underwater.
“Guess she hated me too cuz one day she just didn’t come home. At first I was really scared. I thought something had happened to her. She got mugged a couple times, and I thought maybe this time something worse had happened. But she was fine. She just didn’t want our shitty life anymore. Didn’t want a life with me.”
Rhys already knew this part but I said it again in this new context.
“Every day, I sat on the stoop waiting for her to come home from work. I didn’t like being in the apartment.”
It was cramped and loud and dirty and I was scared of the roaches that seemed to sneak out whenever I wasn’t looking. My cousins would stomp on them, but the crunch of their bodies giving way upset me more than just leaving.
“My mom would get off the 1 train at 181st and I’d watch the corner she’d always come around. She’d roll her eyes at me, but not unkindly. She’d run her hand over my head. She’d ask why I didn’t play with the other kids. When I shrugged she’d say I could play with her instead, even if playing really meant cleaning the kitchen or folding laundry.”
I swallowed hard.
“Then one day, she didn’t come.
“I sat, and I watched the corner, but she didn’t come around it. It got dark, and my aunt tried to get me to come inside for dinner. I ate, then came back outside to wait. Sometimes she had to stay late at work. Then it was bedtime, and my aunt told me to come inside. But she looked worried. I refused to leave. I kicked her when she tried to drag me inside.”
But my mom didn’t come.
She didn’t come the next day either, or the next.
“She was just gone.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven. I thought she’d been…kidnapped or killed or— But I heard my cousins talk about her being deported so that’s what I thought too.”
It had been a deep fear of hers, so it had always filled me with dread too. I imagined her locked up somewhere, kept away from me. I imagined how scared she’d be, in a cell, in the dark, alone.
Then one night a few months after she disappeared, I heard my aunt on the phone. She had gone out onto the fire escape to talk, but I heard every word through the window.
Arianna, she’d said. You can’t just leave him here and take off. When are you coming back? You’re fucking where?! You went back to Italy and left your fucking son waiting for you on the steps, you selfish bitch. What were you thinking? A pause. My mother’s lilting voice through the phone. When would I hear it again. Yeah? Well, I feel that way too, but I don’t run away because I have people depending on me. My mother again, quieter now. You selfish child. I can’t believe you did this.
Not kidnapped. Not killed. Not stolen from me. Fled. Fled, happy to be rid of me.
“That’s why I let you think that. For a little while, I really…I really thought it was true.” I bit my lip. “But she left. Went back to Italy. She was from this town in the south. Cosenza. But she didn’t go there, she went to Rome. She started a whole new life, probably.”
“Do you know where she is now?”
I shook my head. “She left me there. I never heard from her again. I, uh, I thought she’d come back for a long time. Stupid kid.”
Stupid stupid stupid stupid. That’s what they’d said at St. Jerome’s. Stupid kids. They think mommy and daddy are coming back. Stupid.
“Don’t say that about my husband,” Rhys said, moving to cup my shoulders.
“I was. I waited for her for so long. Like one day she might turn that corner again wearing that stupid skirt, with that stupid flower in her hair. I waited every day.”
My cousins had tried to distract me. Two of our neighbors who were a few years older called me a crybaby and a pussy and would make sobbing faces when they saw me.
“Then, my aunt had this family friend die—you already know this part.”
“Tell me anyway,” he said. “Tell me again.”
“Okay. Um, I guess they said she could move into their house in the Bronx. She said we’d have more space and maybe we could get a dog and my cousins were all excited. I begged her not to go. Finally I pissed her off so much she said I was just lucky she was taking me with her at all.”
Rhys snarled, eyes bright with fury on my behalf.
“I thought if we left…how would my mom find me? I told my aunt we had to call her or send her a letter, but she didn’t have an address or a phone number for her. I said we had to leave her a note. I even wrote one. I put it in a sandwich bag and taped it to the railing. I’m sure it was gone within a day.”
I’d written it in green because green was her favorite color. Our new address, so she could find us, and a note. Please come get me.
“We moved to Morris Park, but I ran away. I kept running away and going back there. If anyone stopped me I told them I was going to meet my mom.”
“How old were you now?”
“Like eight?”
The cold of the concrete seeping through the seat of my pants, chilling me as I huddled there for hours. I’d close my eyes, trying to conjure my mother’s perfume, the smell of her shampoo, the heavy silk of her soft curls. But it was just hard concrete. Just concrete and darkness and the stink of the city around me.
“First time, the people who lived there told me to leave. But I just kept coming back. Then they didn’t tell me to leave anymore so I’d sit all day. I’d make up stories. Like. My mom got married and she was coming to get me so we’d be a family. My mom won the lottery in Italy so she’d send a helicopter to pick me up and we’d live in a castle. Or whatever they have in Italy. Do they have castles in Italy?”
Rhys looked upset, and I realized I was squeezing his hand so tightly it had to hurt, so I let go. I was sweating again.
“They do,” he said.
“You were in Italy, right?”
“Yeah. Rome, Venice, and Florence. On the European tour for Big Mad Wolf about eight years ago.”
I nodded. “You might’ve walked right past her. In Rome. She could have been at one of your shows.”
“Baby,” Rhys said, like his heart was breaking.
I shook my head and closed my eyes. That was what I couldn’t stand to see. To feel. But I took a deep breath and made myself go on. I had promised.
“One day there was a snowstorm. The people who lived there told me to go home, then they told me to at least come inside. I…I don’t know why I wouldn’t. It had just become this…thing that I did? They tried to get a cab for me, but I wouldn’t get in. The cabdriver radioed the cops, I guess. They showed up and took me home. Only, my aunt. She told them I couldn’t stay with her anymore. That she wasn’t actually my mom’s sister, which I kind of already knew. And that I’d become too much to handle. Too out of control. So I had to leave. They…took me. And that’s…” I shrugged. “How I ended up in the system. It’s actually pretty undramatic, compared to a lot of people’s stories.”
I was shaky and sweating, but somehow I felt lighter. I sipped at my cold coffee so I had something to do with my hands, but it tasted awful.
I could see Rhys’s thousand questions, see his horror on my behalf. The horror of a man who’d grown up with a warm house and plenty of food and parents who loved him. I could see how badly he wanted to hold me and comfort me and make it better.
I stood up and dumped out my coffee, washing my cup vigorously as sweat trickled down my spine. My skin was crawling and my brain felt edgy. I wanted to run or scream or fuck or do something. I wanted to go to sleep.
Rhys had followed me into the kitchen, holding the pie. I’d never seen him look so unsure of himself. I hated it.
“Can we take a break?” I asked.
“Yeah. Of course. What do you need?”
“Can we just do something normal people do?”
“Like throw a Frisbee or read the newspaper?”
“Uh. Well, not those things.”
“We could…we should go apple picking?”
“I’ve never been apple picking.”
“You’re really lucky,” he said, cocky grin firmly back in place.
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because you live in a fairy-tale town with like fifteen pick-your-own-apples places nearby, and you’re married to a guy who can reach the apples really high up. Higher than most people can reach. And everyone knows the ones that are harder to reach taste better.”
He winked at me and the return of his easy teasing was such a relief I could actually feel my muscles relax. He was trying so, so hard.
You’re too much to handle.
“Well, if you can get them easily because you’re tall, then they’re not hard to reach for you, are they?”
Rhys put a hand to his heart like I’d wounded him.
“Clearly, we need to conduct a taste test. You want to go?”
When Rhys and I first started dating, he took me places all the time. Random places, silly places. Oddly specialized museums and old amusement parks, drives in the country and tours of the city, disco night at a roller-skating rink and volunteering to paint kids’ faces.
I’d thought at first that it was some kind of elaborate attempt at romance, but Rhys just liked to do things. He liked to learn things and see things, touch them and try them. And whenever he was around, I had fun. It was a foreign concept at the time. Even now, he sometimes had to drag me places, reminding me that I never wanted to go but I was always happy I’d gone. He had faith that things would be enjoyable. I had faith in him.
“Yeah. I wanna go.”
There was that grin.
We drove with the windows down, the early October air drowsy with autumn. Rhys pulled into a dirt lot packed with cars parked every which way. The farm grew things besides apples, and there was an open-air market selling fruits, vegetables, and flowers. The smell of cinnamon doughnuts perfumed the air and made my stomach growl. While Rhys got a basket weighed, I bought a bag of the freshly made cider doughnuts, oil instantly spotting the paper. I held them up to Rhys across the room, and he nodded enthusiastically.
He looked absurdly hot holding the basket under one arm, in his worn jeans and orange and brown flannel shirt. Rugged and outdoorsy. He looked like he’d smell of cinnamon and cut grass and sweat. We walked down the lane to see a field of apple trees sprawling before us.
“Wow,” Rhys said. It was beautiful. The green grass and brown dirt. The green trees and red apples. It looked like something out of a children’s book.
“This is super what normal people do,” I said.
Rhys looked so fucking happy. I closed my eyes for a moment and let it wash over me. This was what I had trained myself to do, back when I started working at Mariposa and Imari pointed out to me in no uncertain terms that I had things to live for and be happy about, and if I chose not to notice them then that was my fucking problem.
I’d close my eyes for a few breaths and notice how, in that moment, something nice was happening. Or something interesting. Something exciting.
Rhys’s arm came around my shoulders, and I leaned into him. Then his hand rustled the doughnut bag, and I laughed and shoved him away. I found a big tree, and we sat underneath it. I opened the bag to the smell of fried dough and cinnamon and sugar, and Rhys grabbed one and ate it in two bites. Then he leaned in, gave me a sugary kiss, and tried to take a bite out of mine.
“There are two more in the bag!” I said, shoving it at him.
“But yours tastes better,” he said, giving me big puppy dog eyes.
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Mm,” he agreed and sprawled out on the ground, putting his head in my lap. I rested my hand gently on his chest, feeling its easy rise and fall with his breath. I held my doughnut to his mouth, and he smiled and took a small bite. Sugar fell on his shirt and clung to his lips, and when I bent to kiss it off Rhys sighed, hand coming up to my hair. It was a perfect moment.
“Are you—” I shook my head. “Never mind.”
Way to ruin it.
“What?”
“Are you still mad at me?”
“It wasn’t because you did anything wrong,” I said quickly.
Rhys sat up and brushed the sugar off.
“Maybe,” he said. His eyes looked haunted. “But, baby, all this time that we’ve been married, I thought that I knew you. And I…I didn’t. I didn’t know the most basic things about your childhood. And I know you have more to tell me.”
I looked at the ground, ants and other small things soldiering through grass so much taller than themselves.
“All this time I was telling you everything about myself. And I thought we were sharing things. And you were keeping all these things hidden. All this time you’ve had these secrets. That’s—” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “Things I thought about you—reasons I told myself for things that upset you. They’re not true. I—fuck.”
Rhys clutched at the grass and then visibly made himself breathe deeper.
You’re awful. You betrayed his trust. You took the most beautiful thing in your life and tore it in half like a piece of worthless paper.
“I’m sorry,” I choked out. “Hiding things—not thinking about things—it was part of how I…sometimes I had to. It made stuff easier.”
He took another deep breath and stroked my hair. “No, I’m sorry. You asked for a break. We don’t have to talk about this now. You wanna pick some apples?”
He stood up and offered me his hand like we were walking into battle together.
“You know how right now you’re just going on with things even though there’s this…thing in the background?” I said.
“I just wanted to—”
“No, no, I’m saying: You see how you can be kind of okay and have a good time and still shit is messed up, but the okay also isn’t fake?”
He nodded.
“That’s what I did. I didn’t…I wasn’t working hard to keep secrets from you. I—it was like there were the things from a long time ago. And there was you, and our life now. And I just picked apples.”