When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  I heard my mother’s footsteps in the hallway, her quick, uncertain gait, and my heart quickened as she came closer. I listened to her pause outside my door, and then continue to her own room.

  “You realize,” Mr. Irving said at last, “this will be our best-attended show of the whole year. This is a big deal, Beth. You never know who might be there.”

  “I know,” I said. My throat seemed to be closing, and I could just force out a whisper. Did he think I didn’t know that—that this was easy for me?

  “You’re absolutely sure,” he said.

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “You’re turning it down.”

  “Yes.” My voice was giving out, my throat clutching at my vowels, like it wanted to stop me.

  “Well, all right, then,” Mr. Irving said. “Don’t say anything to Jason. I’ll announce it tomorrow, and he’ll find out when everyone else does.”

  It was still early enough that he could have called Jason that night, if he’d wanted to. And so I thought he was waiting to tell Jason because he was giving me time to change my mind. I thought about it, wavering, when I picked up my violin again that night and felt a desperation to play that piece, just for pleasure, while it was still sort of mine. I looked at the clock and thought how it wasn’t too late yet; I could still call Mr. Irving back, or go in early to rehearsal the next day and tell him I’d made a mistake. Even the next day, when we arrived at rehearsal, I thought how no one knew yet, and it wasn’t too late.

  Right before Mr. Irving signaled for quiet, I looked at Jason. All day he’d been withdrawn; all day he’d seemed nervous. He looked up—our eyes met—and he gave me a quick, reassuring smile. “Good luck,” he whispered, and I had to look away. The room was thick with its waiting, and there was a burning like hunger in my chest.

  When Mr. Irving announced it would go to Jason, I was careful to look surprised, but not sad. I wanted Jason to turn to see me, to know I was happy for him.

  From a distance, if you were in the back row with the percussion or maybe off on one of the far sides like the flutes, it probably seemed like Mr. Irving was looking at Jason. But he wasn’t; he was watching me, waiting to meet my eyes, and when I looked up he gave me a slight, quick nod. I don’t think anyone else saw it; it was subtle, and no one else would have known the context. But I saw, and I understood then that he hadn’t waited to announce the solo because he was waiting for me to change my mind—if that had been it, he would have asked me again if I was sure, and he wouldn’t have reminded me, at the end, that I had chosen this. That little look he gave me told me that he’d waited to tell Jason so I could see this: Jason’s shoulders slumped in relief, his smile like curtains opening and sunlight spilling across a bare hardwood floor.

  OUR WINTER show was at a church in Portola Valley the Saturday before Christmas. School had just gotten out the day before—it had been a crush of finals and projects and papers due; Grace had messaged us one evening in tears from the stress—and Jason had been reserved and distracted all week, especially at rehearsal. Later, of course, I would look back and agonize over what I might have missed, but at the time I thought he was nervous about his solo. But, as expected, it was very good. He stood near Mr. Irving in the front so that his shadow from the stage lights fell across me and he was a silhouette to me, backlit, as he played. He played flawlessly and precisely, his strokes steady and sure.

  Just as he got to the final strains, just as the rest of us had lifted our violins and flooded the room again with our sound, someone in the audience broke into applause. It sounded like someone pounding on a door, breaking into some sacred private moment, and I stiffened—clapping after a solo was even worse than clapping between movements—and it made me stumble and, for two beats, lose my place.

  But then, for a moment—just a moment—I could pretend, if I really tried, if I blurred my vision so I lost sight of Mr. Irving and of Jason, flushed and hiding a smile before me, that that applause was for me, that it was my music that had moved someone to forget themselves and to break the audience’s code. For a measure, before I returned to my immersion in the song, I let myself pretend.

  When it was over, when we’d finished that last fermata and the lights in the audience had come up just slightly again so we were no longer cocooned up there in that brightness, I was watching not Mr. Irving, and not Jason, but Jason’s father, in the front row of the audience. And when we lowered our instruments, when Mr. Irving reached up and wiped his forehead, shining under the lights, and when Jason exhaled, I was still watching his father and wondering if perhaps he had been the one to applaud. Because even before Mr. Irving held out his hand toward Jason to acknowledge the solo, Jason’s father—who must have arrived at least half an hour early to secure that seat—was beaming and clapping loudly and speaking excitedly to the people around him, motioning occasionally toward the stage, and in that moment what I imagined him saying was, Look, up there, that’s my son.

  * * *

  For Christmas Eve that year, my father was going to come and get me. I hadn’t seen him in a year, since last Christmas Eve, when we’d gone to eat at a Korean barbecue place one of his coworkers had recommended, and afterward we’d gone to Rancho so he could take pictures. It had been crowded, and I kept hoping we’d run into someone I knew, someone I could introduce to him, but it had mostly been older hikers. I’d been stiff and anxious, second-guessing everything I said and fumbling my answer when he asked what I was playing (I’d answered for BAYS, but he meant video games, which seemed obvious in retrospect), but toward the end of the hike he’d been pleased with his pictures, showing them to me almost shyly, and his happiness had been a treasure I’d carried around with me for weeks.

  We’d planned to go to lunch, and all week I’d been checking the weather report four or five times a day to make sure it wasn’t supposed to rain, just in case he wanted to go back to Rancho, too. The day before Christmas Eve, a package I hadn’t ordered showed up on the doorstep, and when I opened it, it was a heavy-duty raincoat from Sunny, with an accompanying note that said fingers crossed for no rain, but just in case!! On Christmas Eve, I woke up before dawn and then the day was too charged and promising to sleep any more, so eventually I got up. I had six hours before he was supposed to come still, and none of my friends were even awake to talk with. I made coffee and thought about making some for him, too, but decided against it because it would be cold by the time he came and he’d always been particular about coffee. He’d always liked brownies, too, so I decided to bake some. My mother came downstairs a little after seven. “What does it smell like in here?” she said, looking around happily. “Are those brownies? How festive!”

  While they finished baking, I changed my outfit twice and wrapped the gift I’d gotten him, an antique book of black-and-white photos of UC Berkeley. By then the brownies had cooled, and I cut them carefully and messaged Grace, who I knew would be awake by now, for advice on how to make them not like they were from a grade-school bake sale. She sent me a picture to copy from Pinterest, and I folded them up in parchment paper, then hunted around until I found some leftover ribbon in one of the junk drawers and tied the ribbon around them to make a neat package. Then I decided it would look better with a label, so I untied the ribbon and wrote cocoa brownies in my neatest handwriting on a slip of paper, punched a hole in it, and retied the whole thing. My father had always appreciated clean, attractive packaging.

  I realized too late I should’ve saved some for my mother. But then it was just a few minutes before he was supposed to come and I didn’t want him to catch me in the middle of unpacking and repacking again.

  Our home phone rang ten minutes after he was supposed to pick me up, and right away I knew. I let my mother answer the phone and let her come find me in my room, still holding my purse and the book and the brownies on my lap.

  “Hi there,” she said. She tried to smile. “That was your dad.”

  I stared at her. A little ringing, a high-pitched shriek of tin
nitus, started in my ears.

  “It turned out he had a meeting,” she said. “An emergency meeting. They had an internal launch last week, and there was a bug and it’s losing them money every minute—he couldn’t miss it.”

  “Oh,” I said. I turned away from her. Now I could hear my own pulse, a rapping sound over the ringing.

  She reached out, tentatively, and tucked my hair behind my ear. I pulled back, tossing my head so that my hair fell back where it had been. She dropped her arm quickly to her side.

  “Let’s go get lunch,” she said. “We can get anything you want.”

  “I’m not really that hungry.”

  “You don’t want to eat?”

  “No, I’m not hungry.”

  “We could get Thai food,” she said. “That’s your favorite. Or we could get—”

  “I’m not hungry,” I snapped. “And that’s not even my favorite.”

  She blinked; I’d stung her. “Beth,” she said, “I’m sure he really did want—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I just think—”

  “I said it doesn’t matter.” She hovered, her arms halfway reaching out, and I said, sharply, “I’d just like to be alone.”

  She closed her eyes, tightened her mouth—she looked as though she were in physical pain. She stepped back and turned around and went out the door, and I watched her go, my arms crossed over my chest. After she’d gone, I flung my father’s book to the floor and watched as it thudded to a landing on its side, the corner denting. I could hear my mother’s footsteps hesitating down the hallway, on the stairs.

  * * *

  Talking to Jason was the only thing I could imagine helping, but when I wrote to him he didn’t answer, even though I held my phone and looked at it for a long time.

  Unfairly, maybe, I was hurt that no one else had checked in to see how it had gone. I tried to tell myself it was for the best, because I couldn’t imagine admitting to them that my father hadn’t wanted to come see me. With their happy families, the Christmas bustle—they would think I was pathetic, and I would cast a pall over their day.

  When I went downstairs a few hours later, my mother had made a tableau on the kitchen counter: the newspaper flat before her in a way it never was when she actually read it, a full cup of tea that had cooled. When I saw her waiting for me like that I felt guilty, not at all like a person whose father might treasure her company.

  “Are you hungry?” she said. She tried to smile. “I made noodles. Or there’s some char siu bao in the freezer. I could warm one up.”

  “I—okay.” I still wasn’t hungry, but I knew she’d feel better if I ate. “Are the noodles still warm?”

  “I’ll warm them.” She stood up quickly and went to the fridge, pulling out a covered bowl. She poured the contents into a pot on the stove and turned it on. It was more dishes that way, but she always thought food tasted worse when you heated it in the microwave. She stirred carefully with chopsticks, leaning over the stove until steam rose from the pot, as I waited.

  “Thanks,” I said, when she lifted the noodles back into the bowl and set it in front of me. I ate a few bites, chewing more than I needed to. “These are good.”

  “Oh.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Too salty. I put too much oyster sauce.” She pulled out her chair and sat down next to me, watching me eat.

  “Beth,” she said softly, “I’m sure he really did want to come.” She reached for her cup and tilted it so that the liquid inside swirled around, and she watched the little whirlpool she’d formed. “It’s hard for him to show things, you know. He gets nervous. And I think he wishes he saw you more, and then he feels guilty when he—”

  “What else did you put in these noodles?”

  “Garlic.” She set her cup down, and she looked sad. “Lots of garlic. I can make more if you want.”

  “No, I’m full.”

  “They say garlic boosts the immune system,” she said. “I don’t want you to get sick and be—”

  My phone buzzed. My heart skipped, expecting Jason, but it was Grace: How’s your dad?? Did you guys go to Rancho? Are you still with him? How did it go?

  It was only because coming downstairs to see my mother waiting for me like this had hollowed me out, and only because it was Grace, that I wrote back that he’d decided not to come. Six seconds later, my phone rang.

  “Come over,” Grace said immediately when I picked up. “Come have Christmas Eve dinner with us. Do you need a ride?”

  * * *

  My mother took me. She had mentioned earlier that it might be nice to make hot chocolate and watch Christmas movies when I got back from seeing my father, but when Grace invited me she said nothing about that, and I tried not to think of her waiting at home alone that night. On the ride there, I kept my phone in my palm, but Jason didn’t write back. Twice my mother opened her mouth and then closed it again, the roundness of it making me think of a fish.

  When I went inside, Mrs. Nakamura gave me a long hug. Their house glowed, adorned with endless white Christmas lights. There were painted wooden snowmen by the entryway and pine wreaths on each door, a full-size tree in the front room and a little one with handmade ornaments by the TV, and a fire gleaming and flickering in the living room. Upstairs, in Grace’s room, there was a surprise: Sunny and Brandon were there.

  “What are you guys doing?” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing family stuff?” Sunny’s relatives were in town—she had three cousins all crammed into her room—and every year on Christmas Eve, Brandon’s family had crab and prime rib.

  “Grace told us about your dad,” Sunny said, and she looked (maybe predictably) enraged. Brandon said, roughly, “You deserve better than that, Beth,” and Grace folded me into a fierce hug. My eyes welled up. I couldn’t speak. They’d dropped everything, had left their family obligations without notice, to be here.

  When she stepped back, Grace said, “We’ll have a better time without him.” She motioned toward her desk, where she’d arranged a plateful of baked goods: English toffee, Mexican wedding cookies, peanut butter brownies, variations on granola and chocolate and cake and caramel, and two tall glasses of milk. And—I’d just noticed—there were carols playing from her laptop, and a pop-up card next to the cookies with shiny red cut-out letters: MERRY CHRISTMAS, BETH!

  She turned to smile at me, and I thought of her that day in eighth grade before we were friends turning around in the lunch line with that same smile, the way she’d said, It’s Beth, right? You’re in BAYS with us!—that moment I thought of now as the beginning of my life, the beginning of everything. My throat tightened, a lump forming. And I thought, for the thousandth time, Why me?

  MY MOTHER and I were still having dim sum with my grandparents Christmas morning—she had reminded me about it at least once a day for the entire week beforehand and knocked to make sure I was awake Saturday morning—and when I still hadn’t heard from Jason by then, I told myself it was because it was Christmas, that everyone was busy. I’d sent him a Merry Christmas message, but he was neither a holiday nor an emojis person, and so it wasn’t entirely unusual for him not to respond. And I’d overslept, and my mother was anxious about us being on time, so my mind had wandered a little. As we were leaving, my mother had looked at me. “That’s what you’re wearing?”

  I was wearing jeans and a striped sweater and the jade pendant my grandmother had given me. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” my mother said quickly, after waiting a few seconds too long. “It’s fine.”

  I messaged my friends on the way there to complain. What are you wearing? Sunny asked, and when I described it—she knew exactly what items of clothing I was talking about—she wrote back: It’s dim sum! It’ll be like, grandparents in sweats. You’re fine.

  My grandparents lived in the Outer Sunset in the same house where my mother had grown up, a pale blue two-story that touched its neighbors on both sides, part of the block-long continuous row of pa
stel houses that were all variations on one another: the same second-story bay window protruding over the garage, the same stucco roof. You could stand in the middle of the street and look three blocks down to the ocean. It was perpetually foggy there, gray even when it had been sunny driving in, and all the telephone and Muni lines crisscrossing overhead tessellated the sky. Every few minutes the house would clatter, my grandparents’ porcelain rattling in the china hutch, when the Muni rolled by.

  My grandparents were very particular about things—even though we always drove into the city, they were adamantly against driving within the city limits and refused to go anywhere they couldn’t walk or take the Muni. Today, because they wanted dim sum, which meant the one specific place in Chinatown they liked, we were going to meet them there.

  My grandparents were already sitting when we finally arrived at the table, both of them wearing dark windbreaker- type jackets, both a little more severely angled with age. They were short, shorter than my mother, and my grandmother, who had always been small, had lost weight; her jacket puffed around her, and her cheeks were hollowed out. She was wearing, along with her jacket and cheap-looking slipper shoes, large diamond earrings and a diamond pendant and several rings, and there was a Gucci purse draped over her chair. I knew she would stuff creamer and sugar packets from fast-food restaurants into her pockets, she would steal stacks of napkins and plastic utensils on the way out and hoard them so she never had to buy her own, but the purse was probably real. It had been nearly five years since I’d seen them, and I hesitated for a moment, unsure if I was supposed to hug them. My grandmother stood up, smiling.

  “So big now!” she said. She stuffed a red envelope into my hand and then closed my fingers around it.

  “Oh—you shouldn’t—” I said, but she waved me off impatiently.