“Well,” I say with a forced smile, “then maybe we should just stick with the honey. It can be our little effeminate secret.” His lips curl into a small, tight grin, and he nods his head slightly.
We lie face-to-face in my bed for a minute or two before he speaks again. “My dad smelled like sawdust, and when I was really little, my mom smelled like fabric softener. I used to love the smell of dryer sheets because of her. I used to think we were rich because of that smell. But then, when she started to get sick, her smell changed. For a year or so before she died, she smelled like dirty skin and stagnant air. I think our whole apartment might have smelled like that.”
I take a breath. “Did she have cancer or something?” I ask, and before I can stop it, the sadness is welling up in my chest again. Compassion and sympathy and sorrow cram into my heart. I swallow hard in hopes of keeping my emotions to myself.
“No,” he says, still looking into my eyes. I think for a moment that he might stop talking, that he might not offer me anything else. He blinks a few times and touches my arm. “She wasn’t that kind of sick. She was just broken inside.”
“Oh.” It’s all I can say. He regards me for a moment or two. I think he is waiting for me to say something else. But I can’t. I can only mentally shove my tears back into my eye sockets. David closes his eyes and snuggles his head down into his pillow.
“You need to go to work, Emma, and I need to go back to sleep,” he says softly. “We can talk about it later. I’ll pick you up at work, and we’ll go get something to eat. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say, kissing him on the forehead. I know that I will spend the entire day thinking about David’s mother. About what he means by “she was just broken inside.” I steady my breath and consider asking him outright, but I know from his closed eyes that he is done talking. “Good night, David,” I add, lightly brushing his cheek with my hand as I climb out of bed.
I gather my things and head to the bathroom, pulling my favorite green dress from the closet as I go. I was wearing this dress the night I went up to his apartment and straddled his lap in front of his friends. When he picks me up tonight, I want him to see it and remember our first night together. I want this dress to remind him that I was the one who made the first move. I was the one who wanted us first. And I hope seeing it serves as some sort of confirmation for him. Proof that I love him. Proof that I want to be with him, despite the wounds the past has fashioned for both of us.
* * *
Instead of thinking of David and his mother all morning, I am surprised to find myself engaged in an all-too-lively discourse with Matt and one of my supervisors. We are debating the merits of several different schematic circuit designs and having trouble coming to a consensus about it. I’m eating this shit up—not only because I’m presenting an intelligent and accurate argument, but also because they are listening. I think I may be right about this, and it is so fucking satisfying just to be heard. When lunchtime arrives, we still haven’t settled on the specific design, but we are making great progress. Their openness to my ideas is thrilling, and I can’t wait to tell David about it.
Matt ends up grabbing us a quick lunch from the cafeteria, and we eat it as we work. It is nearly four o’clock before I am able to head back to my cubicle and check my cell. When I flip it open, I find a message from David. It was sent nearly two hours ago.
Hi.
Hi back.
Sorry about this morning.
Sorry for what?
Leaving the conversation so open-ended. Didn’t want u to be late for work.
No worries.
Thanks for not pressing it.
Sure. Like I said before, only share what u want 2. The rest is NOMB.
But it is your business, Emma.
What is?
This part of my past. My mother.
Why?
Because it’s the reason I’m so fucked up.
More fucked up than me and my stepdad?
Yes.
The word stops me in my tracks.
Impossible.
It’s true.
I’ll still love u no matter what kind of fucked up it is.
Promise?
Promise.
That is the best word ever.
His response makes me smile.
Will it be the last fucked up thing u tell me about yourself?
Yes.
Promise?
Promise.
That IS the best word ever. :)
See you at 6:00. I’ll wait by the car.
I love you.
Promise?
Promise.
* * *
At six o’clock sharp, I gather my bags and head down the elevator alone. When I see David standing by his car, I instinctively reach up to my chest and pull the dog tags and raven pendant up and out of my dress. I am sliding them back and forth along their chain as I walk toward him. His eyes follow my fingers, and by the time I reach him, he is wearing a smile.
“Hey,” he says, pulling his hands from his pockets and reaching for my hips. “Nice dress.”
“Glad to know you remember it,” I say.
“How could I forget?” he says with a lopsided grin.
I put on my best puckish smirk. “I kicked some ass at work today.”
“How’s that?”
“I argued some design points, and they listened to me and made a bunch of changes because of it. It felt pretty damned good.”
“That’s excellent,” he says just before he plants a kiss on my mouth. It is deep and incredible. Just like always.
“It kinda was,” I say after he pulls away. “I feel like it was the first time I could really prove that I’m good at what I do. You know?”
“Yeah,” he says with a grin. “I’m proud of you, Emma. And I hope you brought Matt to his fucking knees.” I laugh out loud, knowing that it was more of a compromise than a slaughter.
“Let’s just say that by the time I was done, everyone was begging for mercy,” I tease. His face lights up, and a small laugh escapes his throat.
“Atta girl!” he shouts as he jumps up on to the hood of his car. What the fuck is he doing?
“David, what are you doing?” I shout up at him. He spreads his arms out wide, and he lifts his face toward the sky.
“My girl kicks ass,” he yells up into the sky. Everyone on the street is looking at us, and I want to sink my face into my hands out of embarrassment. But instead, my cheeks flush, and my mouth rips into a gigantic smile. “And...” he adds, looking down at me and quieting his voice, “she promised she will always love me—no matter what kind of fucked up I am.”
“It’s true,” I say to a lady walking past me. I give her a little nod and add, “I did say that.”
“Good for you,” the lady says, picking up her pace. “Bunch of crazies,” she adds when she thinks I am out of earshot.
“That’s true, too!” I shout over at her.
David is laughing at me as he hops down from the hood of the car and opens my door for me. His smile is deafening.
We drive across the river to one of the neighborhoods just outside the city. In the car, David asks me to recount all of my stellar arguments this morning, as well as the reactions from both Matt and my supervisor. I have a good time embellishing the story with a few obvious fabrications. At one point in my story, my supervisor even offers me a job as chief operations officer just because I am so fucking smart. David knows which parts are true and which are not, because he laughs at precisely the right moments. By the time we get to the restaurant, I feel swollen with pride.
The lovely little Italian place has brown craft paper and a votive candle on every table. We eat our meal and talk more about work and the end of last night’s poker match. David tells me about how Carl scorned him for missing most of the game because of a girl. Then he said he played Carl under the table for an hour or so before they packed up and headed home. David settles the bill, and we walk to his car.
“Let’s go si
t somewhere outside and look at the stars,” I say, knowing that at some point he might tell me more about his mother. David says that it’s a great idea, and we drive to Addison Park again. We park in the same gravel lot and walk the same dirt trail until we reach the big rock pile and climb to the top to overlook the city. I’m thankful to be wearing flats today instead of his shit kickers. The view is even more beautiful than it was all those weeks ago.
“I know I said it in my text, but I really am sorry that I left you hanging this morning,” he says as we sit down. “I wanted to tell you about my mom, but I knew there wasn’t enough time and I shouldn’t have said what I said and then cut off the conversation. It was stupid of me to have brought it up like that, but you were talking about the whole sleepy smell thing and it just kind of came out.”
“It wasn’t stupid, David. I was stupid. I shouldn’t have called you my bright little bird last night. That wasn’t fair, especially since I don’t know anything about her. You looked so...I don’t know...so disparaged when I said it. I thought you might run the hell away and never come back. But then you lay down in my bed, and I didn’t know what to do. And then this morning, when you said that she was broken inside...I don’t even understand what that means. I am hurting for you, David, and I don’t know why.”
“Don’t say that,” he says emphatically. His voice sounds a bit angry, and I’m not sure where it’s coming from. “Don’t hurt for me. I can’t stand the thought of you hurting. Especially because of me.” His knees are folded up against his chest, and his arms are wrapped around them. He looks straight out over the city.
“I can’t help it,” I say quietly. “That’s what happens when you love someone. Sometimes you hurt for them. Sometimes you want to take the pain they are feeling and put it on yourself instead.” The sun is just starting to go down, and I can’t take my eyes off of him, even though I know he won’t look back at me.
“But you can’t, Emma. You can’t make it better. It’s impossible. Because it isn’t hurt and pain I feel about my mother. It is seething anger. I am angry at her and at my father and at myself. I am angry that I couldn’t fix things for them, no matter what I did.”
“Fix what?”
“Everything,” he says, resting his chin on his knees. “Emma, my mom spent a good part of her life in a deep depression. That’s what I meant when I said she was broken inside. I watched her sink so deep into herself that she stopped caring about everything. I watched her stop eating and washing and talking. I tried to take care of her, and I tried not to rile up my dad. I tried to turn chaos into control. I tried to make it better for both of them, but I couldn’t. And then I watched her die right in front of me, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it from happening.” I hear a mixture of sadness and hatred in his voice. David unfolds his arms and reaches into his back pocket. He pulls out his wallet and takes out a piece of paper. I watch him unfold it and smooth it down flat on the rock before passing it to me. It is warped and cracked and watermarked. I can’t read most of what it says because the ink is runny and splattered, and the sun is too low in the sky.
“What is this?” I ask as I look back up. His eyes are on me now. Watching me.
“It’s the note my mother pinned to my shirt just before she committed suicide. I was supposed to be asleep in the car.”
“Oh, David. Oh, no. No.” I look down at the note. I can see that it starts with “My bright little bird,” and I can make out something about whatever his father said not being true, but that’s all. She signed it “From your loving Momma.” I want to cry so badly. I want to crawl over to him and hold him against me. He was only eight fucking years old. Eight. Who does that to a child?
“I woke up just as she was about to jump off a bridge with sandbags tied to her feet,” he says. He curls himself up again, into a ball, and hugs his legs.
I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that two women in David’s life met such a brutal and tragic end—and each at their own hands. Both Anna and his mother jumped from a bridge. Both drowned. And both of their choices made him suffer far more than any man should. I want to squeeze myself in between his thighs and his chest and melt into him. I want to erase all the bad. I want to erase Anna and Lucia and Jenny and Kelsey and everyone else who has ever hurt him.
“I got out of the car and asked her what she was doing,” he continues, his voice soft and husky, “but I think I already knew. I think I knew for a long time that my mom was going to leave me somehow. I tried to grab her when she jumped, but I missed. And then I screamed at her. I think I told her to try to fly, to flap her arms or something. And when she didn’t, I jumped in after her. I felt around in the water for her for a long time, but it was dark and I couldn’t see. She died right in front of me, Emma, and I couldn’t save her.” By the time he finishes, he is crying. His body is heaving with sobs, and I wrap my arms around him. His face presses against the front of my shoulder, and I feel his tears seeping through the fabric of my dress. I am crying now, too. My skin is hot with anger—so much anger—for this woman and what she did to her own son. I should feel sad for her—like I do for Anna—but for some reason I can’t bring myself to pity her. He was a child, for Christ’s sake. A child. I am mad at David’s father for not being there for him, and I’m mad at David because I know that he feels as if it was his fault. But it wasn’t. How could it be? How could he think he was responsible for “fixing” his parents? How could he blame himself for his mother’s choice?
A few minutes later, he pulls away and wipes at his face. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry to lay this on you, but...it’s fucked up, right? I never told anyone that I tried to save my mom because I didn’t want anyone to know that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t save my mother.”
I look at David’s face and think about how people all over the world are walking around with massive secrets bound to their backs, weighing them down until their knees scrape the ground. It isn’t just David and me. It is everyone. We all suffer at the hands of secrets, whether we are the cause of them or not. And we are a world of self-made martyrs because of it. We try so hard to hold on to our secrets because we are afraid that no one will understand or that we’ll somehow be judged because of them. People steal and lie and cheat and murder and ignore and deceive, and their victims wear the burden of these wrongs like some kind of godforsaken badge. I am guilty of it, and so is David. But I think David is ready to give up his martyrdom. I think, like me, he is ready to slough off his secrets and move on. He already recognizes that, without them, he wouldn’t be the man that he is. But now, I think he’s finally recognizing that maybe he’ll be a better man without them.
“It’s okay, David,” I say as I brush my hand against his hair, stroking his head as if he were still the small child I am picturing in my head. For once in my life, I know the right thing to say. “You know what, she didn’t want to be saved. It wouldn’t have mattered what you did or said. She had already made up her mind. She saw you standing there, watching her, and she still chose to jump. She chose to do that to her own child. She was gone before her feet even left the bridge, and nothing was going to change that.”
He looks at me as if I just smacked him in the face. “She was sick. I don’t think she saw it as a choice.”
“She had a choice,” I say ardently. “Even if she saw suicide as her only way out, she could have made the choice to leave you out of it. But she didn’t. She involved her own child in a terrible thing—a very grown-up thing—and no child deserves that. And now you are the one who has had to think about it for all these years, and that is really fucking unfair.” He reaches over to me and pulls me toward him. I climb on to his lap, straddling him and wrapping myself around his body. When I hear him start to sniff back more tears, I want to weep again—but instead, I keep talking. “You’re right. It’s fucked up, David. You’re fucked up. And I can totally see why. I can’t imagine how all this has affected you for all these years. Hell, you already know how messed up I am. You k
now what Michael did to my life. His choices influenced everything I did for years. And your mother’s choice did the same to you. But you have to find a way to move on. You have to stop punishing yourself for something that wasn’t your fault. We both have to.”
His hands move up to my head and bend it forward, until I am face-to-face with him. He kisses me, and it is deep and lustful. The burn in my skin turns from anger to passion, and I feel loved and needed and right.
“I can’t move on by myself, Emma. I need help. I need you to make it go away,” he says when he pulls his lips from mine. His voice is scattered and nervous.
“Listen, you already know I love you, David, and I always will. If you need me to tell you those words every fucking day for the rest of our lives, I’ll do it. And I don’t ever have to hear them back. I’m not going away. We can move on together.”
David blinks up at me. His eyes are warm, roaming over my face carefully. He seems to be strengthened somehow. His back straightens and his mouth sets into a straight line.
He snakes his hands around my waist to the small of my back, weaving his fingers together and resting his palms against the base of my spine. “I know something you can do right now that will make everything better,” he says, the nervousness disappearing from his voice. “I know what I need.”
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