The notebook I pull out isn’t your standard college-ruled school thing. It’s a hard-backed journal, basically, with kai el khoury embossed in gold letters on it. I undo the leather binding around it before I even question whether or not I should.
A photo of me falls out.
A ripped photo of me.
A ripped photo of me that is clearly part of a larger group photo.
I don’t need to turn it over to confirm what I already know. To know that there are words across the back. But I do turn it over.
It’s the missing tear-out from the box. In Kai’s journal.
My heart beats hard in my chest, but it’s not anxiety or anger or sadness this time. This time, it’s just telling me it’s working in overtime. Telling me it’s too tired to feel anything. Too tired to deal with being lied to again.
I can’t believe I’m here again. That I let this happen.
I flip idly through the rest of the notebook, but there are no other photos of me, nothing else he’d taken from the box.
There’s been this constant feeling I’ve had since all this began. A slow and steady ease spreading across my chest. A symptom of unlearning panic.
But all of that … now all of that unravels. All the growing I’ve done turns again to aching, and all I can do is sit here on his floor, my heart ripped open like a pomegranate in Kai’s hands.
“Are you doing nothing again?” he says as he walks back into the room, his arms full of knickknacks and bobbles, filtered light bulbs and plastic planet shapes.
“Tasia?”
I look up. Then, “You lied to me?” It’s a plea. I am begging him to tell me I’m wrong. That he would never.
He can’t. He sees the photo in my hands. He doesn’t say a word, instead coming to kneel in front of me, placing a hand on my knee.
With Kai El Khoury is where I learn to love physical contact. With him is where I learn why people need it. To press in close, so that every part of me is touching every part of him. To curl up inside of him, hunched and nestled in deep. It’s those moments where he’s just breathing inside my personal space, dragging his cheek against mine repeatedly, touching his nose to mine, as though the act is simply another means of communication, and yet still another, whenever his lips press hard on my chin, just under my bottom lip.
I know when I’m older—not by much, but just slightly more mature and sure of myself—I’ll look back on my experience with Kai and know what kind of things he gave me.
I’ll remember him as the young, humble king that he is. Meant to inherit millions, who’d have worked twice as hard to give it away. I’ll remember he was on the receiving end of a bum deal.
The fact that I hold Kai in such high esteem isn’t lost on me. I worship him. And I thought I knew, with every bone in my body, that he felt the same. That he looks at me and sees a conqueror, that he’s too young to look at me and see something that ought to be exalted—and yet. Yet, he’s shown he feels that way about me, constantly.
Still, I know that although Kai is my rock, my most solid thing, I am not his.
If I were, he wouldn’t have lied to me.
I push his hand off my knee. “You sent the box.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
I drive myself home that night and I don’t even know how. I’ve got no memory of pulling in behind Merrick’s Benz or walking up the stairs to the apartment, or shuffling into my room, of shutting out the lights and everything else.
But apparently I did.
He didn’t even try to stop me. Oh, God. Why didn’t he try to stop me from leaving?
All of it, every single moment with him, without him, with Merrick and V and Mamma and the box, it all just comes in like wildfire. I walk into the bathroom at Merrick’s and sit down inside the tub, try desperately to hold myself still, to just be the brush embracing the burn. I can’t be inside my room right now. I know immediately that its empty, undecorated walls will whisper to me as soft as the flick of a lighter, and I just don’t think I can stomach that right now.
Why wouldn’t he tell me? Why would he lie? Why didn’t I see it coming a million miles away, when I was learning to trust him or falling headlong into this petal-soft, incinerating kiss.
Mamma always says healing is kinda like the ocean running its fingertips over the shoreline, like the snake as it sheds its skin. She says it’s the process of feeling pain, aching, then growing from it, over and over again. She says that end part is the crux of it.
Maybe that’s why I’m here, in this pit of repetitive licks of pain. Maybe that’s why I’ve had to have the important people in my life lie to me.
Maybe each of their lies was my over-and-over-again.
I don’t want whatever this end product is. The pain doesn’t feel worth it. Doesn’t feel like healing. I haven’t come out on the other side intact. Now, instead, I’m wearing lies and the weight of this new world of mine on my back.
Mamma was wrong, I think slowly. It occurs to me that Mamma’s gala is tomorrow. I don’t even care if she’s been wrong about healing or the box or Merrick or any of it.
I need her, I need her, I need her.
On days like today, when heartache and homesick are synonymous, I wish I could just disappear. I do my best to get there inside a tiny, porcelain bathtub. Just until I can get home tomorrow.
Chapter Forty
Mamma’s gala is tonight and I don’t know if I’m ready. I need her, though. Or maybe I just need something normal. Maybe I just need to pretend for a while.
Six steps across the room bring me to my closet, where a gown hangs. I pull it out, lay it across the bed. Exhale.
The Newark Group, so named for the powerful women in Mamma’s family who chose to keep their maiden name—this does not include Mamma, who hyphenated to Newark-Quirk—hosts a celebration of its newest acquisition.
The moment Tristan and I walk into the Newark Group’s event, I’m tackled with a sense of awe. Mamma enters a room, takes control, commands attention, and directs with a steady voice and a sure hand. Men of any race, size, color, and creed follow her with no questions asked. And the ones who do second-guess her are curbed very quickly. I’ve seen her in action before, once, when one of her board members questioned a decision she’d pretty much declared as law. She set him straight with a pretty smile, a few blinks of her heavily mascaraed lashes, and eight hard words: “You can call the shots when you’re president.”
Now the building we’re in is all glass walls and titanium borders and fixtures. Soft lights and clean angles. Men and women in black buttondowns walk through the space with trays of finger foods I’ve eaten at a hundred of these events, and Mamma’s business partners—whom I’ve known since I was old enough to walk—smile and greet both Tristan and me.
Raul and Natalie Cabrera are my parents’ best friends. They stop, ask Trist and me a few questions about school. It’s obvious they don’t know about what’s happening in our family, but they understand that something definitely is going on. Tristan and I smile, nod a bit, answer the same questions they all ask us, in the same tone and with the same inflections. We play the sibling game because that’s what we do at these events. What we’ve always done.
Mamma finds me standing at one of the fruit tables just before dinner is about to be served. She knows me so well, well enough to understand that I will bypass dinner in favor of several plates of fruit plus dessert pastries.
“I did this for you,” she says. She means the fruit table. It’s the most elaborate food table. There’s fricking cubes of dragon fruit and roasted jicama—with a sprinkling of sugar, the way Poppa taught us to love it.
I smile, say quietly, “I know.”
The list Tristan and I made burns a hole in my dress pocket. When I slipped the list in there, I couldn’t even take a second to appreciate that the dress does indeed have pockets.
The list has been long since memorized, so I don’t know why I’ve taken to carrying it around everywhere. It’s like a paperweigh
t, holding me down, centering me and reminding me about the existence of gravity.
1. Have an honest conversation with Mamma. Ask her how she’s doing. Expect her to tell you the truth—no matter what that means.
“How are you?” Now is not the time to have this conversation. I should have chosen another number on the list.
She smiles. Nods, though I don’t know at what. But after a second, I know she’s actually going to be honest with me. I don’t know how I know, but maybe it’s the way her shoulders square out or the way her collarbone suddenly juts forward. Honesty sits in her body language.
I am both ready and not ready for it.
“I’m not okay,” she whispers. The steadiness in her voice is false. “But I’m here, and that’s more progress than I’ve made in … too long.”
“Not okay,” I say.
Mamma smiles. “No,” she says, soft.
“Trist says you haven’t been getting out of bed some days.”
She’s human; she glances around the space to make sure no one is within earshot, then says, “Textbook depression. It’s a bitch.”
I laugh—a totally heathen bark of approval—because Mamma does not use words like that. She’ll say “hell” and “damn,” maybe, if it slips. But never the hard words that can only be said with rough-sounding consonants.
“It’s my faul—”
“Not even if you cut off all your hair and eloped with a Republican in Vegas,” she says. “This couldn’t ever be your fault.”
“Okay. I mean, yeah. I … okay. But when I—”
“This, me with depression and not handling life well, I’ve dealt with it forever. Since I was maybe fifteen or so. It’s part of the reason I got so close to—Anyway, I’ve been dealing with this sort of thing for a very long time.”
I nod. That feels true too. Honest. And it helps me see her as a little more human. For a moment, I wonder why parents don’t tell their kids these things. What if I have it too?
3. Think of her as “just another adult.” Not “my adult parent.” Trust me—this works.
The dimples in Mamma’s cheeks make an appearance as she says, “I really should go up there and give this speech.”
“Did you write it yourself this time?” The last speech she had to give was written by someone else. And you could tell it wasn’t what Mamma had in mind. Halfway through she stopped and said, right into the mike, “Who the hell wrote this? Jesus, this is boring. Okay, listen.” And then she proceeded to give the speech of her life.
Now, she laughs. “I did. You remember that other one?”
I nod, smiling. “And Raul was like, ‘Sloane, it was one speech!’”
“‘One damn speech, Sloane, and you couldn’t just read it and exit stage left?’”
And then we’ve both been set off, and we’re laughing together and then Mamma sobers and says, “How are you? How’s Rick?”
It occurs to me that Merrick is her Rick, but I ask anyway. “Rick?”
“Merrick was Rick. And I was always Slo.”
She was his Slo. For one awful, terrible, horrifying moment, I wish they were together. I wish my actual parents were still together and in love and happy with each other. But they never will be.
I think about Daddy and I know, without a doubt, that Mamma will always love him. No matter what. And he, her. That much is obvious, if my existence is anything to go by. Solomon Quirk will stand by his wife through anything. And the same is true for Mamma—come hell or high water, she’s in his corner.
“Merrick’s good,” I say. But that’s a lie. It’s the kind of lie that you don’t even realize is false because the response is so common.
Someone says, “You okay?” You say, “I’m just tired.”
Someone says, “What’s wrong?” You say, “Nothing.”
Someone says, “How are you?” You say, “Very well, thank you.”
Mamma’s hand comes to her chest, as though she just has to feel the deep inhale and exhale she’s taking. “That’s great. I’m glad you guys are getting along—”
“Actually. I mean, it’s just … There’s a learning curve, I guess? And Merrick is, like, not the most awesome student?”
She laughs. “But you’re okay? Not emaciated or sleeping in a closet or anything?”
I shake my head. “No, I’m eating well. Sleeping in a bed of my own.”
She nods, and I feel her about to walk away, and I don’t know how to stop it or freeze this moment, and it’s making me nervous. And would grabbing her by the arm be unwelcome or look suspicious, or would that be me admitting defeat? I don’t know, but she saves me instead, for just a moment longer, when she asks, “And Kai …?”
I swear my heart must be a bone. It cracks and splinters just a little more. Shaking my head, a very gentle smile on my lips, I say, “How’d you know?”
“I can read your sadness like my own,” she says, and maybe it’s just me, but my heart, that bone, I feel it warm a little, I feel it mending.
“And,” Mamma continues, “I think Kai and Tristan are friends on the video game. Your brother didn’t say much, but he said enough for me to wonder.”
Jesus. They’re all much more entangled than I thought. The ache is back. It’s a big, soiled, green thing, like moss that’s been stepped on one time too many.
“You still like him?” she says. She wants to know. I think she’s probably imagined herself present for most of this situation in my life.
I nod.
“A lot?”
I nod.
“You love him.”
I shrug and nod again, and I smile because I can’t help it. When I think about Kai I really can’t help it, but so much of last night is ash. It’s just soot and debris now.
“What do you love about him? This dress is pretty,” she says as an afterthought.
This is what Mamma does. It’s not calculated or planned. It’s just Mamma, loving on me the best way she can. In exactly the ways I need, pulling my new, bright green roots out of the ground with her bare hands—even through all the rubble that’s burned.
My heart takes off, full speed to the space it knows is home. “He’s weird. He says what he’s thinking and seems very sure about a lot of his opinions and a lot of his knowledge. But he’s actually not sure about a good bit of who he is. Not his style or his looks or his friends or even where he comes from. Not his family or his nationality. And he’s giving. Very giving. And … and he’s a good kisser?”
She laughs, her mouth long and open and wide, her face full of scandal and excitement. She grabs my forearm.
And it’s so us. It’s so classic us, and I’m so incandescently happy for the briefest moment in time that I almost forget what he did. How he lied. How he let me glorify love with him, sing its praises, call it godlike.
A tear slips down my cheek. There’s no reason to fight it. Poppa used to tell me never to fight tears, since they’re just your own confusion and frustration made tangible. “He sent the box. He lied to me about sending the box.”
Mamma doesn’t look shocked, but I can tell she’s hurting with me. I watch it move through her.
She grabs my wrist and pulls me outside onto the patio. Heads turn our way as we leave. I know she’s gotta go and give that speech, but all I care about is that my mamma is here and she’s got me and that’s just enough for me right now.
“Do you trust him?” she says.
I don’t know. “I thought I could. I thought I did.”
“Your answer right now, the one you just gave me—it’s not a no.”
She’s right. It isn’t a no. Kai has done exactly the thing the rest of my family did to me. “So what’s that got to do with the lie?”
“Did you know I’m getting help? I’m delegating more of my work so that I can see that therapist I told you about. I’m also making time to see an emotional counselor. Which is basically just a therapist who makes more money for less work.”
I smile and shake my head, still not see
ing the connection. “What, is Kai your money-hungry emo counselor? Did he lie to me about that, too?”
She rolls her eyes at me. Her favorite thing to do when my dramatics are busy working. “No, angel. What I’m saying is this: I’m getting help. I’m working on me so that I can be deserving of your trust again. I’m working on me so that I can be a better mamma to you and Trist.”
I nod, connecting the dots she’s setting in front of me.
“I lied to you too. I had a reason for it—admittedly,” she says, holding her hand up before I can take off with that, “not a good reason. But I’m becoming a better person because of my mistakes. I hate that it was at your expense, though. I do. I wish that part didn’t have to happen. I wish I could have spared your heart that. But it did happen. And you taught me something. And I’m growing into someone new. Someone who makes mistakes and handles them properly.”
“I see.”
“My question to you is this: Do you trust Kai enough to give him the same grace? Doesn’t he deserve a second chance too?”
He does. That’s not even the question. The question is whether or not I am someone capable of forgiving the people who’ve hurt me when they’re the same people who are supposed to love me best.
I shouldn’t ask her this next question while we’re here. I should maybe save it for another time. But I can’t, so I say, “What did you love about Merrick?”
“A lot,” she says. The jump in subject doesn’t seem to surprise her at all, like she’d always planned to answer this for me, like she was just waiting for the wind to blow a certain way, for things to come together the way they maybe are now. “I liked his music, and that he laughed a lot, and once I saw him with some friends in the park, tossing a Frisbee, and when he ran to catch it, his T-shirt rode up, and I think I liked that about him a lot, too.”
I’m a little grossed out but I still smile, nose scrunched up, head shaking. “Okay.”
Mamma glances at the watch on her wrist. “I have to go give this speech now, but … if you need to talk this through some more …” She leaves that open ended. And I get it.
Home and Away Page 23
