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My soup arrives, as does a salad for her that comes laden with garbanzo beans.
“When it comes to work.”
“In some ways, yes. In others, probably not. Why?”
“So.” I swallow. “I work hard. I don’t have time for much of anything except my job. I take what I do very seriously. There’s no point doing something if you can’t be the best, right?”
My mother stabs her salad. A garbanzo bean skitters away from her fork and flies across the table. She picks up the errant bean idly and slips it into her napkin. “That is not an entirely complimentary description of either of us.”
“Sorry.” I shake my head.
“It’s also not wrong. It has taken me many, many years to get to the point where I can let things go. The joy and the agony of being a perfectionist in a changing world is that you will never succeed in being without fault, but you also never run out of chances.”
I nod.
“But I don’t think you came here to talk about Cyclone’s product release cycle.” She gestures with her fork. “What are you really asking?”
Until this moment, I wasn’t sure. But I think about Maria’s face. About Em. About wanting to take back six months of my life, starting with a single moment of inattention, and not knowing how. I think about Chase, and about how much that inattention can sometimes cost.
“How do you fix something that’s completely broken?” I ask.
She freezes. She looks down at her salad. “Um.” She sets her fork down. “Okay. That’s a pretty massive question.”
It’s twelve years massive.
“What do you do,” I say, “when you fuck up so badly that nobody can ever expect anything of you again?”
“You’re talking about your father and me,” she says. “And Chase.”
“No.” My heart is pounding. “Yes. Maybe a little.” I want to know how to pick up all the broken pieces and put them together again. I want to think it’s possible.
I want to think it’s not too late to patch together what I had with my parents, even if it is too late for Em. I want my mother to tell me what I did wrong. I want her to give me something to fix.
All this time I’ve been working. Waiting to finally meet her standards. I pushed away the idea that I could be enough, now, as I am.
But at this point—one PhD, twenty-three peer-reviewed journal articles, and seven serious grants into my life, it’s obvious this is not working. Will thirty publications be enough? Fifty? A chaired professorship?
I want to know. I want to know how I can be enough for her, because this method isn’t working. It’s not working for anyone.
She flinches away from me. “It’s a good question.” She flattens her hands on the table. “I’ve thought about it for years. I think it comes down to…I was arrogant.”
I look at her. I blink. I don’t know why she’s talking about herself.
“I was on top of the world. Everything was going so well in my life. I knew something was off with Chase, but Wat had issues when he was younger, and he came round—so I just let it slide.”
I open my mouth. I close it. I don’t understand.
“I should have asked Wat for advice. Or spent more time with Chase. Or…” Her voice cracks. She stares at the wallpaper for a long moment, before she clears her throat. “Or anything. Sometimes, when you’re wounded, you lash out. Your father and I said some things to each other that were unforgivable.”
I’m not sure I understand what she’s saying. “But you did,” I say eventually. “You did forgive each other.”
“Well, that’s the thing. Sometimes when you’re hurt, you can’t get past yourself. I hurt. I was wounded. What he said to me cannot be forgiven. Give it a little time, though, and the I starts to disappear. You let go of your guilt. You acknowledge the shame at having hurt someone. Love doesn’t mean you never screw up. It means you don’t hold onto the unforgivable.”
I consider this.
She sniffs and turns her head to the wall. “I hate showing emotion in public. Give me a moment.”
I do. I wait until the glimmer is gone from her eyes. Until her breath evens out and she picks up her fork again.
“What do I have to do?” I ask.
Her gaze darts to mine over the table. Her eyes widen in surprise. “What do you have to do for what?”
“What do I have to do,” I say, through a throat that seems too thick, “for you to forgive me?”
She stares at me as if I’ve grown extra arms.
The words start coming out. “You always told me Chase was my responsibility. That I needed to take care of him. I knew better than you that something was wrong.”
“No,” she says. “No, no, no.”
“Clio was the one who pushed him over the edge. And afterward, no matter what I did, I knew I’d disappointed you guys. You stopped pushing. You stopped asking, even. I disappeared for three days and you didn’t even ground me.”
She puts her fork down. Then she stands up and slides next to me in the booth.
“No,” she says. “No, no, no, no, no.” Her arm slides around me. “Not that. Never that. I can’t speak for your father. On my part, I stopped pushing because you were the only thing in my life that didn’t hurt. How could I punish you for grieving when I was at fault?”
I slide my arm around her. “You weren’t.”
We don’t say anything for a while. There’s nothing to say. No words to communicate. My chest feels heavy and light all at once. She squeezes me and I squeeze her back.
“Huh,” she finally says. “We are a lot alike.”
“How so?”
“Both a little too good at guilt.”
I think of Em again. “Maybe,” I say. “Or maybe we’re both just bad at giving up.”
* * *
When I get back to my office, I don’t check my email. I avoid the chat app on my phone. I slide my unread papers into my bag and ignore the committee report I have to read sometime in the next three days.
Instead, I lock my door. Students are walking out in the courtyard. Someone’s taking a break and feeding who knows what sort of junk food to a squirrel.
My father’s books still sit in a row on the shelf. I take the first one down, hold it in my hands.
I sit down and spread the book open to the first pages.
The dedication is simple: For my boy, my dad wrote.
That’s me. He always called me that when I was little—“my boy.” Chase was always “my kid.”
I’ve never been able to read it. I’ve always been afraid in a bone-deep way of what I would find. It’s a story about a man losing his child. Maybe I would end up the villain. Maybe I wouldn’t find myself at all, viciously erased from the most traumatic incident of my own life. Maybe—and this is what I’ve never been able to admit until now—I was afraid that he would forgive me, when I’ve never been able to forgive myself.
I start reading.
My father always told me that he never based his books on real life, except when he did. I see that in play now. He writes in a simple, literary style—the kind that gets warm reviews in trade magazines.
This book isn’t about him. It isn’t ab
out me. It’s just about losing someone you love. And it’s about not losing everything at the same time.
It’s not about me at all. It’s about a man who loses his daughter in a white-water rafting accident, then his job to depression, his house to foreclosure. He manages to avoid making it sound like a bad country music song by investing it with a growing sense of humor and hope.
Sometimes, losing what you think of as “everything” makes you learn to love what you still have. It’s a messy, serious, complicated book, and I’m left with the feeling that if I knew a single thing about literary analysis, I’d get a lot more from it.
I get enough.
Dad never bases his books on real life. Except when he does.
By the time I’m done, it’s dark outside. I wake up my computer, shake my head at the sixty-three emails in my inbox. They can wait. I turn on my phone.
Em hasn’t tried to chat with me. She hasn’t called.
I ignore all the other notifications and dial.
My father picks up the phone.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi, Jay.”
The silence stretches. I’m sure he’s talked to Mom. I’m sure that he’s wondering what to say, how to make things better.
There’s no better. It’s messy and it’s complicated. There’s only forward.
“Do you have time for lunch sometime this week?” I finally ask.
“Always,” he says. “Always.”
19
JAY
I know something is wrong the next morning when I step into my lab and see Soo Yin and Gary, my two newest graduate students, look over at me in pure terror. They freeze where they’re huddled over a notebook on the lab couch like rabbits. They’re first-years, and this is the first semester where they’re doing research instead of teaching. Which, no, does not mean that they do actual new science. Not yet. It means that they learn fundamentals.
The fundamentals start from “learn how the tunable laser works,” and work up to “duplicate this controlled-NOT gate using cooled, trapped Beryllium atoms.”
It doesn’t matter that I feel sick to my stomach. That I may have lost someone who was really important to me. Life doesn’t stop.
