“I’m not itching.”
“It’s Randy’s place, two floors up. They’re treating the whole building just to be safe.”
“Emily. You’re a shit liar,” he said, chuffed at himself for catching me.
“Fine. Why have you never invited me over? What are you hiding? Do you collect human skulls or Beanie Babies or something?”
“No,” he said. “It’s way more gone than that.”
That night, Roman was lying on his back on the bed, staring at the ceiling of the apartment on East Thirty-Eighth Street that he shared with two Scottish guys who worked at Citibank. Or was it Pricewaterhouse? And I was staring into the aquarium of his emotional-support turtle.
Roman got Turtly when he was ten. Something to comfort him after all the “unpleasantness”—that’s what they called it—with the priest at the Holy Cross School for Boys. It only happened once. He hardly remembered it—or even really knew whatitwas—until teachers and adults and the police and then the media all started asking questions. A pet was the child psychiatrist’s idea. Roman’s eldest sister was allergic to dogs, but nobody realized turtles live a human lifespan. So, here was Roman, twenty-two years later, sharing a bedroom, hardly big enough to fit a double bed, with a living reminder of the worst thing that ever happened to him.
I lay on the bed next to him. “Why not just give it away? Or let it go in a pond?”
“Her.She’s a girl. Not an it. A pond? That is some cold-blooded shit.”
“Sorry.” My stomach sank. I’d fucked it all up. Here he’d opened up to me and I’d been insensitive. Then—
“I’m messing with you, Em. A pond is actually a good idea.”
I lay next to him. Took his hand. Let the silence sit there, until he was ready.
“I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of…It’s like…” I watched Roman’s math brain search for the right words. His eyes scanned the ceiling. “It’s like…none of us can get rid of the things that happen to us when we’re young. So what if mine is…it’s like, instead ofmine being this scar you can see or some messed-up shit I tell some fuckin’ shrink, it’s a turtle…She stinks, but…I don’t know…She’s just part of me now, I guess. Something I have to take care of, ya know?” He turned his head, looking at me, realizing. “I’ve never told anyone that. You think I’m a proper fuckin’ basket case, don’t ya? I don’t blame you if you make a fuckin’ run for—” I kissed him.
We didn’t leave his bedroom for two days except for when Roman ran out to buy fresh baguettes at the French bakery downstairs. From that moment on, I knew that we’d always be together. That we’d be a family: Roman, Turtly, and me. I told him that things had happened to me, too. Things anyone else would’ve considered a grotesque stain. And we left it at that. He didn’t ask any questions. We lay in bed, laughing and fucking and kissing through warm bites of bread.
When we moved in together, I’d lie awake listening to Roman breathing and shifting in his sleep and think about how your worst secrets can sometimes seal you to a person in the best way. My love for Roman was so intense then that I wanted to live inside his chest. I wanted him to inhale me and keep me prisoner in his rib cage and never cough me out. Four years later we thought we might have a baby. We’d never talked about it before, and even when we did, I didn’t think about it so much as becoming a mother as morphing my love for Roman into a small, squishy human, and how I’d really like to meet that person and dress them in tiny overalls and take them to the Egypt room at the Museum of Natural History on the C train. That mix of Roman and me.
Now I sometimes wake up and wonder, Who is this man? What is a turtle doing in my apartment? When he catches my eyes studying him—studying my new life—in this way, he will tilt his head down a little and lift his eyebrows and say, “Hello, wife? I’m Roman.” And I’ll say, “Hello, husband.”
Chapter Seven
• • • • •
On our third date,over Thai food in Queens, Roman told me his mom, Sue, had been a social worker before she married his dad. But one night, a man from the halfway house whom Sue had been helping to get back on his feet followed Sue home and tried to assault her. His dad just happened to have been driving by her house to leave a mixtape, heavy on hair metal and Depeche Mode, in her mailbox. He heard Sue scream and beat the guy to a bloody pulp. They got married three weeks later. Sue never worked again.
I told him my mom was a Taurus and that she did tarot card readings and was on the hunt for a fourth husband. “Pass the larb?”
Roman overshared about his family as a way of prodding me, trying to get me to tell him about my past. I never talked about college or the years before I moved to New York. I hardly ever talked about ex-boyfriends or my early twenties. I had no fun stories. No Prague youth hostel or backpacking on a Eurail pass; no dancing on a table at Señor Frog’s or stumbling home on Orchard Street after a night at Pizza Beach, holding a girlfriend’s hair back as she cried and vomited over some boy named Jordon. It seemed like he’d go back to Neolithic times before I even told him my middle name.
Even as we melded together so naturally, I kept swaths of my past,my family, in a safe he’d never crack. Maybe he liked that. We’d only been dating for a couple of months when Roman asked me to go home with him to Melbourne. It was his grandmother’s eightieth birthday and he wanted me to meet his Gigi. Roman’s mother is the best mother I’ve ever met. She is the kind of mother who let her kids play in the field all day until they came home for meat pie. She always has snacks in the pantry and remembers friends’ and teachers’ names. She keeps scrapbooks of clippings for each of her three children: a golden curl from Roman’s first haircut, aJumanjimovie ticket, a molar on a pillow, like a museum’s tiny crown. Sue looks like she spent her entire childhood at the beach before sunscreen was a thing and hasn’t bought herself anything new in twenty years. She is gorgeous.
The first time I met Sue, in Roman’s childhood home, a cookie-cutter brick two-story on the outskirts of Melbourne with a wild backyard that emptied out into a grassy expanse with a rushing stream, she’d hugged me so hard that my feet levitated. She loved me immediately, because Roman loved me. That was enough.
When Roman told his mom that I was expecting, she offered to stay with us for a month to help with the baby. She’d done this with all her grandchildren. She wasn’t about to let distance stop her. We sent her every ultrasound. She’d call us and gush, “My American grandson.” How she could already see his fingernails. Or how she could tell he’d be athletic like his dada. Or she’d point out the shape of his cranium and say he’ll be a math genius, like Roman.
Before Holden was even born, Sue sent us a lifetime supply of Australian stuffies. The nursery was filled with wallabies and quokkas, two echidnas, and more koalas than any child needs. We’d been so certain that Grandma Sue would swoop in on a Qantas flight and show us how to keep our newborn alive that we hardly listened in the infant safety class. Other parents-to-be took notes and practiced slapping the back of a raggedy doll at the Little Hearts Baby Zone, in awalk-up office building above a Chipotle in Kips Bay. Not us. We had Sue. In a particularly terrifying portion of the class, titled “Fire Prevention for Babies,” the instructor showed us a photo of a baby playing with a wad of electrical cords. A haggard mom heating a kettle on an open flame. A baby permanently disfigured. That reminded me that we should do Korean BBQ that night, before we had to keep our baby away from all heat sources. Roman couldn’t have agreed more.
Then Gigi got sick. They gave her months to live. Sue had to stay in Melbourne.
So each week, Sue tries to figure out the time difference so that she can FaceTime with her American grandson. She tries to stay upbeat and cheerful, but she is heartbroken. Instead of showing us how to sponge bathe Holden in a sink, and clean the little wound where his umbilical cord fell off, Sue is on the other side of the world spoon-feeding soft foods and filing nails and nursing dry skin.
The first night we brought Holden home, Sue sang “Wobble Wombat” over FaceTime, the same song she sang to Roman when he was a baby. She started to cry. “I looove loooove loooove you,” Sue said, not just to Holden, but to all three of us.
I took Roman’s hand. The problem with having a family tree with roots that are intact—and not eating themselves alive with some fungal infection like mine—is that you feel everything. The nonstop flood of fear and guilt and caregiving and grief.
There is never time on these calls to grab the phone, to take Sue on FaceTime into the bathroom and lock the door and ask her to tell me everything. Tell me, Sue, how do I become a good mom? How do I keep my baby alive? Please, Sue—someone?—tell me.
