Page 111 of Spiced!

He let that sit, then, quieter, said, “And you don’t have to say anything about what it was. That’s the other thing I want to be clear about. I’m not fishing for the meaning of it. It was—” He stopped, and I watched him decline three or four words as inadequate before giving up on a better one. “It was the most I’ve ever understood you, and you didn’t say a single word. I don’t need you to explain it. I just need you to know that I saw it.”

And there it was.

The out.

He had handed me the same gift I was always handing other people—the permission to stay behind the glass, to be loved from a comfortable distance, to let the beautiful thing speak so the person didn’t have to. All I had to do was take it, to say something warm and deflecting, to change the subject to Puck, to pie, or to his ridiculous unfinished tea.

I’d taken that out my whole life. I was, honestly, very good at taking it.

“It’s about my mother.”

The words slipped out and sat in the lamplight and didn’t get taken back. Brendan went very still, and I made myself keep going.

“The beginning, the happy part, that was real. I remember it. I was little. We lived in this apartment in Santurce with a window that got the afternoon sun. She used to dance with me in the kitchen. Not—not dance dance. Just—she’d put music on and pick me up, and we’d go around the kitchen. She’d sing the parts she knew and hum the parts she didn’t, and I thought—” My voice did the thing, and I let it, which was new. “I thought that was the whole, a warm kitchen and a person who had you and music. I thought that was just what being alive was going to be.”

“And then she went back,” Brendan said, quietly, not a question.

“She went back when I was eight.” I turned the mug in my hands. “Everyone tells the story like it was done to me. Abuela’s careful about it, even now, like it’s a bruise she doesn’t want to press. I let them tell it that way because it’s easier, but the true version—” I hadn’t said this part out loud to anyone, not Benji, not Abuela, not even the mirror. “The true version is that she asked me. Before she went, she sat me down and asked me if I wanted to come with her or to stay with Abuela in Tampa, in the schools, in the life that was going to be bigger and more. She gave me the choice, because she loved me enough to give an eight-year-old a choice no eight-year-old should have to make.”

The apartment was so quiet then.

“And I chose to stay,” I whispered. “I chose it, Brendan, so I don’t get to be the one it was done to. I was there. I picked. She got on the plane, and I watched the jet bridge take her, and I’ve spent twenty years being the easiest, most wanted, most fun person in every room I walk into, because some part of an eight-year-old decided that if you are good enough, if you are delightful enough, if you never once ask a person to hold the hard parts of you—then no one will ever make you choose again. And . . . and no one will ever choose the plane.”

I had never laid it out like that.

I had never laid it out at all.

It sat there in the lamplight, the whole ugly architecture of me, and I waited for the thing I always waited for: the flicker, the recalculation, the moment a person realizes the fun one is expensive after all.

Only Brendan didn’t flicker.

He set his tea down, he took the mug out of my hands and set it aside, and he held both of my hands in both of his, which were warm. He looked at me with his unhurried eyes that had watched a scared tapir and a scared beagle and now, apparently, a scared dancer, and had never once looked away from any of us.

“Thank you,” he said. “For not giving me the easy version.”

“It’s not a fun fact about me,” I said, trying to reach for the deflection even now, even here. “It’s a lot. It’s a lot to hand somebody eight weeks in.”

“A couple of months in,” he corrected, because he was precise about everything, even this, and it made me laugh, wet and startled, one syllable of it.

“A couple of months in.”

“It’s not too much, Adrian,” he said. “I want to be careful how I say this, because I’m not—I don’t have your gift. I can’t make a body say the thing, so I’m going to say it badly in words.” He took a breath, the way I knew he did before a diagnosis. “You keep telling me the story where you’re the one who chose the plan, where it’s your fault, so nobody can leave you again because you left first, you chose first. I understand why an eight-year-old built that. It’s a very good shield. It kept you safe.” His thumbs moved once across my knuckles. “But I watched you dance the truth an hour ago, and the truth your body told wasn’t, ‘I chose this.’ The truth your body told was of a child reaching for a warmth of a mother that moved, and of that child reaching anyway, and never once deciding the reaching was the problem.

“You didn’t dance a person who left first. You danced a person who stayed on the floor with his arm out. That’s not the story of someone who leaves, Adrian. That’s the story of someone who stays. You’ve had it backward your whole life.”

I did not have a single word.

Me. The one who always has the words.

I sat in that lamplit living room with a ferret asleep in a hammock and my hands in the hands of a man who had just walked into my most securely locked room, and I couldn’t produce a single sound.

“I told you I’d say it badly,” he said.

“You didn’t—” I choked out.

“I reorganized your childhood trauma on our first real conversation about it. That’s—even for me that’s a lot.”

“Brendan.”