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“Penny told me all about you discovering your grandfather and your family here. I’m sorry you felt like you had to lie to me about it. I suppose that I deserved it, though, after the things I said.”
I arched an eyebrow. Why didn’t Penny tell me she’d told Stephen where I was? It wasn’t like her to share information with him at all. I stared him right in the eye as I said, “Yes, you did. But I am sorry for the things I said. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have hung up and called back the next morning.” I opened the door and ushered him into the living room. “Tea?”
He nodded. “Please, and then I’d like you to explain a few things to me.”
“I will; I just need something to do with my hands.”
I put the kettle on to boil and pulled out the bags of oolong, which he preferred. As my hands moved, I tried to figure out exactly what I wanted to tell Stephen. My chronically unhelpful brain was coming up blank. So I went with the “let it all just tumble out of your mouth” method.
“I didn’t tell you about coming here to meet relatives because I didn’t want you to have one more thing to hold against my family. I could almost hear you in my head. ‘Here we go, another dramatic debacle, courtesy of the McGavocks.’ You say those things so often I don’t think you even realize you’re doing it.”
“But even you make jokes at your family’s expense,” he protested.
“Yes, but I’m not serious when I do it,” I said, trying to think of a way to explain the principle of “it’s OK when I pick on my family, but no one else should try” to someone whose parents used an intercom to communicate dinner plans. “You know there are large portions of my life that I hold back from you—hell, I hold them back from myself—because I am afraid that you can’t handle them. And it’s not fair to either of us. I’ve only given you a partial, watered-down version of myself, and you shouldn’t want that. I want better than that for you, better than a half-relationship with a half-person. I just don’t think what we have works anymore.”
“Wait, I thought you were just angry on the phone. Are you really breaking it off with me?”
“I’m sorry, Stephen,” I said, rethinking the wisdom of handing him a cup of boiling-hot tea.
“Haven’t you wondered why I haven’t introduced you to my parents?” he sputtered. “I kept waiting for the weird shit I had to put up with to bottom out. I wanted to know how bad it could get. But it just kept getting worse! You want to know why I wanted to move with you to Dublin? Because I wanted to know whether you were someone I could consider proposing to. But you just kept putting me off! It doesn’t have to be this way,” he insisted. “If you could just draw some boundaries with that band of loonies, then—”
“Do you realize you’re actively making my point for me?” I asked.
“All right, all right,” he said. “I’m sorry, darling, I’m just upset. I don’t want to lose you. I will learn to watch my tongue, but you have to make some changes, too. We can make this work. Don’t you see how easily we could fit into each other’s lives?”
“Maybe it’s not about fitting into each other’s lives but making one life together. I shouldn’t have to feel like I should hide things from you. I can’t keep compartmentalizing and tucking away the bits of my life I’m afraid will upset you.”
“But I came all this way to see you.”
“I didn’t ask you to. And I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
And round and round we went, until I lost track of the time and our tea grew cold. We hashed through every angle of our relationship, my inability to separate from the family, his unwillingness to take my job seriously or meet my family halfway. Stephen got more and more upset as the conversation went along and I didn’t budge on splitting.
“I refuse to accept this,” he spat. “We love each other. If we’re not going to be together, it won’t be caused by something so silly. Lots of people don’t get along with their in-laws.”
I nodded to his cold tea. “Would you like me to warm that up for you?”
“Why do you keep worrying about tea at a time like this?” he asked, exasperated.
I cupped my hands around the mug, closed my eyes, and thought of what I’d thought and felt right before burning Jed. I dredged up that hurt, the red-hot singe of anger, and pictured the energy flowing from my heart down to my hands. I imagined heat traveling from my skin, through the mug, and into the liquid, moving the water molecules around at such a pace that the water boiled. I could see the surface rippling, steam rising from the cup. I could feel the energy building, gathering, pushing through my flesh and bone to do my will.
I opened my eyes and saw Stephen, mouth agape, horror-struck, as he watched his tea bubble and boil. It popped and hissed merrily even after I moved my hands away, the steam curling up toward us like misty fingers. I jerked my hands away from the ceramic before it split or exploded.
“This is what I am; this is what I can do,” I told him. “To pretend to be anything else would be wrong.”
“I didn’t know,” he whispered. “I knew your family claimed that they had mystical whatnot, but I never imagined. Have you always been able to do that? All this time?”
“Yes. Do you still want me, Stephen? Do you? Because I’ve been twisting myself into knots trying to keep this from you, but I can’t anymore. The people I’ve met here, they’ve shown me that you can’t shut yourself up and pretend to be something that you’re not. I’ve acted shamefully toward my own family because I was afraid of disappointing you or scaring you. You believe in facts and figures, and that’s fine. I don’t disagree that algebra exists. But you’re missing a whole big world out there. You’re blind to it because you’re afraid of what you might see.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, softly, stepping back out of range. “I can’t deal with this.”
“I know,” I told him. “It’s all right. I can barely deal with it. I’m sorry I lied to you.”
He stepped back to the kitchen table, slumping against it. “No, no, I should have guessed, I suppose. Your family took this far too seriously to be faking it,” he said, staring off into space.
A long, heavy silence hung in the air between us.
“So . . .” he started. “As far as breakup stories go, this will be different from my friends’ tales of sad-face text messages and requests that we ‘still be friends.’ ”
