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“So I love you,” he said. “I wanted to say that first. Because I have some other things to say, too, and they’re hard things. Just remember what I told you first. I love you. Okay?”
A chill ran through me as I looked at him. The wind was rising, the night was getting colder. I took a step back, crossing my arms protectively over my chest. I thought for a moment about taking another one, and another—about turning and bolting into the night, not even waiting to hear whatever it was that could make him look at me with so much misery in his face.
“What are you talking about?” I said quietly.
His shoulders slumped. “I’ve been lying to you.”
“About what?”
“About everything.”
17.
He told me everything then. The story I thought I knew, about how he’d been raised by his grandmother after his parents’ death when he was seven, was a lie. He’d invented it: a past just sad enough to keep someone like me from asking too many questions, from ever probing deeper into the tragic, terrible truth that lay underneath.
Adam had been a mistake, he said. Born to an eighteen-year-old mother and a deadbeat father who had abandoned the family so quickly that his son had no memory of him at all. His mother, saddled with a kid she’d never wanted, had tumbled downhill into a life of needles and booze and bad men from the moment he was old enough to feed himself. Adam had tried to take care of her, doing the best he could—right up to the moment that the police, tipped off by a neighbor, kicked open the door and found the two of them watching cartoons at ten o’clock on a Tuesday. A woman in her underwear in a drugged-out daze, and her boy, seven years old, unwashed and malnourished, sitting on the floor with three fat cockroaches chasing up and down the length of his little legs.
He told me how his maternal grandmother swooped in then, how he was loved and sheltered for nearly five years before a heart attack took her, and the system took him. By the time he’d aged out of foster care, he had been in and out of a dozen different houses, halfway homes, and juvenile detention facilities.
Six weeks after his eighteenth birthday, he was crashed on a friend’s couch when the police kicked down the door looking for drugs and guns. Everyone in the house was arrested. Adam’s lawyer told him not to be stupid, to rat out his friends and keep himself out of prison. He did.
Then he fled—except that he had nowhere to go. No family, no friends, no plans, no prospects. His parents were dead by then, his mother of an overdose, his father in prison. The world had spent years chewing him up. Now it had spit him out.
“I’m not telling you this to try to make you feel sorry for me,” he said. “I’m just asking you to understand how alone I was. I was so alone that I got certified as a health aide instead of becoming a janitor even though it’s more work for the same money, because at least this way I could be around people. I started working in assisted living because that’s most of the job, just being with people, talking to them. Listening to them. And I convinced myself for a long time that it was enough. But then I met you, and I wanted... more.”
He stood there, hands stuffed in his pockets, misery painted over his face. The few feet of space that had opened up between us when I instinctively stepped back suddenly felt huge and cold and empty—and when I looked at Adam standing there on the other side of it, something twisted inside me. The expression on his face was so haunted, so hopeless. As if it was already over between us. As if he’d been left alone so many times that there was no other way it could end. I thought about the little boy he used to be, a kid trying desperately to take care of the woman who was supposed to take care of him. I had wondered so many times what would draw a guy like Adam to this kind of life, this kind of work, when he could have done anything. I didn’t wonderanymore. This was his pattern. Taking care of people at their most vulnerable—he was making up for his old failure, doing for all these other people what he couldn’t do for his mother.
“Why are you telling me this?” I said. “Why now?”
“Because you deserve the truth. And because...” He paused. “Because I deserve it, too. I’ve been so ashamed that I couldn’t really live. All this time, ever since that day I ratted out my friends to stay out of prison—I was so busy running from my past that I never thought about the future. But then you came, and everything changed, Delphine. I didn’t want to live like that anymore. I wanted to be a better man, the kind of man who is worthy of someone like you. But I could never be that person unless I told the truth about who I used to be.”
“Because you love me.”
“Yes. I love you.”
Neither one of us spoke after that. I looked down the dark street, empty but for those pools of light spilling from the windows onto the sidewalk. I imagined Adam walking anonymously through a town like this, one of the many towns he’d lived in as he made his way north. A man with nothing—no friends, no family. A man too ashamed of his past to ever dream of a better life. I imagined the courage it must have taken to keep going. To bear that weight. To keep living each day, battling against the loneliness. And one day to find the strength to believe in someone else—and in a future where he wasn’t alone anymore.
I only had one other question.
“Was it a ring? In the box you gave me?” I had found it on my nightstand hours after we’d found Mimi’s body and stared at it, a relic of a yesterday so distant that I couldn’t fathom it, couldn’t touch it. The idea of opening a present in that moment, of celebrating anything at all, was obscene. I’d handed the box back to Adam before he left that night. He’d taken it with a wordless nod.
He nodded. “It was. I mean, it still is. I brought it with me, in case... well, in case this conversation didn’t end with you punching me in the face and telling me you never want to see me again.”
“Is that what you thought? You thought I would break up with you because you didn’t have a perfect childhood?”
“The kind of stuff I got into is a lot worse thannot perfect. Especially for someone like you.”
“Someone like me,” I said. “You mean someone with money.”
“It’s not just the money, Delphine. It’s different worlds. You’ve never been alone like that. And you have a family who loves you. You think your mom would be okay with it if she knew we were together? You think she’d be okay with you ending up with someone like me?”
“My mother doesn’t care about any of that. She would want me to be with someone who makes me happy.”
“You say that now,” he said. “The funny thing is, I’ve been telling myself the same thing. That if we both wanted it, it wouldn’t matter how different we were or if anyone else approved. But now that I’m standing here, I can see so clearly that it’s crazy. It’s crazy to ask you to marry me, and if you said yes, that’d be crazy, too. I’m never going to be good enough. You deserve someone who can give you everything.”
A chill ran down my spine, another echo of the past. “You know my grandfather said something like that to Mimi when he proposed.”
He laughed at the look on my face. “Yeah, I know. I stole his line. But it’s a good one, and it’s true.”
