Happy Place(69)

It makes me beam. It makes me ache.

It’s this feeling like the universe is compacting around me, while something in my rib cage is expanding. I’m the culmination of their lost dreams, their missed other lives, and at the same time, they’re proud of me.

Before they shuffle to bed at nine forty-five—the same time they’ve gone to sleep my entire life—I follow my mom into the kitchen to finish the dishes.

“So,” I say. “What do you think?”

“About what?” she says.

“About Wyn,” I say.

“He’s a very nice young man,” she says.

I wait for her to go on. For a minute, we’re both drying plates and putting them away. Finally she faces me and smiles wanly. “Just don’t rush anything. You’ve got your whole life, your career, ahead of you. And you know, feelings come and go. Your career won’t. That’s something you can rely on.”

I make myself smile. “But you like him?”

She sighs and sets the hand towel aside, facing me with a creased brow. “He’s sweet, honey,” she says in a low voice, eyes darting toward the doorway, “but frankly, I don’t see it.”

My heart jitters. “See what?”

“Him making you happy,” she says. “You making him happy.”

“I am happy,” I say.

“Now.” She nods, glances toward the dining room again. “But that’s the kind of boy who’s going to want to move home and start having kids. He’s going to want someone who’s at home, who has a life that matches his. I pictured you with someone who had a bit more going on, who wouldn’t expect more from you than you were able to give.”

I blink against the stinging sensation in my eyes, the whole front of my face.

She softens a little. “Maybe I’m wrong.” She picks up the towel and goes back to drying dishes. “It’s our first time meeting him. Just be careful, Harriet.” She hands me another dish, and I robotically towel it off.

Inside, I feel like I’m a log she’s split with one swift swing of an ax.

I miss Wyn from the other room. I miss our apartment with its hissing radiator and its friendly book-moving ghost. I miss sitting on the rocks in Maine, shivering in the cold with Cleo’s arms wrapped around me, both of us bundled up in old Mattingly sweatshirts while Parth and Sabrina argue over the best way to make a s’more.

Perfectly golden, according to Parth. Utterly burnt, if you ask Sabrina.

The four of us say good night in the living room, and then, when they close their bedroom door and it’s just Wyn and me, I slump against his chest, and he holds me for a long time, kissing my head, rocking me back and forth.

“I missed you,” I tell him.

He cups my face. “From the kitchen?”

I nod in his hands.

“Me too.”

“I want to go home,” I say.

His arms tighten across my back. “We will,” he says. “You and me. In two days. But first I want to see everything.”

“My boobs?” I joke.

“Those too,” he says. “But I was thinking more like your boy band posters and embarrassing diaries.”

“Joke’s on you,” I say. “The periodic table was my boy band poster.”

He groans. “God, you’re such a nerd.”

I lace my fingers against the back of his preternaturally warm neck. “But you still like me?”

“You,” he says, “are my periodic table.”

I laugh into his chest. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means when we get home,” he says, “I’m covering our walls in lewd posters of you.”

“It’s always fun to have a home improvement project.”

Circling the first floor, examining the minutiae of my home with him, is a fun-house version of our trip to Montana. Instead of a fridge crammed with out-of-date holiday cards and time-yellowed crayon drawings, there’s a smooth stainless steel surface with a whiteboard mounted to it, a grocery list tidily written in Mom’s handwriting. “Yogurt,” Wyn reads, tapping the list. “Fascinating.”

“Well, you didn’t think all of this,” I say, gesturing toward myself, “could come from a home without yogurt.”

He kisses the back of my hand. “I still have no idea where this came from.”

He tugs me back into the lamplit living room. Instead of washed-out pictures in macaroni frames of me and Eloise in homemade Halloween costumes, like I’d seen of Wyn, Michael, and Lou, my degree sits in a frame, off to one side rather than centered. There was already an empty frame on the other side, waiting for my medical degree. They’d bought it as soon as I called them to tell them I got into Columbia.

“Where are the baby pictures?” Wyn asks.

“There’s a box of albums in the basement,” I tell him.

“Can we get them out?” he wants to know. So we go down and click on the overhead bulb, dig around until we find the right box, and carry a couple of albums back to my room.

My parents’ story has never been much more than a corkboard of haphazard mental snapshots, and the photo album does little to fill in the gaps. There are a smattering of photographs to capture their whirlwind courtship in college, and a couple over the course of Mom’s surprise pregnancy. Five pages’ worth of pictures to capture the shotgun wedding, where Mom’s belly was straining at her dress’s seams, and a few more covering Eloise’s infancy. My parents look tired but happy. In love. If not with each other, then at least with Eloise.