How to End a Love Story(11)
He thinks he catches a glimmer of humor behind her eyes.
“Fine,” she says simply.
He wonders what it would take to make her laugh.
“I know you hate me,” Grant says, stabbing more pasta on his plate. “But this could be fun, if we let it.”
“Stop it,” Helen snaps, and he looks up. She’s angry and he’s surprised by its vehemence as much as its sudden appearance. “I know what you’re doing. You’re being . . . charming, homecoming king, class president Grant Shepard, and I am the one person—the one person—that is not ever going to work on.”
Are you sure about that? he wants to ask, just to get a rise out of her. What if I try really hard this time?
“Okay,” he says instead. “No charm for Helen. Noted.”
He sips his water and starts mentally counting down how many weeks they have left (twenty, give or take a few holiday breaks) until they can walk out of each other’s lives again.
Helen’s mom calls as she drives her rental car back to the west side.
“Oh, you can hang up and call me back when you are not driving,” Mom says, then proceeds to ask twenty “just before you go” questions about how it’s going in LA, does she need one of Mom’s friends in Yorba Linda to come check up on her, what grocery store is she buying her groceries from?
By the time Helen opens the door to her condo, she’s giving a half-hearted account of her trip to 99 Ranch and listing Chinese vegetables while her mother grunts in approval or disapproval.
“You will need to make the water spinach soon,” Mom says. “I will send you a recipe.”
“Okay,” Helen says. “Thanks. Is that everything?”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. Helen feels a touch of guilt, spooling from New Jersey to catch her all the way at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
“Just call us back when you can. We know you are busy.”
“Okay, I will,” Helen promises.
She hangs up and rests her forehead against her cabinet doors.
She hasn’t told her parents he’s working on the show.
She knows Mom and Dad have already experienced a few lifetimes’ worth of undeserved pain. Sometimes it feels like she’s spent her entire adult life carefully steering them away from sharp objects and despair.
Helen remembers the feeling of freedom when she finally left for college—she’d spent the summer ferrying food and water between her father, who watched Chinese soap operas nightly in the living room with dull, expressionless eyes, and her mother, who spent days at a time sobbing quietly in the master bedroom between her manic episodes of cleaning the house for the steady stream of visitors coming with food and condolences. Helen herself had stared at the closed door of Michelle’s room every morning and every evening—willing it to open, for Michelle to reveal this had all been some sort of sick goodbye prank. Come out, I dare you.
College was Helen’s first chance to write her own story from scratch. She had thrown herself into meeting new people, finding new routines, discovering new vices, and she had resolutely ignored the strange pang in her chest every weekend when her roommate would Skype with her brother.
She remembers with some embarrassment the first time she told a boy she loved him—they’d met the first night of orientation. They had been walking around campus in large packs, a bunch of teenagers trying on new adulthood for the first time. They heard the roar of a distant crowd and Helen had wondered aloud, “What’s going on over there?” The boy next to her had said, “I dunno. Wanna find out?” and hoisted her above his shoulders, like something from a rom-com meet-cute.
That had been the start, when her weary heart had sputtered to life for the first time in what felt like forever.
She remembers being surprised by the intensity of their friendship, how they both insisted it feels like time passes differently here than it did back home. She learned more about him in a week than she felt like she knew about anyone from high school—his name was Ethan, he was from Pittsburgh, his parents were professors who never had time to teach their own son, he had a high school sweetheart going to school three hours away, he was the best-looking boy who had ever smiled at her.
“I love you,” she had blurted out one night, just a week after they’d met. They had been sitting outside on the grass after exploring the campus after dark, as they had every night since the first night. She had told him about her parents, her sister, her pettiest thoughts and most shameful secrets, and he had listened and stroked her hair and held her hand, and she had thought, I’ve never felt so understood before.
“You love me?” he had chuckled, in a half-teasing, half-embarrassed way. “We’ve only known each other for a week.”
That wasn’t love, Helen admonishes herself even now. You’re not that stupid anymore. You don’t fall for just anyone who smiles at you.
She sometimes wonders if she’s incapable of loving the way other people do, and if the ones closest to her can sense it.
When the TV deal was officially announced, Helen’s agent took her out for a celebratory lunch. Chelsea had tittered gossipily when she saw Helen’s ex from across the room—Oliver, a foreign affairs correspondent. They’d had a nice life together for two years—he had practically moved into Helen’s place, the doorman knew him by name, and he knew all her favorite breakfast and dinner spots within a four-block radius. He told her he loved her just often enough to be reassuring instead of suffocating and he accepted that after two years, she still hadn’t said it back to him. “Say it when you’re sure,” he always added.