How to End a Love Story(33)
“Well,” she says finally. “Have a good break.”
He nods. “You too.” He hesitates, then adds, “Call if you get bored.”
“Ha,” she says. “Okay.”
She gets in the cab then and it drives off, taking her farther and farther away from Grant Shepard and his strong, warm shoulders.
Ten
The truth is, Helen hates coming home for the holidays.
She feels a lot of guilt about it, and that doesn’t help. There’s a memorial for Michelle set up in her former bedroom turned study, and it’s always Helen’s first stop during a visit home. She has no idea when in that first year her parents decided to change Michelle’s bedroom, and Helen still remembers the whiplash of coming home for summer break and seeing that long-shut door suddenly opened to a room she had never seen before.
Why didn’t they ask before changing it? She’d been pissed on Michelle’s behalf. I should have protected you from that.
The walls are lined with clean white IKEA bookshelves: The first shelf to the left is full of textbooks on organic chemistry and Chinese test-prep books from the eighties—relics of her parents’ graduate studies. A large section—two bookshelves’ full—is devoted to Helen’s own novels, each row boasting at least a dozen copies of each book in the Ivy Papers series, along with various translations and special book-club editions. Below the one window in the room, a shorter shelf holds the small collection of books Helen and Michelle shared between them—a combination of science-fiction classics that Dad would read to them as children and their own carefully considered Scholastic Book Fair purchases—and on top of that short shelf rests a neat row of silver-framed photos: deceased grandparents, and Michelle.
Helen lights two sticks of incense and bows, then she places the slow-burning incense in the waiting pot next to Michelle’s portrait. The heady scent always paints a memory in the smoke of the first time she did this ritual—with Michelle, when they were visiting China at ages twelve and ten. They were in the countryside with distant relatives and paying their respects to long-dead people they’d never met, at a fireplace memorial in an otherwise bustling kitchen. Helen recalls affecting a serious expression and acting as if she knew what she was doing, and Michelle carefully copying her movements as their elderly relatives clucked approvingly in the background.
If you were here, we’d be at a bar catching up.
The thing Helen struggles to imagine most is her sister today, if things had been normal. It’s as though her brain stumbles, suddenly flummoxed every time: This is the end, you are leaving the city limits of imaginable things.
Michelle would have been anticipating turning thirty next year, but what would that have looked like? Would she be single or possibly married? Would she have a pet? What city would she live in? What would her apartment look like? Helen can’t picture any of it—every conjecture feels half-hearted and paper-thin, less real than all the fictional characters she’s created.
The real Michelle didn’t want to be here.
Helen sits in an armchair by the window and picks out a book—The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She keeps reading from where she left off, her last trip home. Sometimes she’ll find a dog-eared page or an underlined passage telling her where Michelle once left off too. Helen has read through their entire shared collection twice (just in case she missed something).
The other homecoming routines will be mundane from here. Mom always scrubs the floors down to their varnish in anticipation of a visit and has a meal of all of Helen’s favorite home-cooked dishes ready to greet her, no matter what time she arrives. Dad is more gruff—they usually run out of conversation by her second day home (“How’s work?” “I saw this article about another Chinese author . . .”)—but grunts approvingly whenever Helen updates them about life and work.
She shares only the good things—a book announcement, a positive review, news about the show’s development, a writing retreat with friends. She hates the look of worry in their eyes; it reminds her too much of a childhood stifled by parental concern and gives her a wooly, claustrophobic feeling that makes her want to run and run and run until the pavement turns into the California beach beneath her feet.
Helen has never introduced them to any of the men she’s dated over the years. The thought of having to tell them about a breakup is so impossible a concept, it’s laughable.
The white friends in her author groups would balk at this, while her Asian friends would often nod and commiserate.
“But—never? Like not even one?” Elyse had exclaimed with wide eyes.
“They can meet when there’s a ring on her finger,” Pallavi had said, waving it off. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Elyse would say the point is so that your parents know what’s going on in your life. But Helen has created a very special window into her life that’s just for her parents. Don’t look there, the view’s not as good, she would say, pulling the drapes over a messy fourth date, a failed situationship, a bad breakup, and a drunken night out. She stores up bad news like acorns in the winter and metes them out in small doses, when she finally has good news to soften the blow. “The revision’s been tough, but I finally turned it in and my editor loved it!” “I hadn’t heard from Elyse in a while and thought she was mad at me, but it turns out she’s expecting her first child and she wanted to surprise everyone!”