How to End a Love Story(93)

“How are you feeling?” Mom asks, and a tiny line of worry appears between her brows.

“Good,” Helen says. “I mean, not great, but pretty good, under the circumstances.”

“The doctors said you have broken bones,” Mom says, her eyes scanning Helen’s limbs.

“Yeah, but I’ve broken bones before and gotten better. Remember that time I fell on my chin in fourth grade?”

Helen remembers it. She had been on the swings at Mom’s friend’s house and decided to try jumping off the swing like she saw the older kids doing. She’d fallen chin-first onto the ground, and she can still see the way Mom’s eyes went comically aghast at the sight of all the blood gushing down her chin. She’d driven Helen to the ER, completely silent, radiating panic from the car to the parking lot to the waiting room. Helen remembers Mom asking questions in soft, broken English to the doctor until they found a nurse who spoke Mandarin and could explain Helen just needed a finger splint and fourteen stitches on her chin.

“You were younger then,” Mom says.

“My point is, you were worried then too, and it was fine. I’m going to be fine.”

“Fine, fine, all you ever are is fine,” Mom says. “You don’t tell us anything.”

“I tell you things,” Helen says, and can’t keep a petulant tone out of her voice that makes her sound exactly seventeen years old.

“Listen to our daughter, listen to how she lies,” Mom says, turning to Dad. “So easy for her.”

“She needs to rest,” Dad says.

“She says she’s fine!” Mom snaps, then rounds on Helen. “I know what you’ve been doing with—with that boy.”

She says that boy with disgust and Helen’s brain wearily thinks, I can’t do this right now. None of her surprise or shock synapses seem to be firing—all Helen can muster is tired.

“I saw your text messages,” Mom says. “I had a lot of time to wait for you with your iPad.”

Helen blinks furiously. She mentally runs through the entirety of her texts to Grant in milliseconds and tries to remember anything incriminating. The fact that she texts him at all is incriminating. But they didn’t text that much—they spent most of their waking hours together.

“The way you talk to each other, come over, I miss you, happy birthday—”

“Oh my god, this is such an overreaction, Mom—”

“I know what he is to you!” Mom cries. “You let him in here before your own mother.”

Helen looks away then. She’d forgotten, somehow, that Mom would have seen that. The hospital’s ability to wield a magical legal boundary between her and her parents’ access to her must have driven her mad with power, or she’d never have forgotten something like that for even an instant. She remembers the last time she slipped up—in high school, when she’d come home one day in freshman year to find her diary open on the kitchen table and Mom waiting for her with an expression of betrayal. How could you write these things about your own mother?

“What would your sister say?”

Helen shakes her head silently and looks out the window.

Michelle would probably high-five her and say, I never thought you had it in you.

“You have no idea what he is to me,” Helen says finally. “Anyway, it’s over. He loved me, and it’s over, and I really don’t want to talk about it.”

She’s slightly horrified to find she’s crying again and swipes furiously at the tears that refuse to stop silently rolling down her face.

“Helen. This is a sickness.”

She’s heard this one before, it’s her mom’s favorite phrase—when Helen would stay up past three a.m. reading by flashlight under the covers, when she found pages of Helen’s diaries where she’d scrawled four more years four more years four more years in cursive script until she ran out of ink, as a way to calm the pounding in her head when her parents had done some now forgotten thing that probably had her best interests in mind but had felt wildly unjust at the time. This is a sickness. Yet Mom had balked when she’d first heard that Helen had started seeing a therapist regularly in her late twenties—“Why? What’s so bad you need to see a therapist?”

Helen knows her parents have always done their best by her, that they just want an easier life for her. They aren’t that bad, she reminds herself. They let you become a writer, when everyone else’s kids became doctors and pharmacists. They’re supportive. They show up. It’s just that they don’t have context for her and it makes her feel like they’re talking in opposite directions in every conversation.

But I didn’t choose this, she thinks. You decided to move to another country and start a family. You should have known that not fully understanding your own kids would come with that territory.

She loves her parents, she does, but it’s a prickly, complicated love, and suddenly Helen is swept up in a hopeless feeling that maybe all she’s capable of is prickly, complicated loving. Maybe even with Grant Shepard permanently, safely in the rearview mirror, she’ll never be able to love simply and without disclaimers.

Helen feels a clawing sensation in her gut, a panicked kind of trapped feeling, and when she opens her mouth, the words come out in a choked gust—

“It’s suffocating, being loved by you.”