“With her, it was always empty promises. I think I stopped believing she’d ever follow through when I was nine or ten. But that summer . . . that summer was different.” He takes a deep breath and part of me wonders if he’s ever told anyone this before. “Before the end of the school year, she called and told me my grandparents had given her money to buy a plane ticket for me to see her in New York and I’d be staying with her instead. I wanted to tell you, but to be honest, until I saw her waiting for me at the airport, I didn’t think she’d follow through.”
Millions of questions race through my mind, but I can tell he needs to say this without any interruptions. I tighten my hand in his, hoping it relays at least a small bit of how much I care.
“When I got there, she was so excited to see me. She couldn’t stop hugging me or telling everyone we passed on the street that I was her son. She had all these huge plans for us too. We were going to go see a Yankees game, check out Times Square, take a boat to see the Statue of Liberty. She told me about this little Italian restaurant down the street from her apartment that had the best chicken Parmesan in the entire city.” He takes a deep breath and all my muscles go taut. “But most of all, she couldn’t wait for me to come to some little theater off-Broadway to see the show she was starring in. She was so proud, she kept telling me it was finally going to be her big break.”
The air turns static as pieces to a puzzle I didn’t know existed begin to fall into place.
“The first week was so great that I almost called you and told you everything. Her place was small and a little junky, but in a New York City way I thought was cool. She walked me around her neighborhood and introduced me to all of her neighbors. I ate so many hot dogs that I almost threw up my second or third night there.” He smiles a bit at the memory. “I hated Times Square, but she insisted that I’d like it one day. She’d keep telling me I’d been in Ohio for too long, that I needed to expand my horizons if I wanted a real future.
“The second week was when things started going downhill.” He leans forward on the stool, and all I want to do is wrap my arms around him. “I was tired of tagging along with her to rehearsals. I was a teenage boy who liked baseball and math; musicals weren’t my thing. I tried to seem enthusiastic because I could tell that’s what she wanted, but she saw through it and she gave in and let me stay at her place alone.
“The first night she came home with pizza. I remember that. I was worried she was mad at me, but when she got home she seemed fine. She taught me how to eat New York–style pizza and we watched some movies from the eighties that she loved. But the next night, she didn’t come home.”
“Nate—” I don’t know what to say. My heart breaks thinking of him all alone in that junky New York apartment.
“She came back the next morning with bagels and coffee,” he says. “She told me I’d love the coffee. It was black, too strong, and it burned my tongue. But I drank it all. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings and make her disappear again.”
I, an almost-thirty-year-old woman, can’t stomach black coffee. I can’t believe an adult would push a fifteen-year-old kid to drink it. But I guess considering this was the same woman who left her son all alone in a strange apartment, nothing should surprise me.
“For the next few days, it was a crapshoot if she’d come home or not. The groceries she had stocked up were starting to run out and I was lying to my grandparents more and more about how things were going. It wasn’t great, but it was only for a month and I thought I could tough it out.”
The story already has me so angry that I can’t imagine it could get worse, but somehow I know he’s barely scratched the surface. I want to tell him that he doesn’t have to tell me the rest, that I understand and we can move on, but something is telling me he needs to get this out as much as I need to hear it.
“One night, I can’t remember how long I’d been there, she got home really late. I was sleeping, but I guess she lost her key or something so she just started banging on the door, yelling at me to let her in. As soon as the door opened, it was like someone hit me over the head with a bottle of whiskey.” His voice is flat as he stares unseeing straight ahead. “She stumbled inside and the smell of alcohol filled the entire apartment. When I tried to get her to lie down, she started screaming at me. Telling me that getting pregnant ruined her life. She said my dad was the worst mistake of her life. How he tried to trap her in Ohio to keep her small like him and I was just like him, pulling her down, and it was a mistake to have me visit her. She said she should be a star and it was everyone else’s fault that she wasn’t.”
It’s hard to breathe.
My first year in LA, I bruised two ribs.
I became friends with this girl in my dorms whose cousin was a stunt double. Her cousin had just landed a role as a stunt double in a major action film and invited us to train with her one day. I was eighteen and an idiot who didn’t think anything bad would ever happen to me. So when her cousin asked if we wanted to learn how to look as if we were getting hit with a baseball bat, my dumb ass didn’t think twice. Of course she accidentally hit me. Because I never did the whole team sports thing, I’d never gotten a serious injury before. I’ll never forget how painful it was to do something as simple and necessary as breathing. I vowed I’d never do something stupid like that again.
Yet, here I am, sitting in Nate’s kitchen, feeling as if shards of glass are tearing me apart every time I inhale.
“I waited until after she passed out to call my grandparents. They bought me a train ticket back to Ohio the next day,” he says quietly. “The train ride was almost twenty hours and I don’t remember much of it, but the one thing I remember vividly is how fast the sadness morphed into anger. I spent the next two weeks at my grandparents’ farm and my mom didn’t call me. Not once.”
The urge to track the woman down and beat the living daylights out of her is almost too much to handle. I can’t imagine anyone treating anyone that way, but your own son? It’s unfathomable.
“I’m so sorry.” It’s not enough, but it’s all I have. There aren’t any words to make what he went through any less terrible. “But I’m still not sure I understand why you didn’t tell me any of this.”
“I know it’s not fair, but I was mad at you.” His grip tightens and he prevents me from pulling my hand away. “I spent all that time alone on the train and then two weeks with my grandparents just stewing on everything. I was pissed, but my grandma kept telling me how I only get one mom and although she may not be perfect, I had to love her anyways.”
“You know that’s not true, right?” I’m still not sure how this is going to end, but I won’t be able to leave here unless I know he’s created healthy boundaries in his life. “You don’t have to accept anyone hurting you. Even your mom.”
It might not be a popular opinion, but I’m of the firm belief that nobody is deserving of space in your life if they only cause harm.
“I know that now, but I didn’t then and I needed my anger to go somewhere. And you know what they say.” He pauses and takes a deep breath before looking at me. “You hurt the people closest to you. For me, that was you.”