He tries to kiss me, but I turn away so his lips land on my cheek.
“My dad is right there,” I say.
“He’d be happy for us,” Julian says.
As he’s trying to kiss me again, my mom pokes her head in the door. “Your mom says it’s time to go soon,” she says, and her expression is carefully blank, even though she must have seen what she was interrupting.
He grins at her like they’re sharing an inside secret and kisses my temple before stepping away from me. “I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Okay,” I breathe.
He leaves the room and follows my mom down the hall, and I stand there, frozen in place. If my mom hadn’t come at just the right time, I probably would have let him kiss me. I might even have kissed him back. Not because I want to, but because I feel like I have to—in order to make everyone happy.
Everyone but me.
My dad starts moaning, his regular E-flat moans, and my heart sinks. My everything sinks. I check the time. Not medicine time. I go to his side and touch his forehead. Cool to the touch. No fever. I check his body positioning to see if anything is off. There’s nothing obvious.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” I ask.
He doesn’t open his eyes to acknowledge me, but his brow furrows and his moans continue. There’s nothing I can do other than hold his hand, so that’s what I do. His hand remains limp. He doesn’t hold me back. He never does.
In a way, he’s been gone since he had his stroke. He’s still alive, but I lost him months ago. Perhaps I’ve been mourning all this time without realizing it.
Can you hurt without knowing it?
When he falls asleep and stops moaning, the tension in my body eases, but I still hear those E-flats in my head. They repeat on an endless loop.
My mom enters the room quietly, checks the spreadsheet to see if I’ve kept on track, and sits on the sofa next to the bed. “Everyone just left.” When I don’t say anything, she adds, “They said good things about you.”
I don’t have energy for this, but I force myself to smile like I mean it and say, “That’s nice of them.”
“Especially Chen Ayi,” my mom says, referring to Julian’s mom. “From what I saw a little bit ago, it’s obvious you two are back together again. I’m relieved. That other …” She shakes her head and wrinkles her nose.
“Quan’s been really good to me,” I say, feeling like I need to defend him.
“Of course he’s good to you. He knows how lucky he’d be to have you. Look at you. Look at him. But Julian is good to you, too,” she says.
I don’t understand why Quan would be lucky to have me. I’m a mess. My life is a mess. I haven’t even been able to tell him that I love him.
But I think I do.
I think I’ve fallen hopelessly and irrevocably in love with him, like seahorses and anglerfish do.
“You need to talk to that Quan,” my mom says. “He’s not a bad person. He deserves for you to treat him with respect. Be kind when you end things.”
Tears blur my vision, but I hold them back. “He makes me happy, Ma.”
My mom sighs and gets up to come to my side. “He’s a phase. You don’t marry boys like that.”
“He doesn’t feel like a phase.”
“Trust me, okay?” my mom says. Her voice is gentle, her expression caring, and I’m reminded that she loves me. She doesn’t have a Make Anna Miserable agenda. She wants what’s best for me—unless it conflicts with what’s best for my dad or Priscilla. Then I’m a lower priority. Because I’m youngest and female and unremarkable. That’s just how things are. “You’re young. You don’t know the value of what you have. But I know. Julian will take care of you, Anna. You need that. You knew how we felt about your music career, but you chose it anyway. Now you have to be realistic.”
“I’m not good at anything else,” I remind her.
When my parents first signed me up for violin lessons, I think they did harbor the hope that I was a prodigy and would go places. When special talents never arose, they kept me in lessons because it would look good on my college applications if I was “well-rounded.”
That’s how it worked for Priscilla. She performed a violin solo at Carnegie Hall when she was in high school, and that experience, coupled with her exemplary academic record, got her into Stanford, where she majored in economics, and then went on to receive an MBA. Everyone was horrified when I announced that instead of following in Priscilla’s footsteps, I wanted to use my musical training to be an actual musician.