I blink against the stinging sensation in my eyes, the whole front of my face.
She softens a little. “Maybe I’m wrong.” She picks up the towel and goes back to drying dishes. “It’s our first time meeting him. Just be careful, Harriet.” She hands me another dish, and I robotically towel it off.
Inside, I feel like I’m a log she’s split with one swift swing of an ax.
I miss Wyn from the other room. I miss our apartment with its hissing radiator and its friendly book-moving ghost. I miss sitting on the rocks in Maine, shivering in the cold with Cleo’s arms wrapped around me, both of us bundled up in old Mattingly sweatshirts while Parth and Sabrina argue over the best way to make a s’more.
Perfectly golden, according to Parth. Utterly burnt, if you ask Sabrina.
The four of us say good night in the living room, and then, when they close their bedroom door and it’s just Wyn and me, I slump against his chest, and he holds me for a long time, kissing my head, rocking me back and forth.
“I missed you,” I tell him.
He cups my face. “From the kitchen?”
I nod in his hands.
“Me too.”
“I want to go home,” I say.
His arms tighten across my back. “We will,” he says. “You and me. In two days. But first I want to see everything.”
“My boobs?” I joke.
“Those too,” he says. “But I was thinking more like your boy band posters and embarrassing diaries.”
“Joke’s on you,” I say. “The periodic table was my boy band poster.”
He groans. “God, you’re such a nerd.”
I lace my fingers against the back of his preternaturally warm neck. “But you still like me?”
“You,” he says, “are my periodic table.”
I laugh into his chest. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means when we get home,” he says, “I’m covering our walls in lewd posters of you.”
“It’s always fun to have a home improvement project.”
Circling the first floor, examining the minutiae of my home with him, is a fun-house version of our trip to Montana. Instead of a fridge crammed with out-of-date holiday cards and time-yellowed crayon drawings, there’s a smooth stainless steel surface with a whiteboard mounted to it, a grocery list tidily written in Mom’s handwriting. “Yogurt,” Wyn reads, tapping the list. “Fascinating.”
“Well, you didn’t think all of this,” I say, gesturing toward myself, “could come from a home without yogurt.”
He kisses the back of my hand. “I still have no idea where this came from.”
He tugs me back into the lamplit living room. Instead of washed-out pictures in macaroni frames of me and Eloise in homemade Halloween costumes, like I’d seen of Wyn, Michael, and Lou, my degree sits in a frame, off to one side rather than centered. There was already an empty frame on the other side, waiting for my medical degree. They’d bought it as soon as I called them to tell them I got into Columbia.
“Where are the baby pictures?” Wyn asks.
“There’s a box of albums in the basement,” I tell him.
“Can we get them out?” he wants to know. So we go down and click on the overhead bulb, dig around until we find the right box, and carry a couple of albums back to my room.
My parents’ story has never been much more than a corkboard of haphazard mental snapshots, and the photo album does little to fill in the gaps. There are a smattering of photographs to capture their whirlwind courtship in college, and a couple over the course of Mom’s surprise pregnancy. Five pages’ worth of pictures to capture the shotgun wedding, where Mom’s belly was straining at her dress’s seams, and a few more covering Eloise’s infancy. My parents look tired but happy. In love. If not with each other, then at least with Eloise.
But then the pictures get more sporadic—a couple of birthdays and Christmases, a trip with my aunt and her first husband—and my parents’ tiredness has transformed.
Not staying-up-all-night-with-a-crying-baby exhausted, but bored-beyond-belief-chafing-at-their-new-roles fatigued. You can practically see their deferred dreams reflected back in their eyes.
There’s a fairly large gap in time where there are no pictures at all, and then I’m born. And my parents do look happy again, in love again, cradling my wrinkly little baby body in my much-too-large pink onesie. Maybe not quite as overjoyed as the first time around. In six years, Mom’s transformed from a cherub-cheeked near teenager to a full-fledged and stern-jawed adult. Dad’s gained some weight, along with a vague terseness in the corners of his mouth. Even when he’s holding me on his hip at the zoo, Eloise dangling from his other hand, smiling in front of the giraffes, he looks distracted.
Not miserable. Just like it’s not enough. Like he and Mom both know there are other universes where they’re more, bigger, happier.
As we flip forward through pages and times, Eloise becomes increasingly sulky, always standing a ways off, whereas I start to smile like my life depends on how visible my teeth are.
Wyn pauses on a picture of me with my first-place science fair trophy, grinning despite my missing front tooth. “My little genius.” He touches the edge of the picture. “I hope our kids have your hair.”
Kids, I think. It knocks the wind out of me. The way he says it—so easily, so lovingly. That familiar homesickness, that longing, roars awake. But what my mom said sneaks in too, a quiet whisper at the fringes of my mind.
“What if I’m bad at it?” I ask. “Being a parent.”
He sweeps my hair back from my neck. “You won’t be.”
“You don’t know that,” I say.
“I do,” he says.
“How?” I say.
“Because you’re good at loving,” he says. “And that’s all you have to do.”
My throat tightens. My eyes burn.
“When I was a kid,” I say, “I always felt like I was balanced on the edge of something. Like everything was so . . . tenuous, and it could all crumble at any second.”
“What could?” he asks softly.
“Everything,” I say. “My family.”
His hand runs down my spine, turning soothing circles at the curve at its base.
“There was never enough money,” I say. “And my parents were always exhausted from their jobs. I mean, tonight was the most positive I’ve ever heard them be about their work. And then when Eloise got older, they’d get into these huge fights with her, and they’d tell her she had no idea what they’d sacrificed for her, and how she was throwing it all away. And then she’d storm out, and they’d go to separate rooms, and I would be so sure that was it. That Eloise wouldn’t come back. Or my parents would split up. I was always waiting for something terrible to happen.”
Wyn’s fingers graze back up my spine, settling at the base of my neck. He listens, waits, and like it always has, his presence pulls the truth out of me. Like whispering secrets into a box and shutting it tight, I used to think.
“I used to make these bargains with the universe,” I say, smiling a little at the ridiculousness of it. “Like if I got straight As, then everything would be okay. Or if I won the science fair a second time. Or if I was never late to school, or if I always did the dishes before Mom got home from work, or I got her the perfect birthday gift, or whatever. And I know my parents love me. I’ve always known that,” I say tightly. “But the truth is . . .”