“This doesn’t mean anything,” I tell him.
It means everything.
He squeezes me just a little, and I’m afraid I’m going to start crying.
He lets me go, and the hallway feels suddenly cold. He reaches out and slides a strand of my hair behind my ear. His fingers leave a trail of confusion on my skin.
Then he turns around and goes back into the room. I can hear him talking to my brother. “She really doesn’t feel well,” I hear him say. “Do you have a car here? I don’t.”
I don’t hear my brother’s response.
“Well, you should probably take her home if you can.”
It’s a nice thing to do. It’s thoughtful. I hate that he’s nice and thoughtful. I hate that he can be nice and thoughtful. I know this side of him far too well, and if Jay had let me see this earlier…
But he didn’t, and now it’s too late.
When he walks by me, I don’t make eye contact.
I don’t dare. If I look at him again, I might not let him leave.
18
JAY
I call her at nine.
She answers. “Hi.” It’s all she says.
“Are you okay?” I’m pacing in my living room, trying to figure out what to say.
“No.” She exhales. “Are you?”
“No.”
We settle into a silence.
When your relationship is all text, there’s a lot of silence. But silence on an actual voice call is audible and real in a way that an absence of typing is not.
I don’t see the read receipts telling me that she’s there, that she’s listening.
“I fucked up,” I say. This is an understatement. I feel like the captain of a ship, surveying a gash in the side, wondering where that iceberg came from and why there are so few lifeboats.
“Me, too.” Her voice is low.
I wish this feeling were new. That I didn’t know what it was like to break things so badly that I can’t blame someone for giving up on me. I don’t know how to say “trust me.”
But I want to know how. I want to know it desperately.
“I need time,” I tell her.
“Me, too.”
“Em?” I realize I’ve called her by her other name a second after I do it. I don’t take it back. “Everything I said last night still stands.”
She exhales.
“Come by any time you need…” I trail off, not knowing what to offer. A hug. Some soup. Me. I don’t finish the sentence.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”
* * *
The room is cold, and the air conditioner is running even though it’s February and below sixty outside. It’s been two days since I talked to Em, and I’m still at a loss.
Some people are reminded of their childhood by leaf piles or the smell of pancakes. For me, it’s the feel of artificially cold air on my neck, the clinical smell of ozone and the scent of antistatic wipes. It’s the persistent hum of server rooms, of a raised floor that clacks beneath my feet. I encounter pockets of heat from machines that do their best to overcome the industrial-strength climate control.
This space brings back old memories. Sitting in a conference room and doing homework. Occupying emptied cubicles at night with some of the other kids. Challenging each other to network duels.
It’s been years since I came here, but Eric out front still recognizes me and waves me through.
My mother is talking to a group of people in the corner of the room. She is holding a mug of coffee in a metallic gold travel cup, gesturing to a whiteboard. Flecks of marker dust dot her cuffs. She is completely in her element, arguing with someone about a black box pentest on enterprise level server systems.
Cyclone has a tendency to grab people and never spit them out. My mom started at Cyclone six months after I was born, never intending to stay past the moment Cyclone went public and her stock options turned into real money. She’s talking to Kenji Miyahara, who I’ve known since we were both teenagers, back when we did penetration tests after school for fun and Cyclone shares.
Now he plays red team/blue team hacker games for a living and bosses around people twice his age.
For a moment, I think about leaving without disturbing her. I’m not even sure why I’m here, or what I’ll say to her.
Kenji is half-Japanese, half-black. He’s shaved his head since the last time I saw him. He towers over my mother. She still manages to dominate the room, gesturing, brushing back her hijab when it catches on her shoulder.
Kenji sees me first. He turns. “Hey!” He starts toward me. “Script kiddie!” It’s an insult we used to use—a dorky insult, because when you’re a kid whose parents work at one of the largest computer companies in the world, coding prowess is the only measurement of worth you tolerate.
I raise my chin in his direction. “Give me twenty years and and all your boxen will belong to me.”
“Have fun with that,” he says sarcastically. “I’ll stick to computers I can back up without destroying the results.”
“Asshole.” In the Cyclone style, I say this with affection. I shake his hand as he offers it.
He punches me in the shoulder with his free hand. “Saint K., I didn’t know we were getting a visit from the prodigal son.”
“Oh, I’m prodigal, am I?”
“Doing all that science and then putting it in the public domain? Whew.” Kenji grins. “That requires a hell of a lot of forgiveness.”
“Spoken by the man who has never had to deal with a university patent office.”
My mom comes up beside me. “I am unspeakably embarrassed.” Her hands go to her hips. “Jay, did you show up unannounced to engage in this sorry excuse for shit-talking? I taught you better than that.”
“Of course not,” I say. “I want to talk to you. I’ll wait until you’re done.”
Her eyes narrow, and she tilts her head to one side. I feel like she’s looking through me, past the half smile on my face.
I keep it in place, but I’m not fooling her. It’s the middle of the day. The middle of the week.
“You want to talk to me. And you can wait.” There’s a subtle emphasis on those words, as if she can’t quite believe what she’s hearing.
I stuff my hands in my pockets. “Yeah.”
She dusts off her hands. She’s wearing jeans and a white T-shirt—now marked with red and blue flecks that almost match her flowery hijab—and she doesn’t even come to my shoulder when she hugs me. She smells like the shampoo she’s used since before I was born. Some part of me has classified this smell as Mom. It brings with it a wave of nostalgia. Of comfort. Of safety.
It makes me think of grilled cheese sandwiches made on a hotplate in the corner of this office and tomato soup nuked in a microwave. My version of comfort food.
“Shit just got real,” says Kenji.
Mom pulls back and frowns at the calendar on her watch. “I’ll just tell Aaron I’m going to lunch. We’re done here, anyway. I can rearrange my afternoon.”
“I don’t want to bother you. I know you’re busy.”
She gives me a look. “If we waited until I wasn’t busy, we would never talk to each other.”
Over the last five years, I’ve been busy, too. A lot. I look over at her and swallow.
“We can go down to the Cyclone cafeteria, if you want,” she says, “or we can splurge and head to Nikki’s.”
Nikki’s is a soup and sandwich shop that’s two blocks from the Cyclone campus. It’s not expensive; when she talks about splurging, she’s referring to the time it’ll take.
She doesn’t wait for my answer.
“Never mind. If you came all the way down here, Nikki’s it is.”
We don’t talk about much on our way there. Mom drives, and I try not to distract her. It’s not that she’s a bad driver; it’s exactly the opposite. She’s great, and she knows it, which is why she swears at everyone who is a worse driver than her—in other words, everyone.
“Why
, why,” she rants, “why is your turn signal on? Merge if you want to change lanes. If you don’t, fuck off!”
The other drivers, thankfully, can’t hear her.
She’s given a table in back when we arrive. Mom comes here often, and they know who she is.
I consider the menu when we’re seated. Sandwiches. Breakfast all day. But I think of Em, and order minestrone.
“So,” my mother says after the waitress leaves. “Why are you here?”
“I need some advice.”
Her eyes get subtly wider. I have not asked her for advice since…no, I didn’t even ask her about my choice of university.
“Advice about what?”
“I think,” I say carefully, “that I’m a little like you.”
One eyebrow raises. “In what way?”
My soup arrives, as does a salad for her that comes laden with garbanzo beans.
“When it comes to work.”
“In some ways, yes. In others, probably not. Why?”
“So.” I swallow. “I work hard. I don’t have time for much of anything except my job. I take what I do very seriously. There’s no point doing something if you can’t be the best, right?”
My mother stabs her salad. A garbanzo bean skitters away from her fork and flies across the table. She picks up the errant bean idly and slips it into her napkin. “That is not an entirely complimentary description of either of us.”
“Sorry.” I shake my head.
“It’s also not wrong. It has taken me many, many years to get to the point where I can let things go. The joy and the agony of being a perfectionist in a changing world is that you will never succeed in being without fault, but you also never run out of chances.”
I nod.
“But I don’t think you came here to talk about Cyclone’s product release cycle.” She gestures with her fork. “What are you really asking?”
Until this moment, I wasn’t sure. But I think about Maria’s face. About Em. About wanting to take back six months of my life, starting with a single moment of inattention, and not knowing how. I think about Chase, and about how much that inattention can sometimes cost.
“How do you fix something that’s completely broken?” I ask.
She freezes. She looks down at her salad. “Um.” She sets her fork down. “Okay. That’s a pretty massive question.”
It’s twelve years massive.
“What do you do,” I say, “when you fuck up so badly that nobody can ever expect anything of you again?”
“You’re talking about your father and me,” she says. “And Chase.”
“No.” My heart is pounding. “Yes. Maybe a little.” I want to know how to pick up all the broken pieces and put them together again. I want to think it’s possible.
I want to think it’s not too late to patch together what I had with my parents, even if it is too late for Em. I want my mother to tell me what I did wrong. I want her to give me something to fix.
All this time I’ve been working. Waiting to finally meet her standards. I pushed away the idea that I could be enough, now, as I am.
But at this point—one PhD, twenty-three peer-reviewed journal articles, and seven serious grants into my life, it’s obvious this is not working. Will thirty publications be enough? Fifty? A chaired professorship?
I want to know. I want to know how I can be enough for her, because this method isn’t working. It’s not working for anyone.
She flinches away from me. “It’s a good question.” She flattens her hands on the table. “I’ve thought about it for years. I think it comes down to…I was arrogant.”
I look at her. I blink. I don’t know why she’s talking about herself.
“I was on top of the world. Everything was going so well in my life. I knew something was off with Chase, but Wat had issues when he was younger, and he came round—so I just let it slide.”
I open my mouth. I close it. I don’t understand.
“I should have asked Wat for advice. Or spent more time with Chase. Or…” Her voice cracks. She stares at the wallpaper for a long moment, before she clears her throat. “Or anything. Sometimes, when you’re wounded, you lash out. Your father and I said some things to each other that were unforgivable.”
I’m not sure I understand what she’s saying. “But you did,” I say eventually. “You did forgive each other.”
“Well, that’s the thing. Sometimes when you’re hurt, you can’t get past yourself. I hurt. I was wounded. What he said to me cannot be forgiven. Give it a little time, though, and the I starts to disappear. You let go of your guilt. You acknowledge the shame at having hurt someone. Love doesn’t mean you never screw up. It means you don’t hold onto the unforgivable.”
I consider this.
She sniffs and turns her head to the wall. “I hate showing emotion in public. Give me a moment.”
I do. I wait until the glimmer is gone from her eyes. Until her breath evens out and she picks up her fork again.
“What do I have to do?” I ask.
Her gaze darts to mine over the table. Her eyes widen in surprise. “What do you have to do for what?”
“What do I have to do,” I say, through a throat that seems too thick, “for you to forgive me?”
She stares at me as if I’ve grown extra arms.
The words start coming out. “You always told me Chase was my responsibility. That I needed to take care of him. I knew better than you that something was wrong.”
“No,” she says. “No, no, no.”
“Clio was the one who pushed him over the edge. And afterward, no matter what I did, I knew I’d disappointed you guys. You stopped pushing. You stopped asking, even. I disappeared for three days and you didn’t even ground me.”
She puts her fork down. Then she stands up and slides next to me in the booth.
“No,” she says. “No, no, no, no, no.” Her arm slides around me. “Not that. Never that. I can’t speak for your father. On my part, I stopped pushing because you were the only thing in my life that didn’t hurt. How could I punish you for grieving when I was at fault?”
I slide my arm around her. “You weren’t.”
We don’t say anything for a while. There’s nothing to say. No words to communicate. My chest feels heavy and light all at once. She squeezes me and I squeeze her back.
“Huh,” she finally says. “We are a lot alike.”
“How so?”
“Both a little too good at guilt.”
I think of Em again. “Maybe,” I say. “Or maybe we’re both just bad at giving up.”
* * *
When I get back to my office, I don’t check my email. I avoid the chat app on my phone. I slide my unread papers into my bag and ignore the committee report I have to read sometime in the next three days.
Instead, I lock my door. Students are walking out in the courtyard. Someone’s taking a break and feeding who knows what sort of junk food to a squirrel.
My father’s books still sit in a row on the shelf. I take the first one down, hold it in my hands.
I sit down and spread the book open to the first pages.
The dedication is simple: For my boy, my dad wrote.
That’s me. He always called me that when I was little—“my boy.” Chase was always “my kid.”
I’ve never been able to read it. I’ve always been afraid in a bone-deep way of what I would find. It’s a story about a man losing his child. Maybe I would end up the villain. Maybe I wouldn’t find myself at all, viciously erased from the most traumatic incident of my own life. Maybe—and this is what I’ve never been able to admit until now—I was afraid that he would forgive me, when I’ve never been able to forgive myself.
I start reading.
My father always told me that he never based his books on real life, except when he did. I see that in play now. He writes in a simple, literary style—the kind that gets warm reviews in trade magazines.
This book isn’t about him. It isn’t ab
out me. It’s just about losing someone you love. And it’s about not losing everything at the same time.
It’s not about me at all. It’s about a man who loses his daughter in a white-water rafting accident, then his job to depression, his house to foreclosure. He manages to avoid making it sound like a bad country music song by investing it with a growing sense of humor and hope.
Sometimes, losing what you think of as “everything” makes you learn to love what you still have. It’s a messy, serious, complicated book, and I’m left with the feeling that if I knew a single thing about literary analysis, I’d get a lot more from it.
I get enough.
Dad never bases his books on real life. Except when he does.
By the time I’m done, it’s dark outside. I wake up my computer, shake my head at the sixty-three emails in my inbox. They can wait. I turn on my phone.
Em hasn’t tried to chat with me. She hasn’t called.
I ignore all the other notifications and dial.
My father picks up the phone.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi, Jay.”
The silence stretches. I’m sure he’s talked to Mom. I’m sure that he’s wondering what to say, how to make things better.
There’s no better. It’s messy and it’s complicated. There’s only forward.
“Do you have time for lunch sometime this week?” I finally ask.
“Always,” he says. “Always.”
19
JAY
I know something is wrong the next morning when I step into my lab and see Soo Yin and Gary, my two newest graduate students, look over at me in pure terror. They freeze where they’re huddled over a notebook on the lab couch like rabbits. They’re first-years, and this is the first semester where they’re doing research instead of teaching. Which, no, does not mean that they do actual new science. Not yet. It means that they learn fundamentals.
The fundamentals start from “learn how the tunable laser works,” and work up to “duplicate this controlled-NOT gate using cooled, trapped Beryllium atoms.”
It doesn’t matter that I feel sick to my stomach. That I may have lost someone who was really important to me. Life doesn’t stop.