Toby’s lips twitched. I could tell he was fighting back a smile. I stared back at my bowling shoes. “You think I’m silly, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “But not in the way you think.”
He leaned in toward me and reached for my hand. He held it, gently pressing his palm against mine. “Taliah. There are very few people I’ve met who I’ve found more interesting than you. Lost and found, remember?”
I nodded, a fluttery feeling building in my stomach. “You know, these are the kind of moments that I used to roll my eyes at when I read them in books.”
Toby smiled knowingly. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “But it feels different when it’s actually happening to you.”
He leaned in even closer, not letting go of my hand.
“Those scenes,” I continued, “they just seemed so . . . unrealistic. Like how can you instantly know with a person? But here I am. Talking to you in a way I don’t really talk to anyone.”
His fingers interlaced with mine. “I think with some people you can just tell you’re going to have a history with them. Even if that history hasn’t happened yet.”
The fluttery feeling in my stomach grew. But something about what he said made me think of my mom and Julian. I wondered if it had been like that for them when they first met—that somehow they just knew that they were going to matter to each other.
“What?” Toby said.
“Nothing,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
“No. I can tell something else is bothering you.”
“It’s just . . . it’s upsetting that it seems like all of the songs Julian is famous for are so loved because of his sadness. Like doesn’t it suck that it seems like he owes his whole career to the fact that my mom broke his heart into smithereens?”
Toby’s forehead wrinkled with thought. “You know what?”
“What?”
“I don’t think what people are responding to in those songs is the sadness, Taliah. I think it’s the love.”
III.
Julian was waiting for me right when Toby dropped me off.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He was standing near the entryway to the back porch.
“For what?”
“Well, for everything. But in particular for being scared when I first found out about you.”
I looked at him and he seemed more vulnerable than he ever had before. Even in the hospital, I hadn’t seen him seem this open. This raw. All of his rock star persona was gone. He was just a guy. My dad.
“I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel,” he continued. “I’d never gotten over your mother, you know? But I had taught myself how to live with it. I’d developed coping mechanisms. And then, learning about you, it opened up all those old wounds. I got scared. I ruined my chance. And I’m so sorry for that.”
I paused for a long time. “You found out when I was five?”
He tipped his head back and sighed. “Yes. But . . . I was an idiot.”
I stared at him.
“And when you got my letter?”
“I was an idiot again.”
“That’s starting to become a common refrain,” I said.
“I know. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Taliah. I’m tired of being an idiot and a coward. I don’t want to hurt you anymore. I’m going to try to be better, you know?”
I looked down at my sneakers. I was silent for a long time. I thought of his famous pause in “That Night.”
“Tal?” he said.
“I know,” I finally said, quietly.
“Do you?” His eyes searched mine.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“Plus,” he said, a small smile snaking across his lips, “I had no idea how great you would be. I was such a clueless idiot.”
I laughed, suddenly feeling very self-conscious.
“No, I’m serious,” he said. “You’re so great.”
He reached out to hug me, and I let him. I didn’t know if I quite forgave him yet, but I understood. And somehow understanding felt even more important than forgiveness. “Thanks, Dad.”
I felt his whole body tense. He squeezed me tighter.
DAY FIVE
(In Which I Learn How All Endings Are Also Beginnings)
I.
I woke up to my mom sitting on my bed.
“Geez,” I said, startling and propping myself up. “Creepy much?”
Mom smiled at me. She reached out and grabbed my hands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I yawned. “How long have you been sitting there?”
“A while,” she admitted. “I’ve been thinking—”
I wrinkled my nose. “About how it’s complicated?”
She nodded. “And about how I need to explain my choices to you.” She let go of my hands for a moment and sighed. “The thing is, I wish I had some dramatic story to tell you.”
I blinked. “What?”
“You know. Something that would make my choices obvious to you. Explain everything.” She shook her head and stood up from the bed. She began to pace across the room. “But it isn’t like that. Over sixteen years ago, I made a choice. And it was a choice driven by grief and shame and fear. A whole lot of fear.” She briefly met my eyes. “And I’m not proud of that. And I think, well . . .” She paused.
“Mom?” I urged.
“I think one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to talk with you about this is because I was ashamed of how much of my decision was driven by fear. And I didn’t want you to grow up believing that was the best way to make decisions.”
I thought about how she had taught me to be so guarded and cautious. How she’d raised me to be suspicious of new people. “But you did,” I said quietly. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but I was tired of tiptoeing around the truth. I was so tired of it.
“I know,” she said, letting out another heavy sigh. She sat back down on the bed. “I was torn because I also didn’t want you to make the same mistakes I did. I never wanted you to trust the wrong people.”
“Do you think you were wrong to trust Julian?”
Mom gave me a small smile. “I don’t know.” Her face went blank like she was remembering something. “After all these years, I’m still not sure.”
Miami, 2000
In the days following the news of her mother’s death, Lena spent most of the time feeling like she couldn’t breathe. There was a physical ache in her throat. It was as if her lungs felt guilty for still working when she knew her mother would never inhale or exhale again.
“Let me go home with you,” Julian pleaded with her every night.
But she’d shake her head. She couldn’t go to the funeral. Not in the state she was in. She couldn’t face her family. Lying to them about her career and her studies over the phone was one thing; lying to their faces was completely different.
“You’re going to regret it if you don’t go,” Julian said to her as he held her, whispering into her hair.
“You don’t get to tell me how I’m going to feel,” she snapped, and pulled away from him.
But he was right. She did regret it. And she tried to nurse her regret by attending more of S.I.T.A.’s after-parties and social functions.
But the parties only made her feel worse. They amplified her feelings that an insurmountable gulf was growing between Julian and her. She, the grieving nobody whose artistic pursuits were going nowhere, and he, the rock star who was growing more popular and beloved by the day.
She hated that she resented his success. It made her dislike herself even more. She felt like she had disappointed her mother, and now, she felt as though she was disappointing Julian. She felt stuck in a cycle she couldn’t escape: her jealousy made her upset, and the more upset she got, the more jealous she became.
It didn’t help that at these parties she saw how many girls flirted with Julian. And how he flirted back. She was convinced he had cheated on her. Or if he hadn’t, that he was on the verg
e of it, which somehow seemed even worse, in the way that the anticipation of something awful is sometimes worse than the thing itself.
Whenever she’d raise her concerns to Julian, he would shrug her off. He’d get annoyed, offended. Downright self-righteous.
“Lena, I’ve tried to do everything for you. And it’s never enough,” he would say, and then would leave the room in a huff.
And that was the problem. Nothing was ever enough. And she wasn’t sure why.
At the last party she attended, she got there after Julian. She looked around for him and found him near the tiki bar, surrounded by girls. One of them, in a pink cocktail dress, was practically pawing at him.
She felt possessive. And then she hated herself for it. She made her way to the bar and ordered a drink. The bartender handed her something very tropical. Very Miami. She hardly ever drank, but she gulped it down in three sips.
“Whoa, there,” a guy she didn’t recognize said to her. “You’re Julian’s girl, right?”
She nodded tersely.
“I’m one of the new sound guys. Joel.” He stuck out his hand. She shook it reluctantly.
“Your boy’s a big star. He’s got lots of new friends,” Joel said. She could smell the alcohol on his breath.
She watched Julian put his arm around the girl in the pink cocktail dress. She was only a few feet from him, but he didn’t see her. That was the problem. She felt like he never saw her anymore. She felt invisible.
And she was tired of it.
She hadn’t crossed the Atlantic Ocean to feel invisible.
She thought about what her mother would think if she could see Lena now. And she knew her mother would be deeply disappointed, ashamed even.
That’s when Lena knew what she was going to do. She would leave.
She would reclaim her life. She would become a doctor like she had promised her mother all those years ago when she’d boarded the plane to America. Maybe not the type of doctor her mother had expected, but it would be something.
And something was better nothing.
II.
When Mom finished talking, she looked emotional. She wasn’t crying, but somehow that seemed worse. Like she was still holding all of it in. I thought about the sadness that oozed out of Julian’s songs and realized that it wasn’t only his sadness to own. It belonged to Mom too.
“So you left?”
“Yeah, HB, I left,” she said, her leg brushing against mine. I scooted over to give her more space and she wrapped her arm around my shoulder. “At the time, it seemed like the only thing to do. I didn’t like the person I was becoming.”
I wondered if Debra had been partially right. That a big part of love is learning to accept different versions of the person you love, but that it’s also important to love the version of yourself that the person you love brings out. That sometimes it’s possible to love someone fully, but still need to leave.
That seemed heartbreaking to me. And that’s how I knew it was true.
“It was the most difficult choice I’ve ever made,” Mom said. “Well, second most difficult.”
“Leaving Jordan was the most difficult?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I didn’t know about you when I initially left. But then a few weeks later I . . . well, I discovered I was pregnant.” She leaned into me, resting her head against my shoulder.
“Did you think about telling Julian?”
“Of course,” Mom said quickly. “There were many times that I was so close to calling him.” She took a sharp breath. “And when you were five, I did.”
“Why then?”
She moved her head away from my shoulder so she could look me straight in the eye. “I’m not sure, really. I think you had just done something—made some expression or something—that was so quintessentially Julian. And something cracked open inside of me. I guess it made me miss him.”
“So you called him?”
She nodded. “And after a few moments of talking to him, I knew it was a mistake. We fell into our old pattern of accusations and arguments. I could sense the fear and uncertainty in his voice, and I didn’t want to bring that fear to you. You didn’t deserve that.
“You see, Taliah,” she continued, “I made the initial decision I did not because I thought Julian would be an awful father, but because I didn’t want to raise you in an environment with constant bickering. I didn’t want you to see me as a person who was always jealous and disappointed.” Her eyes met mine again. “It was a selfish choice. I know that. But at the time, it felt like the best one. I really thought, and honestly I still do think, that I was a better mom because I was able to do it on my own terms.”
I straightened my spine so I could sit up more in the bed. “And as I got older, you never thought about telling me the truth?”
She reached for my hands again. “Oh, Taliah. Of course I did. But the more time passed, the guiltier I felt. And I didn’t want you to see me as a liar, and I thought the best way to prevent that was to keep you from knowing the full truth. I was so scared of losing you.” She gripped my hands like she was afraid I was about to disappear right in front of her.
“I’m not asking for you to forgive me right away, but I’m asking you to try and understand why I did what I did,” she pleaded.
I returned her grip, squeezing her hands in mine. “I understand,” I said slowly. “It makes me sad, but I understand.”
She nodded a little and reached out to stroke the back of my head. “You know, I’ve been so worried about this moment for years. I knew that someday you’d discover the truth. And I knew it was closer than ever when you started to ask questions about Julian Oliver a few years ago. But now that this moment is here, now that everything is out in the open, I actually feel better.”
I gave her a small smile. “Yeah,” I said. “We should probably work on that, huh?”
“On what?”
“On opening up more.”
She nodded again and a few tears finally spilled out of the corners of her eyes. “Yeah. We probably should.”
III.
Mom kept her promise and let us stay for the memorial. Aunt Sarah’s house was in a more developed area of Oak Falls. Unlike Tom and Debra’s, her house didn’t sit on a plot of rolling acres. It was a squat white brick home on the end of a cul-de-sac.
She’d organized the backyard for the event. Serving dishes of various dips and casseroles were laid out on a table on the deck, and her husband, Todd, was manning the grill, flipping burgers and hot dogs. She’d set up a small microphone near the edge of the deck and explained that later, she thought people could get up and share their favorite memories of Tom.
There was already a good crowd of people in the backyard when we arrived. I didn’t recognize most of them, but I did spot my cousins nursing root beers and chatting under a shady oak tree. When they saw me, the twins gave me a halfhearted wave and it felt like progress.
“It’s nothing fancy, but it’s something,” Sarah said to us when she arrived. “I thought we all needed something.”
“It’s wonderful, Sar,” Julian said.
“It’s lovely,” Mom agreed.
“I know I told you yesterday, but I’m so glad you’re here, Lena,” Sarah said, and I could tell she really meant it.
Mom gave her a gentle smile and rubbed the small of my back.
I saw Toby standing in the corner by himself. “I’m going to go say hi to a friend, okay?” I said to her, and walked in his direction.
“How are you holding up?” Toby asked me as I approached.
I shrugged. “Overwhelmed. But somehow kind of content. I feel like for the first time in a long time, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”
A look of satisfaction passed over his face.
“I don’t mean—” I said quickly.
“I know, I know. But I can’t help but agree with that proclamation.”
“Really?”
“Really,” he said. “And you know what else?
”
My stomach flipped a little. “What?”
His dark eyes twinkled. “If this wasn’t the memorial for your grandfather, I would kiss you right now.”
My cheeks burned in the best sort of way as he reached for my hand. “And I should’ve kissed you last night at the bowling alley. And the night before in the woods. But again, the timing,” he continued. “But I’ve decided to forget the timing.” He wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me close to him. He leaned down and kissed me gently on the lips.
My whole body thrummed. The kiss was quick, but somehow it felt infinite.
As Toby pulled away, the backyard got dramatically quiet. I worried for a moment that everyone was staring at us, but as I looked around, I saw that the crowd was focused on Julian, who had made his way up to the small microphone. He tapped his fingers against the mic.
“So you’d think by now I’d be used to speaking in front of a crowd of people,” Julian joked. The crowd let out a slight laugh. “But right now, I’m unbelievably nervous.” His eyes found mine and he smiled. “But I’m going to try to fight through my nerves because I want to tell you about my dad.”
The crowd leaned forward in anticipation. And somehow, even though I knew what we were all there to commemorate was an ending, it also felt like a beginning.
As Julian paused, his mouth hovering above the microphone, I briefly wondered if the reason so many people loved his songs was because he invited the listener into a place of certain uncertainty, a place that allowed for sadness and anger. And love.
A place that felt a whole lot like both an ending and a beginning.
And I felt like I’d finally reached a place similar to that myself. A place with lots of unknowns, but that was somehow okay. Better than okay, even.