Jack
Sunday, June 6, 6:00 a.m.
Amazingly, I’m up right at six on the dot. I take one glance at the shower, and despite how gross I feel, there is no way I am stepping foot in that petri dish, so I make do with a wet washcloth and a bar of soap, and I lather on the deodorant.
The sky is gray, it’s drizzling from the low-lying fog, and my sweatshirt is no match for the dampness. I bolt across the street to the diner and am waiting in a booth and nursing a cup of coffee by 6:47. I get a refill at 7:02. Alex still hasn’t shown, but it’s literally been two minutes. By 7:15 I’m growing concerned, and by 7:19 I’m also a little pissed. I pull out my phone and realize Alex doesn’t have my number, nor I his, and I don’t know where he lives or anything about him other than the address at the teen center. But he knows exactly where I am. He could easily find a way to reach me if he wanted to.
At 7:28 the waitress wants to know if I want to keep waiting or if I’d like to order something other than coffee. I get sourdough toast and a double side of bacon because bacon makes everything better.
At 7:46 the waitress comes to the table with a coffeepot in hand and asks, “Are you Jack?”
“Yeah?”
She hands me a green paper folded in half with my name written on it. “Some guy asked me to give this to you.”
I take it from her and open it as she refills my coffee. On it is my brother’s familiar scrawl.
Trust the journey, little brother. Wherever it takes you, be authentic and you’ll be all right. Best I can do for now.
Be authentic. He wrote that on the paper mixed in with his stuff at Mei’s. He must have heard it somewhere and adopted it into his lingo. He always did stuff like that. If I’m Human Google, he was Walking Urban Dictionary. He’d discard words as easily as people when they no longer served him.
I look out the window toward the street, but there’s no one there, only cars driving by.
“When did you get this?” I asked.
“Some guy handed it to the cook through the back door a few minutes ago and described you. You’re the only one here that fit the description.” She smiles and stops filling my cup. “Can I get you anything else?”
I’m not entirely surprised he didn’t show. Still, I had hoped.
“No, I’m good. Maybe just the check please?” I look at his words again. Trust the journey. Best I can do for now. I can’t help but smile. For now offers the hope there’s a later, and I guess that has to be enough. At least I had the opportunity to tell him how I feel.
I finish my coffee and am sliding out of the booth to go pay the check when the bells on the front doors jingle, followed by a dog’s yip. The noise catches my attention. I throw a casual glance in that direction and do a double take before breaking out into a smile.
“Oscar?”
He’s the last person I expect to see, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy for a familiar face. Princess starts wagging her tail furiously, although that might have less to do with her recognizing me than coveting my leftover slice of bacon. I spend the next hour continuing to caffeinate while watching Oscar eat steak and eggs as he tells the saga of how things unfolded with Operation: Wedding Breakup. Apparently, his ex lives somewhere down the street, and he’s just come from a final drive by her apartment and decided to grab a bite before hitting the road.
“So, things didn’t go the way you hoped?” I ask. Looks like I’m not the only one.
“Not exactly. I showed up at her place and parked right across the street. I had Princess in my lap, Terrapin in the trunk—I was feeling confident. I was ready to tell her she was making the biggest mistake of her life and I was here to save her from it and how great things could be if she’d only give me another chance. Before I even got out of my car, I saw her come down the front steps of her building with Kevin, and she looked so freaking happy. She never looked like that when we were together. Maybe early on, in the beginning, but not for a long time. I couldn’t bring myself to move; I sat there and watched them walk down the street, and I thought to myself, You’re a supreme douche if you do this, Oscar. Not because I might actually cause her to change her mind, but because if I truly love her, I should want her to be happy, even if I’m not the one that makes her feel that way.”
I shake my head. “Man, I’m sorry. That’s rough.”
“Yeah, well, you know…” He sips his coffee. “Now they’re married, so that’s done.”
“Did you go to the wedding? I don’t think I could stomach watching that.”
“No. I’m not a total masochist. I sat in the church parking lot and tortured myself by waiting until they came out. Then I went back to my friend’s apartment and got stinking drunk and marathoned BoJack Horseman on his couch until I passed out, and now here I am. Have you ever watched that show? Brilliant but depressing as hell, and probably not the best choice at the moment. Can you pass the ketchup?”
I hand it to him. “For whatever it’s worth, I think you did the right thing. It frees you up to meet the right person.”
“But what if she was the right person?” he asks.
“This is the part where you just have to have faith in the universe.” I find myself repeating Hallie’s words to Oscar. “If you’re meant to find each other again, you will.”
“I guess time will tell, won’t it?” He squeezes a blob of ketchup on his plate, and the bottle makes a loud farting sound that makes the waitress look in our direction. Princess lets out a single bark.
“So, what are you going to do with Princess now that she’s not the cornerstone of your happily-ever-after master plan?”
The dog, who sits between us eating bites of Oscar’s steak, perks up at the sound of her name. He scratches her between the ears, and her eyes form contented slits. “We’ve grown pretty fond of each other, actually. I think I’m going to keep her. At least I’d know she’s being treated properly. Plus, guys with dogs are chick magnets.”
“Note to self.”
“So how about you? What brings you to this obscure dining establishment early on a Sunday morning?”
“I was supposed to meet my brother, but he didn’t show up. So now I guess I’ve got to figure out how to get back to LA.”
He nods and swirls a bite of egg in ketchup. “I’m about to drive back. Why don’t you just come with me? No charge.”
Which is how I end up back in Oscar’s car, in the front seat this time, with Princess curled up on my lap, driving back to Los Angeles while contemplating life, love, and the mysteries of the universe.
As we reach the outskirts of LA, the sky glows an eerie orange from the lights and flames reflecting off the smoke particles in the air. Hard to imagine now, but after the first rainfall, these same charred hills will turn as green as Ireland. Life finds its way. If nature can figure out how to start from scratch after being devastated and scarred, so can I.
I remember at the last minute that my car is still at Carly Ginsburg’s house. As we approach her McMansion, I see it parked all by itself on the street. There’s an abandoned red cup sitting on the trunk and another on the roof. Toilet paper dangles from a tree at the base of the driveway next to the exact spot where I stood with Natasha, unaware of the turn my night would take. It seems like eons ago.
When I get home, I don’t even turn on the lights. I head straight upstairs to my room, where I collapse on my bed. In the darkness, I can make out the silhouettes of the two suitcases standing sentry by the door, and a rush of emotion overcomes me.
What am I doing?
This is real. This is the rest of my life, and it starts now. It’s not too late to fill those bags and catch another flight, and yet the idea makes my heart pound faster in my chest, and suddenly it’s as if I can’t get enough air in my lungs.
I’m like a can of soda that’s been shaken up and someone just pulled the tab. Everything bottled up inside me explodes. The tears come fast and furious, and I curl into a ball, fetal, my body lurching with guttural sobs and howls.
I miss my dad so fucking much. I wish he were here to tell me what the fuck I should do, to assure me that everything would work itself out and be okay. I have never needed him more, and he’s not here. Nobody’s here. I am alone, literally and figuratively.
I have never known how lonely I could feel until I felt the vast emptiness of the space my father once occupied. Our connection since he died is almost closer than the one we shared when he was alive. I know he was far from perfect, but all that bubbles to the surface are the good things that makes me physically ache: The gravelly sound of his voice. A random moment where I felt his love. How safe he made me feel in the world. The satisfied noise he’d make after his first sip of coffee in the morning. His repertoire of two jokes that he told all the time and how it used to drive me crazy. I’d give anything to hear him tell them right now. The pain of his loss is so profound, it lives deep in my bones and permeates every pore, infiltrates every thought, and sucks up all the oxygen in the room.
And my brother. To find him only to lose him all over again.
And my mother, somewhere halfway across the country, and who couldn’t be bothered to show up for me the way I needed even one fucking time.
And Hallie, who’d only just met me but shared this amazing connection, and yet she had no problem walking away, not even wanting to keep in touch.
What is it about me that makes me so easy to leave? Because everyone I care about seems to eventually—if not physically, then emotionally.
I cough, and it makes me gag. The grief flattens me. I want it to stop. I want to feel like me again, but I don’t even know who that is anymore.
I just want, more than anything, to close my eyes and wake up to find everything the way it used to be.
I dream that I wake up to the sun shining and the distinct smell of coffee brewing. It’s an olfactory hallucination, of course, because I’m the only one here. I rub my eyes, stand up, and as I crack open my bedroom door, the smell only grows stronger.
I swear I can hear someone banging around in the kitchen. I tiptoe down the hall and hear voices. Male and female. What the—
I walk into the kitchen, and there’s my mom, pouring a cup of coffee, adding a splash of hazelnut sugar-free coffee creamer and then filling a second mug black, no room, and putting it on the table. I see a hand reach for it, and I’d recognize my father’s hand anywhere. Thin, precise fingers, the silver-and-gold band of his watch against his tanned wrists. But that’s impossible.
My mother turns to look at me as I enter and says, “Oh, good, you’re up. We were just going to check for a pulse,” she says, like that kind of joke could be funny in our house.
“Dad?” I want to go to him and hug him, but I can’t move.
“You okay, bud? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He cracks a smile and takes a sip of his coffee.
And then Alex walks in, his hair askew in the way I remember from back when he gave zero fucks. He goes to the refrigerator, opens it, and takes a swig of OJ straight from the bottle.
“Alex! Cut that out! That’s disgusting!” my mother chastises, which only encourages him to take another sip just to taunt her.
“Sorry, Suzanne,” he mumbles and puts it back, then steals a slice of bacon from the plate on the counter and winks at me.
“Stop calling your mother Suzanne. You know she doesn’t like it,” my father says.
Alex slides into the chair opposite him. “Sorry,” he says and then adds quietly under his breath, “Suzanne.” My father rolls his eyes as Alex snickers, and then all three of them are staring at me because I’m still standing there wide-eyed.
I try to move again, but my legs feel as if they have twenty-ton weights attached.
“I was just telling Mom that it was a beautiful day for a hike. Any interest in joining?” Dad asks. He was always trying to get me to hike with him, and I wish I’d said yes more often. Before I can answer, Mom responds.
“He can’t until he finishes all his work.” My mother lays the plate of bacon on the table and one of eggs and another of toast and then motions with her chin toward the table. “Sit down, Jack.”
“Oh, right,” Dad says and puts a spoonful of eggs on his plate.
“What work?” I ask.
She looks at me in disbelief. “What work? You have to finish taking all the tests for your college classes up front because they want to see how much they need to teach.”
“That makes no sense,” I tell her.
Alex shakes his head. “Why do you always have to look for things to make sense? Haven’t you been paying attention?”
What the actual hell is going on?
“Is this real?” I ask. “Are we all sitting here in the kitchen having breakfast right now?”
My parents exchange a concerned look. My mother walks over to me and puts her hand to my forehead like I’m five years old and she’s checking my temperature. “Jack? Can you hear me?”
Dad tells her, “Let him rest, Suzanne. He’ll be all right. He has to figure out how to fly with his own wings.” It’s the translation of the Latin phrase on Hallie’s bracelet.
Before Mom relents, she gets right in my face—checking my pupils to see if I’m high, I’m guessing—and when she backs up, I turn to look at Dad and Alex, but they’re gone.
Someone is tapping my cheek, gently at first and then harder.
“Jack?”
It takes me a minute to orient myself to what is happening. I’m back in my room. The sun is shining in the window, and I’m still here on my bed in the clothes I’ve been wearing for the past two days. My eyes fly open, and I nearly jump out of my skin.
It’s my mom. I let out a little yelp, and it startles her. She retracts her hand and clutches it dramatically to her chest.
“Oh, thank goodness. I kept saying your name, and you didn’t respond. You’ve been sleeping since I got here, and it’s nearly three.”
“What are you doing here?” I scrunch my eyes against the light and sit up abruptly.
“I should be asking you the same thing,” she says with a little more edge to her tone. She’s entitled. She’s tried to reach me about a million times, and I’ve ignored it, which was kind of an asshole move. Still, I’m disoriented and ill-prepared for this confrontation to take place. When I don’t answer, she adds, “Alex called me. Apparently, you showed up out of nowhere having some sort of life crisis, and amazingly he did the right thing and let me know. He was concerned about you.”
For a second I feel as if Alex betrayed me, but then I realize in his own way, he was probably looking out for me. He knew when he didn’t show up, I’d probably go home and that it was the right thing to do. I could only run from my problems for so long—something he knows all too well.
“I’m glad somebody is.”
I didn’t mean to utter the words out loud, but it cuts to the heart of everything I’m about to say. She immediately looks hurt and confused as she stands up and faces me, arms crossed over her chest. “You think I’m not concerned? I called my editor on a Sunday night at home and let her know I needed to end the tour because there’s a family emergency. If that doesn’t qualify as concerned, I’m not sure what meets your criteria.”
“You didn’t have to come,” I tell her.
“Of course I had to come. You’re my son. So take a shower, because frankly, you smell like you crawled out of a sewer, and then come have a cup of coffee and help me understand what is going on.”
I appreciate the buffer of being given time to wake up and refresh my brain before launching into everything with her. I take a long, hot shower and then throw on a fresh pair of jeans and a clean T-shirt and pad barefoot on the cool wooden floors, following the scent of my mother’s Chanel N°5 until I find her in the kitchen. There’s a half-empty bag of Milano cookies on the table. I plop into the seat Dad usually occupied. “Okay, here I am. Let the lecture begin.”
“Is that supposed to be sarcasm?” she asks.
“No, actually it is sarcasm.” I shove a cookie in my mouth. It’s slightly stale, but I eat it anyway. Her eyes lock on my thumb as she places a mug of coffee in front of each of us and sits down adjacent to me at the table.
“What’s on your finger?”
“I got a tattoo.”
“A tattoo?” She raises her eyebrows. In all fairness, I did tell her the other morning that I was going to get one. I just didn’t know I wasn’t joking. “This is quite serious, Jack.”
“Not as serious as lying to me for the past two years about Alex, telling me you didn’t know where he is.”
“It’s not that black and white, Jack.” She sighs deeply and shakes her head. “At the time, it was what your father and I thought was best for everyone involved. It was for your own good.”
“You have no idea what I needed. You never asked. Not then, not now, not ever.”
“Part of being a parent is sometimes having to make impossibly difficult choices that on the surface seem like they’re not caring but are actually just the opposite.”
“Were you ever going to tell me the truth?”
“Yes, of course, but if you want me to be honest, I worried about him coming back into your life when you seemed so emotionally fragile. Despite that, I invited him to come to the funeral, except I didn’t tell you so that you wouldn’t be upset if he didn’t show. When he didn’t, he only proved to me that he still hadn’t moved beyond only thinking of himself. So, hearing you’re looking to him for life advice like he in any way has your best interests at heart has me, understandably, a little concerned.”
“At least he was willing to try to help.”
She tries to redirect the conversation as she doctors her coffee, pouring in her hazelnut creamer. “Look, Jack—I need you to explain what is going on. I can’t fix anything if you won’t talk to me, and hopefully it can be fixed. I’m sure changing tickets or calling your new boss is no problem. We’ll tell them something came up and you’ll be able to start later in the week. And worst comes to worst, we’ll buy another ticket.”
“But that’s the whole point, Mom. I don’t want you to fix anything. My whole life, everyone else has been thinking for me. Not once has anyone asked me what I want, so for the longest time, I’ve believed it didn’t matter. But it does. I’m tired of feeling like being anything less than the person you want me to be is not good enough for you.”
Her eyebrows form an agitated V, and she huffs. “Don’t put that on me, like everything you’ve done is because I held a gun to your head.” She averts her eyes to the plant in the center of the table and begins picking off the yellowed leaves. There’s no shortage of things that have suffered from a lack of attention around here. “This is what you’ve always wanted to do.”
“No, this what you’ve always wanted me to do, and I went along with it because it seemed to make you guys happy. But if I can’t trust my own voice, why should I trust anyone else’s?”
I’ve never stood up to my mother in my life, and my doing so takes her by surprise. I’ve got her full attention.
“Are you saying you aren’t interested in being a doctor? Or you aren’t interested in going to Columbia?”
Here we are. It’s all come down to this moment. I need to make a decision, and the more I talk, the more my choice becomes clear. I shake my head. “All of it.”
“I see. And what sparked this sudden change of heart?”
“It’s not sudden. Since before Dad died, I’m realizing. Honestly, it’s always felt like if I didn’t do this, you might not be proud of me—both of you.” I take another cookie out of the bag and crack it in half before putting it in my mouth. “For the past year, all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball. The future is suddenly imminent, and it doesn’t look like I’d expected. It’s like I’ve lost my sense of place and purpose and my ability to see anything good up ahead, and it scares me a hell of a lot more than letting go of this.”
I feel a wave of sadness building offshore. I don’t want to fall apart in front of her. She’ll write it off as anxiety and start analyzing me, and I’ll lose ground. It’s more than that.
Predictably, she says, “Maybe we should talk to Carole about going back on an antidepressant.”
“That’s not the solution for me. I know they’re amazing for some people, and they helped for a while, but I don’t personally like how they make me feel. I want to have agency over my life and learn to deal with whatever happens without having to rely on meds to feel okay,” I tell her. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I’ve realized I’m just not ready. Like life has kept moving forward but I’m standing still, and I need some time to catch up. I don’t know if that’s a few months or a year, but I don’t want to rush into something that doesn’t feel right. It seems unrealistic for me to have my whole life figured out at eighteen. And frankly, I shouldn’t have to. Maybe I can talk to Columbia about deferring so if I decide it’s what I want, that option is still there—I don’t know.”
Her jaw tenses. “That would be wise.”
“Most of all, I want to be happy, to wake up every day and feel good about who I am and how I’m walking in the world. And how I’m choosing to do that should be secondary for you because it’s not about you.”
She sighs deeply. She can’t refute that, and she knows it. It’s why my father also once said I’d make a good lawyer. “I think you might be making a very big mistake that you will possibly regret someday.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. If you think about it, everything we do is potentially a big mistake we might regret deeply one day. We’re always one decision away from changing our whole lives.”
I know you can’t hold on to anything forever. Not a person, not a situation, not a plan. Perhaps my problem is I keep trying.
We talk late into the evening. Really talk, like we haven’t in years, if ever. I’m glad to find I haven’t given her enough credit. She has her own feelings about everything I’m saying, but surprisingly, she’s not discounting mine.
Before we call it a night, I ask her, “Do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you’d made different choices? Would you be happier? Or would it have just been a different series of disappointments and heartbreaks?”
As she turns off the lights and we head down the hall to go to bed, she answers, “I think disappointment and heartbreak are unavoidable. But giving up the painful, messy moments that come from those choices would mean giving up the positive ones that came from them too.”
I nod. “So—are you flying back to New York tomorrow? I mean—I know you still have three weeks left on your tour.”
She shakes her head. “No. I want stick around here for a while in case you need me—which I know you don’t, sounds like you’ve got this under control. But you know what I mean.”
“I’ve always needed you, Mom,” I tell her. She folds her arms around me, and we stand there like that for a long time.