Transformations

Something flickered in the darkness. The light, a tiny, hand­held candle, wavered for a moment, then danced about like a firefly. Its illumination was too ephemeral to really be called light: it was a pallor, a skin-tone glow of marble whiteness. The sheets on the bed were white as well, crisp underneath with hospital corners and turned back on top at the perfect forty-five-degree angle. We drew in a breath, and then, with a sigh less an exhalation than a movement, slipped into the sheets, the down of our bodies ruffled by their cotton coolness. The faint smell of bleach raised the hair on the napes of our necks. With blind hands and animal instinct we made love, the candle glowing white somewhere behind us, the sheets yellowing with sweat like soft butter around our thighs, a blue night just visible at the edge of the curtain. We moved quickly, slowly, not at all; there might have been some blood, blotting rose petals on the sheet, but no pain. Then, sleeping, it was over; the sun rose behind our eyelids and washed out the room, and everything in it became translucent. Looking in, anyone could have seen us and felt our bodies pressed together under the blanket and known what we had done; my face on his chest, our breathing synchronous, rose and fell like a wine cork on the waves.

It should have been like that: lights, camera, action, every­thing. Heavy on the filters, a little fog drifting in from under the bed. But I lost my virginity to my stepfather on my mother’s double bed during the afternoon’s heat while she was at work. Salty water rolled off our bodies and the bed creaked under our weight like old bones; it was far too hot to climb between the sheets. He wouldn’t look at me while we did it, and he was quick about his business. Afterward, we sat in bed and he held me, staring blankly at the door and occasionally running his fingers through my hair as he’d done for the past two months, ever since he’d started sleeping with my mother. They weren’t married at the time we had sex, not even engaged, and I was pretty sure he was the first man since my father’s death a year and a half before. He’d had cancer. Liver, spleen, stomach, intestine. Just about all his guts rotted away.

My mother had come home from the hospital the day he died—he’d been in six months—and I knew what had hap­pened because she was in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and drinking a rum-and-Coke when I came home from school. The knob on the front door nearly came off in my hand as I entered the trailer; it had broken more than a week before. My mother didn’t really greet me when I walked through the door, just called out, “Come on in here.” Her words weren’t slurred, but they came out in two uneven bursts. I walked in the kitchen and sat down at the table. A package of Kents lay on the table, a few of the cigarettes scattered about like the crooked spokes of a bicycle tire, and two open bottles—a plastic one, half filled with Coke, and a glass one, nearly emptied of Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum—were on the table next to her. She’d pushed the placemat away, and the formica tabletop was scarred with scattered water rings near where she sat, as if she’d been not just drinking but moving the glass around for hours. She didn’t say anything so I unpacked my lunch box, pulling out the empty sandwich bag, apple core, and half a Twinkie, and set them all on the table. My thermos sloshed when I lifted it, and I remembered that I hadn’t drunk it all at lunch that day. I unscrewed the lid cup and the inner plug, and filled the cup with flat pop. Then we sat at the table for a few minutes, each of us drinking and refilling our cups, me with just Coke, she with Coke and the last of the rum. “So,” she said finally. “It’s over.” I nodded my head; I knew that. “Okay?” she asked me. What did she mean, okay? Was it okay with me that my father was dead? Was I okay? “He’s dead,” I said. “Yeah, he’s dead,” she said, and started crying. “Oh, my baby,” she said through her tears, and I didn’t know if she meant me or him. She came over and squeezed herself in the chair with me, wrapped both arms around my shoulders, and shook me with her sobs. Then I started crying too and soon the tears rolled off my nose and cheeks and splashed in the forgotten cup I half held in my lap.

We’d been expecting his death for a while but still we cried a lot. Too much, perhaps: for two or three days we didn’t stop. We were new there, and we had no relatives within a thousand miles, nor any close friends in town. With no one to share our grief and measure it out, we expended it in one great, incomplete burst of tears, and it seemed we stopped feeling when we couldn’t cry anymore. Later, she’d some­times ask me to be with her until she fell asleep. “Come stay with me,” she’d say, always waiting until I’d gotten ready for bed. I’d just go to the door at first and stand there to see if perhaps she’d already passed out. There was always a glass beside her bed; on bad nights there were the rum and Coke bottles as well. “Come right here,” she’d say if she was still awake, and pat the side of her bed. I would go over and kneel beside her, facing the picture of my father on her bed table. In the winter I’d be in my pajamas, in the summer just a T-shirt and underwear. I can still taste the toothpaste, feel my face tingling from the washcloth, see in the glass protecting my father’s picture my own hair, damp and combed straight back. The long ends tickled my shoulders and dripped water down my back. My mother would put one hand on my father’s empty space beside her, the other on my head, and leave them there except for when she needed a drink. Then her hand kind of slid off my head to the table and grabbed the glass. At some point she usually knocked over my father’s picture, and during the course of a night, each time her hand returned to my head it fell a little harder: a tap, a thump, a slap, her hand scattering the strands like a wild rake through grass, until, late at night, she would miss completely, and then I knew she was almost asleep. Quietly I would stand my father’s picture up and smooth my hair, using the glass as a mirror.

In the distance, somewhere in the depths of the house, a fan belt would kick in and squeak arrhythmically, and dry air would wheeze from floor vents. When my mother’s breathing came in time with the fan’s gasps I went to my own bedroom, though once I moved my father’s picture to his bed table so my mother wouldn’t knock it over again. On the day my stepfather and I slept together it was the clanking of the window air conditioner that signaled the presence of the house. At the noise, my stepfather eased out from me and dressed. As he left he turned to me and said, “I know I can trust you to keep this a secret.” Then he pulled the door softly closed behind him, like a lover or a thief. I was thirteen then.

My mother brought him home from a bar one night; what I thought I’d heard was confirmed when, in the morning, I went to awaken her for a telephone call. I opened her door quietly and saw her curled on the bed without clothes or sheets, her head at a lopsided angle on the naked sternum of a man I’d never seen, a man with a handsome body and a face that, in repose, looked sad. A breeze blew through the half-open slats of the Venetian blinds and moved her hair. I looked at her face: it was red and puffy, but underneath that, content. She lay on my father’s side of the bed, and that picture, an image of a very young man rugged in fishing gear, no more than twenty, and smiling victoriously at his catch, shone over her shoulder. The stranger slept soundly, his hand interposed—but only slightly—between my moth­er’s shoulder and my father’s smile, and his penis lay harm­lessly like a small white fish a few inches from my mother’s mouth. I let them both sleep, unable to break the fragile harmony of the scene: the odor of sex, new to me, mingling with spring; my father and the man lying side by side with my mother; her own, obvious security in their combined presence.

Back in the living room I hung up the phone without taking a message. I turned on the TV and stared through it. My stomach seemed filled with liquid, and as I sat there it boiled out of my guts and into my veins, and my skin turned red with the angry heat of its passage. I felt betrayed, and suddenly my father’s picture on the bedside table flashed in my mind. But my mother’s stranger was, almost immediately, kind to me. He came in the living room around noon and acknowledged to me what he’d done with a silent shrug of his shoulders. It was a mature shrug, the kind one adult gives to another, and, as a child, I was flattered. The shrug wrecked my resolve, which had risen with the heat of the day: I’d wanted to assault my mother—and him—with my knowledge of their hideous infidelity to my father’s memory, but my anger, sourceless from the beginning, retreated into the blaz­ing pit from which it had sprung. His shrug simply said, It happened. There was an apology there if I wanted it, but it was superfluous. Then my glare softened, became a stare, and I found my eyes wandering his body, which was covered now by a loose pair of jeans. “I’m Martin,” he said then. I opened my mouth to tell him my name, but the word flew from my tongue before I could voice it. I said, “Did my mother tell you who I was?” He said, “Yes.” “Good,” I said, for if she’d told him my name, then she must have told him she had a child in the first place. And if there was a child, he must have realized, there would be a father as well, and I believed that my mother had explained what had happened to him. So this man, Martin, knew everything, yet still he’d come. I don’t know why I thought this, nor why I took comfort in it, but secure in that knowledge—unaware that none of it was true—I turned back to the television. Martin went in the kitchen.

Later he slipped back in the bedroom with the breakfast I’d heard him making. He took time to stop and tell me there were eggs and bacon on the stove, and plenty of coffee. “Thank you,” I made sure I said, pleased he’d considered me mature enough to drink coffee. I ate all the food he’d cooked, though I’d already had both breakfast and lunch, and I drank two cups of coffee, though it raised the gall in my throat. When I finished eating I put on the long apron that hung in the cupboard and started washing dishes. The dishwashing apron, my father had called it, because it was waterproof, and from a long time before I remembered laugh­ing at him encased in its yellow ruffles. After a few minutes Martin entered the kitchen behind me and tousled my hair. His fingers were still greasy from the bacon and I could feel his fingerprints on my scalp after he took his hand away. “Thanks,” he said. He grabbed a towel and dried the dishes that I washed and handed to him. I started to explain where everything went, sensing he would need to know this for the future, but he interrupted me. “I know,” he said. “I found it all before I cooked.” “Right,” I said, and turned back to the sink. Martin worked beside me and behind me, and I took as long as I could with the dishes but said nothing more to him, thinking anything that could come out of my mouth would sound childish. When I finished I helped him put away the last of the dishes, and then we pulled a fresh towel from the drawer and dried our hands simultaneously, our skin touching together sometimes within the towel’s folds. Then he put his hands on my shoulders and pulled the long apron over my head. “These look ridiculous,” he said. “I splash.” “Don’t be afraid to get wet,” he said, then tossed the apron on a counter and went back to my mother’s room. The apron had looked old and silly in his hands, and quickly, before I could change my mind, I threw it in the trash. In this way, Martin fitted himself into our lives; sitting on the lid of the trash can, I found it easy to imagine that he’d climbed in my mother’s bed while she slept, and for a brief second I felt he could just as easily slip into mine.

My mother had met Martin at a bar; within a month he and I joined together and tried to keep her from returning. We sat on either side of her bed and held a hand apiece, one of hers in two of ours. Martin had moved across the bed since that first day; looking over my mother, I could see my father smiling by his right arm. My mother moaned aloud often, sometimes curses, sometimes pleas for just one drink, some­times my father’s name; Martin and I looked at each other silently over her sweating body. “Oh, goddammit,” my mother shrieked, eyes closed, face to the ceiling. “Damn it all to hell.” Sometimes I wondered to whom she directed her words, but she never said. And sometimes I wondered what, or whom, she was talking about, but that too was never made clear. “Son of a bitch. Fucking bastard. Stupid little prick.” I tried to stare at Martin’s eyes and ignore what she said. His eyes showed only sorrow, but I felt it was for both me and my mother. And I noticed also self-pity, but the sum of all that sadness didn’t seem to have a dampening effect on him. It was almost as if he were happy to be sad. “Henry,” my mother yelled, pulling my eyes back to her. “Henry, why did you do this to me?” Her face was sticky with sweat, and her tongue poked from her mouth after she finished speaking. I looked back at Martin. He held my mother’s hand and sat poised in the chair, as if on view, and his glance at me was long and almost dramatic in its empathy. He stared directly in my eyes; I couldn’t break the contact, and felt the struggle register itself on my face as my jaw muscles tightened and my cheek twitched. Martin’s eyes and face were steady and relaxed. My mind wavered: dreams rolled in like black clouds. Like death. I felt it coming for my mother and, perhaps, for me. In my chair, I started crying weakly, silently, expecting at any moment for my mother to heave into convulsions as my father had done that day when we’d had to bring him to the hospital for the last time.

When my mother finally ceased struggling that night I left her room to go to my own, leaving Martin caressing her sleeping body. I sat on the edge of my bed and choked my pillow, angry now, no longer crying, and remembered the convulsive way she had gripped Martin’s manly hand, and the limp hand she let sit in my girlish one. I wanted to believe, as I held my pillow to my chest, that it was I who held my mother from her rum-and-Cokes, but I knew that she had at some point given that task to Martin. I’d been in my room for only a few minutes when he came in without knocking and sat down next to me on the bed. He did the thing with his fingers in my hair, and when I didn’t respond he pried the pillow from my arms and tossed it to the head of the bed. “Pillows are for sleeping,” he said. I threw myself backward and at an angle from him on the bed. My head landed on the pillow but my feet still rested on the floor. I lifted my legs up and over Martin, but halfway through the action, my legs raised and spread right in front of Martin’s face, I froze, realizing suddenly that I wore only a skimpy pair of under­wear. I couldn’t decide whether to put my legs back on the floor or complete the movement: indecisive, my legs stuck up in the air like those of a pregnant woman locked in stirrups, and I felt a hot blush across my cheeks. Martin pushed my legs down on the bed with one hand, then lifted the sheet up and covered me to my waist. “I’m sorry you have to see her like this,” he said, as though nothing had happened. “But we’ll get her through it, don’t worry.” It was a platitude, I knew, but it wasn’t condescension, and I felt his sympathy from his tone, not his words. And I don’t remember the words I used—probably these very ones, since I was an un-subtle child—but I told him how afraid I was of losing her as I’d lost my father. I sat up, put my head on his shoulder, and again I cried, gradually slipping down, curling my legs up and around, until I was like a baby half in his lap. Dimly I realized I cried for myself, not my mother, but I made no effort to clarify this realization, only letting my tears, as they always had, cloud my vision. Martin soothed me with soft, breathy exhalations, saying, “I know, I know,” in such a way that I believed he did know, had always known, just how I felt, and at the last he loosed a sob and I felt the clear delineation of a teardrop falling on my back and soaking through my T-shirt to my skin. My own crying ceased immediately, with a shudder, as I contemplated that soft wet spot on my shoulder. I lay back, exhausted; he gave my head one more pat good night. The tears in his eyes glistened like golden oil from the glow of the parking lot light outside the window. That night, like all the nights before, he said, “I’m going to sleep with Bea now, to make sure she’s okay.” But that night his voice was heavy—weighed down, I felt, by the tears I’d caused. Martin bent down and kissed me on the cheek before he left; his lingering lips were dry and soft, and I could feel their imprint on my skin. When he stood up the bed creaked, covering the sound of my suddenly twitching legs rustling the sheets. I swallowed my last sobs with an acrid amount of mucus until the door closed and he was gone, and then I resolved never again to bring pain to a man who would cry for me.

We nursed my mother through a month of withdrawal, and soon drew our strength from her own adamant refusal to drink again, though sometimes her body called for it in shudders so loud the bed shook with her moans of pain. My mother, I remembered, and told Martin to add truth to the memory, had not really drunk until my father became sick. As he worsened, so had she. Her goal seemed clear: to drink herself into the grave and follow him. But after her sadness had passed there was only the alcohol, which seemed determined to kill her though she no longer wanted to die. She always drank alone in her bedroom, sucking down the dank liquid until she was so intoxicated she stumbled out of the house and sang sad songs up and down the gravel streets of our trailer park. Going to the bar had clearly, in my mind, been a move to meet someone like Martin, someone to peel the carcass of drink off her, since she was unable to do it alone. It seemed to me, the more I thought of it, the perfect trans­formation: my father had brought the bottle into her life with his death; therefore, it would take a new life, a new love, to save her from dying. I was young and I had loved my father as much as my mother, and with a respect that came from seeing her bathe his twisted, convulsing, deteriorated body unaided, even as he tried to force his face under the water, I accepted her solution, and loved Martin as my own.

After a month she got out of bed. She arose at her regular time in the morning as if she’d never been unwell, and had breakfast for Martin and me when we emerged from our sleep. We ate like prisoners enjoying their first free meal after a long confinement. During breakfast she got up suddenly and went to the cabinet where she kept the liquor. There was half a bottle of rum there that we’d stupidly forgotten to throw out. She grabbed the bottle, but went with it to the sink, not the table, and poured it down the drain. Then, overruling our protests, she went to work that same day, saying she’d been gone a month and they wouldn’t hold her job much longer, and besides, it was Friday and she’d have the weekend to recuperate if she needed it. I, she said, could take the day off.

 

Martin and I did the dishes together. We were both very happy, I’m sure, but disoriented, and Martin murmured bemusedly, in a voice with a sound like the flipping pages of a book, something about “only when you’re dead.” I didn’t understand him until years later, after I’d finally made love to a man again without seeing Martin’s face at the door and hearing him say, “Keep this a secret.” We wandered about the house and idly cleaned, vacuuming, dusting, doing the breakfast dishes. At some point Martin asked me, “Where do you keep the tools?” I led him to the closet and showed him the metal tool box that had belonged to my father. Martin lifted it; I knew from experience that it was too heavy for me, and watched in admiration as the muscles of his arm bulged when he picked the metal bin off the floor. I followed him to the front door and then realized what was up. The lock had broken on the door around the time of my father’s death, and it had never seemed necessary to repair it. Now we went at it, but halfheartedly, as though we were tired, and it took us a couple of hours to complete the job. When at last we finished, Martin closed the door, and locked it.

We ate lunch, left the dishes in the sink. The day dragged by. Sometime in the afternoon I slumped on the couch. The energy and tension flowed out of my body like a current, replaced by relief. I suppose I was at last realizing that my mother wasn’t going to die like my father, and that Martin wouldn’t vanish now that his task was done. But then I only felt joy, an overpowering coolness like an ice-laden cloth on my forehead. I started to cry. Martin came up to me then. He sat down on the couch and folded his hands in his lap like a nervous woman. He didn’t say anything to me, didn’t ask me why I was crying or why I sprawled on the cushions like a rag doll. Instead, he started crying too. Again, I was amazed by this man who could, unlike all the other men I’d ever known, even my father, cry. I said, I don’t know why, “You must love her a lot already.” Looking out the window, he said, “I do.” Turning to me, he said, “And you too.” He paused for a moment as if awaiting a response, and then he said, “It’s been hard for both of you.” While the sun shone outside, and the wind blew, and cars chewed up the gravel in the parking lot, and a radio that Martin must have turned on without my knowledge played somewhere in the house, we cried, a few feet apart on the couch, not looking at each other. Then my tears stopped on my cheeks, and I sniffled with uneven breaths. Martin’s tears ceased as suddenly as they had come, and for just a second I doubted the emotion that lay behind them. But then he reached out and rubbed my hair. His hand rested on my head for a second and I sat like a statue. Then his hand drifted down my face and wiped at a tear. He said, softly, “Come on. Let’s stop this.” I felt the rough, knuckly hand of a plumber, a hand like my fa­ther’s. I held it there, and then used his fingers to scratch a soft itch inside the skin of my cheek. And then, slowly, expecting at any moment for him to pull his hand from mine, I put it in my mouth. His fingers tasted like mayonnaise.

A final tear rolled down his cheek. He pulled free from my mouth and took my face in both his hands, one dry, the other wet, and kissed me on the lips. As I closed my eyes I was left with the image of his face being washed by the tear into happiness. There was nothing more then from either of us as we walked to the bedroom: no tears, no touches, no words, significant looks, or communication: no symbols. I wished for a second that he would carry me. Not like a bride, but like a baby, because that is the only way I could imagine myself in my mother’s bed. We had sex with enforced qui­etness. Several times I caught him, and also myself, looking at the bedroom door, listening through the windows, as if expecting some third party to come along and complete our triangle, or dismember it completely. When we finished, I lay in bed for a few minutes after he left. Still looking at the ceiling, I suddenly felt the weight of my father’s eyes on me. Then I heard the latch pop open as Martin unlocked the newly fixed door.

That evening, my mother’s roast beef gleamed like a small mountain rising from a valley of potatoes, carrots, and onions swimming in a lake of brown juices. Steam bathing her face, my mother said carefully, each word its own proud sentence, “Dinner. Is. Served.” “It smells wonderful,” Martin said, inhaling audibly. “I know it’s a bit much, especially with the weather and all, but it’s been so long since I’ve felt like cooking anything worth eating, that, well, you know.” I couldn’t see if my mother was blushing or merely flushed as she placed the roast on the table. She sat down between Martin and me. “I think I understand,” Martin said, reaching for the loaf of homemade bread and cutting three thick slices. “This meal belongs in a palace,” he said, and distributed the bread. The steam out of her face, my mother’s skin remained pink. “Oh, you’re just saying that.” She took his plate and put several pieces of meat on it, then ladled out vegetables and the drippings. She put it back in front of him, then took her plate and did the same. Then she served me. She talked throughout the meal about her first day back at work, about how good it felt to walk home and pass by the bar without feeling the need to go inside, about having someone at home to greet her when she came in. I sat in my corner and watched her and Martin, picking slowly at my food, and every once in a while I said something to pretend I was part of the conversation. But her eyes were fastened on Martin, and his on her, and if she barely touched her plate, it was because she was too busy talking to eat. Martin, though, ate steadily throughout dinner, and the only time he spoke, other than to say I know or I understand, was to compliment her on the food. The meal seemed to be over when Martin pushed away his plate with its half-eaten third piece of apple pie and pro­claimed, “I’m stuffed.” I got up then to do the dishes, and after a minute Martin started to help me. My mother sat in her chair behind us. She said, “It makes me happy to see you two getting along so well.” My hands submerged in a sink of soapy water, my back to her, I didn’t say anything. Martin dropped a hand on my shoulder, then ran it through my hair. “You’ve got a good one here,” he said. My mother said she was going to watch some television, then turn in early. “When you’re finished,” she said, “come stay with me.” “Sure,” I said, without turning around. “Not you, silly, Martin.” “Sure, Bea,” Martin said. “I’ll be there in about half an hour.” “I’ll be waiting,” my mother said. “Good night, dear.” I washed the dishes without looking, to see if they came clean and handed them to Martin silently. I felt my mother’s hand on my shoulder. Her voice came in my ear. “I said, Good night, dear.” I jumped at her touch. “Oh,” I said. “Good night.” “See you in the morning,” she said, and pecked me on the cheek. She’d never done that before, and it seemed hollow to me, like half a kiss. “I’ll see you in a couple of minutes,” she said. At the same time, Martin and I both said, “See you.”

Later, months later, he and my mother were married, and she had me put away my father’s condoling picture forever. Martin and I never had sex again; and once, after tousling my hair, he sat up quickly and said he couldn’t do that any longer either, and he left my bedroom. Still wanting him, I would look at him for long periods at a time, staring at him through his newspaper until he would drop it tensely and look back at me, softly, sharply, fearfully, always with love and sadness, and once or twice with lust also, but each time he only shrugged it, all of it, away.

The marriage didn’t last because my mother only loved him for helping her to overcome drinking and my father’s specter. I never saw her fight with him; she only drifted further and further away, and grew more silent until one day all she could say was “I’m sorry—” and he moved out without pro­test. Later I learned that they’d said things when I wasn’t there, had fought and made up often, fucked, talked about me, done the dishes and things like that, lived a separate life while I was out; but then I only hated my mother for sending Martin away even though I loved him more than she. I yelled at her that I would never forgive her if she didn’t bring him back, nor would I accept anyone else, because that’s what I believed she’d do: go find someone else. With the cruelty of adolescence I screamed, “You’re just a slut!” For a moment I stared at the air, as if I could see the word I’d just hurled at my mother. Then she slapped me hard, twice, and said, “Only when I’m dead and gone can you say things like that about me. But while I’m alive you make damn good and sure you mind your place!” On her final words, her voice rose to a scream. I jumped up and down, my arms flying out and hitting the walls so hard that a picture frame filled with family shots fell to the floor—my father, my mother, me; and, still tucked in the frame in front of the glass, new configurations featuring Martin and the two of us. “I loved him!” I yelled, pointing at the broken glass and scattered pictures. “I loved him! And he loved me!” “Shut up!” my mother shrieked. She grabbed me by the hair and threw me down. I lay there and looked up at her. Her face was twisted with rage and disgust. “Don’t you ever say that again.” I stared at her, my mouth open, tasting blood though I wasn’t bleeding. “Get away from me, you foul boy,” she said, and turned away. If sleeping with Martin had taught me anything, it had taught me about desire, and I yelled at her retreating form, “You’re just pissed because he got what you wanted.” She turned, and I saw the shocked expression on her face, and then, before she could hit me again, I ran away.

I was too angry to admit my grief or guilt, and choked on the apology I knew she deserved. Weeks went by and we didn’t speak, and I heard through a friend that Martin had moved from town. Only when my mother dragged out my father’s picture did I realize how deeply I’d cut. But the alcohol was gone and the only addiction was to a dead man’s memory, and I no more had the cure to that than she could stifle my own sobs for Martin, so I used my pillow to do it to save her any more pain; she clinging to her picture, I to my pillow, we both searched for the essences of men long gone.

I received a letter from him today, you see, that’s why I’m remembering all this. It’s months old, and has followed me through four different addresses, as if the message it contains is vital. And perhaps it is, though the phrases he used have a curious discordance about them, and the message, if any, has to be picked out carefully: there is a desperate finality in this letter, yet at the same time it is mired in ambiguity. “Dear John,” he wrote. “Do you remember our time to­gether?” Sometimes I don’t know what I remember, what’s real and what’s been transformed with time. “I’ve never for­gotten you or your mother, but I had to leave for my sake, and yours and your mother’s.” All he ever wanted was both of us, and of course he could have neither in the end. That’s like Martin, like his tears, his touches, his other empty words. You can have your dreams, he’d said in the kitchen, of how life should be and what your ideal lover should look like and how your first time should go, but he knew—and I do too, now—that you’ll never get it, or never be able to hold on to it if you do. Not in this life, he’d told me: only when you’re dead.