ten
It’s barely six thirty in the morning and everything is covered in a fine, white mist as we walk through the trees. The air is beginning to smell of snow, even though it’s too early for it, too warm. But this mist makes everything look like it is happening within a dream.
Did I dream her in my bed last night?
Am I dreaming her now, walking next to me?
“Tell me something about your parents,” I ask her.
“My books,” she says. “Some of them belonged to my mom. That’s what got me started on reading vintage romances.”
“That is so sweet.” She is waiting for me to say something, but I can’t talk about my dad. Not yet. “My mom plays the cello,” I say.
“Wow. So you take after her.”
I scoff. “I so do not. She is actually talented. But thank you for comparing me to her.”
“You are so talented, Isaiah,” she sighs. She still looks pale and tired, and for a second I remember how she looked when I found her last night and my heart goes concave. “Talk to me about your family a bit more. Please.”
She keeps those honey eyes on me, and I can’t refuse her anything .
So I talk to her about my brother, my mom, my grandparents, even my dad. It’s the first time I’m talking about him—I haven’t managed to do that, even to my therapist.
“I love the look on your face,” she says, “when you talk about them.”
I thought I would hate talking about Dad, that it would be traumatic. But it was healing. My dad is alive while I’m talking about him. And Eden is meeting him through my words for the first time.
So I keep talking, even though there is a lump in my throat that feels as big as the world.
“My mom was a musical prodigy from the minute she was born. Her parents were Chinese immigrants, and they were so proud of her they kind of pushed her to compete here in the US, but she lost them both in quick succession. When she met my dad, they promised each other that their kids would never feel the pressure of expectations or ambition. Then stupid James was born, and he was every bit the prodigy mom had been at his age—except more.”
“Wait, your brother is older than you?”
“No, much much younger,” I reply.
“How much much younger?”
“Two years.”
“Always with the drama, this one,” she murmurs to herself. I smile. So I’m ‘this one’ now. Nice. “Two years is not ‘much younger’, but whatever. You came along first. You’re the first son.”
“Yep. And I have been nothing but a disappointment, I assure you.”
“That doesn’t sound right. Your dad sounds like a good man.” She looks like she is about to cry, and I wonder why. I haven’t told her he is dead on purpose.
“He… he has his flaws,” I say, although I can’t remember any right now. Is it grief that makes me think of him that way? Or did I really not appreciate him while I was growing up? Took him for granted?
“What if he is really flawless?” she asks.
I laugh. “No one is flawless, Eden. He must have flaws too.”
“Like what?”
Like leaving me , I think, but I can’t say it out loud, or it will be real.
When we reach a bend in the road, where the affluent neighborhoods begin, she stops walking. There are no houses in sight yet, just a huge church property and a park .
“I’m a block down from here,” she says. “Thank you.”
“You don’t want me to see which house is yours, right? Scared you’ll find me climbing into your window at two a.m. tonight?”
She shivers, and I think I do too.
“What, you don’t think I’d do it?” I ask jokingly.
“I know you would,” she replies in the same tone.
But then she looks up, and her eyes are an ocean of pain and longing. She licks her lips, and then says only three words:
“I am terrified.”
I duck my head, smile awkwardly.
I’m guessing she is thinking of her overbearing asshat dad, but I am trembling for a completely different reason. I can’t stop thinking about me climbing into her room, finding her in bed, waking her up and—
My brain is on fire again. My body follows suit.
“Remember what we were saying about our dads being flawed in some way?” she asks.
“Yeah?”
“Well, my dad has one that I just thought of.”
“I know, he’s strict. But, I mean, look at you. Of course he has to be.”
She blushes and I think I do too, but she shakes her head.
“Not that. I’m not sure… It’s not up to me to say if he’s too strict or not. But he does leave me alone a lot.”
I frown. “And without a phone,” I add.
“I have one, but he doesn’t let me use it for more than three hours a day, so…”
My heart constricts. Ignoring your kid for so many hours should be a criminal offence. I hadn’t thought of it until now, absorbed as I have been by my own needs, as per usual, but this is not right: She is alone every day, wandering around until she found the woods, and me. Bleeding knees. Fainting in the darkness. She has been coming to meet me every single day, including most weekends—which means she has zero supervision during those hours.
She’s alone when she leaves, and alone when she comes back. My chest actually hurts as I inhale.
“Look, Eden…” I turn to her.
“Don’t!” she hisses, and I take a step back,. “Don’t you dare pity me.”
Her teeth are clenched and her voice is so broken it comes out as a whisper. Her eyes are shining with tears and now I’m the one who is terrified. I’ve never seen her fight back tears like this. She’s usually calm or cold. She turns her pain into dark sarcasm. But tears? Never.
“If I catch you feeling sorry for me, Isaiah, I’ll never come back to the woods. Never.”
She turns around and leaves me standing there.
I watch her walk around the street and disappear into the mist, shaking with a terror so great I’ve never known the likes of before.
It’s a good two minutes before I can bring myself to start walking back, and a good three hours before I fully stop shaking.
She called me ‘Isaiah’.
She told me not to pity her.
She—she flooded me with so many emotions I can’t begin to untangle them all.
She ruined me.
I miss the days when I belonged to myself, when I had full control over my brain’s and my body’s functions.
Actually, that’s a lie.
I don’t miss them at all.
…
She doesn’t come to our spot the next day.
Or the next.
At first, I think that it’s good that she doesn’t come. She needs to recover, go to the doctor, take care of herself. But then the panic starts setting in. What if she fainted again? What if she didn’t tell her dad what happened and she keeps starving herself without him knowing?
It’s killing me not knowing.
What if she’s finally had enough of me?
What if that’s it? That was the last time I saw her and I wasted it? What if I blew my chance to tell her that she has become the most important part of my day? That meeting her has changed the chemistry in my brain.
On the fourth day, I lose my mind.
I have no number to call her, no social media handles. I didn’t even know her last name. And I haven’t asked for any of it, because she was always there. Until now.
I have felt the urge to text her in the morning when the sadness descends on my chest like a manacle, and during the nights when kept composing stupid, meaningless songs in my head instead of sleeping. But I don’t have her number.
I mean I have friends, actual people in my real life I could text when I feel bad. I have a therapist. But I never text anyone; the grief is too much, and they don’t know how to handle it.
Except her. She knows how.
I have to physically fight the urge to start running and not stop until I reach the block where she lives. I don’t know what I would do once I got there. I might start randomly knocking on doors and asking random strangers if a beautiful, sad girl with glittering eyes lives there. I am that crazed with worry.
I can’t shake the feeling that washed over me when I found her. It seems that primal fear woke me up in the most brutal way. I keep seeing her like that, lying curled on the dirt, dying… and it’s as if I am looking at myself. As I fought to make her breathe again, I was fighting to make myself breathe again too. I have decided that I will fight. I will live. I never want to be in that place again, half-dead. And I never want her to be either.
That decision is doubly hard to keep today, without her. When all I want to do is curl into myself on my bed, with the blinds down, and pred that the entire day is a long, sleepless night. But I don’t.
I force myself into the library, into the gym, I force myself to take a shower. And another one in a few hours, just to wake myself up out of my depression.
Nothing works the same as being next to her does. It’s a physical need at this point. My chest is tight again and my head is swimming with darkness and emptiness. I had forgot how it feels like to be without her for the whole day.
If only I had her number… No matter how little she is allowed to use her phone, at some point, she would have seen my text. She might even have answered it.
No. I need to control my thoughts.
I can’t push her—I will lose her if I do, and that’s the one thing I won’t allow. It’s already getting too inse, this thing between us, and I can’t risk losing her. I just can’t. I’ll lose what’s left of my mind.
So I keep going to the woods every day, hoping.
…
Two days later, when she’s under her tree again, I act like nothing’s happened.
No one will ever know what it costs me not to run over to her like a madman and drop to my knees in front of her, but somehow I don’t. I barely even say ‘hi’ to her. She is not smiling, but she is calm. There is color on her cheeks—a bit too much color.
She’s blushing hard, the red traveling down her neck with every step I take towards her. She doesn’t look up from her book.
Look at me, baby , I think at her. Look at me with those eyes.
She doesn’t. A shudder of pure need travels down my body, nearly buckling my legs. I mean, I have liked girls before, I have done things with them, I have felt things, but this… My body has never stood on attion like this before. I have never melted like this. It scares me that I am reacting with so much insity to her, such longing, such… heat. And just by looking at her.
So I stop looking at her. Except I don’t.
We pick up right where we left off, and the days pass slowly and quickly, as the leaves die and fall around us, autumn giving way to a dead winter.
I fill out my applications, start sleeping a little at night, put on a bit of weight. Some days, I bring my textbooks with me. Some days, we swap and she liss to the symphonies on my phone and I try to read her book.
I bring food with me and she never refuses it. I eat with her, so that she won’t feel self-conscious, but the fact that she never once refuses the food gives me this tight feeling in my chest. I want to ask her if her dad is poor—although she did tell me he isn’t, but maybe she’s ashamed, so I don’t. I remember her warning about not pitying her, so I just bring more food.
We talk about how we grew up—well, I do. She doesn’t like to talk about herself.
“Growing up Chinese American has its challenges,” I tell her one day, “but I was lucky to have these parents who were nothing but supportive. Am lucky.”
“And those cheekbones don’t hurt,” she blurts out.
I stop breathing. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, it was definitely something.”
Is she attracted to me? I can’t breathe. Is there any chance that she might find me —
“Don’t start getting too full of yourself,” she says and I burst out laughing.
No wonder I am completely in love with her.
Wait, what did I just think?
I am in way over my head.
Whatever, I might as well drown.
…
I bring my violin more and more of as the weather grows colder, even though my fingers go numb with it. But out here in the freezing cold, I have played more than I have in the last seven years.
“I have never composed music until now,” I tell her. “Never really played as much as I wanted.”
“What happened? Why did you stop playing?” she asks me.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not to me. You play the violin the way I think heaven must feel.”
My whole body gets covered in goosebumps. I lean back against the tree’s trunk, its ridges dusted with snow, pressing into my jacket, and I close my eyes to drink in the feeling.
“My music teachers would always try to get me to play at concerts, as you have to when you pursue any kind of training in classical music,” I tell her, “but I always made mistakes. It was my mom who stopped it when I was seven. James was five; he had already won a bunch of competitions for adults. Adults . I was still grappling with the preludes and fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.”
“I don’t know what any of those words mean,” Eden says.
“Well, nothing good for a seven-year-old, I promise you,” I tell her, shivering. The memory of those books still haunts me. “In this particular competition, I messed up the end of my performance. And the middle. And a little bit of the beginning.”
Eden laughs.
“James was insisting that I could do it; he said I hadn’t messed it up when I was practicing at home. How I haven’t yet murdered that annoying little puppy I don’t know. But mom said that that was it. She was pulling me from the piano lessons. She said that even with the mistakes, I was better than pianists three times my age.” I swallow. “I think she was lying.”
“Why did she pull you?”
I close my eyes .
I remember that day perfectly. I remember how light I had felt at the prospect of being finally free of the classical music training, but the thought of disappointing her was too much. My stupid, childish heart couldn’t stand it.
“She said that it was because I didn’t enjoy it,” I tell Eden now.
“Your mom is so cool,” she replies, and the naked sadness in her voice just about tears me apart.
“Yes,” I say. “Anyway, that was the day I stopped being scared of music. And found out that I was head over heels in love with it.”
“I love this story,” Eden says dreamily. Her book is closed, a rare occurrence. “I think I love your mom. She sounds amazing.”
“She is. My dad too.”
“Oh? Is he a musician too?”
“Yeah. Was.”
“What?”
She raises herself to her knees, eyes wide and full of tears in an instant.
“He…” I didn’t mean to tell her, it just slipped out.
She looks so scared.
I take her hand in mine—her skin is ice cold. Tears spill down her cheeks, and I am speechless in front of such naked, raw sorrow. For my sake.
“Don’t be sad, Eden, hey, are you crying?” She hides her face from me, and I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, trying to get her to look at me. “We… lost him. Suddenly.”
“When?” she asks, still crying.
“It was… Actually it was a week before I met you, which is why… Hey hey…” She is crying so much that I get really scared. She is having difficulty breathing, as if there is something pressing down on her chest. “Eden, breathe, look at me.” I place my hand on her chest, fingers spread out.
Her heart is beating like a frantic bird’s and I press down as if I can stop it from flying away. I can feel the delicate outline of bones beneath my fingers.
“Breathe, Eden, it’s ok, it’s ok, just breathe with me. Can you do that?”
She nods.
“I’m here, you’re ok.” I hardly know what I’m saying.
I start talking about random things like how I remember my dad shoveling snow outside our front door, how we used to have several music rooms in the house, all of us playing a different instrument at the same time. I try to tell her all the weird things we did, just to get her to smile, but she doesn’t. I still say them.
I keep talking, and by the end, she is not crying any more.
I feel euphoric, almost happy. It happened again, just like before: talking about my dad brought him back to life. It was therapeutic, talking about him so much.
“Should I stop now?” I ask and Eden shakes her head.
“I love the look on your face when you talk about your dad,” she says, and I’m not sure she realizes she’s told me this before. When she didn’t know he was dead.
“I want to make him proud,” I reply.
“I bet he is.”
“Are you thinking of your dad right now?”
She looks away. “I wouldn’t say that he’s proud of me, exactly, but I want him to be proud of me one day. Hopefully.” She half-laughs.
I’m watching her. There is no real warmth behind her laughter, but her lips are trembling.
“You love him,” I say, my voice shaking strangely. I suddenly realize why she was crying so much. It wasn’t just for me, was it? It was for him as well. Is she scared she will lose him? Does she adore him so much?
“I love him,” she agrees. “He’s all I have.”
I nod. I get it. I love my dad too. I don’t know if I told him enough. One more time. I just want to be able to say it to him one more time. I just want to tell him that I miss him and that I—
I suddenly turn away to wipe the stupid moisture off my eyes.
“Look at me while you cry, Isaiah,” Eden says, her voice gentle but firm. “You held me while I fell apart, and now you turn around so that you’ll hurt alone? I want to be there for you like you were for me.”
“I don’t…”
“Let me,” she simply says.
And I simply do. She envelopes me in her arms and finally, after all this time, I bury my head in her shoulder and let go.