Chapter 25
25
Callum made me take off my soaked coat and put on his, warm and waterproof. He made me wait under the eaves of the building while he called Tess to say he’d found me and that I was okay. When he hung up, he studied me for a moment, and I realized I must look terrible—straggly wet hair, mascara all over my face, eyes and nose red from crying.
“My aunt and uncle live just around the corner from here. You can use the bathroom there, clean up and dry off, okay?”
I tried to imagine it: me, being delivered to Callum’s fancy family. How I would stand there, the lost idiot American, dripping on their expensive carpets. But the appeal of a bathroom full of fluffy towels had begun to percolate in my brain. Maybe a hot drink. It was very persuasive.
Callum took my hand, and I let him pull me back down the hill and up the next street. He knocked on a red door and it opened a moment later.
“Callum!” a small woman exclaimed. “ O que aconteceu? Entre, entre. ” She stood back and waved us inside, and I followed Callum into a small, cozy living room.
He spoke quickly in Portuguese, and then the woman turned to me, her face softening with concern.
“Good that you have come here,” she said, in English. “Let me get you settled.”
Callum nodded to me. “Anna, this is my aunt, Lena.”
“ Boa noite, ” I said. “I’m so sorry to interrupt your evening. I just need a moment.”
“No, no, you’ll stay until you warm up!” Then, to Callum, she said, “Go and tell your uncle to set two more plates, yes? He should be almost finished. Arroz de marisco.”
I took off my wet shoes, and Lena led me down a narrow hallway. The floor and all the walls were pale stone, and the bedrooms we passed were modest, small and lightly furnished. I had assumed that all of Callum’s family was wealthy, but this house felt like just a normal family home. I knew that Callum’s cousins were grown and moved out, but I could imagine this place stuffed full of kids, almost overcrowded.
In the bathroom, Lena handed me a dark towel and a comb, and turned on the hot-water tap—“You have to let it heat up,” she said—then disappeared back up the hallway. She returned with some folded clothes.
“Oh no, that’s okay,” I said, embarrassed.
“I need to hang your wet things by the fire,” she said, putting the clothes in my hands. “I’ll wait here.”
She closed the door, and I obediently put on the clothes she’d given me—loose linen pants, a soft tan sweater, cotton socks. I handed back my wet clothes and she left again.
The mirror showed me even worse than I’d imagined, but I scrubbed my face with hot water until all my ruined makeup was gone. My eyes were still red and puffy from crying, but that couldn’t be helped. I pulled the comb through my knotted hair, in small sections, until it looked like I had just stepped out of the shower.
When I emerged from the bathroom, I could smell dinner cooking. I knew the Portuguese ate late, after nine, which meant I’d been wandering the streets even longer than I’d thought. How long had Callum been out there, looking for me?
I followed my nose to the dine-in kitchen and found him leaning against the counter, talking to his uncle, who was stirring a pan on the stove. I felt foolish, joining them in my baggy borrowed clothes. But Callum waved me in.
“Anna, this is my uncle, Martim.”
The older man passed the spoon he was stirring with to his left hand so he could shake mine without pausing.
“You picked a good night to visit,” he said. “My seafood rice is unmatched. It is a very traditional dish here.”
Callum gave me a crooked smile. “What do you say, Anna—are you ready for this ‘taste moment’?” The sound of our laughter echoed off the stone.
Lena came into the kitchen then, and wordlessly Martim held out the wooden spoon for her to taste. She stood still and let it steam for just a moment, then tried it and nodded.
“ Está pronto ,” she said. Then, to us, “Sit! Sit!”
I sat at the table on the far end of the kitchen. Callum sat next to me and Martim ladled our bowls full. I had expected something like paella, but it looked more stew-like—rice, fish, shrimp, mussels, peppers, and onions surrounded by a bright orangey-red broth. Callum passed me a small bowl of chopped coriander to sprinkle on top. It was salty garlicky perfection.
“Delicious,” I said. “I can’t believe I almost left without trying this.”
“You leave tomorrow, too? With Cal?” Martim asked.
I nodded. “Back to real life.”
“Did Callum take you to all the good places here?” Lena asked.
Callum and I laughed. He shook his head. “We went to one place a few nights ago—you should have seen it, Tia. Each course a bite of fish, a drop of broth, a single clam.”
“Oh dear. Muito caro? ” Lena asked, rubbing her fingers together.
“ Sim, muito. Everyone wanted Anna to have the best meal, for her birthday.”
“You should have just brought me here,” I said.
Martim smiled. “Well, we’d better be your first stop next time.”
“And next time, I’ll bring a map,” I joked.
Everyone laughed. “Maybe an umbrella?” Callum added. He was smiling, but I felt the finest line of tension there. We’d both heard it, his uncle’s implication. The misunderstanding that we would be back visiting together again. That we were a couple.
“There never used to be restaurants like that here,” Lena said. With her fingers, she tore the end off a baguette, then passed the baguette to me. I ripped off my own hunk and dipped it into the broth.
“This is a little more my speed,” I said. “In my family, we almost never ate out. And definitely not at fancy places.”
“Not a big food family?” Martim asked. His brows knit together as if this was a tragedy. “Why not?”
“Don’t be nosy, Tio,” Callum said lightly. Protecting me from having to talk about my complicated family, if I didn’t want to. In case it hurt to do so. So thoughtful of him, but the truth was that I’d been glad to talk about it, with him. It had felt better to say it.
I answered Martim honestly. “We only went out to eat for really special occasions,” I said. “Maybe once a year? It was too expensive.”
“ Sim, sim, ” Lena said, nodding. “It adds up.”
“Probably the last time we went out was for my high school graduation.” It hadn’t gone great; Mom always had to worry so much about what she ate. Too many carbs meant too much insulin. So even if we went out, she wouldn’t eat much, or she could only eat one thing. Dad would get grumpy and refuse to say why, even though we all knew it was because we’d spent all that money to go out and she had hardly eaten. And I would just try to make everyone laugh. I wanted them to pretend we were having a good time so that I wouldn’t have to pretend so hard for all of us.
“But for birthdays and things like that, my mom would always bake a cake,” I said. “She was a really good cook.” The past tense landed heavily on the table, as if I’d said, My mother was a really good cook, and then she died.
“That sounds better anyway, a good homemade cake,” Lena said kindly. “My mother baked every day, I miss it so much. The smells, o deus , delicious smells.”
Martim turned to Callum. “ Avó still keeps you loaded up with pasteis , I hear. I don’t know how you stay so trim.”
Callum shrugged. “We have a deal. I walk the dog, she gives me a custard tart fresh from the oven, plus a few to take home.”
I caught his eye. “What, no gold leaf on top?” I said. “How many Michelin stars does your grandmother have?”
Callum laughed hard, a thing I hadn’t seen before: his head tipping back, lips parted, all his perfect teeth showing. This didn’t even seem like the same Callum I’d met in France, the same one I’d spent so many hours with in Highgate. I wanted to stay here with this Callum, or bring this one back to London with me.
“Well, your bowls are empty,” Lena said. “Why don’t you two go sit in the living room, the fire’s going,” Lena said. “Unless you want seconds?”
I shook my head. “I can’t eat another bite.”
“We could make you up some to take with you?” Martim asked.
Callum chuckled as he pushed his chair back. “Not sure they’ll let us take shellfish through airport security.”
The living room had one small couch facing the fireplace, where my jeans and shirt and coat hung drying on a rack. There was one armchair, but it was already occupied—a fluffy cream-colored cat that blinked at us and went back to sleep. Callum and I sat on the couch, and a moment later, Lena brought us cups of tea.
“Tess was so relieved that I’d found you,” Callum said. “She was so worried when you didn’t come. She’s really fond of you, you know?”
“I know,” I said. “I’m crazy about her, too.”
“She was worried about something that happened at the restaurant? Oysters?”
I explained the mix-up to Callum, the waiter not hearing us over the piano. Tess and Ginny not understanding why we couldn’t just send the oysters back, when I’d needed little more than the waiter’s panicked expression. I leaned back, sinking into the couch cushions next to him.
“To be honest, I’m not sure I would’ve grasped that, in the moment,” he said. “It’s lucky you’re perceptive about those things, and also that you’re generous.”
“You all would’ve done the same,” I said. Hoping it was true as I said it.
“Were they good, at least?” Callum asked.
“Very good, though I’m no expert.”
He grinned. “Yes, as I recall, you’re still rather new to oysters.” Thinking, obviously, about passing me the tiny oyster fork in Bar Sube. Five months ago, somehow.
Callum picked up a photo album from the coffee table, next to our steaming mugs. “Some world-class embarrassing baby photos in here,” he said, “if you’re looking for blackmail. Tia Lena got it out for me earlier.”
“Show me the goods.”
He opened the album on our laps. “My grandparents lived in London from when they were young and raised my father and Martim there. And my aunt, who lives in Manchester now.” He pointed to a discolored photo: two boys and a girl, sitting on the steps of a skinny brick row house.
I nodded. “In Lambeth, you said. I remember. Little Portugal. When did Martim move back here?”
“In his twenties, just for a summer, he said. But then he met Lena.”
“And he stayed. That’s sweet.” I smiled, thinking of Martim holding the spoon out for her to taste in the kitchen. It looked like a moment that had happened every night for twenty years. It made me miss my parents. Both of them.
Callum turned a page in the album. The top photo showed a forty-something couple, both in aprons, smiling in front of a restaurant. The sign read O Galo , with a brightly painted rooster on each end.
“This isn’t really the family I imagined you having,” I said. I was too warm and full and relaxed to be embarrassed about all the assumptions I’d had.
Callum chuckled. “You thought I was old money , did you? My dad’d be well chuffed to hear that.” He tapped the photo of the couple. “This was the day my grandparents bought the restaurant they worked at. My avó is an amazing cook. When they decided to retire, they sold it for a good price and moved to a house in South Hampstead. It’s nothing fancy, but it has a back garden, and that’s what they wanted more than anything in the world.”
“Your grandparents must have wanted their kids to join the business? To take over when they retired, I mean.”
“Yes,” Callum said. He looked at me for just a moment, a little surprised. I liked that I was surprising him. I had been wrong about him, in at least a few ways. Maybe he would see that he’d been wrong about me? “I do think that was their hope,” he said. “But Martim had a family here, and my father and aunt went into academia, after uni. My dad taught economics, finance, and then he did consulting. Now he advises hedge funds,” he said, with a sheepish smile. “Hence the Highgate address. We didn’t start out there.”
“And they were the first in the family to go, I assume? To uni?”
Callum nodded. “I think it was hard for my grandparents. When I see them with my dad, there’s a distance there. They don’t understand his life, and he didn’t want theirs.”
I couldn’t keep the sadness out of my voice. “Yes, that’s how it was for me.”
“You left on bad terms? With your father?”
“I just left. It wasn’t only about him; I felt so trapped there, so locked into the way I’d always lived. Coming here—this was my chance to start new, to be new.”
Callum turned the next page, a slow, distracted gesture. “And it worked? Everything is different here?”
“No.” I felt my throat tense, a sign that tears might be on their way. I felt raw, worn thin from the exhausting night. “I love London, but I’m still me. Still the same, still scrambling to keep my head above water, still out of place everywhere.”
Callum was nodding; I could see him putting it all together. “That’s why you like everyone to think you don’t work, that you’re just a student.”
“It’s been so nice, being this other version of myself. Being the person things work out for, for once.”
“Is that really what’s happening, though? Or is that just what it looks like?”
“I know it’s terrible. I know. Selfish and superficial.” I had to stop again, clear the sound of tears from my throat. “But even this sort of half-true happiness feels a hundred times better than anything I’ve had since my mom died.”
“Your mum,” he said, very quietly, pausing to give me a chance to rebuff him. “She was sick?”
“Diabetic,” I said. “When your glucose levels are high, for years, you get ‘complications.’ Organ damage, eyes, heart, circulation. She saw a lot of specialists, and then”—I paused, shaking my head—“she just got the flu.” It still didn’t make any sense to me. That a person could die from something as simple as the flu. That my mother could be alive, the heart and center of my life, and then gone the next day.
“I’m sorry, that’s awful,” Callum said.
“It still seems so strange to me. A couple times a day, I remember, and I have to kind of explain it to myself all over again. That it happened.” That I had kept living, and my father had, too, and the world had barely paused, barely noticed. “It’s not so strange, of course. People die all the time. Even from the flu. But there’s something about that—it’s so mundane—that doesn’t fit what it’s actually like.”
“Suffering isn’t mundane,” Callum said gently.
“I don’t know, I think it is. Mourning is pretty much a universal thing, right? We all have to do it, at some point. Everyone on the planet is doing it, will do it, but when you’re going through it, it’s only yours.”
I tipped my head to one side, my eyes on the fireplace. I had never told anyone this. “Someone told me, when she died, that the grief would be proportional to how much I’d loved her. Like a balance. They meant it as a good thing—like my pain was a sign of how much we’d loved each other—but it sort of haunted me. Any day where I actually got through work and did all the things I needed to do, got groceries, washed my hair, any day where I felt half normal, I’d feel terrible, like it meant I didn’t love her enough. But I also didn’t have a choice; I had to keep going, keep working.”
That’s what happens: each day has newer, smaller disasters for you, and they rise up and claim you—train tickets, taxes, dissertations—and even you forget for a little while. Forget that you once held your sleeping mother’s hand in a hospital bed and told her you didn’t want her to go, but she didn’t have to stay if it was too hard. You would figure out how to get through it.
“I’m just trying to find a way to be okay,” I said, looking up at Callum. “I know I’ve made a mess of it—I know you don’t agree with how I’ve done it—but that’s why.”
Callum nodded. “Well, I’m glad you told me. But you know,” he said after a thoughtful pause, “you don’t have to be this specific, just-right person for everyone to like you. You don’t have to wear the fancy clothes. You don’t have to show them just the good parts of you. I know they’ll like you with all the complicated parts. You should give them the chance to.”
I put my hands into my hair, brushing it back out of my face. The fire was warm, almost too warm. It made me feel drowsy, loose, open. “It’s not just about being liked,” I said. I tried to take a moment, to decide how much to say, but I was too tired to think through all the permutations, what to hide and what to share. “I don’t always want to be the person who has those messy parts. Sometimes I just want to be like you guys. Everything is simpler for you. Safer. I want to feel that.”
“I think you might be able to have it both ways.”
“Do you think they’ll understand? Will they even listen?”
“Tell Tess. She will, I think.”
“And then?”
He laughed, nudging his shoulder into mine on the couch cushions. “Then she and I will tell everyone else to get on board and get over it.”
I smiled up at Callum. He was being so kind to me. Kind enough to pretend he didn’t judge me for being so dishonest. Kind enough to pretend he liked me anyway. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll do it when we get home.”
Callum looked down at me, but he didn’t smile back. His brow was furrowed, almost a scowl; he didn’t seem happy, like I thought he’d be. Happy that I’d agreed. Unsure, I started to pull back slightly—I’d been sitting too close to him—but in that same moment he shifted closer, leaned down. He put his fingers on my chin, tipped my face up to his, and brushed his lips over mine. Lightly, so lightly.
I shivered against him, my body reacting before my mind could. I pressed closer, pushing into him, pushing his lips open with mine. Felt dizzy, felt his hand on the back of my neck, pulling me in.
“More tea, you two?”
Callum sprang back from me, grabbing at the album as it slid off his lap. Lena was there, at the edge of the room, holding the kettle in one hand.
“No, we’d better get back and get packing,” Callum said breathlessly. Standing, he took several steps away from me, shaking his head. Saying no to Lena’s question, but also, clearly, no to me. Without even glancing in my direction, he followed his aunt into the kitchen.
I took my hot clothes from where they hung by the fire, went to the bathroom, and changed. They were too warm, a little damp, and I felt smothered by them. What had just happened? It had felt like surrender: natural, inevitable.
When I opened the bathroom door, Lena’s clothes folded in my arms, Callum was there in the dark hallway. “It was a mistake,” he whispered. “That’s all.”
The heat from the clothes seemed to creep up my neck, into my face. I was hot with embarrassment. “That’s all?” I said, unable to keep the hurt from my voice.
“What about Theo?” he said harshly. “You may not have a problem with lying to people, but I do, Anna.”
I stepped back, away from him, and the light from the bathroom fell across Callum’s face. His expression was hard, almost a scowl. Like this was somehow my fault. “ You kissed me ,” I hissed. “Don’t pretend you’re some fucking saint.”
“A mistake,” he said again.