Chapter Twelve
It wasn’t a routine. Routine made it sound predictable, ordinary. Routine, you counted on and took for granted. Had confidence in. Faith.
I never took finding Kai on my doorstep, or on the patio deck, or in the pool for granted.
He was young, and bright, and confident.
Outgoing. Clearly had friends - even if I had mixed feelings about the one example I’d met - and interests outside of his studies.
In short, there were plenty of reasons why the company of the guy living next door to his parents might pale in appeal, compared to all of the other things he might choose to spend his summer doing.
I wouldn’t be able to blame him for deciding that, and I also couldn’t stop myself from responding to his apparent satisfaction with our arrangement.
Like fresh, green shoots from some long-neglected plant, questing upwards.
Torn between bravery, in delighting at something new and exciting, and the companion dread that comes from understanding how harsh the real world can be.
“You can go out with your friends, you know. You don’t have to keep me company every night.”
He’d laughed as I made dinner - at how I fumbled through boiling pasta, clumsily browned the meat, sprayed my shirt with sauce as the jar’s lid proved obstinate - but Kai had still sat down, smiling and eager, to eat with me.
Waved off my apologies for culinary skills barely on par with what his college peers possessed, if even that.
“Trying to get rid of me?” A grin, as he tore bread to dunk in the bowl’s arrabbiata dregs.
“Trying not to monopolize you.”
“Thoughtful of you.”
Was it? Attempting to explain a strategy of showing yourself to someone piecemeal in order to sustain their interest felt like it could be self-defeating.
“I remember what it was like, being bored on summer breaks.”
Kai laughed. “You have a way of referring to your past as though it happened centuries ago. Is this you dropping hints that you’re some ancient vampire?”
“Brooding up in the hills, only coming out under cover of darkness, and hungering for the blood of the innocent,” I suggested.
“Well, innocent is questionable.” He smirked at me. “But I’m down for a little biting.”
I chuckled, shaking my head. “I’ll bear that in mind. But, seriously, if you want...”
“Tate, stop,” he interrupted. “You’re not camp counsellor; you don’t need to supply me with ways to stay occupied and entertained.”
“You work hard, I just don’t want you to feel like you wasted your time off.”
He bent again, to sweep carbs around tomato sauce. “You’re a terrible judge of what’s wasteful.”
Said with such weighted casualness, there was no way I dared protest further.
“What sort of medicine does your dad practice?” I asked instead.
Kai swallowed. “Thoracic surgery, mainly.”
“Throat stuff, right?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, throat stuff. I guess you could say I willingly followed in his footsteps, there; I’m a fan of throat stuff myself.”
I ignored the very obvious detour I was being presented with.
“Does he want you to be a thoracic surgeon, too?”
Kai pushed the empty bowl away, sitting back in his chair. “Not really. He doesn’t so much care, just as long as there’s an ‘MD’ involved somewhere in the title.”
“And his father? Your granddad?”
A smile, or the shade of one. As if surprised I’d even remembered that medicine ran in his family.
“Oncology. Back in the days when there was a lot more done with a scalpel.” Kai shook his head, seemingly remembering old conversations. “I think he saw radiation therapy as an affront to his knife skills.”
I tried not to imagine what Kai’s grandfather would’ve said, had he watched my own haphazard attempts to cut onions earlier.
“If you’d said you really didn’t want to go into medicine yourself, would that have been okay?”
For a moment it felt like I might’ve gone too far, pushed too eagerly into a topic that was not yet - might never be - open to me. Then Kai made a face.
“There are spoken expectations, and unspoken ones, right?” He waited for my nod. “And I think the latter are the most potent. They’re the ones which really shape us.”
“Go on,” I prompted.
He frowned, reaching for his wineglass. “Like, someone telling you, ‘you must do this!’ you can argue with. Or debate it, if you’re feeling measured and reasonable, or something in-between. Whatever. You can talk it through, yeah?”
I nodded again.
“But unspoken expectations are sneaky. You project all your own stuff on top of them, give them twice the weight. My parents want me to be a doctor, and I don’t want to disappoint my parents, or let down ‘the family legacy’ - whatever the hell that is, really - and if I don’t go to medical school, well, what the hell else am I planning to do? ”
“We’re our own worst enemies, sometimes,” I suggested.
Kai grunted agreement. “Growing up, it felt like everything was touched, somehow, by my dad’s job.
Mealtimes organized around his shifts at the hospital, vacations squeezed into the gaps in treatment schedules.
My mom was ‘the doctor’s wife’ and I was ‘the doctor’s son,’ and that was something honorable, something to be admired. ”
“He did something important.” I wasn’t sure if I was agreeing, or playing Devil’s advocate.
Kai’s expression twisted, unhappily. Something closer to disgust. “Oh, sure. Always important; always life-and-death, even if I bet half his days were just full of paperwork and insurance bullshit. You can’t argue with that sort of important, y’know?”
I nodded.
“And everything else feels so...” He gestured, with the hand holding the wine, searching for the words. “So very bland, in comparison.”
“Milquetoast.”
A beaming grin, like I’d passed him an unexpected gift. “Milquetoast. Yes. So, the doctor’s son isn’t sure he wants to go to med school, boo-hoo. There are people out there dying of throat cancer, stop being so damn precious.”
“But he didn’t say that.”
Kai shook his head. “Like I said, the unspoken expectations and criticisms are the most powerful ones.”
Reaching over, I topped up his glass. Sneaking glances at the morose, preoccupied look on his face as he watched the wine flow.
“But you don’t hate the idea, now,” I prompted. Unclear, still, if I was trying to rescue the mood of the evening, or cheer him up, or save myself from the sudden sense of awkwardness. “Med school, I mean.”
“I enjoy it. Or, bits of it, really. That’s the galling thing.”
“How dare your dad be correct.”
“Exactly.” Kai laughed. “There was a part of me that wanted to hate it, to resent every minute of classes, lectures, all of it. Even though I knew that was ridiculously self-defeating, because it wasn’t like I’d be upsetting anybody bar myself.”
I grinned at him. “I’m picturing your utter dismay, at realizing it wasn’t actually as terrible as you wanted it to be.”
“Something like that,” he agreed, still sounding amused. “I came to what must sound to you like a hopelessly naive realization, that just because someone wants you to do something so intensely that they pressure you into it, doesn’t mean that thing is automatically bad.”
“The version of Tate you have in your head is a lot more wise than the version you’re having dinner with.”
Kai flashed me a ‘don’t start that’ look. “What about your parents? Did they have gallingly reasonable expectations for you to rebel against?”
“They only really expected me to leave.”
He frowned. “They threw you out?”
I shook my head. “Nothing so dramatic. I grew up in a tiny town, barely dot-on-the-map level: the sort of place where ‘anything, just not here’ counts as reasonable ambition. Neither of them ever said it, not in so many words, but I always knew resented each other for the fact that they were there all their lives. My mom blamed my dad for trapping her, and my dad blamed my mom for the same thing, and neither of them ever got around to asking whether they could’ve left together. ”
“Co-dependence, they’d call that, in my psych class.”
“Look at you, learning all the big medicine words,” I teased, with a smile. “But yeah, when I told them I was leaving for college, it didn’t really matter what I was studying, or where.”
“Anything, just not there,” Kai suggested.
I nodded. Feeling like I was teetering on the edge of something, of some fresh honesty, that I wasn’t sure I wanted to dive into. Deeper and more serious than any pool.
“But I understand what it’s like to resent your parents, even if it’s for pressures they didn’t realize they were applying.” I took a gulp of wine. “You couldn’t live with them and not see the red flags in their relationship. Not be affected by them.”
“You watched them silently seethe with resentment for each other, but blind to how the other was feeling, and you’ve been terrified ever since that the same situation would happen to you.”
It felt like he’d slapped me.
“So astute,” I managed to say, dryly.
“And me, just a kid,” Kai said, matching my tone.
I pushed my chair back, snatching up our empty bowls. Concentrated on walking as smoothly, as normally as possible to the sink, even though my body felt leaden. The white noise of the running faucet competing with the static buzzing between my ears.
“Tate, I’m sorry.”
He was closer than I expected, than I thought he could be. Practically on my heels.
“What for, being right?” I couldn’t turn, not knowing he was right there.
“For being blunt. Thoughtless.”
“That’s what we expect from our doctors, isn’t it? What we actually want from them. No mincing around the truth.”
“Maybe. But not from our...” He paused. “Not from the people we’re intimate with. And I get that wrong, sometimes.”
“I already told you, you were right.” The bitterness was ripe to my own ears; I knew Kai would hear it too.
“It’s not about being right. It’s about being... kind.”
I snorted, surprise bubbling through. “Lying to make me feel better, you mean?”
“Thinking before I speak. Remembering that you can be truthful without being an asshole in the process.”