Games

Exit Event #5

“Ah.” Aleksandr nods. “You know about my past, I know next to nothing about yours. Again, how much I really didn’t know about

you. Really, the signs were there, if I looked for them—how in hindsight, you were never fully in it.”

“That’s not true,” she insists. “You weren’t exactly forthcoming about your history, neither of us were.”

“Well, suppose I’d like to know now. About you, your family.”

“Do you—do you really care?”

His gaze narrows. “You think so little of me, still?”

She glances away, flushed. “I mean, you know the outline of it,” she says. “I think I told you early on that my parents died

in a car crash. When you asked, the morning after my birthday, if I was spending time with my family. I was young when it

happened, six.”

She bites her nail.

She could leave it there: the matter-of-fact details, the clear facts.

She doesn’t want to.

“They left me with our next-door neighbor,” Lili continues. “She babysat me sometimes. My mom had labs to check on at the

university, my dad drove her over. Diana, our neighbor, was an art student, knew my mom from school. We’d always do art projects

together, when she’d look after me. I was painting, I was happy, and it was sunny. I remember the feeling of dried paint—white

and red and pink—on my hands. In my hair, too, for days later.

“Afterwards, I was in a group home for a few weeks, until I got placed with my foster family, up in Marin. That’s where I

grew up, I guess.”

“What were they like?” Aleksandr asks. “Your parents.”

His face is impassive, unreadable. But he is watching her.

She looks down at the laces of her shoes. “Brilliant, both of them. My dad worked in tech, business strategy. He’d done time

at Bain while my mom did her first graduate degree. She was doing her PhD in physics, when they—when it happened, the accident.”

It feels like pressing on a bruise: revisiting these memories and seeing how fuzzy the recollection has become. Her father’s

smile, her mother’s laugh, and her, their only child.

“She, um—she really loved art,” she continues.

“My mom, she was crazy about it. Said science and art looped back around, weren’t separate.

We went to SFMOMA together, all the time.

She’d let me lead her to whatever paintings I liked, listening to me—these little ramblings of a four- or five-year-old, looking at some Kandinsky or Picasso, telling her all about the little characters inside it.

“We’d get falafel near Chinatown afterwards and walk along the Embarcadero. Sometimes we’d meet my dad at the farmers’ market,

after his weekend run. If we took the detour up Telegraph Hill, my dad would help me try and chase parrots. One time, my mom

actually got one to land on her arm, when she just stood still. ‘That looks like much less fun,’ my dad had teased her, and she’d smiled, smug but also delighted.

“He once mixed up contemporary and modern art, when he was talking about some exhibit at de Young, and Christ—she lectured

him at the dinner table, saying if he couldn’t understand the difference between Ai Weiwei and Brancu?i, she’d have to divorce

him. He’d rolled his eyes, looking at me like we were in on a joke, and I would grin, swinging my legs under the table, but

he was happy. He was so happy with her.”

Even with how heavy this sadness is, she feels a faint smile. Weak with remembrance, the scent of lemon, freshly squeezed—standing

on her tiptoes, helping her dad cook dinner. She remembers the sizzle of oil, and fresh air, evening light, and windows flung

open, the scent of jasmine growing on the trellis, the sounds of North Beach, Italian grocers, salt air from the marina. How

they’d hear her mother walking up the street, laughing as she spoke to neighbors—her laugh, her laugh: Lili remembers it, like a loss at the heart of her.

“I suppose maybe I’d think of them differently, if I knew them now,” Lili says. “If I’d grown up with them. Maybe I wouldn’t

have been smart enough for my mom, or maybe I’d have felt stifled by my dad, but it—it feels like it was stolen, how I didn’t

get to have that.

“And yes, sure, I idealize them. My mother was easily exasperated, and my dad was a little too sharp when people were slow and unintelligent, or when they assumed I wasn’t his kid, or was adopted—he was very blond, green-eyed; I take after my mother.

But they were both—they were both really kind, I think.

People did really love them. I remember how their friends, our neighbors, their colleagues would talk about them, would watch them.

Like their lives felt brighter, sharper, fuller, for having them.

“But, I guess, how much can a six-year-old really remember,” Lili concedes. “I knew them for less time than I haven’t, now.”

She forces a laugh, trying to defuse the guilt, thick and drifting, in how little she knows these people who were her parents.

“I used to count that—how many more days I’d lived without them, than with them. Waiting for the balance of it to tip. And

they were young, really young,” she says. “Barely thirty when they died. That’s—that’s hardly half a life.”

Aleksandr’s phone buzzes in his pocket. Lili flinches, startled.

“Sorry,” she says, a flush of shame. “You should be at work—”

“Ignore it,” he says. “I’m where I need to be.”

She glances at him. He does not look away.

“Right, well—foster care,” she continues, looking back across the park. “It was fine. Other people have it much worse.”

“You stayed with that family until you left for school?”

Lili nods. “Jane and Robert. They fostered many kids. Most came and went—I mean, all of them did, except for me. They’d move

on to long-term families, get adopted, or go back to their own families. At first, I thought that meant Jane and Robert liked

me best, maybe even loved me. I remember lying awake at night, hoping that any day now, they’d tell me they were adopting

me.

“But time went on, and I realized that wasn’t going to happen—whether because they didn’t want to, or it wasn’t important

enough, or whatever. That wasn’t coming.

“I just felt like I was counting down to the moment when they grew tired of me and I’d go back into the system, or a worse

foster home—because I knew how unlikely this situation was, with them. They aren’t particularly affectionate people, Jane

and Robert, but they are kind.

“I was braced for it, the inevitable change. I became really scared of getting used to the comfort of having the same house I walked back to after school, a room that was mine, friends. The more I got used to it, the more it would hurt when I lost it, you know? That yes, things will go well for a time, people will like me, maybe even love me, but just for the time that they do, and I’d have no way of knowing when, or how, it would all change again, when the coin would flip .

. . That’s what I thought, that’s what I . . . what I still think,” she whispers.

“And, too, I felt guilty. Really guilty, as it went on—as I tried to deal with this uncertainty by working harder, and by

constantly trying to be good enough. What was I hoping for? Why did I care so much? What did I want—someone to replace my

mother, my father? A family to replace mine? Isn’t that—fuck, wasn’t that incredibly selfish?”

“You were a child.”

Lili shrugs. “I guess. It was probably just a way to grapple with uncertainty—thinking that what I do, and think, and believe

matters. When you know everything will turn bad, isn’t it better to just . . . make it happen faster?

“I don’t—I don’t mean to make them seem like bad people, Jane and Robert. They were—are—good, truly. Think of how kind and generous it is to foster children like that, without fanfare, without causing harm. I

know that seems like the bare minimum, but it matters. Jane smiled when my report cards were good, and Robert taught me to

drive, and there was laughter, more often than not, at breakfast.

“But there was this distance between me and everything—my foster family, my friends. And I was creating it, sure, enforcing

that space to protect myself, or whatever—but also . . . fuck, nobody tried to reach across it? I don’t mean that I was testing

them, I really wasn’t, and people did care about me, but still—no one cared enough to reach.

“Even now—in New York, with friends I deeply love—there’s still that distance, between me and everything else. Except now,

I think—I wonder—it’s almost entirely me? Like, I cling to it, refusing to let anyone in? You talked about when you were in

Paris, my age. Standing at the Métro, that moment right before the train came into the station, and you didn’t want to jump,

but you understood why people did. I think I’ve lived in that moment for more of my life than I should have. That I’m still

sometimes there.

“With you, though . . . you were reaching across it. That distance, and I was reaching, too—towards you. I hadn’t really done that before.

And that—that terrified me. That I wanted you so much, that losing you might cripple me.

So, when you said—about marriage, and implied that .

. . it all hit me, and I—I didn’t know how to handle losing all of that.

I just couldn’t. I didn’t think I could live through that loss, if I let myself have it. ”

Lili lets out a long, heavy breath. Moments stretch before she lets herself look at him.

And Aleksandr—he’s watching her, like he hasn’t once looked away.

His mouth is parted slightly. “Lili, how—how was I supposed to know any of this?”

She hugs her knees tighter. “I tell you more than I’ve ever told anyone else,” she whispers. Vulnerable, raw, she so badly

wants the comfort of him, even as they sit here, with their separate pasts, the moments they shared, and now ahead: their

separate futures.

“The woman you’re seeing,” Lili says, unsure if she can ask this; but she has nothing to gain, nothing to lose. “Sanae. What’s—what’s

there, between you two?”

“You saw that?”

She nods. “Yeah, those photographs from the fundraiser. You looked—you looked good. Happy, maybe.”