Chapter Thirty-One
Jess
What on earth just happened? Jess can’t quite figure it out.
One minute they were talking, then he erupted, like a bubbling volcano that had been waiting for a slight shift in the earth.
She doesn’t know him well enough to have noticed the bubbling, she supposes.
She also clearly doesn’t know him well enough to know how hurtful he is capable of being, how he is able to wield her own fears and hurts against her.
Besides which, he is wrong: she does have a relationship with her family.
Maybe it looks different from other families, but it still counts.
She loves her grandparents; they’ve always been there for her.
She tries not to think about their age, about the fact that they won’t be around forever.
And yeah, sure, she hates being an only child.
Always has done. Sometimes, growing up, she’d wake up panicking at her grandparents’ house, thinking maybe this was the time her mum wouldn’t come back for her, that she’d be having too much fun to remember she had a daughter and a life in London.
Or, worse, that she’d remember, but choose the fun over the daughter and the life in London.
At those times, she wished she could nudge a sibling awake and share the anxiety with them.
Lily always tells her that it’s not like that between sisters, that half the time she and Anna ignored each other or fought, and that if Anna had woken her up in the middle of the night, she probably would have told her to shut up and just go back to sleep, but even that seems preferable to and more companiable than the dark and the loneliness.
She can’t imagine a sibling being cold-hearted enough to ignore her as she quietly sobbed into her pillow.
When the iPad came out, she begged her mother for one, and her mother, at some level wracked with guilt, complied.
Problem solved: in the middle of the night, she didn’t have to cry anymore.
Instead, she could download episodes of her favourite shows and laugh quietly into her pillow.
The downside was that she didn’t always feel great the next day at school – but she probably wouldn’t have felt great if she’d been up crying half the night, either.
But now, Alex has made her face the pain she’s been running from her whole life.
Keep moving, keep working, and when she’s not working, she’s having fun – snowboarding with Lily, planning a weekend retreat with her book club, binge-watching Parks and Recreation.
Writing had seemed like another fun activity, another fun challenge, but Alex has ruined that, too.
Writing now seems to be a place of vulnerability, where the areas that feel tender are poked at and prodded.
And why? Because she cares about him; because she was trying to get him to see that he deserves to be looked after, too.
Maybe all along she was just projecting onto him. Being looked after is what she has wanted out of life. Maybe it’s wrong of her to assume that it’s what Alex wants or needs.
She’s been holding it together as she packs up her notebook, her pen.
But this coffee shop feels suddenly claustrophobic; Jess needs to get out of here.
Walking along briskly while thinking about all of this, she bites her lip to stave off tears, but here they come anyway.
Luckily, this is London, and nobody notices – or if they do, they have the decency to look away.
When Jess gets off the Tube at Pimlico station, her feet take her not to her own flat but to her grandparents’.
Perhaps it’s an old instinct from childhood: she’d go to her grandma with her tears when she wanted to talk and she was home alone, or when she knew her mum would try to cheer her up rather than wade through any difficult emotions with her.
Her grandmother, as she always has, takes one look at Jess’s mascara-streaked face and envelops her in a hug.
Not that she wouldn’t hug Jess if she hadn’t been crying; hugs are Grandma Val’s default love language.
But this is an extra warm, extra tight hug, of the kind that has always made Jess feel better – always made her feel understood and accepted.
‘Put the kettle on, Alan,’ she calls in the vague direction of the kitchen as Jess pulls back to wipe her tears. ‘And bring me some tissues, would you, love?’
With her hand on her shoulder, Grandma Val leads Jess into the living room. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Tell me.’
Jess takes a deep breath and ponders how far back to go, how much to explain.
‘Remember the good-looking writer I was forced to work with?’
‘The one who wasn’t your type?’
Jess winces slightly. She hopes it’s not visible. ‘Yeah. That one.’
‘Turns out he is your type after all?’ Val might be good at deploying strategic silence and letting the other person talk, but she also can’t resist a told you so.
‘I’m not sure,’ she says. ‘I keep changing my mind. But today it feels like I was right in the first place.’
Jess paints a quick picture, which it turns out isn’t as complicated to explain as she thought it might have been: she and Alex have been getting close, but every time one or the other of them touches on a difficult topic, it all goes belly up.
And the last thing Alex said to her had been pretty unforgivable, and even though she’d have been well within her rights to get up and go, he was the one who’d added insult to injury and done that.
‘Sounds like he didn’t know how to make it right and he was mortified at himself, and so he left rather than face the hurt he’d caused.’
‘That’s pretty much it.’
‘Hmm.’ The silence this time is not so much for Jess to fill as for Grandma Val to think things through. ‘Do you mind me asking what the unforgivable thing he said was?’
Jess isn’t sure she can repeat it without crying again.
She wipes her eyes and blows her nose with the tissues Grandpa Alan has procured, buying some time and readying herself for the inevitable next onslaught of tears.
She’s very good at distracting herself so that she doesn’t cry; but when she starts, it is usually inconvenient, and she can’t stop.
‘He said, at least I have a relationship with my family.’
‘Ah. Implying you didn’t?’
‘Yeah.’ Jess swallows hard. ‘I mean, he was lashing out. I’d been gently trying to challenge him on his own family because they tend to take him for granted. He’s the one who looks after everyone else, you know? But it’s still very harsh.’
‘Well, first of all, love. Yes. It’s harsh. It’s also not true. What is this, right now, if it’s not a relationship with family?’
Jess blows her nose again. ‘Exactly,’ she says. She feels vindicated as well as loved: a powerful combination.
‘But why do you think it hurt so much?’
This question feels like a punch to the gut.
Now that the metaphorical box under her bed has been kicked open, she’s been asking herself the same thing and come to some painful conclusions.
Obviously, it’s true that her relationship with her mother isn’t healthy and never has been.
But also, by not engaging with memories of her dad, she’s been denying herself whatever relationship with him is available to her, too.
‘Because of Mum, I guess. Because of the ways she … is. And also because of Dad. Because I’ve never properly grieved him. I’ve always avoided thinking about him. But like, maybe I need to.’
‘Maybe you do,’ Grandma Val says, kindness in her eyes, extending her arms from the sofa where she sits. Jess joins her there, nestles her head on her shoulder. ‘Maybe you need to get in touch with aspects of who he was.’
‘You mean, learn some French?’
Jess can feel Val’s smile in the way her breath shifts. ‘Je pense oui?’ she says, in the world’s worst accent. And for some reason, this tips Jess from tears into hysterical laughter. It spreads to Grandma Val, until both of them are shaking and holding their stomachs.
‘Who needs therapy,’ Jess says, when she finally catches her breath, ‘when you’ve got this?’