14. Kai
— ? —
Kai
Dora’s kitchen smells like coffee and disappointment, and I’m sitting at her table, the same table where I ate breakfast every morning after my parents died, and I feel like I’m sixteen again, lost and desperate for someone to tell me what to do.
She’s at the stove when I arrive, stirring the soup she used to make when I was sick, chicken and vegetables and whatever she adds that I’ve never been able to replicate, and she doesn’t turn around when I come in, just waves a hand toward the chair.
“Sit.”
I sit.
The kitchen looks the same as it always has, terra cotta tiles worn smooth by decades of footsteps, the window over the sink looking out onto her garden, where the roses are blooming and the old oak casts shadows across the wrought-iron table and the string lights are still tangled in the branches from some party years ago that she never bothered to take down.
This is where I learned to be a person again after my parents died, where Dora fed me and scolded me and loved me back to life, where I brought Erika for the first time, terrified my grandmother wouldn’t approve, and watched the two of them fall in love with each other over pot roast and cheap wine.
Now I’m back, and I’ve destroyed everything.
Dora finishes whatever she’s doing, turns off the burner, and finally faces me, eighty-two years old, silver hair twisted up the way she’s worn it my entire life, and she still looks at me like she can see straight through to the back of my skull.
“So,” she says, settling across from me. “You finally decided to show your face.”
“I didn’t know where else to go.”
“Clearly.” She pushes a mug of coffee toward me, the one with the chip on the handle, and I remember when that happened, when I was twelve and helping her wash dishes and it slipped from my soapy fingers, and she kept it anyway. “Talk.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“The beginning is traditional.”
“The beginning was years ago, Grandma. The beginning was every choice I made that led to this moment, and I can’t even tell you when it started going wrong because I wasn’t paying attention.”
She watches me and waits, so I talk. I tell her everything, the whole ugly run of it, right up to the gifts she rejected yesterday and the door closing in my face over and over, and Dora lets me, and when I run out of words she asks the only question that matters.
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“I don’t know.” I stare at my hands, wrapped around the chipped mug. “I don’t know what I should have done. I don’t know how to fix this.”
Her hand cracks across the back of my head.
It isn’t gentle or playful, it’s a real slap, the same one she gave me when I was seventeen and crashed my car showing off for a girl whose name I can’t even remember now.
“Ow! What the hell, Grandma?”
“You turned your wife into staff and called it love.”
The words land clean and brutal and precise. I open my mouth to argue, to explain that it wasn’t like that, that I loved her, that everything I did was for us, and nothing comes out, because she’s right, she’s absolutely right, and there’s nothing I can say to make it less true.
“Grandma…”
“Your father was never stupid enough to take your mother for granted.” Her voice is sharp but her eyes are wet, and that’s worse, because Dora doesn’t cry. “She would have murdered him in his sleep.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve been lost since they died. Running so hard you forgot to look where you were going, and now you’ve run off a cliff.”
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, and the coffee is getting cold, and I don’t care. “How do I fix it?”
“I don’t know if you can.”
“There has to be a way. I can’t just accept that it’s over, that I destroyed the only good thing in my life and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Maybe there is a way. Maybe there isn’t.
” She reaches across the table and pulls my hands away from my face, and her grip is surprisingly strong for a woman her age, her fingers gnarled but firm.
“That girl loved you with everything she had, Kai. Everything. And you made her feel invisible. That hurt doesn’t heal because you’re sorry. ”
“Then what do I do? Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Anything.”
“I can’t tell you that.” She releases my hands and sits back. “You have to figure it out yourself.”
I stare at her. The afternoon light is slanting through the window, catching the silver in her hair and the lines on her face, and she looks tired, old, in a way I’ve never let myself see before.
“I am ready,” I say. “I’m ready to do whatever it takes.”
“Words are easy. You’ve always been good with words. Your father was the same way, could charm anyone when he wanted to.” She shakes her head. “Can you name me one time in four years you put that girl first when it cost you something?”
I want to argue. I want to list all the things I did for Erika, the gifts and the trips and the dresses, and even as I think it I know how hollow it sounds. I gave her things, and I took everything else.
“That girl is the only thing your parents would actually be proud of,” Dora says quietly.
My eyes are burning. I blink hard, trying to hold it together, and it’s no use, the tears come anyway, hot and shameful, sliding down my cheeks, and Dora doesn’t comfort me. She just watches, letting me fall apart at her kitchen table like I’m sixteen again.
“I loved her,” I manage. “I still love her. I never stopped.”
“I know you do.” She stands, goes to the stove, ladles soup into a container. “You just never let it cost you anything.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair. Your parents died when you were sixteen. That wasn’t fair either.” She snaps the lid onto the container and sets it in front of me. “Take this. You look like you haven’t eaten in days.”
“I haven’t been hungry.”
“I don’t care. Eat anyway. You can’t fix anything if you’re dead.”
I take the soup, warm in my hands, and the smell of it takes me back to sick days and all the moments when Dora’s kitchen was the safest place in the world.
“Grandma.”
“What?”
“Do you think she’ll ever forgive me?”
Dora is quiet for a while, looking out the window at her garden, at the roses and the oak tree and the string lights that have seen so many dinners and so many ordinary moments that add up to a life.
“I think that girl has more grace in her little finger than you deserve,” she says finally. “But grace isn’t the same as forgiveness. And forgiveness isn’t the same as taking you back.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because right now you’re looking for a guarantee, and there isn’t one. You could do everything right and still lose her, and you have to fight for her anyway, knowing you might fail.”
“I will. I am.”
“Then stop sitting at my table feeling sorry for yourself and go do something about it.”
I leave Dora’s as the sun is setting, her soup in a container on the passenger seat, and I drive without thinking about where I’m going, and I end up at Erika’s building. Of course I do.
I don’t buzz or knock. I sit in the car with the soup on the seat beside me and think about going up, and I get as far as my hand on the door handle and no further, because I don’t have anything new to say to her and she’s told me twice now what showing up without anything new is worth.
So I just park across the street and look up at her window, second floor, second from the left, her light on and warm behind thin curtains.
She’s probably writing. She always wrote at night, when the world was quiet and her thoughts were loudest, and I used to find her side of the bed empty at two in the morning, her laptop glowing in the office down the hall, and I’d go back to sleep without checking on her.
I never asked what she was working on. God, what an asshole I was.
I get out of the car and lean against the hood, watching her window, the shadow of her moving behind the curtains, back and forth, pacing maybe, or just living her life without me in it.
The street is quiet, Silver Lake on a weeknight, everyone tucked into their apartments with their vintage furniture and their rescue dogs, and a couple walks by holding hands and doesn’t even glance at me, just another guy leaning on his car staring at a building.
After a while the shadow stills and approaches the window, and she’s looking down at me.
I can’t see her face, just her silhouette backlit by the warm glow of her apartment, but I know she sees me.
We stare at each other across the distance, a hundred feet of air and four years of damage, and I don’t wave or call out, I just stand there and let her see me, let her know I’m still here, that I’ll be here for as long as it takes.
She stands at the window for what feels like forever, and then she turns away, and the light goes off.
It isn’t a slam. She doesn’t yank the curtain or make a show of it.
She just reaches over and the room goes dark, the way you’d turn off a light in a room you’re finished with, and that’s worse than a slam would have been.
I stay for another hour, sitting on the hood of my car, watching the dark window.
A guy comes out of the building to walk his dog and gives me a weird look but doesn’t say anything, and someone on a bike pedals past with music leaking from their earbuds, and the streetlights throw orange pools on the sidewalk, and I don’t care how I look.
Let them think I’m crazy. I’m a man who destroyed the best thing in his life and now can’t stop staring at her window like it might give him answers.
When I finally slide off the hood my legs are stiff and Dora’s soup has gone cold, and I get back in the car and sit there for another few minutes, just looking at the building, and the light stays off.
I drive home slowly, the container sliding on the seat at every turn, to a house that feels like a mausoleum, empty rooms and expensive furniture and nothing that matters, and I put the soup in the fridge and sit in the dark living room without pouring anything, watching the pool lights move on the ceiling, and Dora’s words go around in my head.
That girl is the only thing your parents would actually be proud of.
She’s right, she’s always right, and I have to fix this, whatever it takes, whatever it costs, even if it costs me everything.
I sit there until the pool lights time out. Tomorrow I’ll try again, and the day after that, and the day after that, for as long as it takes, because Erika is worth it, and she always has been, and I was just too blind to see it.