Chapter 25
Chapter 25
Three years earlier
Edinburgh, Scotland
Maya: Sorry I didn’t pick up, half of my mouth is asleep.
Conor: Ouch. Cavity?
Maya: Yeah.
Conor: Isn’t it the second in a short time?
Maya: The third. The dentist wants me to start using an electric toothbrush, but I’d rather die.
Conor: Why?
Maya: What if the head falls off and I carve a hole in my cheek with the little iron thing underneath.
Conor: That is a very rational fear.
Maya: What if it explodes in my mouth.
Conor: At least you’d be done with the cavities .
That night, he sends me soup, and three different types of electric toothbrushes.
Two years, four months earlier
Austin, Texas
The plan is genius, and absolutely unhinged. So much so, only Jade could have come up with it.
“I didn’t, though,” she tells me. “It’s called emotional fluffing. It’s a thing.”
The problem is: I haven’t had sex in nearly a year, and I miss it.
The problem is, also: I haven’t wanted to have sex with someone who isn’t Conor since the day I met him again in Scotland.
“Here’s what we’re doing,” Jade says with a straight face. “You set up a hookup with some Tinder guy who looks like he might be decent in the sack. Half an hour before—wait, how long do your calls with Conor last these days?”
I lower my eyes.
“Okay, two hours before, you call him. You talk to him. You get horny from talking about…What do thirty-six-year-olds talk about? The fall of the Berlin Wall? Goldman Sachs? Then you go over to the Tinder guy’s place, and bam.”
“Bam, indeed.”
The plan is absolute genius. And if it ends up not working out, because I call Conor right when we said I would, because we end up fighting about the best way to restructure academic publishing, because he makes me laugh with a story from his rowing days, because I forget to check the time until approximately forty minutes after I was supposed to meet Tinder guy, because I absolutely do not want to have sex with someone who isn’t this man…
Well. That’s my fault.
Two years, one month earlier
Austin, Texas
“I always regret it, afterward,” I tell him the night of my fight with Jade.
He takes a deep breath. “I know.”
“I really didn’t want to. I just…I get so angry, and it’s like I stop thinking clearly, and my brain zeroes in on the meanest thing I can say. And the worst part is, my therapist has given me all these breathing techniques, all these ways to de-escalate, but sometimes I get so mad that my brain short-circuits and I legitimately forget to use them?” I rub my eyes. “I have to be a bad person, right? Good people don’t lash out like I do.”
“If you were, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, Maya.” He’s in Canada, but he feels so close . “I think it’s normal, wanting to hurt someone who hurt you. You’re working on it, and Jade knows you. You said you already made up, right?”
“Right.” I hug my knees to my chest. “What if I do it to you, one day? Will you hate me?”
Soft laughter. “I don’t think that’s possible, Trouble.”
Two years earlier
Austin, Texas
He calls me drunk. Not sloppy, but…almost. I try to make conversation— How was your day? Everything okay at work? What did you drink? —but I don’t think he wants to talk.
“You okay?” I ask, cautious.
“Yeah.” A deep inhale. “Yeah. I just wanted to listen to you exist.”
Hearing it nearly breaks me. “Okay,” I say, and we don’t talk after that. I finish what I was doing before he called: pack my bags for my upcoming week-long camping trip with Jade, fold some laundry, brush my teeth, wash my face. Carry my phone with me wherever I go.
“Maya?” he says, over an hour later.
“Yeah.”
A sigh. His breath, then mine. He’s about to say something, or I am.
“Have a safe trip.”
One year, eleven months earlier
Austin, Texas
“I don’t fully get it, stargazing.”
I huff, outraged. “Do you not love constant reminders of your insignificance?”
His “I’m good, thanks,” makes me bust into laughter.
“Okay, but…have you seen Antares?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“Okay, go look outside now. Southwest. Low in the sky.”
Shuffling feet. A balcony door, opening. Conor, existing. “What am I looking for?”
“The Scorpius constellation. It looks like—like a mechanical arm? Or a scorpion, according to the Greeks, but I don’t super see it. Antares is the wrist of the arm. And a different color from the other stars. Red. So red, people kept mistaking it for Mars, so they named it Antares, which literally means ‘Not Mars.’ Come on, there’s no way you can’t spot it.”
“Saddened to inform you that there is, in fact, a way.”
I sigh. Scrape the smile from my voice. “Well, you better figure it out soon, because this is a time-limited opportunity.”
“How come?”
“Antares is about to die.”
“ About means…?”
“A million years or so.”
“Right.” Assorted noises. Conor getting comfortable on the balcony. A hint of amusement. “Okay. Tell me more about this mate of yours.”
One year, four months earlier
Austin, Texas
Kaede was born a week ago, and we were both at Minami’s today, sitting next to each other, taking turns holding her and smelling her head. Marveling at every yawn, blink, squeeze of her little finger. Tuning out the conversation to just stare at her.
He calls me the second he gets home.
I’m waiting, phone in my hand.
“Do you want a family?” I ask him after a while. “At some point, I mean.”
His windows must be open. I can hear the distant sounds of traffic. “I’m not sure how to explain it.”
“Okay.” I wait, patient. Knowing that he’ll get there. He always does.
“I don’t think that my default state is wanting a family,” he says. “But if I was with the right person, I would want it so much, I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else. I would constantly imagine that she…” He stops. A sharp breath. Laughter, maybe. “It would require a lot of changes, anyway.”
“Such as?”
“I’d want the parenting to be evenly split. I’d have to restructure my work schedule. My habits.”
“You could do that.”
“Yeah, I…Yeah. What about you? Do you want a family?”
“I love kids. They’re just fun, you know? But I love the idea of having my own kids. I know Eli loathed Mom and Dad, but I had so much fun with them. I would tease them and they’d get all mad at me and then I’d tease them even more, and they’d look at each other as if to say, ‘What even is this terrible child we made?’ But with pride. I’d like something like that.” I swallow. “I’d love to make someone feel the way they made me feel. Like the world doesn’t have to be a terrible, scary, lonely place. Like life can be kind.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long while, and neither do I.
One year, one week earlier
Austin, Texas
“There must be one you hate a bit less.”
“Nope.”
“Come on.”
“Maya, my brothers are all assholes of equal proportions. Which means that they deserve hate in equal proportions.”
“Okay, let’s say…I’m pointing a gun at your head.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am. Use your imagination. Full immersion. I’m pointing a gun at your head—”
“What gun?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know guns .”
“What kind of Texan are you?”
I roll my eyes. “It’s a rifle. Those long ones that they used a million years ago.”
“Those are difficult to use.”
“Okay, fine. Scratch that. I have a baseball bat in my hands. I could swing it at your head any second.”
“Yeah, that does sound more like you.”
“Right? My anger issues are all aflutter. Anyway, it’s you, me, and the bat. And I’m asking you to choose, among your brothers, one you dislike less than the others. You have time to think about it. No rush.”
He’s silent. I am, too. Tethered together through a satellite that’s a million miles away. I could drive to his house and be there in ten minutes, but I won’t.
“Okay, I’ve got my answer.”
“And?”
“Swing with all your might, Trouble.”
Ten months, two weeks earlier
Austin, Texas
“Do you still think that Alfie was the one?” he asks after a lull so prolonged, I can’t recall what our previous topic of conversation was.
It’s well past midnight. The unpredictable, witching hour. The time when we talk about things we shouldn’t. Slow conversations. Lots of drifting off. Questions and answers that don’t quite connect.
I’m lying on my side. Sleepy. Listening to the low buzz of the AC. Jade stumbled home late, with someone I don’t know, and the occasional bout of laughter vibrates through the walls, making me smile.
“I know he wasn’t. I guess…Maybe I was infatuated with him?” I think about it. “I liked his teeth.”
A huff. “Maybe it was love, then.”
“Shut up.” I stretch, lazy. “Was Minami your first love?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Did you know it right away?”
“No, no. There wasn’t a lot of it going around, while I was growing up. Love, I mean. So it was hard to recognize it. And there were women before, but…”
The quiet stretches. A car drives by, headlights flooding my room.
“How did that…What was it like, being in love for the first time?”
“Nice. It was nice. I was relieved that…”
“That?”
A lingering pause. “I’ve told you, already. How similar I am to my dad. All I wanted was to have something a bit more…”
“More?”
“Nice. Quiet. Sustainable. It was a relief, finding Minami. Our tempers were complementary. She brought out the best in me. Didn’t have to deal with the bad parts. Or the fucked-up ones.”
I laugh. Soft, but he hears me.
“What?” he asks.
“That’s not really the sign of a healthy relationship, no? Hiding parts of you?”
“It is if two people are well matched. If the relationship is respectful and gentle.”
More laughter. “ Gentle .”
“What’s funny about it?”
“Just…I don’t think that’s all there is to it. To love, I mean.”
“Don’t you think that love means wanting to protect someone from the less pleasant aspects of yourself?”
“I mean…I don’t know. But what you just said about Minami, it sounds like you’re talking about a glass figurine.” I yawn. “Something to put on a pedestal, or in a glass case. Not a person.”
I fall asleep before he replies.