28 Xavier
28
XAVIER
I WAS IN the back room in between patients. I had a favorite at the clinic today. Jafar, an African gray parrot. I knew his family and had grown up with this bird.
He was strutting back and forth across the table, talking to himself. I made a video for Samantha and sent it.
She called me a minute later, laughing. “Is that bird yelling that you touched his ‘no-no spot’?”
“Yes. He’s got an interesting vocabulary.”
Jafar flapped his wings and yelled, “PERVERT!” at the top of his lungs.
“Who taught him that?” she asked, cracking up.
I grinned. “The grandpa. He’s always doing stuff like that.”
I picked him up and put him back in his cage with a peanut while he shrieked “MOTHERFUCKER” at the top of his lungs.
“What are you doing today?” I asked, leaning back on the exam table.
“I’m developing a marketing campaign around the health benefits of mustard.”
“Ahhhh. Smart.”
“Yeah, listen to this.” She cleared her throat. “Mustard contains antioxidants that provide various health benefits including anti-cancer, antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, anti-inflammatory, and wound-healing properties. What did your ex do for you? Nothing.”
I chuckled.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“I love it.”
“I have to go,” she said. “I have to make Mom lunch.”
“Okay. I can’t wait to see you.”
“I can’t wait either. When you get here, I want to do this couples challenge thing I saw on TikTok. Will you do it with me?”
“What thing?”
“It’s hard to explain. It’s kind of like the lift from Dirty Dancing , but it starts on the floor?”
“Would it make you happy?” I asked.
“Yesssss.”
“Then I will do it.”
“Yay!” I could feel her smile through the phone. “Talk to you later.”
We hung up.
I looked around the back room and let a breath out through my nose. This time tomorrow I’d be with her. This day couldn’t move slower if it tried.
Our relationship changed the laws of physics. Time seemed to stop the closer I got to seeing her. Maybe because I was working so much I was sleeping less? There were more waking hours in my days lately so they felt longer?
And then when I did see her, time flew by.
The three nights she’d been here had gone by in a blink. And then there’d been nothing. Monotony. Until I’d met her, I had no complaints about tedium. Now her existence in my world changed how I felt about everything else.
It was harder to go home when she wasn’t there, now that I knew what her being there was like. It was hard to wake up without her next to me, eat a meal where she wasn’t seated across from me.
When they say that someone can be a light in your life, this is what they mean.
And my light was two thousand miles away. I could still feel her from here, but it wasn’t enough. So I worked harder, picked up more shifts. And I was already getting tired.
I knew this pace wasn’t sustainable. I also knew I had to keep it up because not seeing her was not an option. She’d been very clear that she didn’t do long-distance. And I know she’d agreed to it, and she was just as willing to pay to come see me as I was to see her, but money was tight for her too and I’d promised I would make it work. So I would.
I got up to go see my next patient. When I opened the door, Maggie was outside, poised to knock.
“Oh, hey. You have a phone call. She says she’s your mom?”
I stared at her. “My mom?”
She shrugged. “That’s what she said.”
I kept my face straight.
“I thought you didn’t talk to her,” Maggie said.
“Why would you think that?” I asked.
“Because you don’t ever talk about her? Your parents didn’t come to the grand opening?”
“I’ll take the call in the office,” I said.
I closed the door and dragged a hand through my hair, staring at the blinking hold light. My anxiety flared back with a vengeance.
Why was this making me feel like a kid who was about to get in trouble?
Samantha had been right that my parents don’t matter. There was nothing they could do to hurt me now. But my body remembered. It braced like I was still back there, living in that house.
What did she want? Help? Atonement? Closure? Money?
I had no interest in giving her anything. Frankly, she didn’t deserve the time or attention she was asking for either.
But what if it was important? What if it was a hereditary cancer she wanted me to know about? What if my dad had died and even though we didn’t talk she didn’t want me to find out through the grapevine.
I should answer.
I picked up the phone. “This is—” I paused. Who was I? Was I Xavier? That’s who she knew me as. Or was I Dr. Rush, the person I’d become after her? She was somehow someone intimate to me but also a complete stranger.
I decided Dr. Rush gave me the armor I needed to deal with this call.
“This is Dr. Rush,” I said, giving her my professional tone, like maybe I didn’t know who was on the other line, maybe Maggie hadn’t relayed the message.
“Xavier?”
I was a child again, instantly. A Pavlovian response. I felt four feet tall and ready to wince.
“Are you there?” she asked.
“Yes. What can I do for you?” I said dryly.
“Oh. It’s been a long time,” she said, like I was a friend she’d bumped into at the supermarket.
I didn’t respond.
My silence shifted the energy. I pictured her smoothing her shirt down the way she always did when she was uncomfortable. “I’m sure you’re wondering what this is about,” she continued. “Your dad and I were wondering if you’d like to talk.”
I drew my brows down. “What do you want to discuss?”
“Well, we’d like to see you. See how you’ve been. I understand you have your own practice now.”
I stared at the grand opening picture.
“I know it’s been a long time,” she went on. “I wanted to call you, but—”
“But what?” I said coldly.
She went quiet on the other end.
So she didn’t have anything important to tell me. This was a social call.
Thirteen years. She couldn’t care less about me for thirteen years. I could never do that. I could never abandon my child. I couldn’t even conceive of the story she could give me to justify it.
They never came to my high school graduation, my college graduation, my ribbon cutting. I’d had my friends and sometimes their parents there, of course. But none of my family ever came for me. For anything. I’d been alone in this world after being knocked around and belittled and made to feel like I was worthless for the first half of my life. And she wanted to talk? Now?
She cleared her throat. “We were hoping to reconnect. Your dad and I aren’t going to live forever. We’d like to know our grandkids one day. Your wife. Are you married? Dating anyone? What have you been up to?”
When I didn’t respond she went on. “Your dad and I have a new church. He’s stopped drinking, you should know that. He’s been sober for six years.”
“Congratulations,” I said flatly.
Now she paused. “I don’t know why you have to take that tone.”
“Don’t you? I don’t know why I wouldn’t.”
I heard the breath through her nose. The simmer on the other end. My ability to sense her mood was still completely intact, even over a decade later and on the phone. Only now I didn’t care if I poked the bear.
“I was hoping we could have a polite conversation,” she said tightly.
“This doesn’t sound like an apology to me.”
She made an impatient noise. “You know, we weren’t all to blame, Xavier. You weren’t a saint yourself—”
“I was a kid .”
“You punched your father in the face! He lost two teeth!”
“He was hitting me with a belt!” I snapped.
“And? We weren’t supposed to discipline you? When you were failing every class?”
The laugh I let out was incredulous. “What you put me through was nothing short of abuse.”
She huffed on the other line. “Abu—You have got to be kidding me. We were strict. My parents were strict, your dad’s parents were strict. We had every right to parent you as we saw fit.”
“By beating the shit out of me? Calling me stupid? Drowning Winnie’s puppies?”
“The puppies—Oh, grow up. It’s no different than what you probably do every day at your fancy office. You don’t put dogs down?”
“What I do is humane. What I do is mercy. He was a drunken, violent asshole ,” I said carefully. “And you allowed it.”
“Oh, so you’re going to be the perfect parent? You think the job is easy? You turned out fine. Better than fine from what I can tell.”
I gritted my teeth. “No thanks to you. You left me to fend for myself at seventeen.”
“So? At six months older than that your dad was already enlisted and living in a foreign country. You obviously didn’t want to live by the rules of our household so when you wanted to go run the streets with Jesse, that was fine with us. You wanted to be a grown-up and tell us to go to hell and you did. And frankly the fact that you haven’t bothered to reach out to us, knowing that we both have health issues, says a lot about the kind of man you are.”
I was shaking too much to speak.
“I knew this was a mistake calling you.” I pictured her throwing up her hands. “A waste of my time. I just thought maybe you had changed, but I see you haven’t. I don’t need this, I have enough stress in my life, your dad’s getting audited, not that you care what happens to us.”
The irony.
“You know, if you want the truth,” she said. “We always figured you’d end up a janitor, flipping burgers. You did better for yourself than I ever thought you would, and that’s probably because you were taught discipline growing up. You’re welcome for that. But you have an attitude problem and you always have. I see it in the reviews how you talk to people. And yes, I read them. Keep it up and you’ll be out of business before you know it because nobody wants to put up with that. I wouldn’t. I’d be surprised if your little clinic is still there this time next year.” She tsked. “I’ll be praying for you.”
Then she hung up on me.
The whole thing lasted less than three minutes. I couldn’t even articulate how I felt.
It was like the leaves in Samantha’s car. Something had dislodged my parents from my memory and they were swirling around me, everywhere and I couldn’t make it stop. I knew I had to deal with them now that they were out, but I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to face the situation. I needed time to reflect and unpack what I was feeling and process the gaslighting I’d just been subjected to and at the same time I didn’t even know where to start.
I put my palms to my eyeballs.
Is that really how she remembered that time? That I was the bad guy? Or was this just what Samantha said was going to happen? That they’d flip the narrative on me to redirect the blame?
I didn’t tend to change my feelings about things. I felt the way I felt and I didn’t budge. Mostly because I considered all the angles, made choices in a level state of mind, talked it through with friends. I wasn’t reactive, I wasn’t prone to dramatics. I settled into a mindset and I stayed there. This revelation that I was the antagonist in their story didn’t shift my memory of what actually happened, not an inch. It didn’t give me the guilt I think she hoped it would. It just made me angry. It made me dig in. And it made me realize the full extent of the power my parents still had over me, all these years later. It was so much worse than I thought it was.
I couldn’t even will my legs to move me so I could get back to what I had to do today. My knees were knocking together like a scared dog in one of my cages.
My immediate impulse was to call Samantha. Not the guys who’d been there for what happened, the ones who knew my mother. I wanted to talk to Samantha because this whole thing made me feel too vulnerable and I didn’t want to be emotionally naked in front of anyone but her.
And that was the moment I knew two things.
The first was that I could never let my parents see me fail. Ever. I could never shutter this business. It would validate everything they thought about me and I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
And the second was that I was head over heels in love with my girlfriend. And that was worse than I thought it was too.