Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
KELSEY
New York
One day later
It’s already four o’clock—a few more minutes and class is over, thank goodness, because I’m running on empty. I taught five full classes today—two of my own and three I took over from a teacher who took mine while I was on the yacht.
My peeps swore I didn’t need to, but if I sit still for more than twenty minutes, I start second-guessing myself about my decision with Bruno.
A little voice asks me what the hell I was thinking.
The little voice starts asking me if it’s really that big of a deal that he won’t open up.
The little voice suggests that maybe he just needs more time to open up.
But then I remind the little voice that the man lives on a yacht and has secrets the size of Texas that he keeps, even from the people closest to him and that he never has real relationships, and up until a few days ago, he made the human crew on his yacht behave like machines who never spoke to him...
and it all just seems like starting behind the eight ball.
But do those reminders work?
No.
Because I’m missing his smile. And his touch.
And the resting scrutiny face that is really the resting intense interest face.
I miss our little jokes, and the feeling of being on a team with him, and how fiercely angry he was about the fuckery of my family, and how he went after their croquet balls for me.
Bruno would never pretend emotions he doesn’t feel.
He makes me feel safe, and cared for, like somebody out there gets me.
And the sex is unbelievable. I pull out my phone, itching to text him.
And then I put it back.
I’ve thought about him so often. Yesterday I even spotted some version of him on Forty-Ninth: broad shoulders under a coat, a flash of dark bronze hair, and my heart lifted.
I need to build my immunity to him somehow. Maybe a twelve-step group or something. “I’ll-take-crumbs-from-a-guy Anonymous.” Because that’s definitely what I would be doing.
It’s also good that it wasn’t him because my galpals, specifically Mia and Francine and Antonio, my ex turned honorary galpal, would have my head, because I told them the whole story this morning, and they feel pretty strongly that I deserve better, and that he’s all kinds of red flags.
“He’s a hermit!” Mia pointed out. “He lives in a Venn diagram with Gollum and the Unabomber. And the Hunchback of Notre Dame. And Grizzly Adams!”
“I think Grizzly Adams might have been hot,” Francine said. “Grizzly Adams tamed animals and went into town. I’m guessing he was fuckable in a mountain-man way.”
Antonio had shuddered. “In Italy we have Peter of Morrone. They dragged him out of a cave, made him pope, and he fled back to the mountains to be with his rocks and spiders. That is the level of man you are dealing with.”
Francine snorted. “A pope is definitely not fuckable.”
“Oh, some of the early ones were,” Antonio said.
“She’s not looking for fuckable!” Mia said. “She’s looking for human connection. I mean if fuckable is the bar...”
“Fuckable isn’t the bar,” I assured them.
Maybe before last month it would have been good enough. Hell, before last month it was good enough, but this situation with my family made me see how important chosen family is. I don’t want to be with people who don’t let me in. I’m off of it.
I grab my hoodie off the hook and wave at Sienna, who is standing in the doorway with a few of her competition girls. She widens her eyes at me—emphatically, like she’s trying to send a transmission.
I’m two minutes from done. Whatever it is can wait.
“Circle up!” I clap twice. Some of the kids drift over; the rest need to see my stern embodiment face before they settle. Soon sixteen pairs of little ballet feet are all pointing inward and sixteen little faces have their lips zipped.
“You guys killed that routine,” I say. “And I mean that in the good, non-ballet-injury way.” They giggle. “Mila, your chassé finally stopped looking like you were trying to catch the bus. Proud of you.”
We break circle and kids scatter. I’m already thinking about dinner—healthy versus popcorn, and popcorn is pulling ahead. The only question is the butter situation. To stop at the bodega for butter or not to stop at the bodega for butter....
I drift toward Sienna. Behind her, the competition girls are in a cluster with their heads tilted in, all whispering, now. One of them has her phone half raised.
“It’s all yours, dude.” I hand over the space key.
Sienna grabs my arm and pulls me in close, voice low. “There is a man waiting out in the hall for you. I think a couple of my girls need pulmonary resuscitation.”
“What do you mean? He scared them?”
“With his trance-inducing male energy and perfect tailoring.”
Bruno.
I go out there to find him leaning on the wall at the end of the hall in a beautiful black suit, a still point in the chaos of mothers and backpacks. His jaw is rough with stubble, and he has some sort of satchel.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, heart racing. It’s all I can do not to touch him.
“You left all the dresses.”
“That’s why you’re here?”
He looks up and down the busy hallway. “I need to talk to you.”
“About the dresses?”
“I don’t give a fuck about the dresses.”
Half the lobby is watching us. “Come on.” I grab my bag from the hook and lead him down the hallway and down the polished stone stairwell, acutely aware that I’m wearing my friend Tabitha’s Hello Kitty leggings and a studio hoodie with a bleach stain on the sleeve, and my hair is half falling out of a bun.
We come out into the evening. It’s late June, the light still warm and amber. I turn us west through a scaffolding tunnel—half the block wrapped in plywood and green netting.
Hudson River Park is twelve minutes away and there’s always a bench.
“How are you doing?” I ask.
I don’t know if he’s going to answer. We hit the corner, waiting for the light.
“My mom didn’t really drown.”
“What?”
“I thought she drowned. Everybody thought she did. But it was all fake.”
Blood racing, I pull him away from the mob of pedestrians and into the shade of an empty storefront. “What are you talking about?”
“I told you that she drowned when I was seven. They never recovered the body. That wasn’t unusual given the tides that night. Everyone accepted it.”
His jaw is set, and his brows are drawn in. Intent.
“But she didn’t really drown?”
“When I was seventeen, my class took a trip out west to the Grand Canyon. The bus stopped for gas in a small town in New Mexico. Cerro Miel. We all got off to use a bathroom around the back of a dusty little gas station there. I saw her inside, working the counter. Alive.”
I blink. “Your mother was in that gas station?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure it was her?”
“Oh, yes.”
“What...why...” I barely know what to ask. None of it makes sense. “What did you do?”
“I went behind the bus and threw up. And then I got back on the bus.”
“You didn’t go in there?”
“No. I hired a PI to confirm it. The PI even got DNA.”
“So she faked her death.”
“Yes. My PI and I went back to one of the witnesses from the night my mother died—the night she had supposedly drowned. I made him tell. She’d paid him.”
“Did the witness say why she’d do such a thing?”
He just shakes his head.
I set my hand flat against his chest, aware of how huge it is that he’s telling me this, aware that this might be the first time he’s ever told anybody this.
His heart beats like a drum. Bruno, so calm and cool from the outside, but there’s so much more going on under the surface.
“Is that why you don’t want the documentary to be widely seen? Because you think people will recognize her from the gas station?”
“Well, it is an essential part of the tragedy of us three brothers. Losing their beautiful mother as young boys and all that. There’d be a trip through photo albums and video footage. Somebody would recognize her, and it would be a story.”
“I see.”
He takes my hand and we walk. I don’t know what to do with this information. It’s huge. “You never wanted to confront her or ask for answers?”
“I don’t need answers; I already know what happened.
She had three babies and she decided to take off, and she left us with a monster.
You don’t know what our father was like.
Even holidays with him were hell. Why would I want to hear anything she had to say?
And why would I tell my brothers that their mother decided they weren’t worth the effort to save?
She saved herself but she couldn’t be bothered with us? ”
It’s my impulse to make him stop walking, to hug him, but I know he needs space to get it out, to not be pitied. “That’s so messed up,” I say.
“Do my brothers deserve to know? You asked me that at dinner the other night. I don’t know, Kelsey.
Up until that bus ride, I had a mother who loved me desperately and would never have wanted to leave us.
But that wasn’t true, was it? And it’s a mindfuck, because I can look back and feel her love clear as sunshine.
But if she really loved us, why leave us in the care of a cold-hearted monster who wanted nothing to do with us?
So I made the call to spare my brothers from feeling the way I did. ”
We’re at another light. I turn to him. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry you had to carry that.”
Gentle fingertips rest on either side of my jaw. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I just need you back.”
“I’m here. A hundred percent.” I hug him, pressing into him, relaxing into him. “I missed you.”
“God, Kelsey.” He pulls back to look at me. “I know why you had your doubts. I know what I’m like. I was raised by wolves, and the only love I knew turned out to be fake. But I would like—” He pauses, and I can hear him choose the word. “...I want to be close with you. I’m not good at this.”
“You’re doing it.”
“When I first met you, I couldn’t believe that you were such an open book. I was thinking, does this woman just say what she thinks? Show everything she feels? It seemed foolish to me at first.”
“Excuse me?” I protest. “Have we moved into the insult portion of the reunion?”
“But now it seems brave. You show the world what’s true, everything be damned.”
I can barely keep the smile off my face. “I’m so happy you’re here.”
“Fuck, Kelsey.” He kisses me with all of the intensity that’s in him, big hands gripping my hair.
I snake my hands under his suit coat, pulling myself flush to his body. My whole body says yessss. There you are.
“I want to do normal things. I want to take you on a date. A real one. I want to go to a movie. Have dinner somewhere that isn’t on a yacht. Stay over in the city and do this thing. Not that I know how.”
“You totally know how to do it. We’re good, Bruno.” I want to kiss him all over his face because I think he doesn’t even know what regular-people things are.
We keep walking west, past a dog walker, past two women sharing a cigarette outside a bar, all of it so normal, and I am walking through it with Bruno Blackwood’s hand in mine. I feel like I’ve been let out of jail.
“I’d be happy to have you come to my place, but if you recall, I have two roommates.”
“I’d love to see your place.”
“It’s the opposite of the visual order and monkish silence of your yacht.”
“I’ll survive.”
“And I have lots of friends in the building, and we say hi to each other.”
“Are you trying to talk me out of going to your place?”
“No way.” We walk down past the piers, and I steer us toward the ice cream cart. I get a soft serve with sprinkles and Bruno gets chocolate, and we find a bench facing the water.
But I’m thinking about that gas station.
A woman doesn’t just leave three sons out of the blue, does she? Just to work at a dusty gas station? I lick the last of my sprinkles.