Chapter 22 - Anton #2
“It broke my heart when she died,” Mama continues.
“For her, of course. She was a wonderful young woman who was dealt a bad hand. It was a tragedy.” She sighs.
“But mostly, I’ll be honest with you, it broke my heart for you.
Because I knew what it would cost you. I knew, because I know you.
” Her eyes find mine across the length of the table.
“You came into that marriage the same way I came into mine. Through arrangement, through strategy, through the particular arithmetic of alliances. Your father and I were the same. Two families, one agreement, and a wedding.” Her mouth presses briefly together. “You know how that went.”
Yes, I do.
I’ve known how that went my entire life. In many ways, who I am today is defined by it.
“The difference,” she says, “is that you honored it. You could have been your father. You weren’t.
You chose to love her, Anton. That was yours.
That choice was entirely yours, and I’ve always been proud of you for it.
” She lifts her glass, sets it down without drinking.
“And then she was gone, and the sweet baby was gone, and I watched you decide—I watched you make the decision, it wasn’t something that happened to you, it was a decision—that you were done.
That the cost of caring was too high. That you would run this organization and be my son and be a good man in all the ways that could be measured and witnessed, and that would be enough.
That would be the entirety of your life. ”
“Mama.”
“I’m not finished.” She isn’t unkind about it.
She is a proud woman, but never a cruel one.
“I let you. Maybe that is my mistake. For years, I let you, because grief is grief and it takes the time it takes, and I’m not a woman who believes in forcing people through things before they’re ready.
But then.” She stops. Considers. Something in her face shifts into a register I don’t often see there—something unguarded, something that costs her to show me.
“Then Darya came into this house. And I saw you learn how to play again.”
I’m very still.
“Do you want to know how I knew?” she asks.
“It wasn’t one thing. That’s the nature of it…
It’s never one thing with you, because you’re too controlled for one thing to give you away.
It was everything at once.” She looks at me steadily.
“You started sleeping. I don’t mean well—I mean at all.
You’ve been an insomniac since you were nineteen years old, Anton, and within two weeks of that woman being in this house, you were sleeping.
You started coming home for dinner and talking during it instead of looking off in one spot and drifting into your own head.
You started laughing again.” My mother’s voice cracks.
“0I heard it, and I thought, ‘Oh. There he is. There’s my baby boy.’”
My throat is tight. I can barely breathe.
“That’s the man I raised,” she says. “Not the one who’s been sitting at the head of an empty table for a week, telling himself she’ll come to her senses and come home.
Because she isn’t going to come to her senses, my love.
She has all her senses. She has more of them than most people.
What she’s waiting for is for you to show her that you have yours. ”
The dining room is very quiet.
“She lost her mother,” I say. It comes out hoarsely.
“Not to death. To—absence. Neglect. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I know she grew up without a you, mama.
She sees that as a defining part of why she is the way she is.
I don’t know how to forgive myself for adding to it.
This idea that she could ever be easy to leave.
That she isn’t… And then I—in that office—”
“You let her down,” my mother says.
“I left,” I agree. “Not the room, but. My body, I think.”
She nods once. She picks up her glass and drinks from it, as if we’ve arrived somewhere she’d been trying to get us to and can afford, now, to pause. “You know where you went wrong. You know what to apologize for, and try not to ever do it to her again.”
I do.
It isn’t complicated, in the end. It never really was. It just required getting past the part of myself that has mistaken self-protection for wisdom for so long that the two have become indistinguishable. They aren’t the same thing. I know this.
Darya has shown me, in the months since she first walked across a ballroom and left a mark on me I haven’t been able to rub away from myself, that they aren’t the same thing.
Control isn’t protection. I know that too. She’s taught me that as well, without trying to, simply by being someone I couldn’t control and being magnificent at it.
“She’s going to make me bleed for it,” I say.
My mother’s expression does something it rarely does. It warms fully, like a room someone’s finally lit a fire in. “Of course she is,” she says. “Is that not why she is your match?”
She stands, collecting herself with the elegance she never sets aside, even in private.
“Anton.”
I look up at my mother, warily. What else is there? I don’t think I can take another fucking epiphany.
“She redecorated this house,” she says, and there’s something almost wondering in it. “She walked in here, and she saw its history, the same way she sees everything, and she decided how it could be made better without losing its essence. And she did—she has made it better.”
I blink at my mother.
“The house is a metaphor, darling.” She laughs the whole way out of the room and down the hall. The sound of it bounces off the walls. When it ricochets my way and sinks in through my pores, I let it warm me with courage.
Then I push back my chair.
I have a phone call to make, and after that, I have to go for a drive. If my wife won’t come home on her own, I’m going to go get her. It isn’t a home without her anymore.