21. Eliza
— ? —
Eliza
The text comes at seven in the morning.
Gordon: I’m bringing your parents to your apartment. They want to see you. I’ll stay in the car unless you want me there.
I’m standing in my kitchen with a coffee cup halfway to my mouth, and I stare at my phone for a full minute before I respond.
What did you do?
I drove to their house yesterday. Asked them to call their daughter.
Gordon.
They said yes. They’re in the car with me now. We’re twenty minutes out.
My parents. Who I haven’t spoken to in years, not really, not past holiday cards and one stilted phone call when my grandmother died, both of us crying and neither of us saying the thing.
Who said I’d wake up one day full of regret.
Who made it clear what they thought of Gordon, of our marriage, of every choice I made after my seventeenth birthday.
Eleven years of a closed door, and Gordon drove to it and knocked.
He drove twelve hours round trip to their house. He knocked on the door of the two people who spent a decade believing he wasn’t good enough, and he asked them to call their daughter.
I have twenty minutes.
I look around my apartment, at the dishes in the sink and the fabric scraps on the table and the sketches taped to the wall by the window, and my first instinct is to clean all of it, hide all of it, present them with a finished woman in a finished home.
I actually pick up two mugs and carry them toward the sink before I stop myself.
No. This is my life. The mess is the work and the work is mine and they can see my life.
I put the mugs back down. Then I brush my teeth and put on real clothes and stand in the middle of my living room with my heart going, seventeen again for two whole minutes, before I make myself breathe.
I text back: Fine. You can come up with them.
I spend the twenty minutes not looking at my phone and looking at my phone.
Gabriella texts me a photo of her coffee with no caption, which is her way of saying she’s awake if I need her, and I text back a photo of mine, which is my way of saying not yet, and this is a whole language we’ve had since we were fifteen.
Twenty minutes later, they’re standing in my doorway.
My mother looks older. Her hair has gone fully gray and she’s wearing it shorter than I’ve ever seen it.
My father looks smaller than I remember, and I don’t know if he shrank or if I just stopped being seventeen.
Gordon is behind them, carrying a tray of coffees, looking like he’s not sure if he’s about to be thanked or murdered.
“Eliza.” My mother’s voice is careful, and her eyes are going everywhere, my face, my hair, the apartment behind me, cataloging years at a speed only mothers can manage. “Can we come in?”
I step aside.
We sit in my living room. My mother perches on the edge of the couch like she’s afraid to take up space.
My father stands by the window, looking out at a view of the building across the street, because sitting still has never once been a thing he could do.
Gordon sets down the coffees on the table and moves to the corner chair, out of the way but present, exactly like his text promised.
“We handled things badly,” my mother says. “When you left. When you married him. We were so focused on what we thought you should want that we never asked what you actually wanted.”
“You told me I was throwing my life away.”
“I know.” She reaches for my hand. I let her take it.
Her hand is smaller than I remember too, the knuckles bigger, and I have to look at the coffee table for a second.
“And I was wrong. Not because Gordon made money. That was never the point. I was wrong because you were happy, and I couldn’t see past my own fear to appreciate it. ”
My father speaks up from the window. “We were snobs. We thought we knew better. We didn’t.”
“It was never him, sweetheart,” my mother continues. “It was never about Gordon being wrong for you. It was about you being seventeen and already deciding your whole life. We wanted you to want something for yourself first. Even for a year. Even for a semester.”
“I did want something for myself.” My voice comes out steadier than I expect. “I wanted him.”
“I know. And we should have trusted that.” She wipes her eyes with her free hand. “Gordon did love you. I always knew that. Even when I was too stubborn to admit it. A mother can tell the difference between a boy who wants her daughter and a boy who sees her. He saw you.”
I don’t look at Gordon. I can feel him not looking at me with everything he has.
We talk for hours. Things we should have said years ago, laid out piece by piece on my secondhand coffee table.
My mother tells me she wanted to paint, once.
I never knew that. Sixty years old and I’m learning that my mother applied to an art program at nineteen and got in and didn’t go, because her mother told her love would be enough, and it was and it wasn’t, and she spent thirty years being a wife with a spare room she never turned into anything.
She tells me that when I stood in their kitchen at seventeen and said Gordon’s name with my whole chest, all she could see was that spare room.
“I wasn’t trying to stop you from loving him,” she says. “I was trying to stop you from becoming me. I just did it so badly that I lost you both ways.”
My father mostly listens, which is what he’s always done, but twice he adds a detail that proves he’s been keeping track of me all along.
He knows the name of Charlie’s label. He knows my pieces are walking Friday.
When I ask how, he looks embarrassed and says, “We get alerts. Your mother set them up years ago. Anything with your name.”
Years ago. All those years of silence, and they had alerts.
My father admits he was intimidated by Gordon’s ambition, that a kid with forty dollars and that much certainty scared him more than any rich boy would have.
My mother admits she was scared for a different reason, that watching me sacrifice everything for a man reminded her too much of herself at that age, of her own dreams folded up and put away, and she couldn’t bear to watch it happen again.
“I’m not you,” I tell her, and I say it gently, because I finally can. “My mistakes are my own.”
“I know. I think I always knew. It just took me eleven years to say it out loud.”
They ask about the internship, and I show them the sketches on the wall, and my father asks practical questions about the business, margins and suppliers and whether Charlie pays overtime, and I answer all of them, and somewhere in the middle of it I realize he’s not interrogating my choices for the first time in my life, he’s just interested.
My mother touches the fabric samples with two fingers, careful, like they’re important.
She stops on the charcoal wool, the coat fabric Gabriella paid for, and asks who it’s for, and when I tell her about the coat and the shoulders built for arguing, she laughs, a real one, and says she’d like to meet this Gabriella, and I say you will, and realize I mean that too.
Nobody mentions the divorce. It hangs in the room anyway, in the careful way everyone doesn’t look at Gordon in his corner chair, in the coffee he brought going cold in front of him because he won’t reach for anything that might make a sound. Somehow we all survive it.
When they leave, my mother holds me at the door for a long time and says she’ll call Sunday, and asks if that’s okay, actually asks, and I say yes, and mean it.
Gordon walks them down to the car. I watch from the window.
My mother hugs him. It goes on for a while, long enough that he has to shift the empty coffee tray to one hand.
My father shakes his hand, and then doesn’t quite let go of it, and says something I can’t hear, and Gordon nods with his head down and keeps nodding, and whatever it is, he takes all of it standing still.
He comes back upstairs. He stands in my doorway, not coming in, holding the empty coffee tray in both hands.
He spent four hours today in a corner chair in his ex-wife’s apartment, watching her get her family back, and he never once made any of it about himself, and I know exactly how much that discipline would have cost the man I married. I’m looking at what it costs this one.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I want to.” I wrap my arms around myself. “That was a lot. But it was good.”
“They love you. They just forgot how to show it.”
“Sounds familiar.”
He winces. Then, after a second, he almost smiles, because what else is there to do with a hit that clean.
“The showcase is Friday,” he says. “Your pieces are walking.”
“I know.”
“Sloane’s going to be there.”
My stomach drops. “What?”
“Charlie called me. Professional courtesy. He thought I’d want to know.” His jaw is tight. “She’s on the confirmed guest list. Industry connections. He couldn’t block her without making it a thing, and making it a thing is exactly what she wants.”
“So she’s going to show up to my showcase. The biggest night of my year. And try to ruin it.”
“Probably.” He doesn’t dress it up or talk me out of the worry, and I notice that too, the not-managing-me of it. “She doesn’t do anything without a reason, and there’s no reason for her to be in that room except you.”
I take a breath. I think about the checkpoint, and the overflow courtyard, and the cold, and the burgundy dress, and the woman who sat in the back row and watched her whole marriage end on a screen.
I’m not her anymore.
“Then I’ll be ready.”
“You won’t be alone,” he says.
I look at him, standing in my doorway with his empty tray, the man who drove twelve hours in two days to bring my parents back to me and stayed in the corner the whole time so the day could be mine.
“I know,” I say.
And I realize, as I say it, that I believe it.
The week moves fast after that. Final fittings for the showcase pieces, seams checked and rechecked, the low-back gown steamed and bagged and guarded by me personally like it might run away.
My mother calls Sunday, like she said she would, and we talk for forty minutes about nothing, which is everything.
I sleep badly Thursday night, and it’s the good bad sleep, the night-before-something sleep, the first version of that feeling I’ve had in eleven years that belongs entirely to me.
Friday morning, I wake up to a text from an unknown number.
See you at the showcase. Can’t wait to catch up. -S
Sloane. She got my number from somewhere, which is the point, the whole message in four words and an initial: I can reach you.
I read it twice. I wait for the drop in my stomach, the cold, the checkpoint feeling.
It doesn’t come. What comes instead is something with a spine in it.
She’s coming for me.
And this time, I’m not going to hide.