Chapter 26
Elena
I know this version of me.
I know her too well not to dread her, the version that holds on so tight to the image of a family that she starts building one out of borrowed materials.
I have been dreaming of a family since the day I was told I no longer had one.
I was eight. The social worker wore a cardigan with a button missing and spoke in a voice that was supposed to be gentle but was really just slow, and I understood before she finished the sentence that the word “gone” was going to mean something different from now on.
I knew it in the first foster house, when I tried to sit at the table like I belonged and the woman whose name I still remember looked at me like I was a stain on the furniture. I tried anyway. I tried until they kicked us out the day I tried to defend myself.
I knew it in the second house and the third.
I tried to belong. I tried to make something for myself, even when I could always tell the shape of me didn’t fit the space they’d made.
I wish I was more like Nadia. She doesn’t engage.
She has it figured out, the careful economy of caring just enough to survive and not a gram more.
There’s nothing for girls like us that comes naturally.
Not like normal people. People who always had a family don’t know what it costs to pretend you have one.
And here I am, walking through Central Park Zoo on a Sunday morning, holding Erick Aldera’s hand, pretending this is mine.
Patrick hasn’t so much as brushed my shoulder since we got here.
I can feel him keeping the distance, the careful geometry of a man who doesn’t want his four-year-old to see us as a couple.
I am grateful for that. I am. Because if he touched me right now, if he put his hand on the small of my back or let his fingers graze mine the way they did in the hallway on Thursday, I would lean into it with a force that would terrify us both.
So I hold Erick’s hand instead.
I hold it because I want to enjoy the feeling of belonging, even temporarily. Even borrowed. Even knowing that borrowed things get returned.
He is so funny. He tugs me toward the sea lion pool and points at the biggest one sunning itself on the rocks and says, very seriously, “That one is the boss. You can tell because he doesn’t move.
” Then he searches for my hand again when we walk on, like it’s where his hand goes now, and the gesture means so much more than he could ever imagine.
More than a four-year-old could possibly understand.
I know what I’m doing. I hope Patrick doesn’t notice.
I hope he doesn’t think this is too much, that I’m intruding, that I’m letting myself into his kid’s heart so he can’t walk out, so he stays with me.
I don’t want him to think that. I could have said no to this.
But Nadia has been busy with a wedding order all weekend, and I couldn’t spend one more minute alone with my defeated thoughts.
Because the email came. The Okonkwo email.
It arrived Friday afternoon, very polite, very professional, very clear.
They loved my audition. They were impressed with my interpretation of Masha.
They went with someone else. The language was kind in the way language is kind when it’s been drafted by someone who has rejected enough people to know how to do it without leaving a mark.
Since I read it, I’ve been punishing myself.
Feeling like the worst loser in the world.
Replaying every choice I made in that audition room, every line reading, every beat I held too long or not long enough.
The truth is I needed to feel I could be something else today.
Something other than the wannabe actress who didn’t get the role.
Something other than the girl on her sister’s couch with no savings and no plan and no career to speak of.
So here I am. Holding hands with the cutest little boy in Manhattan. Trembling every time his extremely handsome father looks at me and makes me remember how his hands feel on my body.
Yep. I am in deep shit. But at least I am in happy denial.
There is a sensory play exhibit near the far end of the park, a low table covered in materials and textures that catches Erick’s eye completely.
He drops my hand and runs to it. A museum volunteer settles beside him and he begins a conversation with her about the best texture immediately, arranging rubber animals with the focus of a small surgeon.
He’s going to be there a while.
I drift toward a nearby railing. The city spreads out beyond the trees, indifferent, enormous, going about its business.
Patrick stands next to me. Not close. But next to me.
The April air moves between us and I can smell him, clean cotton and something warm underneath, and my nervous system files this information in the place where it files all Patrick-related data, which is the place marked DANGEROUS DO NOT OPEN.
I open it anyway.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Yes.”
I watch Erick for another moment. Then: “His mom. What was she like?”
I’ve been meaning to ask for weeks, and I am not proud of why.
It’s not compassion. It’s not the desire to understand him, though I’m telling myself it is.
The truth, the actual truth I have been refusing to look at directly, is that I asked because I wanted to know if I had a chance.
If I could measure up in any way. If the woman he loved was someone I could plausibly stand next to, even in theory.
I know this is insane. She is dead. There is no competition. And yet here I am at a zoo railing in April, bracing myself against the answer, because some part of me decided that knowing was better than not knowing.
I was wrong.
He is quiet. I can feel him deciding what to give me, which version of the answer. Then something shifts, maybe my face, maybe the way I’m watching Erick instead of watching him, and he puts whatever prepared version he has away.
“She was a doctor,” he says. “Pediatric surgery. She was good at it, she was serious about it, she worked constantly and so did I and we were very good at sharing a life without being fully in it together. We’d been dating for almost five years.
She got pregnant right after we got married.
” He pauses. “She was a good person. She was a good mother.”
A doctor. Someone who was serious and good at something that mattered, who shared his world of long hours and high stakes and understood it from the inside.
Someone who moved through life with the kind of quiet competence that doesn’t need to explain itself.
The kind of woman who wears a camel coat and knows exactly which fork to use and has never once done a panicked British accent at his mother.
I keep my face completely still.
This is what I was afraid of. This specific answer.
Not that she was cruel or cold or that he was miserable, not anything I could work with.
Just that she was exactly what I am not: accomplished, elegant, purposeful.
A woman with a career that meant something, who belonged in his life architecturally, who made sense next to him.
I breathe through it. I make my face do nothing. I am very good at making my face do nothing.
“The accident,” he says, and his voice goes flat in a way I recognize, the managed steadiness of someone keeping what’s underneath locked in place.
“We were going to the theater. We were late, she was frustrated, the pavement was wet. A truck ran a red light.” He stops.
“I saw it coming. Before it happened. I saw the headlights and I knew.”
My hands tighten on the railing.
“It was my fault. I braked. The car slid. But I had time, Elena. I had a full second, maybe two, and I braked when I should have turned. I should have cut the wheel hard left into the oncoming lane, or accelerated through the intersection, or done anything other than what my body did on instinct, which was brake on a wet road and slide directly into the path of a truck going fifty.” His voice is steady.
Practiced. “She died on impact. Erick wasn’t with us. He was ten months old.”
I feel the words land somewhere deep, deeper than I expected, in the place where I keep my own wreckage locked up. Headlights. Wet pavement. The specific sound of impact that I don’t actually remember but have imagined so many times it has become a memory anyway.
“How is that your fault?” I say.
“Because I’ve run it a thousand times. Every angle. Every option.” He looks at his hands on the railing. “I did it wrong. I had the information and the time and I did it wrong and she’s dead because my reflexes chose the worst possible response to a situation I saw coming.”
He doesn’t look at me. I understand why. He is giving me the ugliest thing he carries, and he needs to do it without watching my face while it lands. This isn’t confession. This is a test. This is: here is what you’d be choosing. This version of me. The one who had two seconds and got it wrong.
I feel something open inside my chest. Not gently. Like a door kicked in.
“I have done that too,” I say.
Patrick looks at me.
I keep my eyes on Erick.
“I wanted ice cream,” I say. “It was after dinner. I threw the whole performance, the please please pretty please, the full eight-year-old campaign, and my dad laughed and said okay and they went out to get it. Both of them. Because my mom said she wanted to stretch her legs and it was only five minutes away and they’d be right back. ”
My voice is steady. The same practiced steadiness he just gave me.
“The drunk driver hit them at the intersection outside the shop. They never made it inside.”
The zoo sounds come back in around us. Children somewhere. A bird calling out above the trees. The low hum of the city that never stops, not even when you need it to.
“I have replayed that for eighteen years,” I say. “Every version where I don’t ask. Every version where I just say okay, I’m full, I don’t need it, and they stay home and they’re alive.”
I can feel him looking at me. I can feel the weight of his attention on the side of my face and I don’t turn because if I turn we will both break and I am not ready for that. Not here. Not with Erick twenty feet away sorting rubber animals like the world makes sense.
“So,” I say. “If you were trying to scare me off with that, it didn’t work.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“You didn’t kill her, Patrick. You reacted. In the rain, in a second, with no good options. That’s not a choice.” I look at him then. “But I know that doesn’t help. I know because people have been telling me for eighteen years that asking for ice cream is not a crime and I still can’t eat it.”
The sound he makes is not quite a laugh. Close. The kind of almost-laugh that lives right next to something much worse.
“You can’t eat ice cream?”
I shrug, one shoulder. “Some things just stay ruined.”
We stand there. The two of us at a railing with our matching wreckage, and Erick at his table, alive and sorting, and the city going on without us.
His hand finds mine on the railing. Not a romantic gesture. Something else. The grip of someone who has been holding something alone and just realized they don’t have to.
I hold on.
Erick comes back with three rubber animals and a leaf he found on the ground that he says is “extremely rare.” He studies us with the observational skill of a small detective, looks at our hands, which we’ve separated by now, looks at our faces, and says: “Are you guys sad? You look weird.”
“We’re fine,” Patrick says.
He holds up the leaf. “This will help. It’s a healing leaf.”
He hands it to me. I take it. It is a very ordinary leaf.
“Thank you,” I say, and my voice almost breaks on it.
“You have to hold it for ten seconds,” Erick says authoritatively. “That’s how it works.”
I hold it for ten seconds. Patrick watches me hold a leaf while his son counts to ten with the seriousness of a paramedic, and something crosses his face that I can’t name, something raw and unmanaged and huge.
“Better?” Erick asks.
“Much better,” I say.
He nods, satisfied, and takes my hand again. His small fingers wrap around two of mine and he tugs me toward the exit.
I let him pull me forward. I carry the leaf in my other hand because throwing it away is not an option.
Behind us, Patrick follows. I can feel him there, the specific quality of his presence at my back, and I know without looking that his face, he has not recovered from whatever it did while his son counted to ten.
The same thing I am trying very hard not to show right now.
Which means I am doing a terrible job, because my hands are not steady and my throat is tight and I am fairly certain my face has already said everything I spent the last two months refusing to say out loud.
I don’t know what this means. I don’t know where this goes. I don’t know if he’s going to wake up tomorrow and decide this was too much, too close, too fast, and pull back into the controlled distance that keeps him safe.
And I’m scared because I’m already losing ground. Already wanting too much. Already dreaming of a family.