Chapter 17
Mar’s waiting for me on my front doorstep when I get home. I’d texted her for an emergency download session and she’s sitting outside with two bottles of wine and a greasy bag of smashburgers and fries.
“You could have let yourself in,” I say as I give her a hug, dusty and exhausted. Mar has the front door code—it’s her birthday so she’ll remember it.
She gets up. “Not on your life. Betty sees me coming in alone? I’ll leave with no eyeballs.”
I laugh a little as I let us in, leaving all my stuff in the car. I’ll have to deal with reality later.
“That was a pity laugh,” Mar says as we step inside.
“Sorry, a lot’s on my mind,” I say as I start opening curtains and windows. I can’t do anything until my house is aired out first. “Can I please have some of that rosé I see in your grubby little mitts?”
A few minutes later I’m in sweats and lying on my rug with a glass of wine after having annihilated my burger. Mar sits on the sofa like my therapist, picking at the fries, and Betty is flying around, indignant that we dare have a guest right when I get home.
“I can’t even believe it,” she says, staring out the window, munching a fry. “How in the world does this happen?”
“Magic is real, son,” I say, already drunk obviously.
“Can I be real for a second?”
“When are you not real?”
“Well. I mean, I don’t know if I believed in this fated stuff until now.”
I flop my arms around. “What? You mean my family’s life work?”
“No offense, Cass, but I thought you guys were just really good at matchmaking. I grew up Catholic! All the stuff you guys do seems straight pagan.”
“A lot of cultural customs are pagan,” I say, my finger up in lecture mode. “Doesn’t mean it’s not rooted in something real.”
“Listen, I’m not going to argue with you about this because I am white and uncomfortable with your culture.”
I laugh. “Shut up.”
“Anyway, I feel bad for Ellis.”
“Stop.”
“I do! Couldn’t you have had a few more nights with him before calling it quits?”
“No, you freak!” I sit up and level an attempt at a serious gaze at her. “What’s with married people forcing their single friends to make dubious dating choices so they can live vicariously through them? This is my life.”
“Because we haven’t felt the fear of dying alone in too long and have grown reckless in our sordid daydreams,” she says with a laugh, sloshing her wine around her glass. I love her.
Her phone buzzes with a text, and she holds it up away from her face.
“You know, I don’t mind aging that much but having to squint to read is a real motherfucker.”
“Really looking forward to it,” I say. While Mar types out a text, my mind wanders. “I actually think I feel chill about aging because my mom never had the chance to do it.”
Mar looks up at me, her expression surprised. I don’t bring up my mom that often. But I just had my birthday and, of course, she’s been on my mind.
I take a sip of wine. “I’m not scolding you for complaining, I complain, too.
I hate how I have to do ten squats in the morning in order for my back to not feel like a piece of petrified wood.
And RIP to raw garlic. It’s just that, when I think about how young my mom was when she died—it seems so completely… ”
“Tragic?” Mar finishes for me quietly. “It was awful, Cass.”
I nod. “Yeah. It was. She was thirty-two.” Mar knows this but it bears repeating. I’m lying on a rug my mom picked out on a trip she took to Morocco when she was in college. We used to lie on it together and watch the shadows cross the ceiling as the day passed through the windows.
“Cass?” she said one of those afternoons. “Did you see that?”
My eyes searched the ceiling. “What?”
“The shadow fairy.”
“Huh? Where?” I kept looking.
She pointed, her fingers stacked with rings—all different kinds of metal and colors. “There. You just have to look, Bean. Look for the shape.”
And I saw it then—a tiny darting figure. “Is that really a fairy?”
“Sure.”
“When you say ‘sure’ it means ‘maybe.’ ”
She laughed and looked over at me. “Smarty-pants.” Then she paused.
“You’re smart but that’s not the most important thing, okay?
I want you to always see the magical things—like shadow fairies.
” Even then my mom saw my nascent type A side.
As an artist, she was always trying to nurture my imagination. To make sure I remembered to have fun.
“Okay, Mama.” I reached over and grabbed her hand. She squeezed it tight, lacing each finger through my small ones. I loved the feel of her cool rings on my skin. Sometimes I felt them like a phantom on my hands.
I feel them now, her presence everywhere. “You know what’s wild?” I say to Mar. “I ended up spilling my guts to Ellis about my mom.”
“Was this before or after you fornicated on every surface of this house?”
“After, you perv,” I say with a laugh. “It was in the desert, when I was high.”
“Ah, yes. The shroom musings. Remember how I came up with that genius movie idea on our retreat?”
“How could I forget Ejaculation Inoculation?”
Mar shrugs. “I stand by its brilliance.”
“I should have remembered that before I got high with my fated and his employee. I ended up crying about my mom. About how, well, how I thought she wouldn’t have had the aneurysm if my dad hadn’t left her.
” Mar just looks at me quietly, and I continue, “In the back of my mind, I believe that having to raise me alone made her so stressed that she had an aneurysm.”
“What?” Mar is instantly defensive for me, like I knew she would be. “I can’t even begin—”
“I know, I know. But the thing is, I also told him I wanted to have children one day.”
At this, Mar looks shocked. “Wait, what?”
“Yeah. I didn’t even really know I felt so decided about it until I said it?” I lean toward her, my voice low. “I can’t risk it, Mar. I can’t risk ending up like my mom. The only person I want children with is my fated.”
“Oh, Cass,” she says softly. “But you know that’s not the reason why she died.”
“Do I know that?”
“Yes,” she says firmly. “Because people die for all sorts of reasons. It’s unfair, indiscriminating, and completely out of our control.”
I shake my head. “But we can control who we end up with. I can control that.”
“So, what’s the problem?” she finally asks.
“What do you mean?”
“What’s holding you back from throwing yourself into this future with Daniel?” Mar dodges Betty coming for her.
Extremely good question. “I don’t know. I guess I thought once I met Daniel I would just feel this huge relief. Euphoric, even. But instead I feel…I don’t know, it feels complicated because of Ellis.”
Mar drops onto the floor and crawls over to me until we’re eye to eye. “Was it that good?”
“Come on!” I push her shoulder.
She pushes me back. “No, you! You’ve been searching for your fated for eons.
And now that you’ve found him, suddenly you’re indecisive because of this guy Ellis?
He had to have been good.” And she must see it on my face because she howls and rolls onto her back.
“My god, I thought all young men lately were bad because all they did was watch chokey-chokey porn.”
I fall back next to her, our hair mingling and becoming one. We both stare up at the ceiling, the evening light creating bouncy shapes. “Dude. He was good. It was unreal.”
“Now you’re just trying to rile me up.”
“No, I swear. I haven’t had sex that good since…I don’t know. Ever.”
“Not even with that one Brazilian DJ?”
“Not even him.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
We’re quiet for a second, showing reverence for Ellis’s god-tier sex status. Then Mar rolls over to her side and props her head up as she looks at me. “But, you know. What does that matter with Daniel in the picture? For all you know sex with him will like, heal the world.”
“True.” I turn on my side, too, so we’re facing each other. “Let me read your face, Mar.”
She rolls over and does a weird army crawl away from me. “For the last time, no!”
“Come on, please? I can just confirm what you already know, right? That Logan’s the one.
” I don’t know why I’m pushing this all of a sudden.
I know that Mar and Logan have a great marriage, and I would never ever want them to split up.
But sometimes…just sometimes I worry that because I’m not sure of Logan being her fated, their relationship could be jeopardized.
She’s always resisted, but today I can’t help asking again.
I need some kind of validation. That, of course Mar and Logan are fated. That’s why they work so well.
That breaking up with Ellis was the right move.
Mar is standing now and her hands are on her hips. She has the expression she uses on her kids. “No, Cassia.” Oh, she used my real name. She’s not pleased. “You know how I feel about it. If I was single, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But I already made my choice. And I love him more than anything.”
The words make me smile. Underneath it all, Mar is just as romantic as me. “You’re right. Sorry. I’m just…” I wave my hand in the air, helpless to it. “I’m just emotionally all over the place. I’ve got to sit with this for a while.”
“What did Halmoni say? I bet she was over the moon.”
“Actually…I haven’t told them yet.” It’s something I thought about my entire drive home. When to tell them and how to share this news. I know I should be bursting at the seams to tell them I’ve finally found Daniel.
“What? Why not?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, I need to sit with it. It’s just so much expectation.”
“A decade’s worth,” Mar says. She gets it. She always does. When she goes home, I wash my sheets. The scent of Ellis lingers.