Chapter 20 #2
The thing was, I didn’t quite know how to answer her.
I mean, what was I supposed to say? After years of trying my hardest to push down any emotion related to what were probably some intense—and again, justifiable—abandonment issues, I finally admitted to myself that I was sad because my mommy didn’t, I don’t know, follow me to college and instead chose to have a life of her own?
“I, um.”
I’d never felt the need to give my mother credit for being perceptive, but she seemed to sense that I was not exactly in the best position to answer her.
“I’m glad to hear from you,” she said. “I had a missed call from you, from days ago. I tried to call you back, and when I couldn’t reach you, I called Yaz.”
“And she told you I was on the verge of a meltdown?”
“She told me,” Mami said gently, “that it seemed like you needed me. I know I haven’t been around a whole lot lately, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t care about you or that I don’t want you to feel like you can lean on me when you’re in trouble.”
“Good to know.” I tried to say it lightly, but my words were dragged down by, oh, a decade of resentment.
Which Mami of course couldn’t fail to hear. And I had to give her credit again, this time for not heaving a weary sigh into the phone. “It’s on me that you don’t know that, Mariel. I guess I need to do better when it comes to saying these things out loud. And acting on them, too.”
“I think… I guess I could do better about asking for help when I need it.”
“Why do you need help, Chiquita?”
“Because I…” The air was as thick as soup, making it hard to catch my breath. “I tried to straighten my hair this morning and accidentally fried it and now I’m pretty sure I ruined my curls forever.”
The newly stiff shanks had managed to remain straight while acquiring the same amount of volume my curls would have, which looked…
interesting, to say the least. I had wrestled the whole mass into a scrunchie as best as I could, and then spent another half hour trying to jam a hat over it before giving up.
“Boy trouble, huh? Or, well, it’s been long enough since we’ve talked that I guess I should say relationship trouble instead. In case anything’s changed.”
“Nothing’s changed. And you’re not fully wrong. It’s more like… existential crisis trouble?”
“Then you should count yourself lucky you didn’t experiment with bangs instead,” Mami said. What can I say? I come by my emotion-deflecting tendencies honestly.
I paused at a crosswalk while I waited for the light to change, standing at the edge of a crowd of tourists bickering over where they were going to have dinner.
“Considering that instead I experimented with hooking up with my for-all-intents-and-purposes business partner and then flailed my way out of something that could’ve been really good, maybe bangs would have been better. ”
You had to give it to my mom—she didn’t rush in with empty platitudes. I mean, could she have been a tiny bit reassuring? Sure. Would it have helped? Probably not.
“Nothing is worse than bangs,” she said firmly. “But I can see why your existence is in crisis. We Rivera women don’t do great when it comes to love, do we?”
“Yaz had it good there for a while. But yeah. We all deeply suck at relationships—and yet, none of us are in therapy.”
“Speak for yourself. Nena and I are doing the work. And Yaz was talking about finding someone new when she comes up to New York to stay with you.”
“Then I guess it’s just me, then. At least until I’m back on some kind of insurance.”
The conversation stalled again. Shocking, I know, when health insurance was such a fascinating subject. And such a good excuse to not talk about what was actually on my mind.
Mami had never actually come out and said that I was the worst thing ever to happen to her, but it was implied by the way she’d fucked off the day after I’d turned eighteen.
Here’s the thing, though—as much as Mami leaving had been this stormy cloud hovering over my head, I had never actually talked to her about it.
Or, well, to anyone really, if you didn’t count the oblique snarky comments I’d made to Yaz over the years.
So like the coward I was, I veered away from it and asked about something else instead.
“We never talk about my father and why he left me.”
“Chiquita, your father didn’t leave you, he left me. And honestly…” Her deep breath rustled into the receiver. “I’m the reason he didn’t fight harder to stay in your life.”
“Or maybe he’s just a bastard who’s never thought about me after he ran off,” I offered.
“I won’t argue with you about the bastard thing.
We still have a few mutual friends from back in the day, though, and I know for a fact that not seeing you grow up has weighed on him.
” I couldn’t tell if the sound Mami made was a laugh or a sniffle, or a strange combination of both.
“I’m so damn sorry, Mariel. If you want to get in touch with him now, I could—”
“I don’t,” I said, and I meant it. Whatever space my dad might have left behind had been filled up pretty quickly by Tía Nena and Yaz and even Mami herself.
But when Mami left… her space was so uniquely shaped that nothing could’ve filled it.
“I’ve never really been all that curious about him.
You’re the only parent that I’ve ever really needed. ”
That was definitely a sniffle. “Mariel…”
I had to say it. “Which is why I’ve been wondering why you left.”
There was quiet on the other end of the line.
The kind of quiet that pressed in even while I passed a cabbie slamming his horn at a teenager in roller skates and someone blasting music as they whizzed by on a bike, and approximately fifteen million other people carrying on conversations of their own.
Finally, Mami said, “I had a lot of growing up to do. But before I could do that, I had to take some time to be the kid I never got to be.”
“Because of me.”
“Not only because of you. Nena and I don’t talk about it much, but we both had a hard time when our mother died.
We were so young. She was so young. And even though Nena was older than me, she took Mami’s death the hardest. Our father, too.
” I had faint memories of an older man with a mustache who’d get on the floor and build blocks with me and Yaz.
“So I took over. For years, I was the only one in the house who went grocery shopping. Who made sure our school uniforms were clean and ironed. I bullied Nena into doing her homework and applying for college and moved us to Miami. Sneaking out with your father was the only scrap of rebellion that I allowed myself. And then you came along and…”
“Ruined your life?” I suggested, trying for funny and ending up somewhere closer to pathetic.
“Made me remember my priorities,” she corrected gently.
“At the top of which was my family—which now included you. I spent twenty-five years devoted to other people, Chiquita,” she said, and I suddenly remembered that she was the one who’d started calling me that.
“Nena always said that I’d been forced to grow up too fast, but the truth was that I never really got to grow up at all.
I didn’t have the time to figure out who I really was or what I wanted out of life.
And I was haunted by the idea that I’d get to forty without knowing anything about myself. ”
I guess it shouldn’t have been quite so reassuring to know that she was haunted about stuff, too. But then again, aren’t we all? Who among us isn’t carting around all the ghosts of who we wanted to become and who we loved or we wanted to love us?
“I like to think that I would’ve never left if I knew you still needed me. But…” There was a brief pause. “I don’t know how sure I can be of that.”
It wasn’t perfect, but it was honest. And that was something I could live with.
“I tried not to need you,” I said, and turned left at random, not really heading anyplace in particular. “I’m an adult. What kind of adult needs their mommy?”
“I did,” she said. “I need her still. And I miss her still. And I… Shit, Mariel, I made you go through the same thing I went through, didn’t I? Only with the extra baggage of knowing your mom left on purpose. How much did I screw you up?”
“Oh you know, just enough that I ran away from the first chance I’ve ever had at having a real relationship with someone amazing.”
“No big deal, huh? I guess I should go line up for my Shitty Parent of the Decade award.”
“I haven’t nominated you yet,” I told her. “But only because I don’t even have your current zip code. Which honestly makes me a not-so-great daughter myself.”
“No, that’s on me. I should have called you sooner to tell you the news, but I was waiting until I was settled in before saying anything, in case it didn’t stick. You’ll be happy to know that I finally have a permanent address.”
“I don’t know what it says about us that I gotta ask in which country.”
Mami laughed. “I’m actually in Vegas. Have been for a couple months now. It’s, uh. Kind of a long story.”
“It better be a good one.”
“I hope so.” She blew out a breath. “I’m interviewing for a new job as general manager of a chain of hotels.
One that will keep me in one place for a good long while.
I already looked at a few places, and I found an apartment with a spare bedroom for you and Yaz and Nena to stay in when you visit me. If you want to, that is.”
“I want to.”
“Good—we’ll make plans as soon as I hear about the job. In the meantime, Nena told me that you were working on this big project?”
I let out a laugh. “So it’s called the Duke of Harding.”
We must have spoken for another hour, catching each other up on all things, big and small, that we’d missed. I thought I’d feel hungover again when I hung up, but instead there was this lightness spreading over me.
After that, reaching out to Milo didn’t seem nearly as impossible as I would’ve imagined.
Because even though I wasn’t the one who’d ghosted, I was the one with unfinished business.
So I paused, leaning against the warm brick of a building as I opened my personal Instagram account and found his profile.
I didn’t deserve being lied to, I typed into a DM.
No matter how loud I was, or how dramatic, or how sure you were that I was going to cause some sort of scene.
Not when you knew how much I had started to care for you.
I meant what I said about not wanting your apology.
I don’t want explanations or excuses, either.
I just want you to know that you did hurt me.
And whether I was too much for you or not enough, I deserved honesty.
I hit send. And then I really was free.
I’d wandered clear across Manhattan, from the west side back to the east, only this time I was closer to 59th Street than the Upper East Side. And that meant I was close to the Roosevelt Island Tramway.
Acting more on impulse than any semblance of rational thought—you know, for a change—I started walking toward the station.
I used my virtual MetroCard to get through the turnstile and waited with a little knot of people for the tram.
When it came, I climbed onto the shiny red car and stepped into the corner, where I could look down.
It was the wrong time of day for glittering city lights, but I was in time to catch the beginning of sunset.
The shades of pink and orange that looked like melted gelato as they seeped into the blue of the sky were echoed by the river and repeated in the windows of the buildings crowding Midtown Manhattan.
I was gazing out toward the snarl of metal and concrete that had somehow, inexplicably, become home in a way it never had been before when an incoming message made my phone buzz in my hand.
I knew even before I looked that it was Milo’s reply.
You’re not too much, Mariel. And I’m the one who wasn’t enough.