Chapter 13 #3
“Sure?” Gabe peered at her, not following.
“That’s how it was with my mom,” Anya explained.
“For an hour she’d be totally herself, and we’d be joking and laughing, and it was like, yes, great, this is all going to be okay!
But then she’d be so sluggish, and slurring her words, and we’d have no idea why, and it felt like that would never change either.
And the doctors didn’t know what exactly was causing it, except that this secondary bleed was in her speech and cognition center, so they were certain it was related. ”
“Did they do the second surgery?”
“They tried, but they had to stop. She was too weak. So the only choice was to wait, to hope she had enough time for them to try again. My dad and I basically moved into the hospital at that point. We wouldn’t leave her. And then her friends came to see her, and family, and all these students…”
Anya trailed off. She didn’t want to admit to Gabe the way she’d felt when the parade of visitors began. It was too selfish. Too ugly.
“Were they constantly asking if you were okay?” Gabe asked. “The dumbest question in the history of humanity?”
“Yes. And telling me not to worry, that she would pull through. It was like, I don’t know that! The doctors don’t know that! You certainly don’t know that, Aunt Lori.”
“Stupid Aunt Lori,” Gabe grumbled encouragingly, and Anya almost laughed—but it caught in her chest, came out a plaintive sound instead.
“My dad finally put a stop to it. At the end. It was just us.” Anya’s voice broke. “That’s what my mom would always say, after everyone left on Thanksgiving or whatever. ‘I like it when it’s just us.’ So that’s how we thought she would want it. Even though she couldn’t really talk by that point.”
“And the surgeons couldn’t go back in?” Gabe asked. “Try again?”
Anya shook her head. “They said they would try if we wanted them to, but they were pretty certain it would kill her, and we didn’t—we didn’t want her to die like that, bleeding on a table. So we decided to make her comfortable. Spend whatever time she had left together.”
“That was right.” Gabe squeezed Anya’s hand. “I’m sure that was right.”
“We brought in bagels and Chinese, sat around telling stories. Sometimes it seemed like she could follow what we were saying? But sometimes she was too tired. That’s what it was like at the end—she was just tired. And then she fell asleep.”
“And she didn’t wake up?” Gabe asked.
Anya nodded. She and her dad were both there at the end, each holding one of her mother’s hands, telling her they loved her.
“And since then it’s been like…like I don’t know how to be happy anymore?” Anya squeaked. “Which feels appropriate, because how can I be happy when she’s gone? But then it’s also like, I know that’s not what she’d want, so I feel like I’m letting her down?”
“You are so hard on yourself.” His voice was gruff, muddy with emotion. “You’re here, okay? And you’re doing your best, and you’re helping a really nice lady run for city council—”
“County council.”
“Whatever.” Gabe covered her hand with both of his. “Grief is such a mindfuck. It makes you feel like you’re living two lives—one for yourself, and one for the person who isn’t there anymore. It’s too much pressure.”
“Is that how you felt?” Anya asked. “After Danny?”
“More than I even realized.” Gabe nodded. “But we don’t have to talk about that.”
“Can we?” Anya said. “I think it might help.”
Gabe’s face softened, and he settled his body against the sleeping bag.
“So, you know how I’ve been doing therapy for the last couple years?
” he asked. Anya nodded. “We talked a lot about Danny, and the stuff with my parents, obviously. And how after Danny died, I tried to, like, be him—or not be him exactly, but occupy the space he’d held in my family.
Show my parents that they still had a son they could be proud of.
Except—I guess it became clear to me pretty quickly that they weren’t involved enough in my life to feel pride or anything else.
It was like we were all living separate lives in the same house.
And since I couldn’t make them proud, I tried to make Danny proud instead. ”
“Oh, Gabe.” Anya exhaled.
“I worked harder at school, picked up another sport. Got into Stanford—that was where Danny was going to go.”
“And politics?” Anya asked. “Was that Danny’s thing too?”
Gabe shook his head. “Danny wanted to be a doctor. I mean, he was only eighteen when he died, so who knows what he would have done with his life. But he wanted to be, like, the world’s best surgeon.
So when I figured out how much I loved campaigning, I wanted to show him I could be great too. I wanted to win.”
“One of the best to ever do it,” Anya murmured, recalling what Gabe had told her all the way back in New Hampshire. “And end up on the cover of Time magazine.”
“God, I was such a snot,” Gabe laughed, and Anya did too.
“Anyway, I worked my ass off, and I pretty much always won, and I never really engaged with how bad things were with my parents—you saw what I was like that night with my mom at the hospital. I stayed so busy, and I kept moving up the ladder. I thought I was doing the right thing.”
Anya picked up on a dark note in Gabe’s tone. “But that changed?”
Gabe nodded. “In January, when I found out I didn’t get the job managing Wheeler’s presidential race. Turns out, if I thought winning made Danny proud, then I also thought failing meant letting him down.”
“But you didn’t fail,” Anya protested. “You did a great job with Wheeler’s Senate race.”
“Yep,” Gabe clipped. “When he won his highest margin ever, I thought…”
“That you’d get some credit for how good your work was?” Anya asked.
Gabe shrugged. “That he’d want to stick with the person who did so well for him. But he wanted someone with a national track record and an army of consultants, so that’s what he got.”
“Idiotic decision,” Anya muttered. Wheeler had hired the same team that managed President Flannery’s reelection campaign—a race they lost, notably.
“Thanks,” Gabe said. “I was devastated. And Tallulah—I think she saw it as a good thing? An opportunity for me to move to Australia, for us to travel together. Except, I didn’t want to.
I didn’t want to travel with Lu, and I didn’t want to spend months in some surf shack in Costa Rica, and I didn’t want to immediately run off and join another campaign.
I didn’t want any of my usual avoidant shit.
So Lu and I broke up, which was probably long overdue by that point. ”
“Really?” Anya asked. “Simone mentioned something last year, about how it hadn’t been going well, but that was right before my mom got sick. The next thing I heard was that you guys had broken up.”
“Lu and I were long distance for years, and when I finally had the chance to go be with her for real, I had to admit to myself that the most appealing thing about her was that it wasn’t real. It was more like an escape. From my life, from politics, from my family.”
“And you didn’t want that anymore?” Anya asked. “To escape?”
Gabe shook his head. “I—um. I took it pretty hard when your mom died. Do you remember when I came to your house for seder last year?”
Anya’s breath caught—of course she remembered. She had stayed up all night crying afterward, feeling so pathetic that after all these years, she still wanted so desperately to be with Gabe. Despite all the evidence that it was never, ever going to happen.
But she couldn’t say any of that. So she just nodded.
“I probably acted really weird that night,” Gabe said.
“I wasn’t prepared for how hard it would be.
To be around your whole family like that.
It all felt so lived-in—like the fights were the same fights they always had, and everyone was laughing, and you all love each other so much.
I was having this internal panic attack that my family could never be like that. ”
Anya closed her eyes. Of course. That’s why he’d behaved so awkwardly—it wasn’t about her at all.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “It never occurred to me that’s how you’d feel, but it should have.”
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “It didn’t occur to me either. Then the next time I saw your family was at your mom’s funeral. And it really hit me that if I didn’t try to mend my relationship with my parents now, I might never get the chance. So after Tallulah and I broke up, I moved back home.”
“Gabe.” Anya was shocked. She knew he’d been in LA, but she had no idea he was living with his parents. “How is it?”
“It’s been—hard. And awkward. Sometimes it’s like, what was I thinking coming back here, and then other times it’s almost approaching normalcy?
I’ll argue with my dad about why the Dodgers sent some pitcher down to the minors when they already have so many injured guys, or I’ll take my mom shopping for a new bureau for the guest room, whatever.
It’s not like we’re best friends. It’s never going to be like your family. But I feel like…” He trailed off.
Anya could see his eyes were wet. “Like what?” she prompted.
“Like this is the thing Danny would actually be proud of.” Gabe’s voice broke. “That I found a way to keep our family together.”
“He would, I’m sure he would,” Anya said, and she was crying again too. She wrapped her arms around Gabe and pulled him close. He hugged her tightly, and it felt so good, after all this time—all this life and death and messiness in between—to be warm and safe in his arms.
“I think they want us to be happy,” he mumbled, his breath soft against her hair.
“Who?” Anya asked. She tipped her head upward so she could see his face.
“Danny,” he said. “And your mom. Don’t you think? They just want us to be happy.”
The sun was lower in the sky now, and the light in the car was turning golden, with orange rays dancing off the surface of the lake. Golden, Anya repeated in her mind. It was a word—and a color—that she had always associated with Gabe.
“I missed you,” she said softly. “Like, I really missed you.”